Why the alternative is war or revolution

 

IS WAR A FAVOURABLE CONDITION FOR THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION?

Between 1845 and 1847, the world, and Europe in particular, following on from a series of bad harvests, went through a grave economic crisis. In France the price of grain doubled, giving rise to hunger riots. The ruined peasants could no longer buy industrial products: unemployment  became general, wages fell,the number of bankruptcies soared. The working class embarked on a struggle for reforms: for the limitation of the working day, for a minimum wage, for jobs,for the right to form associations and to strike, for civil equality and thesuppression of privileges, etc. As a result, the explosive events in February1848 in France, so brilliantly condensed in Marx’s famous work The Class Struggle in France, bequeathed a major lesson to posterity: the necessity for the working class to demarcate itself from the bourgeoisie, to preserve it’s class independence. However, an essential aspect of this revolution is often forgotten: it was not provoked by a war. Those who forgot its causes tended to focus their attention on the crushing of the insurrection of June 1848 and on the problem of how to arm the workers more effectively, how to organise better street-fights, ignoring the lessons Marx and Engels drew about the historic period and the nature of the class struggle.

Later, the disaster at Sedan led to the collapse of the Empire in September 1870 and to the setting up of the ‘government of National Defence’ led by the bourgeois Thiers; this in turn failed in its attempt to disarm the Parisian population and provoked the setting up of the Commune in March 1871. This was without doubt the first victorious proletarian insurrection in history; but even so, as Marx recognised, it was an ‘accident’ in a period which was still that of capitalism’s ascendancy. Once again the bourgeoisie triumphed over the proletariat just as it was constituting itself into a class. Those who invoked the Commune while forgetting its accidental nature character sanctioned all sorts of confusions about the possibility of a proletarian revolution emerging successfully out of a war. Certainly, as Engels noted in an introduction to The Civil War in France: “from March 18 onwards the class character of the Paris movement, which had previously been pushed into the background by the fight against the foreign invaders, emerged sharply and clearly”.

But the objective conditions were lacking: the Communards were ahead of the march of history. Within this context, two factors contributed to the defeat: isolation (a city under siege) and the predominance of the military terrain, which is home ground of the bourgeoisie (as Engels put it “the continuing war against the Versailles army absorbed all its energies”. And of course we must not forget the total support that the Prussian forces gave to the French bourgeoisie. An incredible ‘irony’ of history: the Commune, while concretely demonstrating the possibility and necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, gave rise to the idea that any revolution could henceforth emerge out of a war. This gave rise to many false theorisations in the workers’movement. For example, Franz Mehring and Jules Guesde theorised about ‘revolutionary war': in Guesde’s case this thesis became mixed up with the nationalist position of subordinating yourself to your own bourgeoisie. Now,above all at the end of the century as capitalism entered its decadent phase,there were no longer any ‘revolutionary’ wars: what’s more, wars had never been revolutionary in the proletarian sense. In this text, we shall see why war in itself is not a ‘necessary evil’ for the revolution.

Obviously, like any original experience, the Commune, even though it was born out of a reaction of ‘national defence’, came up against a bourgeoisie that was surprised and inexperienced in the face of a proletarian threat in the middle of a war. It showed that a war will inevitably be stopped by the eruption of the proletariat, or at least that it can’t be waged as the bourgeoisie would like it as long as the smallest island of proletarian resistance remains.

The stopping of the war in such conditions allows the bourgeois forces to regroup themselves, to call a temporary halt to their imperialist antagonisms, and together to surround and strangle the proletariat. Despite the fact that such situations are more favourable to the bourgeoisie, for decades it was an accepted axiom in the workers’ movement that wars created or could create the conditions most favourable to the generalisation of struggles and thus to the outbreak of the revolution. There was little or no consideration about the insurmountable handicap posed by a situation of world war, which would limit or reduce to nothing a real extension of the revolution. It was only when capitalism entered its decadent phase and began the race towards the First World War that the issue became clearer: War or Revolution, and not War AND Revolution.

CLASS STRUGGLE UNDER WAR CONDITIONS

The Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in the Course Towards World War

However displeasing it may be to those who glorify the past, the Russian and German revolutionary minorities within the IInd International hadn’t sufficiently considered the conditions imposed by capitalism’s change in period. It’s true that it was terribly difficult to break away from the process of degeneration that the IInd International was going through. The future founders of the Communist International were surprised by the outbreak of the war and had not carried out all the preparatory work that the proletariat needed.
For several years now, the ICC has attempted to show the importance of the notion of the historic course and to point out that conditions of war have been unfavourable for past revolutions (see in this regard the article on the conditions for the generalisation of the class struggle in IR 26).

In retrospect, one can see that it was the audacious, lucid Trotsky and his fraction at the beginning of the century who not only understood, before 1914 and better than the majority of the Bolsheviks, that the bourgeois revolution was no longer on the agenda in Russia, but who also managed to sweep away a number of false theorisations by examining the conditions of the 1905 revolution – a revolution that, to use his own terms, was “belated” and “off target”: “It is incontestable that the war has played an enormous role in our revolution: it has materially disorganised absolutism, it has dislocated the army, it has forced the mass of the population to act with audacity. But fortunately, it has not created the revolution, and that is lucky because a revolution born out of a war is impotent: it is the product of extraordinary circumstances, it is based on a strength outside itself and has definitively shown itself to be unable to maintain the positions it conquers” . (Our Revolution).

The minority around Trotsky, which published Nashe Slovo (Our World) , a product and crystallisation of a powerful movement of the class at the beginning of the century in Russia, was one of the currents that was best able to draw the crucial lessons about the historic spontaneity of the proletariat and the workers’ councils.But it also highlighted an essential reason for the failure of 1905: the situation of war.

In his article ‘Military Catastrophe and Political Perspectives’ (Nashe Slovo, April-Sept. 1915), Trotsky, in the name of his fraction, refused to speculate on the war itself – not for humanitarian reasons, but because of his internationalist conceptions. He pointed to the insurmountable division introduced by the process of war: while defeat shook the vanquished government and could consequently hasten its decomposition, this didn’t at all apply to the victorious government which on the contrary was only strengthened.Moreover, in the defeated country itself nothing positive would emerge if there wasn’t a strongly developed proletariat capable of completely destabilising the government after its military defeat. It was extremely doubtful whether the contradictions that come in the wake of a war would constitute a favourable factor for the success of the proletariat. This observation was subsequently confirmed by the failure of the wave of revolutionary social upheavals that began in the year 1917. War is not a guaranteed springboard for the revolution.It is a phenomenon over which the proletariat cannot have complete control;it’s not something that the proletariat can, of its own free will, get rid of while it’s raging on a world-wide scale.

During these years of apprenticeship, Trotsky clearly saw the impotence of a revolution solely based on “extraordinary circumstances” . The unfavourable conditions of a revolution which has come out of a military defeat in a given country derive not only from the fact that it is restricted to this country, but also from the material situation bequeathed by the war: “economic life shattered,finances exhausted, and unfavourable international relations” (Nashe Slovo).Consequently, the situation of war makes it difficult, if not impossible to realise the objective of a revolution.

Without denying that a situation of defeat can prefigure the military and political catastrophe of a bourgeois state and must be used by revolutionaries, Trotsky reiterated the point that the latter could not shape historical circumstances to their liking but were themselves one of the forces of the historical process. What’s more, hadn’t these revolutionaries been in error in 1903, believing in the imminence of a revolution after a massive development in Russia? This development was initially paralysed by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war; after the turn-about of 1905 it was defeated by the stopping of the war. Trotsky saw an historical analogy with the important strikes of 1912-13, which despite having the advantage of being able to draw on previous experience, were once again blocked by the preparations for war. A Russian defeat in these circumstances did not seem to be all that favourable as far as Trotsky was concerned, all the more so because social patriots like Lloyd George, Vandervelde, and Herve looked favourably on the prospect of such a defeat because it would enhance “the governmental good sense of the ruling classes”. He thus criticised vulgar defeatist speculations about “the automatic strength of a military crash, without the direct intervention of the revolutionary classes” . The military defeat in itself was not the royal road to the revolutionary victory. Trotsky insisted on the vital importance of the agitation of revolutionaries in the period of upheavals that was opening up - even if it was doing so in unfavourable conditions, judging by previous historical experience.

By exhausting the capitalist autocracy’s means of economic and political domination, didn’t the military catastrophe bring with it the risk of only provoking discontent and protest within certain limits? Wasn’t there also the risk that the exhaustion of the masses brought about by the war would only lead to apathy and despair? The weight of war was colossal: there was no automatic route to a revolutionary outbreak. The havoc wrought by the war could pull the carpet from underneath the feet of a revolutionary alternative.
Unfortunately Trotsky was wrong on one point. He believed that an accumulation of military defeats would not facilitate the revolution. But he didn’t see that the contrary was true: precisely to avoid this danger, the world bourgeoisie, informed by its past experience, stopped the war in 1918. Also, Trotsky still used the slogan of the “struggle for peace” instead of the more consistent one of the revolutionary defeatism which was firmly defended by Lenin.

However, in the tragic and, in the long term, unfavourable circumstances of the first world war, Trotsky clearly pointed to the qualitative leap that was necessary with regard to 1905: the revolutionary movement could no longer be ‘national’ ; it could only be a class movement, contrary to the bleatings of the Menshevik and liberal social patriots who lined up behind the capitalist slogan of ‘victory’ ie, of prolonging the war. The proletariat in Russia was faced with all the bourgeois factions who wanted to isolate it and prevent it from reacting on its class terrain. In contrast to 1905, it could no longer count on the ‘benevolent neutrality’ of the bourgeoisie. In 1905 it was isolated from the proletarian masses of Europe, while Tsarism on the other hand had the support of the European states.
In 1915, two questions were posed: whether to recommence a national revolution in which the proletariat was once again dependent on the bourgeoisie, or to make the Russian revolution dependent on the international revolution? Trotsky responded affirmatively to the second question. More clearly than in 1905, the slogan ‘Down with the war! ” had to be transformed into ‘Down with the state power!’ In conclusion: “Only the international revolution can create the forces through which the struggle of the proletariat in Russia can be carried through to the end”.

This long resume of Trotsky’s interesting article, with its pertinent analysis of the unfavourable conditions created by an imperialist war, provides us with important material for combating the leftist and Trotskyist ideologies today, which try to convince us that the class struggle has always assumed a truly revolutionary dimension in the context of nationalism and war: thus these ideologies demonstrate that they belong to the camp of the bourgeoisie.

The explosion of October 1917, forced the capitalist world to stop the war. Because of the weakness and incompetence of the Russian bourgeoisie, world capitalism was caught napping by the proletariat of the industrial centres of Russia. But it was able to recover and call a halt to the revolutionary wave stirred up by this initial success. The crushing of the revolutionary movement in Germany was a decisive blow against the internationalisation of the revolution. This recovery of the world bourgeoisie condemned the proletariat in Russia to isolation, and consequently to a long but inexorable degeneration, which was to prove fatal for the whole world proletariat in the ensuing period. After this first gigantic appearance of the proletariat on the stage of the 20th century had had its brief victory, the bourgeoisie made the class pay a very high price indeed – a counter-revolution from which the international proletariat didn’t recover for decades, even during the course of the Second World War.

THE ABSENCE OF A PROLETARIAN REACTION DURING AND AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

In the middle of this half-century of triumphant counter-revolution, the Second World War could only complete this defeat which isolation had brought in 1920’s. There were no revolutionary movements comparable to those of 1905 and 1917-19. We can of course cite the so-called Warsaw Commune of 1944 – a desperate reaction, dominated by the social democrats, of a population martyrised and decimated under the military jackboot. This uprising held out for 63 days and was then exterminated by the Nazis with Stalin’s consent.  We can also mention the 1943-44 strikes in Italy repressed with the endorsement of the British and their Allies. Neither of these cases proved to be part of a world-wide resurgence of the proletariat, threatening the continuation of the imperialist war.

This was the most profound, most tragic coma the workers’ movement had ever been through. Its best forces had been decimated by the Stalinist counter-revolution and finished off by the democratic and Nazi belligerents, with their resistance fronts and their terror bombings. This second world imperialist carnage achieved an even higher level of horror than the previous one.

Could a revolution put an end to this planetary massacre, could it emerge during or after the war? Dispersed and isolated, the revolutionaries hoped in vain.The victory went to the counter-revolutionary ‘maquis’, with its chauvinist ideology of ‘national liberation’ – a ‘liberation’ by ordered stages,supervised by the democratic strike-breakers, Churchill, De Gaulle, Eisenhower, with ‘comrade’ Stalin at their side. The war ended not because of a new proletarian danger, but because the limits of total destruction had been reached, because the capitalist ‘allies’ had achieved what they wanted in world hegemony.

There was no new October 1917. Capitalism regained a breath of youth, like the grass which grows up over human corpses. A period of reconstruction began on the ruins. This period of reconstruction was temporary: after just over two decades the system once again plunged into an economic morass, accelerating the development of a war economy in preparation for... a third world war. The few workers’ revolts which took place in this period remained fragmented and isolated. Whether in France, in Poland, or the third world, they were derailed and smothered in the mire of capitalist reconstruction or in the so-called liberation of the colonies, planned by the two‘superpowers’ . Fundamentally the course of history was still unfavourable to the proletariat. It would take a long time to recover from the physical and ideological defeat of the 1920’s. You have to understand just how deep this defeat was to see why the world war followed on ineluctably in 1940’s .

THE LIMITS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS INCONDITIONS OF WAR

World war is the highest moment in the crisis of decadent capitalism, but in itself it does not bring about the conditions for the generalisation of the revolution. To understand that is to emphasise the historic responsibility of the proletariat faced with the possibility of a third world war. When we examine the period of the first world war, we can see that, after having suffered an ideological defeat, and then reviving in Russia, Germany and central Europe, the proletariat remained shut up within each nation. By stopping the war to face up to the proletarian attack, the bourgeoisie strengthened national barriers. Although they were a product of a deteriorating economic situation and constituted a revival of the powerful struggles which had begun in 1910, these combative actions by the proletariat were unable to go beyond an illusion propagated by the treacherous IInd International - that the revolution would develop gradually country by country. Despite the justified foundation of a truly communist IIIrd International, the grip of nationalism was strengthened by social chauvinism. Moreover, when the war stopped,differences between the economic situation of the victorious and the vanquished countries maintained illusory divisions within the international proletariat. In putting forward the idea of ‘peace’, the world bourgeoisie was aware of the dangers of revolutionary defeatism and the risks of contagion which, despite everything, existed both in the victorious and the vanquished countries. Only the armistice between the different capitalist belligerents enabled them to close ranks and re-establish ‘social peace’ . Thus Clemenceau was able to lend Hindenburg and Noske a hand against the proletariat in Germany. The isolated proletariat was pushed into rapid, unfavourable insurrections. The conditions for this failure were completed by the stopping of the war in Germany; the proletariat’s one success was isolated within Russia in the exceptional conditions of the ‘weakest link’ – i.e., a situation which didn’t deal a decisive blow against the geographical heart of capitalism:Europe. In this first decisive and inevitable historic confrontation between the reactionary bourgeoisie and the revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie remained the master of the terrain. We can thus say that the whole period of the First World War did not create the most favourable conditions for the proletarian revolution.

A bloody repetition of this capitalist barbarism, the Second World War came directly out of the clauses of the‘Armistice’ of 1918, a provisional and hypocritical peace aimed at justifying the new capitalist division of the world. This repetition was only possible after the physical defeat of the proletariat in the early 1920’s, a defeat completed by the counter-revolutionary ideologies of Stalinism, fascism and anti-fascism.

If the proletariat was able seriously to disrupt the waging of the First World War it was because it hadn’t been physically and frontally crushed beforehand. Fighting on its class terrain, it was inevitably led into opposing the war. Moreover, trench warfare, because of the proximity of the combatants, was favourable to the spreading of the revolutionary contagion. This factor no longer existed during the Second World War with its bombers and submarines. By perfecting the destructive capabilities of these long-range weapons of death, and by developing its first nuclear weapons – ‘tested’ at Hiroshima by the ‘democratic’ American bourgeoisie - capitalism was already preparing to ‘go further’ in a third world war. Now that it could destroy entire cities and could dangle the threat of war over the remotest part of the planet, it was even better equipped to deal with any possibility of internal revolt. There’s nothing mystical about noting this growth in capitalism’s destructive capacities. It merely emphasises the responsibility of the proletariat, whose historic task is to stop this march towards generalised destruction by applying the weapons of the class struggle with at least as much vigour as during the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the century.

Is a third world war inevitable? The last few years certainly invite comparisons with the periods which preceded the two world wars: ‘armed peace’, deterioration of capitalist international relations,local wars, unlimited growth of militarism. social pacifism, relentless ideological campaigns. The comparison is easy to make but the arguments don’t stand up very well to social reality. In saying this it’s not a question of taking our desires for realities but of looking at the concrete situation of the 1980s.

FOUR CONDITIONS FOR THE REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME

If we fixate on the surface phenomena of the two greatest imperialist slaughters in the history of humanity, we could say spitefully ‘never two without three’ , like a superstitious coffee-bar philistine. But if we use the marxist method, we can say that “great historical events repeat themselves: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.We are all well aware that communism is not inevitable, that it all depends on whether the proletariat can raise itself to the level of its historic responsibilities.

But if we examine the immense potential of the modern proletariat, we can also see that the third world war isn’t inevitable either. More than ever, it’s up to the revolutionaries who have drawn the lessons from past defeats to show the real path that has been opened up by the dead generations.

However, it has to be said that the immense majority of the proletarian masses today are still not fully conscious of what’s at stake nor are they ready to embark upon decisive struggles. Despite this, they are more and more being forced to prepare themselves for such struggles. We can’t prove this by talking vaguely about social discontent or by counting the millions of strike-days lost in all countries over the past twenty years. Today, the curve of these strikes tends to be in the descendent, and most struggles end in failure. The bourgeoisie even manages to organise false strikes, counterfeit struggles, or to sow illusions about the self-management of bankrupt factories. But, despite this hardly glossy table of journalistic facts and figures, there have been a certain number of workers’ outbreaks overt he last two decades, in all parts of the planet, from Brazil to Poland, which have built up a series of international experiences. These experiences, though irregular, reveal the essential conditions for the world revolution.

1. The world economic morass

The first real condition for the revolution resides in the world economic morass which has definitively buried all bourgeois hopes for a world in perpetual development. This unstoppable,incurable economic crisis has done more than any revolutionary speech to expose the mystification of humanity progressing towards happiness under capitalism (a mystification which puts the working class back in the 19th century).

Much longer and more intense than the cyclical economic crisis of the 19th century or the crisis of the in-between period at the beginning of the century, this crisis has hit every corner of the planet. Not one capitalist, not one country not one bloc has escaped it. It effects concern, mutilate, aggravate the situation of the entire world proletariat. The economic infrastructure is slowly collapsing, revealing the fatal weakness at the heart of the system. It can no longer be blamed on the enemy on the other side of the Rhine or the Pyrenees. It’s the ‘same the world over’. Despite all the censorship and distorted news in the west as well as the east, ‘they’ can no longer govern as before. The system is showing its retrograde, decadent character and is thus incessantly compelled to renew its panoply of mystifications. ‘They’ are no longer just the bosses but a whole state  superstructure for containing and dominating social life: governments, unions,parties of left and right with their shared language of austerity. The                                                                        disintegration of the economic infrastructure can’t fail to shake the bourgeois political infrastructure. Even though the latter is trying to prevent the proletariat from becoming aware of the causes of the economic morass, it’s not easy to find alibis when the system is suffering from a profound crisis in its basic structures and no longer has any real outlets as it did in its ascendant phase last century. It’s becoming harder and harder to conceal the fact that the only perspective capitalism has to offer is destruction, waste and impoverishment, culminating in a new world war.

2. The perspective of world war

This perspective of world war, which has become particularly clear over the past ten years, is thus the second condition for the development of the proletarian alternative. This isn’t paradoxical. Two world wars have left an indelible mark despite all the boasts of the ‘liberation’. The bourgeoisie, in all its varieties, has always presented these two world wars as:

-            a way of resolving its economic difficulties (‘export or die’)

-            inevitable, despite the good will of men of peace (‘it’s the other’s fault’ or ‘we had no choice’).

The exacerbation of imperialist competition,and the pauperisation which followed on from these wars, as well as today’s gigantic economic crisis, reveal the inanity of the first argument. The barbarism of the two world wars is the product of the bourgeoisie’s inability to resolve the aberrations of its system. Despite the fact that a faction of the capitalist class – the Stalinists  -have outrageously stolen the term for themselves, the net result of all this barbarism has been to hold back the movement towards communism.
As for the idea that the next war is inevitable, this is all the more a lie in that the capitalists themselves are not convinced of this – fundamentally because they haven’t managed to convince the proletariat and the immense majority of the population of this planet. War is indeed inevitable if you only consider the military aspect of the question, but the bourgeoisie can’t be reduced to its military apparatus, even if the latter holds the reins during the war, or comes to the fore when it’s a question of physical repression. The bourgeoisie can’t run society through the military alone: it’s never been able to mobilise for war and repress the proletariat solely via its military HQ,which doesn’t have a sufficient grasp of social reality. If you just look at things from the perspective of the military command, you won’t understand why the proletariat refuses to subordinate itself to the bourgeoisie. This isn’t a classic war with troops in recognisable uniforms, with generals, munitions,etc, facing a similar adversary. The real threat exists inside each capitalist  country, ‘friends’ or ‘enemies’. It’s name is proletarian unity and consciousness.

The hypothesis of a third world war in the short term presupposes an imbecility or suicidal folly on the part of the bourgeoisie, or at least an inability to have any control over the unleashing of a war. We should never forget that the capitalists and their generals can’t make war without troops. The previous world wars weren’t conflicts between professional armies or mercenaries. We’re not saying that the capitalists are preparing for trench warfare or will bring back the musket. The point is that they can’t just present themselves to the world as the murderers of humanity.It’s alright to brand Hitler or some other defeated enemy with this reputation, but capitalism as such has to exempt itself from such a responsibility. Neither Foch, nor Clemenceau, nor Wilson, nor Churchill, nor Stalin, nor Eisenhower could say that they were organising a war for capitalist booty. They had to talk about ‘liberty’, the ‘right of nations to self-determination’, or ‘socialism’. Each one needed such mystifications to lead their troops to the slaughter, justifications to parade before those whom they sent off to figh tfor ‘fatherland or death’. Today, can the Reagan administration invoke the interests of humanity without blushing? Can Brezhnev or Mitterand talk about socialism without making people throw up? Only the proletarian revolution can consign the horrors of local and world wars to the dustbin of capitalism’s past.

3. The awakening of working class consciousness

The third basic condition for weakening the perspective of war, but above all for raising the prospect of revolution, is the conscious, organised, centralised emergence of the only revolutionary force: the proletariat, which has been moving into action since the end of the 60s.

The proletariat wasn’t asleep after the end of the second world war, but during the years of reconstruction its reactions were isolated and the relative prosperity of the system allowed the bourgeoisie to make economic concessions. The year 1968 was a major turning point, marked not only by the massive strike in France in May, but also and above all by the fact that from this point on workers’ struggles began to develop all over the world. The beginning of the 1970s was marked by a succession of important struggles in several European countries,but thanks to the successful sabotage of the bourgeois left, whose speciality in this area was derailing discontent into the trap of electoralism, it appeared towards the end of the 70s that the proletariat had calmed down. With the aid of its sociological lackeys (Marcuse, Bahro, Gorz, etc.) the bourgeoisie was once against spreading the idea that the proletariat had disappeared. Then the workers of Poland came along. Too bad for all the ideologues:today, as in 1918, the proletariat is the only class that can prevent war and put forward the communist alternative. Against all those who in one way or another encourage the survival of capitalism, the proletariat must raise the cry ‘War OR Revolution’. This cry wan’t heard in Poland, but ian affirmation of the class struggle such as August ’80 amounts to the same thing. For two years, western ears have been pounded with propaganda about the invasion of Afghanistan, a ‘confirmation’ of the ‘Russian threat’ .We’ve heard all about the USA’s supposed military weaknesses in comparison with the Warsaw Pact forces. But the Polish mass strikes once again raised the spectre of the proletariat. Despite the unequal and dispersed struggles of the last decade, they confirmed that the proletariat is moving towards a new level of struggle.
The proletariat’s leap onto this new level will be based on the struggle against capitalist austerity, but its also true to say that it is maturing out of all the contradictions of decadent capitalism.

The essential element, class consciousness, is developing because a certain number of bourgeois mystifications are being used up. Even in the 19th century, Marx could see (in the Communist Manifesto) that the bourgeoisie was producing its own gravediggers. Today as well we can say that: “The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education; in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie” .

At the beginning of the century, there were those who doubted the proximity of the revolution because the working class had only recently emerged out of the artisan strata or out of the countryside, or because of the residues of feudalism, of illiteracy, etc. Today no hesitation is possible: in the main industrialised countries, the proletariat really has been formed into a class, and it’s the same in a number of third world countries. It exists as a force which is historically compelled to overcome the weaknesses and failures of its past. Today the lessons of the whole history of the workers’ movement can be reappropriated much more quickly despite all the filth of capitalism. There’s no longer any need for a ‘socialist education’ or for party schools for the cadre. By fighting the economic laws of capital, the proletariat is at the same time smashing up the ideological superstructure of bourgeois rule. This takes place through two factors: the education dispensed by bourgeois society and the modern methods of communication.

We’re not making a eulogy of bourgeois education, the aim of which is to reproduce social inequalities; nor are we making a fetish of ‘knowledge’, which is no measure of class consciousness. Moreover,this education dispensed and fabricated by capitalism is to a large extent a means of manipulation. It makes individuals vulnerable to the dominant ideology and takes the place of feudal religious obscurantism in the maintenance of social discipline. But we have to understand that, at a certain level of the degeneration of any society, even the best fireguards can help to spread afire. In the main industrialised countries illiteracy hardly exists and many proletarians have gone through secondary education and speak a second language.In themselves this ‘progress’ and this ‘education’ have nothing revolutionary about them: they only facilitate revolt because they are synonymous with DEQUALIFICATION and unemployment, because the bourgeoisie has developed school and university education in an anarchic way. Many workers and employees have degrees. Many of the unemployed have university diplomas and are thus without any ‘productive’ qualifications. After being beguiled all through their studies by the promise of escaping the working class condition, the former pupil or student then confronts the harsh reality of capitalism, if he hasn’t understood it already. In the past, an illiterate worker might swallow the speeches of a schoolmaster, or believe that differences in intelligences are hereditary, and leave important issues to ‘those in the know’ . But today they are different.
Modern electronic means of communication are also a two-edged weapons. Radio and TV broadcasts, with their use of the lie-by-omission, penetrate every building today, reaching the most atomised proletarian even if he doesn’t want to read a newspaper, and have the function of smothering class consciousness.But after a certain point these emissions of sophisticated bourgeois propaganda - because that’s what they are – become unable to go on playing the role of‘directors’ of consciousness; when the condition of life are getting worse and worse. When the bailiffs start to knock at the door, they can no longer mask the horrors of decomposing capitalism.
The general crisis of bourgeois ideological values is much more striking when you compare the situation with the 19th century. Then, many workers were illiterate, got their news late, and were crammed with patriotism. Today the system has given rise to a new breed of workers who are constantly dissatisfied, full of doubt about the promises offered by various ideologies.In the absence of class struggle these aspects of contemporary alienation can lead to demoralisation, but when the struggle does develop they can turn against the bourgeoisie and speed up the tendency to question its whole system of oppression.

4. The internationalisation of proletarianstruggles

The internationalisation of proletarian struggles is the fourth factor which will not only facilitate, but will actually be the decisive step towards the world revolution. In the 19th century, the development of struggles could still be seen as something taking place within nations. As Marx put it: “Nations cannot constitute the content of revolutionary action. They are only the forms within which the only motor of history operates: the class struggle.”

In the First and Second Internationals, the realisation of world socialism was seen like this: first struggles added up enterprise by enterprise (nationalisations); then they became revolutions country by country; then the latter would ‘federate’. This is still the vision of the Bordigist wing of the revolutionary movement.

However, although the changed conditions of declining capitalism have shattered this vision, Marx’s idea hasn’t been invalidated, it’s been extended: the form within which the class struggle operates is the whole capitalist world, over and above the barriers of nations or blocs. The world bourgeoisie exploits each proletariat in every country - the Italian machinist, the Russian bricklayer, or the American electrician. A South American worker employed in an off-shoot of Renault knows that his main boss lives in France; the Polish metal-worker knows that he’s dependent on a ‘fraternal’ company in Russia. All this explains concretely why all capitalists have an interest in closing ranks against any strike or mass struggle. On the other hand, corporatist identification with a particular branch of industry has never really permitted workers’ solidarity to break down national divisions. The nature of the working class can’t be defined in corporatist terms: it’s independent of the different professions. The American air traffic controllers recently had a tragic experience of the absence of international solidarity within a particular corporation, an illusion fed by the ideology of the left of capital. In the context of unbridled capitalist competition, the British steel workers on strike saw ‘foreign’ steel being preferred to ‘their’ steel; French miners saw the same with ‘Polish’ or‘German’ coal. The defence or exaltation of the product of a corporation is a terrain where capital remains the master, particularly through the trade unions. It’s a fertile soil for chauvinism. To hope for the extension of the struggle through the same branch or a sister company is to put the workers on the same competitive terrain as the various firms which turn out the same product. It encourages ‘patriotism’ with regard to a particular enterprise,strengthening the capitalist idea that the products ‘belong’ to the workers of this or that industry. Thus the workers are tied to the limits of the enterprise instead of calling the whole capitalist mode of production into question.

The proletariat in its entirety produces all the wealth. Capitalist production, fragmented and mercenary, is alien to it. It has no ‘rights’ over how this production is used at the end of the day. A proletarian is essentially defined  by being a wage-labourer, an exploited subject in a commodity system which is hostile to him. When the proletarians struggle, they don’t fight for a better French coal or a better British steel: they struggle whatever their profession- against the conditions of exploitation and subordination. And, providing they don’t allow themselves to founder on the obstacles put in their way by the trade unions, this struggle leads them into a confrontation with the capitalist state. The generalisation of struggles onto an international level can’t come out of a corporatist extension. The massive strike in May ’68 in France, the strikes which followed elsewhere in the world, or the mass strike of August ’80 in Poland, weren’t the product of a sum of corporations in struggle, first going through a particular branch, then one branch joining another. It was by going beyond the whole idea of a sum of corporations that the workers of Poland found the road of struggle against the state. In the factories and the streets they posed the same objectives: their revolt against the condition of  exploitation became a struggle against the capitalist order and not for a better management or production of commodities. The reaction of the Polish state received the solidarity of capitalist states everywhere. Behind it stood both the Russian state and the western states. This coalition of the bourgeoisie teaches a clear lessons about the proletariat’s lack of international unity. It shows the necessity for a unified fight by the whole proletariat against a ruling class which can momentarily suspend its intrinsic divisions in order to face up to the class struggle. The fact that all factions of the bourgeoisie hurled themselves as one man to fight the Polish fire proves that, despite its insurmountable economic difficulties, this retrograde class will seek at any price to prevent itself being destroyed by the proletariat. It proves that it is wary of the dangers of imitation and contagion. The repression that had been prepared for along time beforehand on an international scale was presented as  a ‘settling of accounts’ between ‘Poles’ .But none of this can hide the fact that behind the Polish army and militia stood the whole world bourgeoisie.

The renewed utilisation of national barriers is a dominant trait of bourgeois  policy today and it makes it hard to envisage an absolutely simultaneous explosion of workers’ struggles in different countries, in which the workers go beyond corporations and start to link up across national boundaries. But the deepening of the economic crisis is undermining these barriers in the consciousness of a growing number of workers, since the facts show that the class struggle is the SAME everywhere. We must draw the lessons from the fact that the main struggles in recent years have been separated in time and without direct links from one country to another. But now the crisis is tending less and less to hit first one country then another, one going up while the other goes down, as in the period of reconstruction after the Second World War. Now it’s tending to hit all countries at the same time, especially the most industrialised countries –those which up till now have been the leaders of capitalist ‘growth’ . Thus the whirlwind of the economic crisis, even though it’s still moving slowly, is nevertheless tending to reproduce a moment such as in 1968 when a sudden acceleration gives rise to workers’ struggles in several countries at the same time, and on the same basis: the struggle against capitalist austerity, against the threat of unemployment, and implicitly against the threat of war. Much more than through the successive struggles that have taken place in recent years, it will be through this growing simultaneity of struggles in different countries that the problem will be posed of joining up the struggles across national frontiers and imperialist blocs. Whether it likes it or nor, this is the next qualitative step the proletariat will have to take. It’s possible in the present world situation, it’s obligatory if the class is to take its struggle forward. In such a situation a mass movement on the scale of Poland in 1980 won’t remain isolated but will get solidarity through the development of other mass movements.
In the 1980s the proletariat has to hit at the main capitalist metropoles if it is to give a powerful impetus to its international struggle. Particularly in the old heart of capitalism, Europe,contacts between different zones in struggle can no longer be the caricature offered by the union officials. The concretisation of real international contacts will be an example to the whole world. This will be decisive for the international revolution. The problem of the destruction of the bourgeois states may be posed more abruptly elsewhere but it can only be resolved in the heartlands.

Gieller