Communist Left n. 52, 2024 (2024)

One thing is absolutely clear to us, who have historically been againstall wars between imperialisms and have only fought for the war betweenclasses for over a century: all warfare between the bourgeois states isthe rule of the capitalist world, which has reached its full spread overthe entire globe, at the lowest point of degeneration.

We communists do not stand for the victory of any one bourgeoisie overthe other, but we are not indifferent to the unfolding historical drama.Analysts, career soldiers, journalists, sold out to the instructions ofthe big bourgeois tycoons or disciplined by the state, and big publishinggroups linked to big national capital, go to great pains to explain to usthe intricate relationships of the troops on the ground, the strategies inaction, the prospects more or less favourable to one or the other side.

Which “victory”, a term that can now only be relative, or whichcease-fire or armistice, occurs, must be a reason for us to study andanalyse, because revolution is also the historical product of how theclash between the capitalisms of the world, between the imperialistmonsters, evolves, as well as the dynamics of capitalism as a universalmode of production. But over everything, the absolutely necessary rebirthof the party of the revolution is required. The party has an obligation tounderstand, to analyse, obviously in the context of its capabilities,everything that is happening, both overt and covert.

But without its “war on war” there is only one true loser, theinternational proletariat, particularly that of Ukraine and that ofRussia. This war is against them, men brought to opposite sides by thecapitalists, disguised on the one hand as a defence of national freedomagainst the invader, on the other hand as a defence of the threatenedRussian national integrity.

On these issues, which are not those of the pro-letarians of the twonations, but opposed to their class interests, both in the invaded nationand in the invading nation, the same lie that has always been repeated inprevious wars and gave justificatory substance to the carnage of the Firstand Second World Wars, gathers strength and resonates. The currentmassacre is being played out on this infamous heap of patent falsehoods,imposed on the general public of the East and West.

In the West, pro-invasion propaganda is by far predominant, reachingdisgusting levels of stupidity, while the bloody and equally lyingpublicity of the invader is rigorously silenced. One is reminded of theaccounts of famous newspaper columnists for the edification of thepopulations during the First and Second World Wars. The tones are thesame, the same lies propagated to drive proletarians to the slaughter, tostir up hatred among proletarians by smearing the “enemies”. Those oftoday enjoy no less barking and brazen techniques.

Only to a Party which unconditionally places itself on the side of theproletariat, which ‘has no fatherland’ and no flag, and is againstbourgeois fatherlands and bourgeois flags, only to such a Party, which inthe storm of war does not lose sight of the goal of the internationalcommunist revolution, which is both far and near, only to this Party,which is absolutely above and against all fighting parties, is it given toidentify the historical consequences of one outcome or another of thebourgeois wars.

It is in this sense that we are “not indifferent”.

(back to table of contents)

Part 18
(continued from last issue)

War: Forcapital, apanacea forallills

The union asaninstitution: cooperation tothebitterend

As the country had been at war for some months, the bourgeoisie could notadmit voices of dissent because they were often accompanied by economicstruggles (which never completely ceased during the war).

The repression of any class struggle worthy of the name and the“patriotic” and anti-worker mobilisation that accompanied it were soonflanked by another initiative aimed at countering the influence ofanti-war propaganda within the workers’ movement.

The development of the US economy in the second half of the nineteenthcentury was accompanied by a vigorous growth of presence on internationalmarkets, especially after the crisis of the 1890s. The value of exportsincreased fivefold in the fifty years between 1860 and 1910, from 400 to1,919 million dollars: but in the following five years it grew by 50%,reaching 2,966 million dollars in 1915. Since the 1890s, in fact, therehas been a sharp increase in the attention paid to foreign markets.Entrepreneurs, financiers, and political leaders saw in commercialexpansion, in the conquest of new markets, the indispensable solution tothe dilemmas posed by growth. The end of the process of internalcolonisation, the so-called “closing of the frontier”, induced the rulingclass to look abroad for new spaces for the placement of surplus goods andcapital. On this basis, the young American imperialism took its firststeps: first, by consolidating its economic and political dominance overthe two Americas, and secondly by trying to extend its influence over thePacific area and the Far East. The “open door doctrine”, enunciated bySecretary of State John Hay in 1899 with regard to China, provided thisexpansionist drive with a “general strategy”, based on the pursuit ofeconomic penetration in new markets rather than on the classic colonialpractice of territorial conquest. At the beginning of the new century,therefore, the United States entered decisively into the internationalcompetition between the great powers. Twenty years later, at the end ofthe First World War, they were already in a position of clearpredominance.

While big capital led this epochal advance, a newly formed working classwas amassing in the cities, whose characteristics were continuallymodified, and even disrupted, by the continuous waves of migration fromEurope. The differences produced by the different experiences at homeintersected and overlapped with religious, cultural, and ethnic divisions.The latter became particularly relevant towards the end of the century andin the first fifteen years of the 20th century. The migratory flow reachedthe highest peaks, touching the average of almost one million arrivals peryear, in the period between 1900 and 1914. Above all in this period, theinflux of emigrants of Slavic or Latin origin from the Mediterranean oreastern areas of Europe became by far predominant, while in the 19thcentury the immigrants were mostly of Anglo-Saxon, German or Scandinavianorigin. As land became more and more expensive, and the possibility ofleaving Europe with even a small amount of capital became more and morerare, there were no other possibilities open to immigrants than life in apoor quarter of the city, working in a factory, or in a remote miningvillage. In the urban areas all the tensions deriving from the impactbetween an extremely composite and differentiated working class and anindustry that was growing and changing its characteristics under thepressure of mechanisation and the search for maximum efficiency wereconcentrated.

In the course of what was called the “Progressive Era” all socialcomponents underwent a rapid evolution. The large corporation in aposition of quasi-monopoly certainly represented the antithesis of theprevious ideals of American democracy of a rural kind, whose centralfigures, the farmer and the small independent businessman, had given lifeto the culture, and the myths, of individualism. The organisation of thetrusts constituted, on the economic level, a mortal threat to thatculture, because their ability to control the market and prices eliminatedevery possibility, and even semblance, of free competition. In thepolitical field, the concentration of wealth offered the possibility ofcorrupting and controlling public affairs on a scale hitherto unthinkable.For this reason, the fight against trusts had already constituted, in thelast decades of the 19th century, one of the battle horses of ruralpopulist agitation. Particularly rooted in the agrarian states of theMidwest, the populist movement had demanded, and in part obtained, around1890, public control over railroad tariffs (Interstate Commerce Act) andmeasures to control respect for the rules of competition (Sherman Act).But the agitation against the trusts continued to remain, at least untilthe beginning of the World War, one of the central themes of the Americanpolitical scene. The anti-monopoly controversy became, in fact, one of thebattle horses of the “progressive” reform movements.

Exponents of the old ruling elites such as Theodore Roosevelt,intellectuals, professionals, merchants, generally the most open-mindedmembers of the middle and upper classes, reacted openly in the face of thepressing radical change of status that threatened them. While on the onehand they saw the rise of the new, arrogant power of financiers andindustrialists who, at the head of great economic empires, accumulated anenormous power of conditioning on the life of the country, on the otherhand they felt the threat of a growing working class that tended to theorganisation of strong unions and, at least potentially, to theconstruction of a socialist alternative.

Faced with the social upheaval resulting from the rapid growth of anindustrial economy, the agitation of a “progressive” nature chose the dualpath of denunciation in front of public opinion and the political battleat local and central level. In the early years of the century becamefamous journalists nicknamed muckrakers (shovelers of manure): theybrought to light numerous scandals, abuses, episodes of corruption in thepublic life of the cities. It spread with them a publicity of denunciationfirst, and then analysis of the social plagues produced by the boom inindustry and urbanism: dilapidated neighbourhoods, poverty, child labourand women in appalling conditions, accidents at work. But while attackingmonopoly big business, they never lost sight of the danger posed by theworking class, whose uncontrolled union organisation and growing presenceof socialism and related ideologies were feared above all.

Big business had clear objectives: stability of the financial system,predictability of market trends, elimination of the harmful effects ofcompetition, elimination or reduction of labour conflicts.

For this reason, the major reforms, especially at federal level, ended upbeing supported, and often designed and managed, by the most politically“enlightened” exponents of big financial and industrial capital. Thus, thereorganisation of the banking system, implemented in 1913 with the FederalReserve Act, was directly inspired by the bankers, who created a moreelastic and efficient credit structure. Similarly, the regulation ofcompetition in the railways, the new Clayton law on trusts, theestablishment of the Federal Trade Commission (responsible for thesupervision of any monopolistic activities), the modification ofprotective tariffs, were all reforms launched with the consent of largeindustrial capital. The men of the large corporations participateddirectly in the conception and planning of reforms that were presented asan attempt at public control over certain aspects of the economicstructure. And they were the ones called upon to be part of the federalcommissions charged with administering and applying the reform laws. Inthis way, the control of major economic interests over politics wasrealised, the use of political instruments to rationalise the economicsystem, defined as “political capitalism”. It was a question ofinstitutionalising the guidance of politics operated by capital, which isinseparable from the capitalist system of production, but which thebourgeoisie always tries to hide, so as not to highlight the classcharacter of the state; and which only appears in the light of day whenthe bourgeoisie is forced to resort to the authoritarian solution.

The reforming thrust of big capital also had as its primary objective thepursuit of a “rational” and “efficient” harmony between classes, toprevent the emergence of an aggressive and organised working class, withall the dangers that this would entail.

On the whole, in the first phase of the war, the administration’s labourpolicy was quite incisive and innovative even if its major results werelimited to industrial sectors directly responsible for supplying the armedforces or building the structures and machinery necessary for theiroperation. In all sectors where the government intervened directly toregulate working conditions, wages rose (at least nominally) to levelsrequired by the union pay scales, even where this had not been establishedsince the first agreements, as in the case of shipyards. This waspartially due to the pressure that the union leaders in the variousagencies could exert, but the main reason was undoubtedly that theworkers’ struggle would have exploded and extended much further withoutthese measures, eliminating any possibility of guaranteeing social peaceand making it impossible to use unions as instruments of conciliation andworkers’ “empowerment”.

As far as working hours are concerned, the maximum limit of eight hourswas established everywhere as the base time, while overtime hours – 50% oreven 100% more than base pay – practically became the rule given theenormous demand for production. The government’s realisation of thislong-held goal of the labour movement was necessary for the conciliationof labour and capital, and if it often was the tripartite agenciesgranting this measure to the workers without struggle, it is equally truethat it was often forced from the employers without any governmentintervention. The bosses as a whole accepted this government policy andonly in special and sporadic cases was any opposition exercised.

From the unions’ point of view, it allowed a considerable strengtheningof their organisations firstly, within the workplace, because of thegreater freedom they had towards the entrepreneurs, thanks to thegovernmental action against anti-union discrimination, and because oftheir growing rank and file; and secondly, more generally, because of thepower they were gaining through the integration of production into thegovernmental apparatus.

The counterbalance to this process was the repression and destruction ofthe forces of the workers’ movement, which represented the only organisedalternative to the conservative unions; this also constituted a validdeterrent for all those who could think of not respecting the peaceagreement by the government and the leaders of the AFL

All these factors, on the other hand, while contributing to thestrengthening of the unions, also shifted their main reason for strengthfrom the ability to successfully face the employers to the permanence ofcooperative relations with the government: that is, they made the unionsless and less “self-sufficient”, as they liked to call themselves, andincreasingly linked to political balance and to their orientation in aliberal sense. This produced some rather important changes within the AFLorganisation itself, wherein all tendencies towards bureaucratisation andtransfer of power to the top management of the unions were accentuated.

In January 1918, the United States Employment Service (USES) was born: afederal employment office, it was responsible for regulating the labourmarket. In general, its work was aimed at planning and organising adistribution of the workforce more in line with the needs of productionsectors, thus remedying the chaos of the first year of war caused by theanarchic race of entrepreneurs to hire labour. Additionally, the USESsupported and often directly organised new flows of labour, which shouldrecreate a large reserve of labour for the bosses since the reserve onceconstituted by European immigrants – in addition to no longer beingavailable during the War – was no more able to be used as a means ofsocial stabilisation, because it had revealed itself to be the mainsubject of the proletarian struggle.

In March 1918, President Wilson decided to transform the War IndustriesBoard (WIB) into an autonomous agency – answerable only to the President –whose director had the immense power to prioritise certain kinds ofproduction and the distribution of supplies among the various sectors ofthe administration. Additionally, within the WIB there was also a PriceFixing Committee, which had to fix and control the prices of severalindustrial products. Ultimately, the war had the effect of creating idealconditions for the self-regulation of industry, clearing any controversyabout trusts and realising on a large scale the interactions between stateand industry – a cooperation that the bourgeoisie is only able totemporarily achieve when the survival of its class is in peril. Staliniststatism was born in Washington.

The last among a series of agencies created by the administration, theNational War Labor Board (NWLB) was born in April 1918 to perform a dualfunction: firstly, to be the central agency for mediation of labourconflicts, coordinating the work of all the other operating mediatoryagencies, acting as the ultimate authority in this regard; secondly, toset up and select new conciliatory structures for productive sectors notalready under con-trol. This was, in theory, solely with the war inter-estin mind, but in reality these powers extended much further and, in thisway, the NWLB became a court of appeal for disputes not resolved locally.

The right of workers to organise themselves in trade unions and to dealcollectively, through their representatives, with employers was formallyrecognised, and it was explicitly stated that employers could not fireworkers because they belonged to a trade union or because they carried outlegitimate trade union activities. The experiences of various agencieswere thus recognised, and in particular of the President’s MediationCommission, which entrusted a decisive role to collective bargaining forthe containment of conflicts, and which at the same time, however,confined the possibilities of organisation and trade union activity ofworkers within the boundaries of the “patriotic” choice of cooperation forthe elevation of war production. It is clear that the term “legitimate”did not apply to all activities considered de jure legal; it was also apolitical judgement: the door was left open to the repression of allworkers who did not respect the agreements and the social truce decided bythe unions. The right to collective organisation was, therefore, onceagain subordinated to the condition that it had aims and methods matchingthe official policy of the administration and its union allies.

Throughout the war period the claim on which the industrial proletariatfought periodically everywhere was the eight hours. It was the insistenceof the workers for the eight hours, and their stubbornness to organise andfight for them, that made this measure so general and widespread duringthe war; the attitude of the NWLB and other agencies to adopt thereduction of hours was the result of such pressures. The action of theworkers in particular was decisive in making even the most reluctantbosses accept the eight-hour and other measures proposed by the tripartiteagencies.

Another focal point of the NWLB were the aforementioned shop committees,having an unprecedented spread and beginning to play an important role inobtaining the settlement of disputes directly in the workplace, on thelargest possible scale, through conciliation and negotiation carried outpersonally by the workers and managements concerned. By the end of thewar, the shop committees had lost all semblance of being instruments ofworkers’ struggle and organisation and became company unions – yellowunions – the nucleus of the reaction of capital within what was designatedthe American Plan; it was essentially the confirmation of the 1915Rockefeller plan.

On the whole, the action of the tripartite agencies in the field of wagesdid not produce great changes; for the workers the improvements in livingstandards during the war were largely illusory. Although wages hadincreased in monetary terms (compared with 1914) by 11.6% in 1916, by 30%in 1917, and by 63% in 1918, this was hardly enough to keep up with thepace of inflation; in fact, in real terms, wages increased (compared to1914) by 4% in 1916, by 1% in 1917, and by 4% in 1918. The regulation ofworking conditions by the government had not done anything other thanprevent a net devaluation of wages with respect to the increase in thecost of living, and this result was also obtained above all through theconstant pressure exerted by workers with strikes or with the simplethreat of struggle.

The real and important changes taking place in the wage structure werethe increase in the real wages of less skilled workers and the consequentdecrease in the wage differences between the highest and lowest paidsections of the proletariat; these were due to the fact that unskilledworkers – generally not organised in unions – had been able to takeadvantage of a shortage of the reserve workforce (thanks to theconcomitance between a very high production demand, the employment of acertain part of the workforce in the armed forces, and the virtualdisappearance of the high migratory flow) to impose their demands on boththe bosses and the government.

The key feature of the last year of the war was undoubtedly the decisiveentry of the government into the field of relations between thebourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat. The establishment of theNational War Labor Board and the War Labor Policies Board represents thestart of a labour policy aimed on the one hand at coordinating andcentralising the government’s conciliatory activity and on the other handat coordinating and – up to a certain point – planning production, mainlyintervening on wage and working conditions: an intervention caused by thewar contingency, first foreseen and then real, which, as indeed in othercountries in similar situations, requires perfect co-ordination ofresources to achieve the goal of victory. In these cases, the bourgeoisstate does not hesitate to strike even the capitalists who do not complywith its regulations, a characteristic that in peacetime is more typicalof manifestly dictatorial regimes, but even in that case the measure islinked to some form of emergency because the bourgeoisie prefers totalanarchy of production, which it calls – rather pompously and crassly –“freedom”.

It goes without saying, however, that it is the proletariat that bearsthe brunt of emergencies and is made to sacrifice the most, by fair means(patriotism, vague promises, propaganda) or by brutal ones (threats ofenrolment, repression, anti-union laws).

Indeed, the constitutive document of the NWLB gave official character andmaximum authority, to collective bargaining and its tools, strengtheningthe boundaries within which it could develop, and thus constituting apowerful deterrent against any temptation to break the balance that hadcome to exist between the bosses, government, and conservative unions.

The consolidation of cooperation between these groups, and itscentralisation under the protection of the state and government, tended torather quickly assume authoritarian and orderly connotations. The wagepolicy of government agencies, thus, while meeting some of theproletariat’s demands in order to eliminate the most important causes ofclass conflict – establishing minimum wages and tying numerical wages tothe trend in the cost of living (i.e., compensating for inflation) – alsotraced precise boundaries beyond which workers’ demands could not go.Beyond these borders there was only head-on confrontation with the stateapparatus and with the broad political and trade union alignment thatsupported its policy.

It is good to remember that the spread and consolidation of collectivebargaining, however extensive, especially during the war, never underminedor weakened the legal systems hitherto used to fight the unions. Thetarget of these means had simply been redirected away from unions andtowards radical organisations; they were far from done away with. The useof injunctions and legislation against trusts for the persecution ofworkers’ organisations, including conservative unions, would quickly makea comeback in the post-war period. However, even if temporarily, a muchmore solid institutional framework was established in the face of workers’struggles, capable of intervening harshly in those conflicts where some ofthe cardinal points of its activity were questioned; its greatercompactness accelerated the integration of trade unions and, as we haveseen, managed to overturn even the behaviours and choices most rooted intheir tradition.

All these factors led to a decrease in strikes in 1918, although ifcompared to the pre-war years the figures still remained very high (in1918 there were 3,353 strikes compared to 4,450 in 1917 and 1,593 in1915), but above all they put the government in a position to put an endto any social unrest that contested the guidelines of its policy. Theadministration therefore decisively imposed itself both on those companies(a few) that rejected the decisions of the NWLB by not accepting any formof bargaining with their organised employees, and above all ontostruggling workers that broke the trade union truce and made demands thatthe conciliation agencies refused to accept.

What actually took place with the war was the political and institutionalresponse given to the labour movement by big business. The dual policyconceived by the NCF towards the organised labour movement, centred onintegration and cooperation with conservative unions and on thesimultaneous frontal battle against the anti-capitalist and radicalforces, reached its maximum extension with the world conflict and its owntemporary triumph. Around it a large unity of entrepreneurs and moregenerally of the ruling classes was formed, as well as a certain consensusof vast sectors of public opinion, favoured and nourished by the climateof emergency and national unity that the war had brought with it.

Even the consequences of the practice of trade union agreements were, orat least tended to be, of a dual nature: on the one hand, unionsaccentuated their bureaucratic character, escaping more and more from thecontrol of their rank and file and thereby disposing of their character asorganisations of struggle; on the other hand, radical organisations andspontaneous workers’ struggles outside “legal” bargaining were isolated,marginalised, and repressed. But above all, the AFL and the unions wereseen as instruments for the maintenance of social peace in the factory andas guarantors of equilibrium and consensus on a social level. As Commonswrote: ‘American workers’ organisations, however aggressive they mighthave been, were found to be the first bulwark against the revolution andthe strongest defenders of constitutional government.’

This betrayal did not earn the unions a safe place in the governmentstructure, but only a temporary political position that the post-warperiod would cancel.

Our Party’s research work on the American labour movement – ended so farby the entry of the United States into the First World War on 6th April,1917 – started with the seventeenth century, when the lack of resourcessuited for robbing the continent forced England, a colonial power in theregion, to focus on the exploitation of labour to fill the coffers of thebourgeoisie and aristocrats. This labour, necessarily, had to come fromoutside – from Europe and Africa – consumed and replaced by ever new wavesof immigrants; this is one of the constants that characterises thedevelopment of capitalism across the Atlantic, and especially of itsworking class. Another constant of the class struggle in North America hasbeen violence: the United States can boast the bloodiest history of thelabour movement in the ranks of the industrialised nations.

After the war for independence from England had begun with a massacre ofproletarians in Boston, it was the workers of the cities who fought andwon the war while the bourgeoisie was divided into two camps, English andAmerican; the proletarians did not obtain any advantage except thegeneralised economic development of the country, largely to the benefit ofthe bourgeoisie. This national development was mainly built off of thestrong exploitation of the proletariat, including women and children,while trade union associations were struggling to take off; the politicalmovement suffered the same fate, despite numerous attempts to create aworkers’ party, a problem that continued to exist throughout thenineteenth century.

A peculiar aspect of the working class in North America was its constantrenewal due to the continuous migratory flows, which brought in thecountry the English, Irish, Germans, in a first phase, and subsequentlyemigrants from southern and eastern Europe. This phenomenon – accompaniedby the growing attraction exerted by the western territories, where it waseasy to obtain land to cultivate – meant a continuous renewal andreshuffling of the composition of the working class, causing immensedifficulty in developing class consciousness and in the formation ofworkers’ organisations, both economic and political. The trade unions,which existed in large numbers since before the civil war, suffered therepercussions of the frequent crises, being born and disappearing withextreme ease.

The Civil War in 1861–1865 represented a further setback for trade unionformation, which was nevertheless followed by a period of considerableactivism due to the influence of the militants of the First International,who imported the socialist doctrine from Europe.

In the years following the Civil War, in parallel with the tumultuouseconomic growth, the working class grew both in number and combativeness,and great national strikes took place. Towards the end of the 1970s, theKnights of Labor developed, which – unlike trade unions – organised allworkers, including non-skilled workers, women, and children. Despite itsnumerous successes, however, the leadership of the Knights of Labor didnot like the weapon of the strike, and this attitude in the long run ledto real betrayals of the struggling workers, and therefore to the declineof the organisation in flavour of trade unions, now united in the AmericanFederation of Labor; which, in spite of the fact that its member unionscontinued to keep unskilled workers away, began to rise rapidly in thelate 1880s.

Unfortunately, the trade unions – narrow and often localistic, aiming forpartial results for the working-class aristocracy – was not what wasneeded in a country where a ravenous bourgeoisie would not retreat beforeanything to impose its terms. Against the struggling workers, in additionto the vigilantes of the company or rented from the Pinkerton agency, thelocal militias were always present, while the judges, always ready tosubmit to the demands of the bosses, did not spare injunctions andsentenced the strikers to severe penalties, often involving imprisonment.Not infrequently, in the most important cases, when all these resourceswere not enough, federal troops intervened. In addition to this complexbourgeois apparatus, there were numerous cases in which the AFL unionsthemselves sided with the bosses, or even organised scabbing. Manystruggles were characterised by armed clashes, wounding and killing many.

With the rise of the new millennium, the interest of the AFL to presentit*elf as a bulwark for the survival of capitalist society is clear, justas the Industrial Workers of the World was born with opposing union andpolitical aims. The latter represented an example of militancy anddedication to the cause of the working class, but it was always a minoritymovement due to its fusion of the party and the union form; nevertheless,this did not prevent it from conducting great and hard struggles,especially in the western side of the country.

The final part of the period treated in this work – ending with the entryof the US into the first world war in 1917 – saw a growing attention andpresence of the federal state in trade union matters, with the intent toeliminate the pressures of the most extreme sectors of the bourgeoisie andto organise in a hom*ogeneous way the conditions of exploitation of theworking class, in order to minimise the conflict between capital andlabour, with preparation for entry into war in mind. This was done bypeaceable means if possible, by ruthless ones whenever necessary. Theseruthless means were, among other things, a harsh persecution of allnon-cooperative trade union agitators and the outlawing of the IWW, evenwith the enactment of special laws, such as the Espionage Act and the lawagainst criminal syndicalism.

State intervention also included a strong involvement of thecollaborationist trade unions – those of the AFL in particular – withregard both to social peace and to the war effort, an involvement that thetrade union movement adhered to with enthusiasm, being almost integratedinto the state; it was so for a time in fact, but never in a completelyformal way. Nevertheless, in fact, the “responsible” trade union isaccepted by the bourgeoisie in its structure of government, a historicalevent that will soon be imitated in all capitalist countries, either in adisguised manner (democratic regimes) or in a directly institutionalmanner (dictatorial regimes).

A peculiar characteristic of the class struggle in the USA, whichdifferentiates it from that which took place in Europe in the same years,at least in the more industrialised countries, was the scarce penetrationof the socialist party into the class due on the one hand to thetheoretical and organisational weakness of the parties that succeeded eachother and on the other hand to conditions outside the class, such as thegreat distances between industrial concentrations, the virulence of thereaction of the bourgeoisie, the fluidity of class composition – oftenmulti-ethnic and multilingual, with successive migratory waves, each timeof proletarians less evolved than those already present (except in thecase of the migration of the Germans in the central period of the 19thcentury, generally socialist workers); in fact, after the civil war andespecially between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War,immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was almost exclusivelycomposed of former peasants, who required years of factory work to acquireclass consciousness. This, combined with the prevailing individualistideology – derived from a past of pioneers – conditioned the developmentof the proletariat in both a political and union sense.

But it is clear that the most important, and most feared by the workers,was the first type of injunction: it was not only issued on the basis ofthe opinion of the entrepreneur and his version of the facts, but also hadthe advantage of a very rapid procedure, so as to be a formidableinstrument of intervention against a strike or other action of strugglefrom its very beginning. In this way, an enormous amount of power wasconcentrated in the hands of judges whose conservative and pro-patronpositions cannot be doubted: it is enough to think, for example, that inthe federal courts alone, in the period between 1901 and 1921, themagistrates granted an injunction at the request of the entrepreneur 70times and refused it only once! So what was supposed to be an“extraordinary remedy” under common law quickly became the “usual legalmeasure” in the attack on workers’ struggles and their organisations, andin fact it was used on the most diverse occasions.

Part One
Struggle forpower inthetworevolutions
Chapters 69 to 80

As arranged in good time and convened by the party’s internationalcentre, a general meeting was held from Friday, 26 May to Sunday, 28 May.Individuals and local groups were connected by tele-conference.

At the Friday preparatory meeting, which was reserved for comrades, 11countries were represented, at the Saturday and Sunday sessions, whichwere also open to serious candidates, 13.

At this meeting, too, communication between the different languages wasfelicitously resolved by providing those present with writtentranslations, in English, Italian and Spanish, of both the section andgroup reports for Friday (also drafted and sent to the centre in advance)and the extended reports for Saturday and Sunday. Further additions,information, requests for clarification and proposals from individuals aretranslated immediately. This is such an arrangement that all comrades canfully get to know and appreciate our work everywhere and in its entirety.

The Party prides itself on the fact that all its activity, includingmeetings – although it always requires great commitment and sometimes hasto deal with issues that are not easy and immediate to resolve – takesplace in total order and discipline. In a natural and spontaneous way, wework together for communism, without having to rely on statutes, laws, orregulations. Not because we would be attracted by the bourgeois myth offreedom and anarchy, which is always individualistic, but because we cango beyond these miseries, the party being a structure not traversed byopposing class interests.

This is how it will be for the communist society, and before it, also forthe reborn party that is strong and world-wide.

The general meeting of the Party was convened from Friday 29 September toSunday 1 October. Some 70 comrades from 10 countries were connected bytele-conference.

As usual, the Friday session, reserved for militants, was devoted to theorganisation of the meeting and our general sessions, those on Saturdayand Sunday to the presentation of reports, to which those seriouslyinterested in engaging in our disciplined work are also admitted.

On Friday, the working groups updated each other on their manyactivities. The comrades came to the meeting after they had workedtogether, in growing understanding, even from distant countries, through adaily correspondence that, in respectful, pragmatic, and dense ways, wepride ourselves on resembling the lifelong correspondence between Marx andEngels.

Out of this collective work come results perfectly in tune with Marxistdoctrine and our best Party tradition. These works and activities, interms of variety, consistency and coherence, given the minuscule size ofour membership, truly appear to be a ‘miracle’, materially determined bythe historical urgency of communism. It is made possible not by theexceptional skills of today’s comrades, but by the organic method of ourwork, free of the miseries of bourgeois civilisation: individualism,infighting, and competition.

We listened to the reports of the local groups, of the progress in ourpress initiatives, periodicals, and monographs, of intervention in thetrade unions in the various countries, of the possibilities ofdisseminating our words, to be formulated ever better in relation to thecurrent monstrous convulsions of the dying world of capital.

In the 11th and 12th centuries cities were born or reborn, particularlyin north-central Italy and Flanders, but also in northern France,Burgundy, Provence, and Rhenish Germany. The pre-bourgeois merchant andpetty-nobility classes settled there, which first clashed and then mergedand gave rise to the bourgeoisie around the 13th century. Incentral-northern Italy, in those same centuries, the Communes establishedthemselves, which tended towards real autonomy from the empire andself-government, more markedly than in the other regions of the formerCarolingian Empire.

Together with the cities and the bourgeoisie, ‘heresies’ appeared, in anincomparably more evident manner than in previous centuries. Suchreligious conceptions, heretical or not, always had at their basis‘millenarianism’, the expectation of the end of time, messianism and themodel of the first Christian communities, where all goods were pooled.

These conceptions did not constitute an ideology useful to thebourgeoisie, but were often taken up by merchants and bourgeoisie as well.To this we can give two explanations. The first, and most obvious,consists in the dominance of a religious ideology that saw the return tothe origins as the only possible remedy against a present ‘degenerated’due to the ‘corruption’ of the Church and the Empire, institutions thatshould instead have marched on the tracks of divine Providence. Thisideology was shared not only by the bourgeoisie and the nobility, but alsoby peasants and urban plebs.

The second explanation, which interests us most, is that the nascentbourgeoisie felt, albeit confusedly, the need to oppose the entire feudalsystem, which all millenarian and pauperist conceptions criticised. In theabsence of its own ideology, the bourgeoisie made use of such censures,accepting along with them the conceptions of which they were part, whetherheretical or not.

Patarenes, Cathars, Waldensians, Spiritual Franciscans, Fraticelli,Michaelites, Dulcinians: these were the main heresies between the 11th and14th centuries.

In our press, we have dealt with the ‘“dream-need” of communism’.Communism only became a real possibility with the rise of capitalism, whencommunist sentiment was joined by communist reason, i.e., our scientifichistorical programme, from the mid-19th century. Before then, communistsentiment, which had been present since antiquity in opposition tosuccessive class societies, could only take the forms of millenarianism,messianism and utopianism.

Generally, heresies were not born as such, and if doctrinal divergencesremained, they were often tolerated. When they did not obey the authorityof the pope and bishops, preaching new principles and creating newreligious orders without their permission, they ceased to be so.

In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Church’s attitude was not yetunequivocal: measures against heretics ranged from conversion,confiscation of possessions (certainly the most widespread measure) and inthe most ‘obstinate’ cases imprisonment and the death penalty.

There was a turning point with Pope Innocent III and his decretal Vergentisin senium of 1199, which drew on Roman law, the codes of Theodosiusand Justinian, and the penalties then reserved for Manicheans. Heresy wasequated with the crime of lèse-majesté, and the crime against theemperor became a crime against God. Conversely, crimes against the emperorcould be punished as heresy. Sometimes the common people of the cities andthe peasants killed and burned the alleged heretics before the Churchpronounced itself, but it is also true that the city institutions oftenparticipated unwillingly in episcopal and inquisitorial initiativesagainst heretics. This was sometimes out of sympathy for them, but mainlyout of fear of having their autonomy curtailed in favour of the bishop,the Inquisition, and the Church.

The term comes from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis), meaningmanifestation, revelation, appearance, discovery. The Apocalypse of John,written at the end of the 1st century, had this meaning. In latercenturies, the term took on the meaning of death, fear, and terror.

Today, the apocalyptic vision is greater in the atheist, rationalistbourgeoisie than in those with religious beliefs. The bourgeois, whetheratheist or religious, feel the smell of death of their class that has nofuture, because they cannot and do not want to believe in a future withoutcapitalism, without the bourgeoisie. ‘The world has no future’ – so theysay. Hence their black and gloomy visions of the future, populated bynightmares of environmental, climate, food, nuclear, demographic disaster,etc. Of course, all this for them is not due to the capitalist system ofproduction, but to the imperfection, or wickedness, of human nature.

Even science fiction creates worlds, beyond appearances, very similar tothe real one: not even in fantasy can the bourgeoisie conceive of a worldnot shaped by capitalist relations of production.

The hope, the certainty in the ‘kingdom of heaven’, the future of thesubaltern classes that preceded the birth of the proletariat, wereinherited by the communists.

All the groups of the medieval centuries in question, heretical andotherwise, steeped in millenarianism, messianism, and Joachimism, may makeus smile at their ideological views, but they are on our side of history.The term ‘compagno’, meaning 'comrade’, comes from the Latin ‘conpanis’ and indicates those who eat at the same table. This term wascommonly used by Franciscans.

It is only with the birth of capitalism and the reflection on it,culminating in the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848, thatsentiment is united with reason and science, giving rise to our historicalprogramme. In the name of the common communist sentiment, with the variousWaldensians, Franciscans, and Dulcinians, we sit at the same table andshare the same bread, the fruit of the earth and human labour.

This same bread that capitalism turns into stone. The latter is not justa metaphor: Marx himself describes how already in his time flour was mixedwith marble dust, to increase the weight of the bread, and thus sell it ata higher price and profit.

The reality of capitalism is worse than any fantasy, and it is worse thanwhatever “conspiracy” the bourgeoisie concocts to give an easy explanationfor what they do not know, cannot, and do not want to understand.

We resume the exposition of the chapter on theories of crises concerningRicardo, which will go into the study of the bourgeois conception of thefall of the rate of profit, accumulation and consequently the crises ofoverproduction, the utmost horror of every apologist, hired to deny thecatastrophe to which the abominable last classist mode of productionconstantly tends.

The language used at this juncture by Marx is far from simple andstraightforward, but every great scientific achievement is dutifullypreceded by a good deal of effort, and this we require of the communistreader whose brain muscles must train to learn the theory of theliberation of the proletariat.

The amplitude of space devoted to Ricardo in Theories of SurplusValue allows the same principles to be taken up again and again soas to approach the crux of the matter in stages.

One of the most important points in the Ricardian system is the discoverythat the profit rate has a tendency to fall.

According to Smith, this would occur as a result of increasingaccumulation and the accompanying increasing competition of capital.Ricardo retorts to this argument by stating that competition can equaliseprofits in the different branches of production; however, it cannot lowerthe general rate of profit.

The tendency for the rate of profit to fall is also derived from theincrease in the rate of land rent, but this tendency of rent does notactually exist, and with that falls its effect on the fall in the rate ofprofit.

Second, the research rests on the erroneous assumption that the rate ofsurplus-value and the rate of profit coincide, and that therefore a fallin the rate of profit corresponds to that of surplus value.

Ricardian theory thus rests on erroneous assumptions: 1) that theexistence and growth of the land rent are conditioned by the decreasingfertility of agriculture; 2) that the rate of profit is equal to the rateof surplus-value and can rise or fall only in inverse proportion to howthe wage declines or rises.

At this point, it is necessary to shift attention to the arena where allthe contradictions and antitheses of bourgeois production come toexplosion: the world market. Precisely because all the contradictoryelements reach their climax here, apologetics unleashes its worst weaponsand, instead of investigating what the contradictory elements that explodein the catastrophe consist of, it contents itself with denying thecatastrophe and insisting, in the face of the regular periodicity ofcrises, that if production conformed to the schoolbooks the end ofprosperity would never come. Apologetics, then, consists in thefalsification of the simplest economic relations and especially in holdingfirm to unity in the face of antithesis.

In order to show that capitalist production cannot lead to generalcrises, all conditions and determinations of form, all principles andspecific differences, in short capitalist production itself, are denied,and in fact it is shown that if the capitalist mode of production, insteadof being a specifically developed, peculiar form of social production,were a mode of production left behind its crudest origins and itsantitheses, its own contradictions, and therefore also its explosions incrises, would not exist. The crises are eliminated through reasoning thatdenies the first presuppositions of capitalist production, the existenceof the product as commodity, the splitting of the commodity into commodityand money, the moments resulting from this of separation in commodityexchange, and finally the relation between money or commodity and wagelabour.

What, then, are the conditions that make crises possible?

1. The general possibility of crises in the process of the metamorphosisof capital is given, doubly so: insofar as money acts as a means ofcirculation, separating buying from selling; insofar as it acts as ameans of payment, where it operates at two different moments, as ameasure of values and as a realization of value.
2. Crises that result from price changes that do not coincide withchanges in the value of goods.
3. The general possibility of crisis is the metamorphosis of form ofcapital, that is, the temporal and spatial separation of buying andselling.
4. Crises can also be generated by disproportionate transformations ofsurplus capital in its various elements.
5. Crises arising from disrupted transformation of commodities intomoney.

The final chapter addressed the contradiction between the development ofproductive forces and the limitation of consumption.

Ricardo believes that the commodity-form is indifferent to the product;further that the circulation of commodities is only formally differentfrom barter; that exchange-value is here only a transient form of materialexchange; that therefore money is simply a means of circulation.

He is forced to believe that the bourgeois mode of production is theabsolute mode of production, thus without any specific determination.Thus, he cannot even admit that the bourgeois mode of production implies alimit to the free development of the productive forces, a limit that comesto light in crises.

It comes to light, among other things, in overproduction, a fundamentalphenomenon of crises, which Ricardo is forced to deny. The difficultiesRicardo and others raise against overproduction rest on the fact that theyregard bourgeois production as a mode of production in which there is nodifference between buying and selling. Or as social production, such thatsociety, as if according to a plan, apportions its means of production andits productive forces to the extent that they are necessary for thesatisfaction of its various needs, so that each sphere of productiontouches the share of social capital required for the satisfaction of thatneed.

This fiction arises from the inability to understand the specific form ofbourgeois production. And this misunderstanding arises from being sunkinto bourgeois production, understood as simply production, just assomeone who believes a particular religion sees in it simply religion andoutside of it only false beliefs.

The exposition of Malthus’ general theory concludes the series of reportsdevoted to the analysis of the main exponents of ‘classical’ economics.

Malthus takes a position that tends to distinguish himself from Smith andRicardo, convinced that he is introducing innovative hypotheses andalternative solutions into the economic debate. While economics would be ascience, it is closer to the moral and political sciences than to thenatural sciences, with the result that the theoretical scheme takes oneclectic connotations. This position is well expressed by a quotation fromthe Principles of Political Economy we have been reading. Todemonstrate this, it has been recalled that the theory of value is notrejected by Malthus, but is considered only as a limiting case, that is,valid only in the exchange between two commodities produced with capitalof equal organic composition, thus not being generalisable; on thecontrary, the general principle should be sought in the law of supply anddemand.

Malthus’ first concern is to erase the Ricardian distinction between‘value of labour’ and ‘quantity of labour’. Since what a quantity oflabour is exchanged against, namely wages, constitutes the value of thisquantity of labour, it is a tautology to say that the value of a givenquantity of labour is equal to the mass of money or commodities againstwhich this labour is exchanged. This simply means that the exchange valueof a given quantity of labour is equal to its exchange value, also calledwages. But it does not at all follow that a given quantity of labour isequal to the quantity of labour contained in wages or in the money orcommodities in which wages are represented.

According to Malthus the value of a commodity is equal to the sum ofmoney to be paid by the buyer, and this sum of money is valued by the massof common labour, which can be bought with it. But by what this sum ofmoney is determined, is not said. It is the vulgar representation of it incommon life in which cost price and value are identical; it is the imageof value proper to the philistine entangled in competition.

Seeking internal solutions within the classical school to the problemsposed by Smith and Ricardo, however, the transition to the vulgarconception is made. In fact, he is forced to derive surplus value from thefact that the seller would sell the commodity above its value, that is, ata greater labour time than that contained in it. In this way, however,what the capitalist would gain as seller of one commodity, he would loseas buyer of another, in a reciprocal swindle.

Where then would the buyers come from who pay the capitalist the amountof labour that is equal to the labour contained in the commodity plus itsprofit? The only exception is the working class.

Since profit derives precisely from the fact that workers can only buyback part of the product, the capitalist class can never realise itsprofit by means of worker demand. Another demand is necessary. For thecapitalist to realise his profit would therefore require buyers who arenot sellers. Hence the need for landowners, those on pensions orsinecures, priests, etc., with the result that Malthus champions themaximum possible accretion of the unproductive classes.

Malthus’ theoretical conclusions are therefore in line with his own roleas apologist. Ricardo represents bourgeois production as such, assignifying the freest unfettered deployment of social productive forces.Malthus, too, wants the freest possible development of capitalistproduction, produced solely from the misery of those who are its chiefarchitects, the working classes, but it must at the same time accommodatethe ‘consumption needs’ of the aristocracy and its branches in the stateand church.

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The course of world capitalism

The past two years have been particularly chaotic.

After a prolonged period of deflation following the great crisis of2008-2009, inflation has returned. Initially, production could not keep upwith demand, leading to congested ports due to a shortage of containerships. Consequently, prices for transportation, raw materials, and energyskyrocketed. This upward trend extended to grain prices, driven by acombination of a general drought and China’s large demand to feed itspopulation and animal herds. The imperialist war between Russia andUkraine, which commenced in February 2022, temporarily sent both energyand grain prices soaring.

What’s more, starting in March 2022, the Fed began raising interest ratesto combat inflation and restore a “normal” economic situation. This movewas followed by all other major central banks, excluding Japan. However,after years of near-zero or even negative interest rates, such a hike isnot without consequences and is expected to contribute to increased chaos.

The incidental and underlying causes of the return of inflation have beenexplained in previous reports. A further factor was the ‘just in time’practice of companies minimising stocks in order to lower productioncosts. Thus, when the period of Covid quarantine came to an end in most ofthe big imperialist centres, in order to replenish themselves, companiessimultaneously issued orders to suppliers. The demand was so sudden andcolossal that they could not meet it. Similarly, the monopolistic shippingcompanies, which had hitherto had a surplus of container carriers, wereunable to meet the demand and freight rates began to rise. The result wasa logistical bottleneck and a surge in prices.

Given their monopoly position, producers and multinationals in the sectorhave seen speculation result in significant price fluctuations, yieldingstratospheric returns in both 2021 and 2022.

The suspension of gas and oil supplies from Russia imposed on Europeunder the pretext of the war in Ukraine sent prices soaring. These peakedin July–August 2022; since then, they have fallen, the price of a barrelof oil even dropping to $70 for a time.

Fearing a drop in prices due to the looming recession, OPEC+ initiallycurtailed production by 2 million barrels in October, followed by anadditional 1.1 million in May, and has plans for another reduction of 1.6million starting in July. Oil prices saw minimal impact from theannouncement, briefly rising to $80 before settling back below $72 by lateMay. Natural gas, reaching a peak of €350 per MWh, subsequently retreatedto below 30, nearing pre-Covid levels of around $20 per MWh.

In addition to these immediate causes, there had been insufficientinvestment in the past decade due to low prices. Today, as a result of thesharp rise in prices, investments are being directed toward hydrocarbons,and those in renewable energy are being reduced. The average cost ofproducing oil offshore is $18, onshore $28. The rest is rent.

Despite the stronger dollar reducing import prices, inflation in theUnited States surpassed that of Europe in 2021, prior to the Ukraineinvasion, and during the initial half of 2022. However, the situationreversed thereafter. Following peaks in June 2022 for the U.S. and October2022 for the Eurozone, inflation steadily declined, as evident in thedisplayed graph at the meeting. In the United States, inflation began todecrease earlier, despite ambitious investment plans, due to earlier andmore rapid increases in interest rates. Consequently, although bothregions are experiencing falling inflation, it is currently higher inEurope than in the United States.

The decline in average inflation in the Eurozone hides a disparitybetween countries. While Germany has traditionally been one of theEuropean countries with the lowest inflation, it is not surprising thatthe country that drew on cheap Russian supplies ended up leading theinflationary surge, followed by Italy and the United Kingdom. In France,where Russian gas accounted for only 17 percent of imported gas, inflationhas remained lower; but here we still do not have a drop in inflation,even though shrinking consumption is exerting deflationary pressure, as inother countries.

Indeed, in addition to causing repeated banking crises due to thedevaluation of low-interest bonds, rising rates also induce a decline inconsumption, which in turn leads to a contraction in production, or atleast a sharp slowdown in its growth.

The most severely affected nations are in Asia, with Japan and Korealeading the list, followed by Germany. The United States is also grapplingwith a significant slowdown, despite substantial investments and effortsto bolster household consumption. As depicted in a chart, Japan has beenin a continuous recession since September 2021. Germany, aside from fourmonths showing positive year-over-year increases, has consistentlyexperienced negative trends since September 2021, with annual growthranging from -0.1 percent to -5.5 percent.

The UK, on the other hand, has been in the midst of recession sinceOctober 2021, which explains the numerous strikes and demonstrations thatare rocking the country.

Similarly, since September 2021, France has fluctuated between slightlypositive and slightly negative annual increases, with the largest gapranging from +1.8 percent to -2.8 percent.

Italy offers a slightly better picture, but since June 2022 negativeincreases have exceeded positive ones.

Poland, which experienced a notable surge in production since becoming amember of the European Union, has witnessed a slight downturn in theindustry over the past three months. This follows a marked slowdownbetween October and December and is concurrently influenced by a declinein international demand.

On the other hand, as seen in the graph, the drop in production in SouthKorea is spectacular. While Germany is heavily dependent on world markets,particularly those in China, Europe, and North America.

India seems to be escaping global deflation for now, with relatively highincreases. This is due to its poor integration into the world market andthe relative weakness of its industry relative to its demographic weight.

After a recession from August 2021 to March 2022, Brazil experienced aslight recovery from July 2022 to November 2022. The -1.1 percent annualdecline recorded in December is indicative of a return to recession.

In Turkey, after a sharp slowdown in industrial production from July2022, the increases have now turned negative, dropping to -7.5 percent byFebruary 2023.

Canada, a major exporter of commodities, particularly oil, has seen allits increases remain positive, but slowing sharply since June 2022, from5.8 percent annually in May 2022 to 1.7 percent in February 2023.

In conclusion, the steadfast old mole persists in its splendid subversiveefforts. The contradictions within the economic undercurrents intensify,creating immense pressures that will inevitably rupture the capitalistframework, akin to a colossal volcano unleashing accumulated forces.

Driven by necessity, the proletariat of the whole world will be on themove again, directed by its class party, to resume its place in history.

The surge in interest rates has initiated a global economic decline,bringing the world to the brink of a recession. Consequently, there hasbeen a noticeable decline in inflation. After reaching its peak in June2022 at 9.1% in the U.S. and in October 2022 at 10.6% in Europe, inflationdropped to 5.5% in Europe and 3% in the U.S. by June 2023. However, therewas a slight resurgence of inflation in the U.S., reaching 3.7 in August.This phenomenon is attributed to the summer season and governmentincentives aimed at stimulating industrial production and supporting thedevelopment of new technologies.

In Europe, there are indications that the inflation disparity amongvarious countries is narrowing. In June, the highest recorded inflationvalues were 6.3% in the United Kingdom and 4.9% in France. A significantcontributing factor to this trend is undoubtedly the escalation in fuelprices, closely linked to the upward trajectory of oil prices.

In a bid to bolster oil prices, OPEC+ has consistently reduced dailyproduction. This strategy has led to a significant imbalance betweensupply and demand in the third quarter, reaching 1.6 million barrels perday – the highest level since 2021. To counteract this decline, countriesdependent on oil consumption are depleting their stocks. In August alone,they withdrew 76.3 million barrels, bringing reserves to their lowestpoint in 13 months. Consequently, this depletion has contributed to asurge in prices, with Brent crude oil from the North Sea reaching $94 perbarrel in September 2023.

The escalation of prices cannot be solely attributed to certaincountries’ monopolies on hydrocarbon production. Another contributingfactor is the under-investment observed in the raw materials and energysectors over the past decade, coupled with speculation that identifiesopportunities for significant profits.

However, within the chronic crisis of the capitalist mode of production,periods of recession are anticipated to be succeeded by a new wave ofdeflation. However, within the chronic crisis of the capitalist mode ofproduction, periods of recession are anticipated to be succeeded by a newwave of deflation. Central banks will then once again have to rush to therescue of capital to keep it from collapsing.

The general trend is not only moving towards a sharp slowdown, but eventoward recession.

In the United States, despite the government injecting hundreds ofbillions of dollars to support industrial production and modernise it bydeveloping new technology branches, there has been a noticeable slowdown,with growth approaching zero since December 2022. In terms of industrialproduction, which includes shale oil and gas, there is only a slightgrowth of 0.2% in the first eight months of 2023 compared to the entireyear of 2022. Conversely, when considering manufacturing production alone,there is a decline of 1.7%, contributing to a 15-year decrease, bringingthe sector to -7.6% from its peak in 2007.

Although a few hundred billion dollars in government aid will allowAmerican industrial production to modernise and cope with the “energytransition”, this will not prevent the spread of the historical crisis ofthe capitalist mode of production.

Japan’s economy continues to trudge along. After a recovery of 5.1% in2021, compared with -10.1% in 2020, and the very modest 0.2% growth in2022, Japan will record -1.6% in 2023, bringing the level of output to-19% from its peak reached in 2007.

South Korea, after years of relatively strong growth, averaging 2.8%, isnow in the midst of a recession with a 6.1% drop in industrial productionin the first seven months of the year! This figure is not to be dismissedlightly; it represents a robust downward trend, signalling a formidablecrisis of overproduction.

Germany has been in recession since September 2021. Along with Belgium,it was one of the few Western European countries to have surpassed thehigh reached in 2008 but has now lost its gains.

From 2014 to 2018, Germany’s growth was weak (1.5% annual average) butsteady, while in the other Western European countries’ growth picked uponly during the two-year period 2017-18, marked by a favourableinternational economy, and then declined from 2019 onward in all majorimperialist countries, including China. In the first seven months of 2023,German industry recorded a very slight gain over 2022, by 0.21%. However,the level of production fell 7.7% from its 2018 peak, while compared tothat of 2008 we have a minus 0.7%, in other words, German capitalism isback to where it started.

The energy tariff choice made by the German bourgeoisie has been imposedon all of Europe by aligning the price of electricity with the price ofgas. This ensures that German industry is not disadvantaged compared toFrench industry, which benefits from cheaper energy due to nuclear power.The French bourgeoisie agreed to sacrifice its own industry, seeking gainsfrom increased energy rent, and aimed to enrich itself at the expense ofthe proletariat and petty bourgeoisie by privatising electricityproduction. A growing mass of parasites bought electricity from EDF at lowprices to sell it at a higher price on the “free market”.

The German bourgeoisie for energy supply had bet on Russian cheap gas.But after the invasion of Ukraine by Russian imperialism, Germany founditself forced to buy oil and gas from other suppliers at high prices, thusreducing the competitiveness of its industry in the face of China and theUnited States. While the latter produces shale gas and oil, China buysmost of its hydrocarbons from Russia at a 30% discount. The Kremlin thusbecomes increasingly dependent to Chinese imperialism.

Similar to many older imperialist countries, Germany invests relativelylittle in infrastructure and digital technology, and a portion of itsindustrial apparatus is obsolete. This weakness undermines thecompetitiveness of German capitalism.

For years, Germany has heavily invested in China to capitalise on thebooming market of the giant nation. The remarkable development of Chinesecapitalism in the first two decades of the century significantlycontributed to increasing the average rate of profit and offered agigantic market, thereby extending the life of the capitalist mode ofproduction for several more decades. This became possible because,starting from the 1950s, Chinese state capitalism developed a formidableindustrial base with the necessary infrastructure that facilitated theinflow of investments. German monopolies in the automotive, mechanical,and chemical industries, by making massive investments in China, generatedfabulous profits for years. However, as Chinese capitalism, havingacquired know-how from the West, has seen its growth slow down, it is nowcapable of competing in sectors like machine tools, chemicals, and motorvehicles, which constitute the strengths of German capitalism.

China stands as Germany’s largest trading partner, with the interchangebetween the two countries reaching $300 billion. However, Germany’s tradedeficit is steadily growing – a trend that could intensify with theincreasing competition from Chinese electric cars, whose prices are highlycompetitive. Europe, and particularly Germany, lags behind in this sectorand struggles to compete with Chinese production. After years ofreluctance to invest in the production of batteries, magnets, and electricmotors, European industry, especially German industry, finds itselffighting for survival. The lucrative car market could slip away entirelyfrom the middle class, as Europe proves incapable of producing vehiclesthat can compete in terms of both price and quality. In its senile crisis,German capitalism faces the risk of succumbing to far stronger imperialistpowers.

French capitalism, like German capitalism, experienced a slightly betterindustrial output growth of 0.51% in 2023 compared to 2022, which hadwitnessed a mild recession. However, the overall picture is even lessoptimistic than in Germany. In comparison with 2019, production is 4.9%lower, while it remains 12% below its 2007 peak. In other words, the levelof production is very close to that of 2009, during the worst times of theoverproduction crisis. Despite various measures taken, the olderimperialist states are evidently struggling to overcome the crisis thatoccurred between 2000 and 2009.

The other great sick man of Europe is the United Kingdom. After thestrong recovery in 2021 from the fall of 2020, Britain has been inrecession again since October 2021. If we compare the index for the firstseven months of 2023 with those of 2022, we have a -1.4%, a decline thatfollows that of -3.7% in 2022. If we compare the 2019 index with the highreached in 2000, we find that in 2022 industrial output is still 6.6%lower than it was 22 years earlier. Hence, British capitalism has been inrecession since the 2000s. But, as if by magic, the statisticians of theBritish bourgeoisie have manipulated all the indices. If we take theaverage of the first seven months of 2023, a year of recession compared to2022, also in recession, we get a surplus of 1.5% over the 2000 index!Thus, the British bourgeoisie would have us believe that Britishcapitalism is doing better than German capitalism.

Even this foolishness is for us a confirmation of their decadence: soonthe bourgeoisies of all countries will no longer be capable of producingreliable statistics. Instead of industrial production they will rely onthe far more dubious GDP statistics.
The situation in Italy is not any better. Following a robust recovery in2021 with a growth rate of +11.7%, which came after a decline of 11% in2020, growth dwindled to +0.4% in 2022 before turning negative in 2023with a decline of -2.7%, based on indices for the first nine months of theyear. Despite positive performances in 2017 and 2018, Italian capitalismhad managed to narrow the gap with the 2007 peak by a still significant17.6%. Despite the post-pandemic recovery, industrial production is still20% lower than it was in 2007.

In Poland, the accumulation of industrial capital has maintained anotable average annual growth rate of 5.4% for a few years. This growth isparticularly remarkable when juxtaposed with the decrepit capitalisms ofthe Old Continent.

But the with recession at the beginning of the year, production recordeda 1.7% drop in the first six months.

World trade shows a slowdown in exports as of October 2022, but they havefallen sharply for most major imperialist countries. The exports of China,Korea, the United States and Belgium have decreased by about 10%. Those ofJapan by 5%. Chinese imports decreased 15% in July on a year-on-yearbasis. As usual, the decline in imports is synonymous with a domesticrecession.

We can conclude that, as expected, after two years of growth in 2017 and2018, global capitalism is once again in recession. It should be notedthat the old imperialist countries, with the exception of Belgium andGermany, have never regained the levels they reached in 2007: all therecovery of the last two years has been lost and the scale of productionin most of the major imperialist countries is now close to that of 2009!

China has also felt the impact of the recession, experiencing notablebankruptcies in the real estate sector, such as Evergrande. The overallscenario involves high unemployment rates, with at least 20% of youngpeople facing joblessness, a decline in consumption, and a return todeflation. With this crisis, there is a looming threat to an entire sectorof China’s petty bourgeoisie and middle class, risking financial ruin.

On a global scale, the colossal debt of companies, households, and statesis accumulating, not to mention the devaluation of trillions of bonds.Consequently, the situation is considerably worse than it was in 2009.

In the current state of affairs, as all capitalisms strive for survival,we can anticipate an increasingly fierce trade war. However, a time willcome when the failure of a few major companies, subsequently leading tothe collapse of a large bank, will set off a chain reaction. The “everyman for himself!” approach will inevitably be triggered for the majorimperialist states, and some may be compelled to declare bankruptcy.

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***

Submission totheKuomintang attheFourthCongress oftheInternational

The orientation of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International onthe Chinese question, favouring the cooperation of the Communist Party ofChina with the Kuomintang as the Communists began to enter in theNationalist Party, was formalized in a resolution of the Executive of theInternational on January 12, 1923:

1. The only serious national-revolutionary organisation in China is theKuomintang, which has its base partly in the democratic-liberalbourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, partly among the intellectuals andworkers.
2. Because the independent workers’ movement is still weak in thatcountry, the central task for China is the national revolution againstthe imperialists and their feudal agents within the country; moreover,as the working class is directly interested in the solution of thisrevolutionary-national problem, while still remaining insufficientlydifferentiated as a fully autonomous social force, the CEIC believesthat the KMT and the young CPC must coordinate their action.
3. Accordingly, under the present conditions, it is advisable for CPCmembers to remain in the Kuomintang.

In this way, the International was taking up the proposal advocated byMaring, who had already tried in the first half of 1922 to push ChineseCommunists to join the Kuomintang. The indication that the resolution gaveto the CPC therefore went beyond the need to “coordinate the action” ofthe party with what was considered to be the only truenational-revolutionary organisation, and formalised what had in factalready begun, with the first Communists beginning to join the Kuomintangindividually from the second half of 1922.

This tactic, as is also suggested in the first point of the resolution,started from a misunderstanding about the nature of the Kuomintang, whichwould have as its “base” partly the democratic-liberal bourgeoisie andpetty bourgeoisie, partly the intellectuals and workers.

Thus vanished the criticisms that only a year earlier, at the ToilersCongress in early 1922, Zinoviev himself, alongside Georgy Safarov, hadmade against the Kuomintang, also making the serious mistake of settingaside what the theses of the Second Congress had indicated about the needto ‘always preserve the independent character of the proletarian movementeven in its embryonic form’. Thus, the first steps were being taken towardabandoning the defence of the party and its programmatic andorganisational autonomy, as the 1920 theses clearly stipulated.

Ties with the Kuomintang went beyond the internal aspect of cooperationwith the CPC, affecting also the diplomatic plane of relations with theSoviet state. Toward the end of January 1923 in Shanghai there was ameeting between Joffe, from August ’22 head of Soviet diplomacy in China,and Sun Yat-sen, who, after his expulsion from Canton, was well disposedto move his party “to the left” and to receive Soviet help against itsdomestic and foreign rivals.

On the Soviet side, after unsuccessful negotiations with the Pekinggovernment had been attempted in past years and a certain openness hadalso been shown toward the warlord Wu Peifu, who had imposed in centralChina and whose initial anti-Japanese attitude had resulted in areconciliation with the Anglo-Saxon imperialists, it began to point moreand more firmly to Sun Yat-sen as an aspirant to power in China. To make adeal with Sun Yat-sen, Soviet diplomacy showed him the benefits ofaligning with the less powerful CPC, backed by the strength of the Sovietstate. This involved temporarily setting aside communist and revolutionaryobjectives in China. Thus, on January 23, 1923 Joffe and Sun Yat-sendrafted the following statement:

Dr. Sun Yat-sen maintains that neither the communist order nor theSoviet system can at present be introduced into China, because thenecessary conditions for a successful establishment of communism orSovietism do not exist there. This opinion is entirely shared by Mr.Joffe, who also thinks that the supreme and most urgent problem of Chinais to realise national unification and achieve full nationalindependence; and, in connection with this great task, he assured Mr.Sun Yat-sen that China has the warmest sympathy of the Russian peopleand can count on the support of Russia.

The initial relations between the Russian proletarian state andthen-extant Chinese bourgeois governments, in a political contextcharacterised by the division of the country, became from 1923 onward analliance. Starting from the pretext that China was not ripe for communismand the soviet system, that is, for the dictatorship of the proletariat,it came to circ*mscribe the tasks of its revolution within a frameworkcompatible with a bourgeois order, of which Sun Yat-sen was the mainprotagonist.

A Menshevik policy was in fact sanctioned insofar as, at that time, Chinawas not economically much more backward than Russia of 1917, where theBolsheviks had instead first fought for a radical, albeit democratic,revolution led by the proletarians and poor peasants against all otherbourgeois and petty-bourgeois class parties. Reversing Lenin’s teachingson tactics in so-called double revolutions and the International’sindications for the proletariat of the colonies and semi-colonies, the newcourse pushed the party of the proletariat into submission to thebourgeois leadership.

In February 1923, Sun Yat-sen reclaimed leadership of the Cantongovernment, leading to strengthened ties between himself and SovietRussia.

That February of 1923 saw the suppression of the strike of therailroaders on the Peking-Hankow line, the last of the wave of strikesinitiated in 1919 that had peaked in 1922. This event was read as aconfirmation of the weakness of the CPC and the need to bind itself to theKuomintang.

In reality this alleged weakness of the Communist Party of China did notentirely correspond to the actual situation, for while at the beginning of1923 the Party’s membership was effectively small, it was also true thatthe Party had taken over the leadership of many trade unions which hadundergone great development precisely in the course of 1922, thusestablishing even then a notable influence on the young Chinese workingclass, still uncontaminated by the contagion of that reformism andopportunism which had already taken firm root in Europe. Moreover, during1922 the proletarian movement had demonstrated a great capacity forstruggle, and the repression of February 1923 had caused only a momentaryinterruption of the vigorous class action that would shortly thereafterresume with superior force, culminating in the great movement of strikesof 1925-1927.

But the Communist Party will arrive at this important stage of the classclash in China with an organisation bound hand and foot by its alliancewith the Kuomintang.

The oil production table shows that the United States remains the largestproducer, with 562 million tons, compared to Russia’s 488 million andSaudi Arabia’s 455 million. The latter two could, if they wanted, increasetheir production, but they deliberately keep it low to keep prices high.This is the law of monopolies. This explains the high price of bothgasoline and diesel as production is kept slightly below market demand.This is clearly seen in the last column, where production is well belowthe level reached in 2019, as increments, apart from Canada, range from -7to -13 percent!

With the argument that the Communist Party was underdeveloped in China,the same argument that was used in Europe to push Communist parties toward“united front” tactics, it was denied the possibility of any autonomousaction within the Chinese revolutionary process. What’s more, according tothe executive of the Communist International, only the dissolution of theKuomintang could have led to the successful revolution of the bumblingnational bourgeoisie.

The Third Congress of the Communist Party of China, held in June 1923 inCanton, then declared, ‘Everyone work for the Kuomintang. The Kuomintangmust be the central force of the national revolution and assume itsleadership’. This call for collective effort and support for theKuomintang emphasised that the Kuomintang should play a central role inthe national resolution and take charge of its leadership. Additionally,it also approved, based on the January resolution of the executive, thetactic of individual entry into the Kuomintang.

Such an approach meant the abandonment of the correct indication of aradical, and, in perspective, communist revolution, and the capitulationbefore the Chinese bourgeoisie that would lead to the bloody defeat of theworking class in 1927.

Denikin, after the conquest of Ekaterinodar, decided to cross the KubanRiver and conquer the strategic Stavropol on the edge of the KalmykSteppe. He counted on the economic support of the anti-Bolshevik forces,on the possibility of managing the autonomist thrusts of the variousCossack groups, but above all on the crisis of the Red Army of theCaucasus, repeatedly defeated even though numerically superior. This,under Sorokin’s command, had 75,000 troops distributed among severalseparate and independent armies, of which only the Army of Taman,entrusted to Matveev, the most experienced and aggressive, was consideredto be the only one capable of regaining the initiative. Moscow was moreconcerned about the new Tsaritsyn front against the Don Cossacks and theVolga front attacked by the Czechoslovak army, so it considered the Kubana secondary front.

Matveev intended to unite his army with Sorokin’s through a long marchfrom the Black Sea coast towards Armavir. Also joining the Reds were25,000 displaced persons fleeing for fear of fierce reprisals from thewhites. Denikin, sensing the danger of the joining, sent adequate Cossackcavalry forces to interpose themselves between the two Red armies in theMajkop district. However, they lingered in fierce and unprovokedrepression of 2,000 workers in the area who were slaughtered because theywere considered Bolsheviks. They were, however, caught between Taman’s andSorokin’s Armies, who on 11 September 1918 began a series of attacks onthe Whites, who were forced to retreat, leaving the Bolsheviks free tomake their way to Armavir, where they could rejoin. In revenge, theCossacks returned to Majkop and killed 4,000 civilians, who were laterfound in mass graves.

Sorokin and Matveev’s units were reorganised into the 11th Army, placedunder the command of the undisciplined Sorokin. These were joined by thenewly elected Revolutionary Military Committee of the Front (RMSR), inaccordance with Trotsky’s recent instructions on the reorganisation of theBolshevik army. Made up of military members of the army and politicalmembers elected by the soldiers of the unit in action, this committee haddecision-making autonomy in all operational-strategic matters. In thisregard, the following passage from Trotsky’s military writings was quoted:

Command, therefore, was somewhat split. The commander retained simplemilitary direction; the work of political education was concentrated inthe hands of the commissars. But the commissar was above all the directrepresentative of Soviet power in the army. Without hindering theproperly military work of the commander and without under anycirc*mstances diminishing the latter’s authority, the commissar had tocreate conditions such that this authority could never act against theinterests of the revolution.

Denikin, in order to annihilate the 11th Army once and for all, reactedby setting up an encirclement of the Bolsheviks entrenched between theLaba and Kuban rivers from five directions, with the aim of cutting offall possibility of supplies and escape routes. An ambitious plan for hislimited forces, which resulted in three weeks of hard fighting at the endof which Sorokin’s counterattack forced the Whites to give up and retreat.

The never-ending disagreements over the conduct of operations betweenSorokin and Matveev were rekindled when precise directives came fromMoscow to move immediately towards Tsaritsyn to bring relief to the TenthArmy; while Matveev proposed the immediate transfer by rail to Tsaritsyn,on the contrary Sorokin intended to descend to the east to controlStavropol, then south to Grozny and the oil fields against the TerekCossacks, and finally to head for Tsaritsyn.

Sorokin had his plan adopted despite the protests of Matveev, who refusedto carry out his orders in the following days. Sorokin convinced the RMSRto have him arrested and shot.

On 7 October, the same day as Matveev’s execution, Sorokin’s elaboratemanoeuvre to conquer Stavropol began, for whose defence Denikin sentadequate reinforcements. The commander of the Steel Division, Zhloba, alsodisagreed with Sorokin’s decision, disregarded his orders, and headed forthe quickest route to defend Tsaritsyn. This other disobedience triggeredstrong internal disagreements, to the point that some members of theMilitary Committee, falsely accused by Sorokin of treason, were arrestedand shot. The entire HQ fell into complete chaos to the point where it wasunable to issue safe and precise orders and did not even know the exactlocation of its forces and the outcome of battles.

Denikin took advantage of the immobility of the 11th Red Army and theweakening of some sectors and occupied Armavir. For fear of the sureCossack reprisals, the number of volunteers who joined the Red Army grew,but the supply problem and the quality of the troops worsened.

Nevertheless, on 28 October, Taman’s Red infantry attack on Stavropolcaused the Whites to retreat more than 30 kilometres from the city, butthe Red HQ, still in chaos, did not take advantage of the favourablesituation to disperse Denikin’s formations, which received new militarysupplies from the Allies, thus enabling a broad counter-attack torecapture the strategic Stavropol, the last supply point for the 11thArmy. The situation worsened for the Bolsheviks when the surviving membersof the Military Committee declared Sorokin a traitor; he sought refugeamong the Stavropol soldiers he believed to be loyal to him. On 2November, he fell into the hands of Matveev’s former fighters and wasimmediately shot.

In the following days, Wrangel’s White cavalry, in repeated attackslasting days, succeeded in occupying the city while what remained of the11th Army, on 20 November, began a long march across the steppesseparating it from Astrakhan. The white cavalry sent in pursuit had togive up, mired in mud.

The causes of the defeat of that valiant army were twofold: lack ofsupplies and chaos due to internal strife.

Having reached the cities of the lower Volga, the former 11th Army beganto reorganise, first having to beat Spanish flu and typhus.

Denikin’s White troops also suffered heavy losses, including their bestcommanders, in combat and from disease, but were still sufficient tocontrol the North Caucasus. By their contrast, the Red forces throughoutthat vast region numbered as many as 150,000, of which, however, only60,000 were available for combat. The main unit consisted of what remainedof Soroki’’s Army, Taman’s Army, and new volunteers from the region,totalling 88,000 men and 75 cannons. This was arranged on a 250-kilometreline, away from both Astrakhan and Tsaritsyn, its southern flank protectedby the weak 12th Army stationed at the foot of the Caucasus range.

The strategic command of the Caucasus-Caspian organised an offensive toregain the lost positions.

On 28 December 1918, the 11th Army attacked the centre of the VolunteerArmy’s array of counter-revolutionary forces, with the aim of cutting theenemy front in two and then outflanking the northern wing behind it andpreventing it from connecting with Ekaterinodar and the Don. Other unitsattacked and bypassed the southern front in a similar manoeuvre; othersstill were destined for the reserve and rear.

After violent and costly fighting, the Volunteer Army retreated toStavropol; in the confusion of the attack, a Taman division left adangerous gap that allowed Wrangel’s cavalry to mount a devastatingcounterattack that forced the Soviet forces in that sector to retreat. Theinitial deployment disintegrated, other isolated groups were attacked frombehind and forced to retreat. In the southern sector the Red offensivealso failed, leaving the 11th Red Army with heavy losses of manpower andmateriel. Demoralised and surrounded on three sides by the enemy with theCaspian Sea behind, unable to reach Astrakhan in winter, it decided tofortify on secure positions and reorganise to regain the initiative.

Wrangel’s cavalry with continuous attacks in different directionsprevented these manoeuvres to such an extent that by the end of January,there was no longer a single Soviet front in the Caucasus, but isolatedsections of what had been the valiant 11th Army.

The Red HQ then decided to retreat to the Caucasus mountains counting onthe support of the local Bolsheviks. The retreat was severely hindered byWrangel’s cavalry, who with new attacks managed to break the army intoseveral sections that headed for different locations. Determined todeliver the final blow to the retreating revolutionaries, the whitecavalry between 27 January and 6 February 1919, attacked the smallergroups that were defeated and captured..

Red commanders were offered to join the whites and upon their refusalwere immediately hanged; as a rule, all Bolshevik political commissarstaken prisoner were shot immediately.

On 6 February 1919, Wrangel’s troops conquered the major cities andreached the Caspian Sea with 31,000 prisoners, 8 armoured trains, and 200cannons. The survivors of the 11th Army, now without any possibilityof sustaining adequate fighting, undertook the difficult journey toAstrakhan in terrible physical and atmospheric conditions due to the cold,snow, and a typhus epidemic that even killed the commander-in-chiefLevandosvsky.

Of the initial 80,000 members of the 11th Army, only 13,000 reachedAstrakhan. In fact, an entire Bolshevik army group ceased to exist afterwhat was considered the heaviest defeat of the entire civil war.

The Caucasus Armies were reorganised and dislocated. The 12th Army wassent in the direction of Chechnya, where the Bolshevik leadership of theformer 11th Army had taken refuge. With the exception of Chechnya andDagestan, the entire Caucasus was now under the control of thecounter-revolutionaries.

This victory, with the rear well secured, allowed thecounter-revolutionaries to bring relief to the Don Cossacks in trouble atTsaritsyn.

The White General Krasnov was supported by the Krug, the Cossackassembly, and especially by German economic and military aid. He had amodest force of about 40,000 soldiers, 610 machine guns, and 150 artillerypieces. Krasnov managed to extend his control over other Cossackterritories and on April 17, 1918, he founded the Don Republic, whichcovered an area more than half the size of Italy, with less than 4 millioninhabitants, half of whom were Cossacks and the rest poorly supportedpeasants and migrant workers.

The conquest of Tsaritsyn, an important railway junction connecting thecentre of Russia with the lower Volga and Caucasus regions, was vital forKrasnov. From the south, most of the grain, foodstuffs and fuel travelledthere to the large Bolshevik-controlled cities of the north and all theraw materials needed by the Soviet war industry and the Red Army, whichwas engaged in defending the ‘encircled fortress’ of the revolution on an8,000-kilometre front.

Moreover, the Cossacks, having conquered the city, would have been ableto join forces with those of Ataman Dutov, on the offensive on the Volga450 kilometres further north. This conjunction would have facilitated anadvance on Moscow.

The plans drawn up by the White Cossack Denisov for the first battle forTsaritsyn envisaged an offensive in two directions: the main one directedat the town; a second to contain any Red relief coming from much furthernorth.

The Soviet defences, distributed along the course of the Don, werenumerically equivalent to those of the enemy. But they were poorlyco-ordinated with each other and deployed mainly in defence of Tsaritsyn,weakening the sectors north of the city.

The defence had armoured trains which, moving quickly on the outerrailway ring, could assist the Red defenders by cannonading the enemy; thesame was true of the river gunboats on the Volga.

The White attack in the north, characterised by the strong numericalsuperiority and the lack of Red co-ordination, disrupted railwaycommunications with Moscow, isolating the city and rendering partial Redsuccesses in the central and southern sectors futile. The Red troops hadto retreat and re-deploy.

Strict decrees were issued against deserters, spies, and saboteurs, andyounger conscripts were mobilised and hastily trained.

On August 22, the reorganised Red Army launched a counter-offensive intwo directions, breaking the enemy lines with repeated bayonet assaults,driving them back along the entire front. Further Red victories in thefollowing weeks pushed the Cossacks back across the Don to their originalpositions, decreeing the failure of Krasnov’s first offensive.

The Cossacks suffered heavy losses: 12,000 dead, wounded, and prisoners;but the revolutionary losses were worse: 50,000 dead, wounded, andprisoners, despite taking dozens of machine guns, 27,000 rifles, 3,000horses, and a large amount of ammunition in spoils.

A telegram from Stalin to Lenin on 6 September ends: ‘The enemy is routedand retreating behind the Don. Tsaritsyn is safe! The offensivecontinues’. Trotsky, President of the Revolutionary Military Council (RVS)and head of the Red Army, instead telegraphed Lenin with the request toimmediately recall Stalin to Moscow because: ‘The battle for Tsaritsyn, inspite of superior forces, has in any case gone badly’.

In reality, the breakthrough had not taken place. Denisov, to ease thepressure, had retreated slowly, engaging in only limited engagements thatsucceeded in stopping the Bolshevik counter-attacks.

The great work of reorganisation of the Red Army directed by Trotsky hadproduced an efficient military and hierarchical structure organised byfronts and armies with an audacious plan to reintroduce professionalsoldiers into the Bolshevik army, the selection of whom was entrusted to aspecial commission headed by Lev Glezarov. At the beginning of the civilwar, the officer corps of the Red Army consisted of 75% former tsaristofficers, often used as military specialists, a proportion that rose to83% by the end of the civil war in 1922. It is recorded that out of 82tsarist generals commanding in the Red Army, only 5 defected. Ifnecessary, their loyalty was secured by holding their families hostage.

Among the former officers who served the revolution and distinguishedthemselves for their remarkable skills was Tukhachevsky, who joined theRed Army in 1918. Due to his strategic and leadership skills, he wasentrusted with the command of the First Army in 1918 at the age of only25.

In the second half of September, Denisov launched a new offensive toconquer Tsaritsyn in two directions: the first from the north-west,entrusted to General Fitzhelaurov, with 20,000 men, 122 machine guns, 47artillery pieces and two armoured trains, was to cut off communicationswith the north. The second, entrusted to General Mamontov, was the mainattack from the west with 25,000 soldiers, 156 machine guns, 93 pieces ofartillery and no less than 6 armoured trains, means now consideredindispensable for operations in that vast theatre of battle.

The Bolshevik defences had about 40,000 men, 200 machine guns, 152artillery pieces and 13 armoured trains. As organisation improved, anetwork of fortifications was erected around the city with trenches andother defensive works.

Stalin opposed Trotsky’s plan to reintroduce former tsarist officersbefore the RVS.

In fact, there were two military councils on the Southern Front: theofficial one with Sytin and his General Staff, and Stalin’s withVoroshilov. This produced a series of orders and counter-orders thatcancelled each other out and created havoc.

The White offensive was developed in the central and southern sectors inorder to cut the links to Astrakhan and the Caucasus, and wedged itselfinto the Red defensive lines, coming within about 40 km of Tsaritsyn,completely cutting off the Bolshevik’s extreme southern flank.

From October 8 to 11, the offensive intensified around Old Sarepta(modern-day Krasnoarmeysky Rayon, Volgograd), on the southern segment ofthe railway ring that encircled the city. For the counter-revolutionaries,taking that station meant disrupting Tsaritsyn’s defence system andopening up a wide gap in the southern sector.

The first decisive attack by Mamontov’s White Cossacks was blocked byarmoured train fire and repeated bayonet counter-attacks by Sovietinfantry so that the White General halted the operation while waiting forreserves.

Stalin sent telegrams for reinforcements and provisions, but received noreply; Voroshilov bypassed the military hierarchy and addressed Lenindirectly. On 15 October, Vācietis, the commander-in-chief of the Red Army,answered him, placing the responsibility for the catastrophic situation onStalin, but because of the obvious state of danger, he sent himreinforcements.

The Whites attacked between the Voroponovo and Chapurniki railwaystations. Here Voroshilov had a double line of trenches built.

On October 15, Mamontov launched 25 regiments. The well-organised Russiandefences stood firm against the first attack.

A few kilometres further south, at Beretovka, two Soviet regiments, madeup of young peasants who had just enlisted, mutinied, killed theircommanders, and went to meet the Cossacks. The latter mistook them for aninfantry assault and pelted them with fire while they were also hit frombehind by fire from the Soviet trenches.

In the meantime, the valiant Zhloba Iron Division arrived with 15,000men, who, with forced marches, even at night, using a defiladed route,managed to get behind the Cossacks and hit them near Chapurniki. TheCossacks under fire from the front and from behind resisted for not evenan hour, suffering the loss of 1,400 men, 6 cannons and 49 machine guns;the sector commander with his entire staff was taken prisoner, forcing theWhites to retreat westwards.

October 16: Mamontov captured Voroponovo, albeit with heavy losses. TheSoviets, short of ammunition, were forced to stem the White advances withrepeated bayonet counter-attacks in order to re-establish themselves forthe defence of Sadovaya station.

The counter-revolutionary vanguards arrived, only 7 kilometres fromTsaritsyn, at the last line of trenches and barbed wire near Sadovayastation, where Voroshilov organised the last defence. He gathered allavailable firepower, including armoured trains, and concentrated his fireon the sectors where the enemy was advancing.

October 17: After the preventive bombardment ceased, the Cossack infantryadvanced according to their classic fighting pattern in orderly, compactrows with their flags flying. When they reached 400 metres from the Redtrenches, they were hit by a wall of fire that created huge holes in theirtight ranks. The Red infantry came out of the trenches to pursue theretreating enemy, who fell back to the west. The railway ring aroundTsaritsyn thus remained under Bolshevik control.

After this heavy defeat, Mamontov launched an attack in the northernsector. The Whites bypassed Tsaritsyn from the north in two directions,blocking river traffic on the Volga. Voroshilov, through rapid movementsalong internal lines, succeeded in re-establishing the defences, whichwere also strengthened by the arrival of experienced Latvian regimentsfrom the eastern front, which restored numerical supremacy in favour ofthe Reds.

October 22: the advance towards Tsaritsyn from the north was halted andthe Whites pushed back about 30 kilometres from the town, allowing raillinks with the rest of Soviet Russia to be restored in November.

This notable defeat deprived Krasnov of any hope of linking up withDutov’s Cossacks, who were operating east of the Volga; the Cossacks’morale plummeted as they became less and less motivated to fight far fromtheir home territories. The arrival of the cold season led to a gradualslowdown in all operations.

November 11: The armistice stipulated by Germany signalled its defeat andexit from the war, depriving the Cossack formations of all support,forcing Krasnov into a more open approach towards Denikin’s VolunteerArmy, which was mainly supported by the British and French.

The failure of the Army of the Don at Tsaritsyn, although superior incombat, was due to a number of causes: the strong attachment of theCossacks to their homeland often led them to desert when news of dangercame from their villages; they used their otherwise-effective cavalry in away ill-suited to the new modalities of modern warfare: not rapid troopmovements, but old-fashioned, reckless, galloping charges, which werestopped by machine guns emplaced in fortified positions.

Voroshilov’s and Stalin’s decision to implement a mobile and activedefence, which let the Cossack impetus vent itself in bloody assaults andthen move on to bayonet counter-attacks, was possible because the fightingquality of the Red troops improved markedly, battle after battle.

The rift between Stalin and Trotsky, which came to constitute a kind of‘military opposition’, was absolutely unconscionable in the midst of thecivil war for the defence of the proletarian revolution. Lenin, pressed byboth sides, finally called Stalin back to Moscow.

The agrarian question

At these meetings a comrade presented the first chapters of areport on the agrarian question in the Marxist tradition. It will bestructured as follows: Historical background; Capitalism and agriculture;Economic theory of rent; The struggles of the labourers; today andtomorrow.

Let us first take up the texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kautsky, and ourParty to recall what we have written so far on this vast and fundamentalsubject.

We mentioned the agrarian question in the Athenian state, the essentialsof which Friedrich Engels well summarises in The Origin of the Family,Private Property and the State. In his conclusion he states:

The debtor could count himself lucky if he was allowed to remain on theland as a tenant and live on one-sixth of the produce of his labour,while he paid five-sixths to his new master as rent.… If the sale of theland did not cover the debt, or if the debt had been contracted withoutany security, the debtor, in order to meet his creditor’s claims, had tosell his children into slavery abroad. Children sold by their father –such was the first fruit of patriarchal right and monogamy! And if theblood-sucker was still not satisfied, he could sell the debtor himselfas a slave. Thus the pleasant dawn of civilisation began for theAthenian people.

The mode of production in the Roman Empire also rested on agriculture. InThe Foundations of Christianity, Kautsky writes:

The basis of the mode of production of the countries making up theRoman Empire was agriculture; crafts and trade were much less important.Production for self-consumption still predominated; commodityproduction, production for sale, was still slightly developed. Craftsmenand merchants often had farms as well, that were in close connectionwith their domestic activities; their work went principally towardproducing for their households. The farm supplied provisions for thekitchen and raw materials such as flax, wool, leather, wood, from whichthe members of the family themselves made clothes, house furnishings andtools. It was only the surplus, if there was any, over and above theneeds of the household that was sold. This mode of production requiredprivate property of most of the means of production, including arableland but not forest and pasture, which could still be common property.It would include domestic animals but not game, and finally tools andraw materials as well as the products made from them.

Possession of land, however, implies having the necessary labour power towork it, without which nothing can be produced. Even in prehistoric timeswe find among the wealthy the search for labour power in excess of that inthe family’s hands.

Such labour forces, however, could not take the form of the wage earner.Early ones could be found, but rarely and temporarily, such as forharvesting. An active family could easily procure the few means ofproduction needed for an independent unit of agricultural production.Moreover, family and community ties were still strong, so that theoccasional misfortunes that could render a family landless were mitigatedby the help of relatives and neighbours.

Kautsky again: ‘Permanent labour forces outside the family could not beobtained at this stage of history in the form of free wage labourers. Onlycompulsion could supply the necessary labour for the larger landedestates. The answer was slavery.’

The description of the period of the rise of the Roman Empire until itsdissolution continued, illustrating how the productive techniques andtools gradually improved to obtain greater harvests, the exploitation ofpeasants, and particularly of foreign peasants.

The phenomena of over-exploitation of land and the depletion of soilfertility were described, phenomena which led to starvation of the farmersthemselves, and to the need for wars of conquest in order to always havenew land available.

At the conclusion of this first report we returned to reading Kautsky:

With the enormous human masses at its disposal the state built thosecolossal works that still astound us today, temples and palaces,aqueducts and sewers, and also a network of magnificent roads thatlinked Rome with the furthest corners of the empire and constituted apowerful means of economic and political unity and internationalcommunication. In addition, great irrigation and drainage works wereconstructed…. As the financial might of the Empire weakened, its rulerslet all these structures go to pieces rather than put a limit tomilitarism. The colossal constructions became colossal ruins, which fellapart all the sooner because as labour power became scarcer it waseasier to get materials for newer construction by tearing down the oldedifices instead of getting them from the quarries. This method did moreharm to the ancient works of art than the devastations of the invadingVandals and other barbarians.

A general picture of that socio-economic formation in Europe – beforeturning to our Marxist classics – can be obtained in Georges Duby’s RuralEconomy and Country Life in the Medieval West. We read:

[I]n the civilisation of the ninth and tenth centuries the rural way oflife was universal. Entire countries, like England and almost all theGermanic lands were absolutely without towns. Elsewhere some townsexisted: such as the few ancient Roman cities in the south which had notsuffered complete dilapidation, or the new townships on trade routeswhich were making their appearance along the rivers leading to thenorthern seas. But except for some in Lombardy, these ‘towns’ appear asminute centres of population, each numbering at most a few hundredpermanent inhabitants and deeply immersed in the life of the surroundingcountryside. Indeed, they could hardly be distinguished from it.Vineyards encircled them; fields penetrated their walls; they were fullof cattle, barns, and farm labourers.

All their inhabitants from the very richest, bishops and even the kinghimself, to the few specialists, Jewish or Christian, who conductedlong-distance trade, remained first and foremost countrymen whose wholelife was dominated by the rhythm of the agricultural seasons, whodepended for their existence on the produce of the soil, and who drewdirectly from it their entire worldly wealth.… Ninth-century WesternEurope was peopled by a stable peasantry rooted in its environment. Notthat we should picture it as totally immobile. There was still room inrural life for nomadic movements.

Movements take place in the summer for pastoral transhumance ortransport on wagons; some periodically venture out to gather wildproduce, for hunting, or for robbery, in search of booty; a portion ofthe rural population also participates in the “adventures” of war.

Newcomers were kept outside the ‘enclosures’, second-class inhabitants.The inventories of the time categorised them precisely as ‘guests’,whose presence was tolerated but who did not have the same rights asother inhabitants. These strict legal limits prevented colonisation fromoccurring in random order and curbed their displacement from theirhabitat.

In the report, the comrade gave an extensive account of the peculiaritiesthat characterised agricultural production in feudal times, getting to theother aspect that characterises the mode of production of the time: theequipment used in working in the fields. It was noted that theseimplements were mostly made of wood. There were two types of ploughs,simple and mouldboard, mouldboard offering a decided advantage over thesimple one. It economised labour; the farmer in one pass was able tosufficiently turn the land, thus aerating it and rebuilding the fertileelements: periodic spading was no longer necessary. Moreover, themouldboard plough could also be used in heavy soils that were impracticalwith the simple one. It made it possible to extend the cultivated area,but it also demanded a far greater pulling force, an equipment of morevigorous work animals.

Next, the poor use of metals was mentioned:

The labourers on the enormous property of Annapes, which reared morethan 200 cattle at the time, disposed of no more than two scythes, twosickles and two spades if we count iron tools alone. And here, too, theessential metal tools were used to shape the wood. For the rest of thework it was utensilia lignea ad ministrandum sufficienter –tools enough, but wooden ones – and they were not worth counting.

So, apart from cutting tools for sawing grass or wheat or felling trees,all agricultural equipment, and particularly that for ploughing, wasnormally made of wood.

Each estate possessed no more than a small workshop provided with irontools intended only for the manufacture or repair of other tools….All the Carolingian documents place the blacksmith on an equal footingwith the goldsmith and picture him as the maker of unusual and preciousequipment. He is hardly ever to be found in the inventories of ruralestates.… It is the same in all the regions about which we haveinformation (except perhaps Lombardy where the ferrarii appearedmuch more frequently in manorial inventories, and where on the estatesof Bobbio, Santa Giulia di Brescia and Nonantola many village tenuressupported regular rents in iron, and more precisely in ploughshares),the impression remains everywhere the same, that very little metal wasused for peasant implements.

In ninth- and tenth-century Europe, even in large estates, the economyhad few wooden tools, but resorted to the labour of many individuals,shaping the villages that became heavily populated to care for thesurrounding fields.

In contrast, wide uncultivated fringes remained, due to the lack ofimplements capable of overcoming the nature of the thick, wet, and densesoils. There were also vast areas of free vegetation useful for feedinglivestock, hunting, and gathering wild products.

To increase labour productivity, mills were introduced:

One can see quite clearly how the manors were equipped with millingmachinery.… Installing a water mill was certainly a costly and delicatematter. The arrangements of canals, and trans-porting, fashioning, andsetting in place the millstones meant a substantial investment and themaintenance of the conveying machinery also required regularexpenditure. Even so, such contrivances were by no means unusual ongreat estates in the ninth century and it appears that the number ofwater-driven mills was rapidly increasing around Paris: of the 59 millsrecorded in the polyptych [an inventory of the Abbey’s assets compiledbetween 823 and 828 by Abbot Irminone] of St. Germain-des-Pres, eighthad just been constructed and two recently renovated by Abbot Irminone….The estate mills [were] available to the local peasant farms in returnfor payment…. [In] one royal manor in northern Gaul, Annapes…as muchgrain was brought to the manorial granges from its five mills andbrewery as was harvested on the entire arable area of the estate…. Inspite of taxes and the pre-emption on their own harvest, peasants foundit to their advantage to make use of the manorial mills.

It was recalled how bread was the staple food, even in the less civilisedregions of Latin Christendom.

We then went on to describe how agricultural production was organised,which can be summarised in these three points:

1) In the texts, the description of harvests and sowings and, morefrequently, that of the grain benefits owed by the peasants, prove that,generally, the fields, both those of the peasants and those of the lords,produced not only winter grains, but also spring grains, and in particularoats.

2) The arrangement in the agricultural calendar of corvées forploughing required of the serfs by the lordships indicates that theploughing cycle was frequently ordered according to two sowing seasons,one in winter, the other in summer or spring.

3) Ploughing plots in large estates often appear in groups of three; forexample, in about half of the domains of the Abbey ofSaint-Germain-des-Prés described in the Irminone polyptych, surveyorscounted three, six, or nine lordly fields. This arrangement suggests thatcultivation there was organised according to a ternary rhythm.

Documentary evidence of the existence of currents and parties with leftpositions is limited to a period of twenty-five years, from 1909 to 1934.But it is a period marked, in the Empire first then in Turkey later, byseveral decisive historical events: the 1908 revolution, the Italo-TurkishWar, the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian genocide, theemergence of the national independence movement against the occupation ofparts of Turkey by the Entente, Mustafa Kemal’s victory against aggressionby Greece and against internal reactionary uprisings, the exchange andtransfer of Greek-Turkish populations, and finally the consolidation ofKemalist power and the defeat of the left wing of the Communist Party.

For this reason, the comrades presenting this report have first sortedthe documents by period, to deal later with the particular circ*mstancesunder which the individual documents they present were written.

It is appropriate to provide the reader with some background informationon the history of the Ottoman Empire, which expanded over a widegeo-historical region.

Factories began to spring up in the cities. The growing power of thenon-Muslim bourgeoisie led even in remote villages to the establishment ofschools to teach positive science. New ideologies such as liberalism andnationalism spread. In turn, peasants began to immigrate to the cities,forming most of the new working class.

Soon the rulers of the Ottoman state were faced with an alarmingsituation. At first, they tried to suppress this undesirable developmentof new social classes, namely the bourgeoisie and the urbanisedproletariat, by repression, but this only fanned the flames of nationalismand led to wars of national liberation, many of which succeeded increating new nation-states, as happened with the independence of Greece in1829, Bulgaria in 1876 and Serbia in 1878. The number of non-Muslims, suchas Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, who remained within the social structureof the empire, and especially their relative weight within the newlyformed industrial bourgeoisie, remained very significant.

Western capitalism joined local demands for reform.

At the same time, the Ottoman bureaucracy began to call for a solution tothe Empire’s unsuccessful attempts over the previous centuries incompeting with European states: modernisation of technology, ways ofconducting business, industry, and science. They too began to advocate theintroduction of capitalism into the Empire, and even bourgeois democraticreforms.

After the 1830s, private industries quickly began to replace artisanseven among Muslims.

Facing pressure from the bourgeoisie, bureaucrats, and officials, in 1839the monarchy issued the Imperial Edict of Reorganisation. This ushered inthe reform period, in Ottoman Turkish ‘Tanzimat’, which culminated in 1876with the declaration of the First Constitutional Regime.

The appearance of capitalist relations resulted in the emergence of harshstruggles between the young proletariat, formed by the urbanisation of thepeasant masses, and the newly emerging bourgeoisie. The first protests inthe factories began as early as 1800. Initially, the most common action ofthe labour movement in the Empire was sabotage of the means of production,but at the end of a few decades such actions were superseded by strikes.The first recorded strike occurred in 1863, in the Ereğli coal mines, butthis weapon of struggle did not spread until the early 1870s in a wave oflabour unrest that culminated in the strikes of 1876. At this timeindustry was developing rapidly and many technicians and skilled workerswere sent to Turkey from countries such as England, France, and Italy.Foreign workers soon took to striking together with the natives. Thenatives, still lacking experience in labour struggles, benefited from thestrikes of the European workers who worked alongside them.

Sultan Abdulhamid II, who would rule the empire with an iron fist fordecades, responded to the struggles of 1878 with a wave of repression thatfor a time caused a decrease of strikes. However, it could not prevent inthe long run the entrenchment of the labour movement.

The chronology prepared by the speaker highlights the stages of thisdevelopment.

The series of reports concerning the history of our party is intended topresent it in its continuity and uniqueness.

A peculiar characteristic of ours is that we have no kinship with anyone;in fact, those who appear closest are actually the furthest away, and wehave always been very careful not to assimilate or approach any otherso-called related political grouping.

The year of our current Party’s birth is unquestionably 1952. But, as wehave written, this is not a turning point or an adjustment of course, butrather to pick up the thread of the past by welding it to the present andprojecting it into the future.

It is certainly no coincidence that in every Party publication we neveromit to print our ‘distinction’: ‘The line from Marx to Lenin, to Livorno1921, to the struggle of the Left against the degeneration of Moscow’,etc., etc. In fact, we fully claim our deep roots and recognise as anintegral part of our tradition all the work and theoretical elaboration ofthe Marxist Left already present and formed within the PSI since the dawnof the 20th century.

Nonetheless, our current party has very different characteristics fromthose of the parties of the time, due to a historical selection that drawson both the victories and defeats of the international workers’ movementand its parties.

If until 1914 the two souls, the reformist and the revolutionary, couldcoexist within the same parties and the 2nd International, it was theoutbreak of the imperialist war that was to separate and define theirreconcilability of the two opposing tendencies: on the one hand thesocial-democracy, at the service of capital and their respective bourgeoishomelands, on the other the revolutionary, for the sabotage of war, itstransformation from war between states into war between classes, theviolent seizure of power and the establishment of the dictatorship of theproletariat.

The same happened after the experience of the Stalinistcounter-revolution. Throughout the course of the Second World War, almostthe entire proletarian movement suffered a blatant subservience to theinterests of capitalist preservation, signing the liquidation, officiallyand unofficially, of the Third International.

No political organisation other than our own current, anchored in theItalian Communist Left, was able to take the criticism of Stalinistdegeneration all the way. Consequently, the leadership of theinternational proletariat can only be taken by the unique, unitaryInternational Communist Party.

When one speaks of the Italian Communist Left in most people’s minds, onethinks of its abstentionism. We can say that this was, at the time, a veryimportant aspect from a tactical point of view, but not one of principle.On the contrary, until then the Communist Left had elaborated otherfundamental characteristics of internal party life and relations betweencomrades: organic centralism, rejection of any kind of personalism, thepossibility for each comrade to participate in Party work.

In this regard, the extended report will include extensive quotationsfrom our classic texts, demonstrating how the current party is in perfectcontinuity with the tradition of the Left.

Organic centralism. As far back as 1922 we proposed abandoning theorganisational concept of ‘democratic centralism’ and replacing it withthe more appropriate ‘organic centralism’.

The communist parties must realise an organic centralism which, withthe maximum compatible consultation of the base, ensures the spontaneouselimination of every grouping tending to differentiate. This is notachieved by formal, mechanical hierarchical prescriptions, but, as Leninsays, with just revolutionary policy. (Lyon Theses, 1926)

Function and role of the leader in our party.

Leaders, too, are a product of the party’s activity, the party’sworking methods, and the trust the party has attracted. If the party, inspite of the variable and often unfavourable situation, follows therevolutionary line and fights opportunist deviations, the selection ofleaders, the formation of a general staff, take place in a favourablemanner, and in the period of the final struggle we will certainly notalways have a Lenin, but a solid and courageous leadership. (6th ECCI,1926)

Discipline and fractions.

The appearance and development of fractions is indicative of a generalmalaise in the party, and a symptom of the non-responsiveness of theparty’s vital functions to its aims, and they are combated byidentifying the malaise in order to eliminate it, not by abusingdisciplinary powers to resolve the situation in a necessarily formal andprovisional manner. (Platform of the Left, 1925)

We see no serious drawbacks in an exaggerated preoccupation withopportunist danger…. Whereas very grave is the danger if on thecontrary…the opportunist disease spreads before one has dared tovigorously sound the alarm in some part of the party. Criticism withouterror does not harm even the thousandth part of what error withoutcriticism harms. (‘The Opportunist Danger and the International’,1925)/p>

How then was it possible that the party that was born in Livorno, foundedon similar foundations, later degenerated? The answer is that it was not anational problem, but an international one, and the parties of the 3rdInternational were spuriously born for historical reasons, frommore-or-less left-wing splits of the old social-democratic parties, fromunions between non-hom*ogeneous groups, and even the Communist Party ofItaly could not completely escape this defect of origin. The degenerativeprocess also depended on the weaknesses that had historicallycharacterised the process by which the new international organisation wasformed, which, when the revolutionary ebb occurred, affected its abilityto react to the unfavourable situation.

The report then went on to expose the stages of the degeneration of boththe international revolutionary communist movement and the Communist Partyof Italy.

The tactical errors of the International led to a long series of defeats,starting with that of the revolution in Germany, which was paid for withthe impossibility of winning over, after Russia, another large country tothe revolution, of decisive importance for the development of worldrevolution.

The degenerative phases of the 3rd International could not but bereflected within the Communist Party of Italy.

After 1924, the Ordinovist group, having taken over the leadership of theparty, began a violent campaign against the Left. In preparation for its3rd Congress, in Lyon in 1926, the voting procedures imposed were sofraudulent that the Left, which a year earlier at the Como conference hadbeen joined by almost all delegates, was confined to a derisory minority.

At the same time in the International and the Russian party, theStalinist counterrevolution was now registering its final victory overwhat remained of the leftist and internationalist revolutionary tradition.

Through falsification of documents, fabrication of plots, and other suchexpedients, the new Russian party leaders managed to get the better of thereal leaders of the Russian revolution. The avenues of deportation openedup to Trotsky and the other comrades as the Russian party and theInternational, by now Stalinised, imposed as a condition for remaining inthe International the acceptance of the new opportunist theory of“Socialism in one country”.

In the Party born in Livorno in 1921, by then on the verge of completeStalinisation, true internal repression had begun against exponents of theLeft since 1925: expulsions, suspensions, denigrating press campaigns,blatantly provocative actions, became ordinary practice.

More than one bourgeois historian or presumed revolutionary strategisthas highlighted the “inability” of the Italian Communist Left to takeadvantage of the auspicious occasion and form an international oppositionin competition and opposition to the degenerate Moscow opposition. Indeed,that was what some comrades and leaders of the international extreme leftgroups expected. Is the Left wrong in stubbornly sticking to itsprinciples? This will be the theme of the next reports.

C – African blowback ofthecrisis intheimperialisthierarchy

A rapid succession of coups over the last three years has reshaped thepolitical landscape of sub-Saharan Africa, affecting numerous countries inthat part of the continent where France’s economic, political and culturalinfluence was greatest. There is talk these days of a probable deadlycrisis in what was christened ‘Françafrique’ in the mid-1950s

The coiner of this term was Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who served aspresident of the Ivory Coast for 43 years, from the moment ofindependence. The African leader most obviously subservient to the oldcolonial power, with which he wanted to maintain close commercial tiesthat propitiated a period of relative economic prosperity, passed underthe publicist label of the ‘Ivorian miracle’, intended to give the term Françafriquea positive meaning.

However, this concept, not incorrectly understood as a legacy of colonialrule that had only recently ended (the independence of most Africancountries dates back to 1960), acquired negative connotations over timethat far outweighed the slavish optimism of the Ivorian president,especially after the Ivory Coast’s little “miracle” came to an end in thelate 1970s as a consequence of the slowdown of the cycle of capitalistaccumulation in the old metropolis.

Highlighting some unmentionable aspects of the relations of the ElyséePalace with the 14 former overseas territories on African soil was anessay published in 1998 entitled La Françafrique, le plus longscandale de la République by the economist François-XavierVerschave. In this book, beyond the usual jeremiads about the lack ofdemocracy in African countries, some characteristics of the relationsbetween the old colonies and the former metropolises were ratherrealistically identified. Françafrique was defined quite correctly as:

a nebula of economic, political and military actors, in France andAfrica, organised in networks and lobbies, and polarised around themonopolisation of the two rents: raw materials and public developmentaid. The logic is to prohibit initiative outside the circle of theinitiated. The system recycles itself in criminalisation.

While we have been witnessing for many years the Elysée’s growingagitation over the fate of its African sphere of influence, a turningpoint in this regard can be established with the war conducted in 2011 inLibya by NATO and strongly desired by the French president at the time.What was loosely perceived as the first step in a campaign of colonialreconquest (the term ‘neo-colonialism’ is inadequate for us to describethe phenomenon given that it is about imperialist spheres of influence inwhich the movement of capital prevails over military occupation and theinstitutional presence of colonial metropolises), was even then a sign ofthe difficulty for France to sustain the contest between powers for thecontrol of African markets.

A misleading interpretation sees the Libyan enterprise as an ‘error’ fromwhich serious consequences for French policy in North Africa andsub-Saharan Africa would follow. But the premises of that mistake were allin the relative decline of France as a power and the appearance on thescene of new competitors whose lesser capitalist maturity was compatiblewith greater economic vitality.

The overthrow of the decades-old Gaddafi regime was seen by Sarkozy as anopportunity to get his hands on the Libyan oil rent by beating thecompetition, in the case of Libya primarily the Italian one, and tostrengthen his control over neighbouring Niger, at that time one of themain suppliers of uranium needed by the French nuclear industry.

On the other hand, France is also not spared by the greed of theimperialist metropoles attempting to appropriate control of energyresources, and their associated rents to compensate for the meagre profitsresulting from their industrial decline.

If, in our Marxist view, politics is presented as a condensate ofeconomics, we find nothing particularly strange in observing how weakeconomies, in which capitalist modernity has disrupted traditional socialorganisation, starting with the introduction of extractive industry,correspond to weak political forms.

The states of sub-Saharan Africa came into being on the basis of bordersarbitrarily drawn according to the interests of the former colonialpowers, on territories that were heterogeneous in terms of physicalgeography, fragmented from an ethnic and linguistic point of view, andcharacterised by very disparate historical traditions.

Their perennial political instability poses a problem of understandingand analysis that does not seem within the reach of bourgeois publicists.Take for instance the raging Jihadist guerrilla warfare of the lastfifteen years.

The prevailing narrative on this persistent scourge in sub-SaharanAfrican countries seeks to explain the difficulties of local governments,and their Western allies, especially in religious motivations, with vastterritories falling under the military control of the faithful who fly theflag of fundamentalism. As usual, the depiction of the bourgeois worldturns reality upside down to rest on its head. It describes with thefaçade of affiliation with internationally known acronyms of radicalIslamism the subjection of individuals from marginalised social groups andperipheral rural communities to fierce economic and military pressure byarmed militias or regular troops from states that in other ways prove tobe fragile and shaky.

While the most trivial publicity explains everything by “Islamicfanaticism”, the proliferation of armed groups is more often than not dueto the attempt of local communities to organise self-defence against thepredatory attitude of private paramilitary groups deployed in defence ofmining concessions and the regular forces of the various states.Multinational corporations, in order to control the areas where the richesof the subsoil are extracted, increasingly make use of mercenaries. Often,the affiliation of local armed groups to international jihadism comes onlylater.

But explaining these aspects of the economic and political life ofsub-Saharan Africa is too embarrassing for the partisan and lyinginformation of the capitalist metropoles: better a convenient depiction ofa fanaticism moulded in Islamic schools and by preaching mullahs, all ofwhich, when they exist, are presented as epiphenomenal manifestations ofthe devastation previously developed in the social structure.

The civil war in Mali, which broke out in early 2012 and has been ongoingever since, has had catastrophic effects for France’s sphere of influencein the region. In this conflict, which has torn the north of the countryapart and pitted Tuareg independence formations and jihadist militiasagainst the central power, the ineffectiveness of an armed interventionwith two French-led military missions, Operations Serval and Barkhane,could be measured.

The French failure became manifest with the two coups in Mali less than ayear apart. The first was in August 2020, when Malian President IbrahimBoubacar Keita was overthrown by the army, which formed a NationalCommittee for the Health of the People to manage a ‘transitional phase’.Nine months later, in May 2021, the army, impatient with the hesitancy ofthe transitional authorities in managing the internal war, carried out asecond coup d'état in which Colonel Assimi Goita, who had already led thefirst coup, solidly assumed the leadership of the country. The militaryjunta let Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group into Mali, whileFrench troops had to leave the country.

A similar script played out in Burkina Faso where an equally rapidsuccession of two coups resulted in the rise to power in September 2022 ofarmy captain Ibrahim Traoré who, like his Malian counterpart, had played aleading role in the first coup. As a pretext for the second pronouncementof the armed forces, the ineffectiveness of the fight against the jihadistmilitias is also mentioned.

In reality, discontent due to the dramatic rise in food pricescontributed to the coup plotters’ action. Social instability is alsodetermined by the high number of internal refugees from areas under thecontrol of jihadist groups. To support the war effort, the junta has madeagreements to buy weapons from Turkey to supply drones, and with NorthKorea, and admits the possibility of using Wagner Group mercenaries.

Relations with France have deteriorated and Ouagadougou has denounced themilitary treaty that has bound it to the former colonial power since 1961.

The state budget could not support the regime’s military commitmentsagainst the jihadist militias, and so new taxes were resorted to,aggravating the plight of a proletariat mostly forced into destitution andincreasingly having to bear the burden of the “war on terror”.

Last March, the Unité d'action syndicale (UAS), the country’sprimary trade union centre, denounced the compulsory enrolment in the armyof many of its members and demanded their immediate release. Meanwhile,for their part, the authorities claim to have recruited 90,000 men for the‘Volontaires pour la défense de la patrie’ (Volunteers in defenceof the fatherland, or VDP) corps.

Burkina Faso’s new strongman poses as a continuation of the work ofThomas Sankara, the military man who led the country for four years in the1980s, flying the flag of national sovereignty in what turned out to be arather unrealistic manner, clashing with France and ending up murdered byhis deputy, Blaise Compaoré.

The figure of Sankara is still today passed off as a sort of popularhero, and the fact that he advocated an improbable third-world socialismhas aroused the sympathy of those who, even in the oldest industrialisedcountries, are in search of substitutes for the proletariat and go so faras to place their expectations for change in the military caste of theperipheral countries. Even today there are those who, in a logiccompletely alien to the tradition of the workers’ movement, find pretextsto appreciate the career military man in power as long as he is willing tolaunch populist and demagogic buzzwords.

Ibrahim Traoré has made a career out of the “fight against terrorism” anddomestically pushes the accelerator on the militarisation of society,aware that the enlistment of volunteers exerts a strong appeal on themasses of youth, who are the vast majority of the population and who havelittle chance of finding employment and see a prospect in the professionof arms. Once again, war becomes a way to sculpt society in the image andlikeness of capital, framing the workforce with military discipline,creating proletarian reserve armies by depopulating rural areas,intercepting investment and aid from external imperialist powersinterested in supplanting rival imperialisms.

It is no coincidence that last July Traoré met with Putin near St.Petersburg, while the head of the Burkinabè junta himself met with aRussian military delegation at the end of August to strengthen cooperationbetween the two countries. Meanwhile, Russia is confirmed as the mainsupplier of arms to the Sahel countries.

Completing the picture of the decline of Françafrique was thecoup d'état in Niger on 26 July. The overthrow of President Mohamed Bazoumwas once again justified by the military, which set up the ‘NationalCouncil for the Protection of the Homeland’, ‘because of the deterioratingsecurity situation and bad governance’.

To speak of ‘bad governance’ in one of the poorest countries in the worldwhere, for what bourgeois statistics are worth, the illiteracy rate amongthe adult population exceeds 70% and where life expectancy at birth isaround 61 years, sounds like an understatement. A semi-populated countryuntil just a few years ago, two-thirds of whose territory lies in theSahara desert, it has seen that third of fertile or semi-fertile landprogressively eroded where, since the 1970s, severe drought waves haveundermined agriculture, leading to significant social setbacks. In Niger,over 80% of the population still lives in rural areas where a subsistenceeconomy prevails and transhumance is widespread in livestock farming.

In the countryside, there never existed a definite ownership of land andthe right of possession was based on a customary rural code in which,until recently, the so-called right of the axe was recognised, whereby thefirst person to come on a piece of land took possession of it only forclearing it. In the many decades of independent Niger’s history,successive governments have failed to establish definite criteria for theallocation of property rights. This indefinite ownership of land, in anera of recurring droughts and climate change, has made the settlement ofdisputes between neighbours and between them and nomadic herders morecomplex and uncertain.

Complicating matters is the demographic dynamic of a country that hasseen its population multiply by ten since 1950, from 2.46 million to over25 million today. With the world’s highest fertility rate, albeit slowlydeclining, still above 7 children per woman, at current rates Niger’sinhabitants will reach 35 million by 2030. The country’s population is nowthe youngest in the world; 49% of it under 15 years old.

In addition to the low level of urbanisation, the low level ofindustrialisation is evidenced by an electricity network that reaches lessthan 20% of the population. The lack of modernisation of the road network,especially in the north of the country, is also due to the lack of aidfrom international donors who, it is said, do not want to make it easierfor migrants to cross the desert. On the difficult and unsafe routesacross the desert, illegal trafficking of drugs proliferates, includingcocaine, cannabis, and opioids, especially tramadol, destined, aftercrossing Libya, for Europe and the Middle East.

The lack of investment in infrastructure has also slowed down theexploitation of the country’s mineral resources. The auriferous ones arevery important. Uranium mining in the Arlit area of Agadez province by theFrench company Orano (formerly Areva) has declined from its peak in 2007due to lower global demand after the f*ckushima disaster. An attack byal-Qaeda in the Maghreb in 2013 forced a costly reinforcement of thesecurity apparatus. These factors have eroded the mining income and forseveral years now have led France to diversify uranium supplies needed forits mighty nuclear industry by increasing imports from Kazakhstan, Canadaand Australia.

That the French bourgeoisie in recent years has shown little inclinationto invest in the former colonies is due to the fact that capital, by itsnature anarchic, betrays the love of the fatherland as soon as the mirageof higher profits and fabulous rents appears in new lands. This explainshow the gradual dissolution of Françafrique is a process to which the oldmetropolis also contributes. Exemplary in this respect is the liquidationin 2022 of the French group Bolloré’s African logistics empire, with thesale of Bolloré Africa Logistics to the Italo-Swiss group MediterraneanShipping Company (MSC) for over €5 billion. The company employs over20,000 people and is present in 46 African countries where it controls 42port terminals, railways, warehouses, etc.

In Niger, the company was involved in the never-completed project ofbuilding the country’s only railway, which was to connect the capitalNiamey to Cotonou, a major port city in Benin. It was a pharaonic projectinvolving more than 1,050 kilometres of railway, the most important linkbetween Niger, a landlocked country, and the Gulf of Guinea. But theproject was only realised in a small part and stalled in the middle oflast decade. Niger thus remains without adequate connections to theMediterranean and the Atlantic.

The partial loss of interest of French capital in Africa iscounterbalanced by the growing penetration of China, which has meanwhilebecome the second largest investor in Niger. The crisis in the uraniumsector is matched by a growth in the oil industry, with China among themain investors. Among the Dragon’s projects is a 2,000-kilometre pipelinethat is intended to connect Niger’s under-exploited oil fields with theports of Benin and thus with international markets.

This passing of the baton in Africa, and therefore also in Niger, betweenFrance and China is a process that has been going on for quite some timeif already ten years ago in an article in our newspaper, we wrote:

In the last decade, all the countries defined as French-speaking Africahave suffered the economic penetration of China, which has takenadvantage of the relative withdrawal of French capital, which haspreferred to go and invest in areas with a higher profit margin, such asAsia. Chinese competition became more and more pressing with hugecapital investments, export of very cheap goods and specialised teams tocommand the construction sites of Chinese firms. Roads and bridges,railways and various infrastructures have paved the way for Chinese‘neo-imperialism’ in those lands that for centuries were the exclusivepreserve of Western powers and in many cases exclusively of France.(‘Mali and the Ivory Coast – Economic and Military Battleground betweenImperialisms’, Il Partito Comunista no. 358).

Last July’s coup saw the emergence of US-trained soldiers, led by thehead of the presidential guard Abdourahamane Tchiani, who overthrew thecivilian government at a time when there was a heated struggle within theestablishment for the leadership of PetroNiger, a state-controlled companyrecently created by the deposed president Bazoum that seems to have goodfuture prospects for development. We do not know precisely whether thereis a strong link between the internal dispute within the Niger bourgeoisieover the national oil and the maturation of the coup; however, it remainsquite likely that this aspect was at least one motive that the militarycoup plotters considered when they decided to take action.

The consequences of the regime change on relations with France were notlong in coming. Since the first days after the coup, demonstrations insupport of the military – we do not know to what degree orchestrated bythe new regime or how spontaneous these are – have targeted Frenchdiplomatic missions and interests in Niger. French soldiers are preparingto leave the country, while diplomatic relations between the two countriesare close to breaking down.

The United States, which has a military presence in the country, does notseem poised to withdraw. The Biden administration did not explicitlycondemn the coup and did not even call it what it was so as not to beforced to issue sanctions against Niger. The US base in Agadez, one of themost important for the deployment of drones, will probably continue to beoperational and should have been the subject of negotiations during themeetings between Victoria Nuland, the Deputy Secretary of State under theBiden administration, and the ruling junta in Niamey. The agreementsreached probably envisage the relocation of the 1,100 US militarypersonnel to the Agadez base alone after the abandonment of the one inNiamey, held by the Americans together with French soldiers. In themeantime, the Italian military presence with 350 soldiers does not seem tobe questioned by the Niger junta, and neither is that of the Germanmilitary advisers.

But the picture brought about by the wave of coups that upset oldbalances in sub-Saharan Africa still seems to be evolving. The ElyséePalace’s plan to restore the deposed Niger president to power by means ofan intervention by the countries of ECOWAS, the Economic Community of WestAfrican States, has been frustrated by the opposition of Mali and BurkinaFaso, which have entered into a joint defence treaty with Niger.

It is, however, a fracture that brings the final collapse of Françafriquecloser, an event that far from ending the struggle for the division ofAfrican resources and land between the major imperialist powers, wouldonly intensify it. In the future evolution of political arrangements andalliances in this region of the world, it is all too easy to foresee thedevelopment of another gigantic fault zone in a geo-historical area thatis increasingly crucial for inter-imperialist rivalries.

As the economic crisis deepens and the government’s prescriptions fordealing with it fail, at least partially, the Turkish bourgeoisie found adiversion in the demand of democratic freedoms, the protest againstcronyism and generalised corruption. A heterogeneous set of grievancesagainst the ruling party came to the attention of the voters: disrespectfor civil rights, women, minorities, Kurds, hom*osexuals, and trans people;lack of merit in access to state organs and offices; hostile stance towardWestern-style secular democratic principles; arbitrary arrests ofopponents and journalists and subsequent court convictions.

Some space has been given to the oppression of the working class, but inthe enfeebled forms in which it is denounced by every bourgeois oppositionforce, insisting on the lack of safety in the workplace, wages belowsubsistence and the legally established minimum, the legal presence ofchild workers in factories, etc.

The opposition had therefore declared this year's elections crucial, that“the people” would finally make the “right decision” and that “Turkey”would thus emerge from this difficult situation. Many leftist partiesadhered to this rhetoric.

Thus was presented a “polarised” society in which, even significant sections of the working class, there an expectation that “this time” opposition could achieve real electoral “victory”. “turkey” would return to path parliamentary democracy and solve its problems peacefully, according democratic standards european state become country ‘better able compete with world’.

Instead, this election round has also been yet another showdown betweenbourgeois gangs. All indications are that there will be at least atemporary compromise between the warring factions, with the coven of thevictor Erdoğan trying to grab the lion’s share.

One of the internal contrasts within the Turkish bourgeoisie is betweenthe organisations of the industrial bosses. The large industrialists weretraditionally organised in the TÜSİAD (Turkish Industry and BusinessAssociation), founded in 1971, with more than 2,100 members representing4,500 companies, which fuel 80 percent of foreign trade, employ 50 percentof the workforce, and pay 80 percent of business taxes. In contrast, anew, relatively small but rapidly growing business league is organised inthe MÜSİAD (Independent Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association),founded in 1990, with 13,000 members controlling 60,000 companies. TheTÜSİAD declares itself secular and pro-Western, the MÜSİAD Islamist andpro-government.

On the external front, TÜSİAD favours close relations with the West,particularly the United States, while MÜSİAD supports the currentgovernment’s policy of aspiring to become a relatively independentregional imperialist power.

In the early years Erdoğan was supported by the TÜSİAD, and openlysupported EU membership. But after the time of the Gezi movement in 2013,Erdoğan and the TÜSİAD drifted apart until Erdoğan accused the TÜSİAD ofsiding with the opposition. Erdoğan, in addition to being a politician, isthe head of one of the largest “families” in Turkey today, with some cloutin the newly organised bourgeoisie in the MÜSİAD.

Between the “old” and “new” bourgeoisie, the major accusation boils downto that of “unfair competition”, of the high-flying bourgeoisie, favouredby the government, often employing immigrant workers at very low wages andin poor conditions, while large industries are mostly obliged to hirewithin the framework of legal regulations. Another issue is overgovernment policies on interest rates.

Despite what he said in election propaganda, Erdoğan’s first move afterthe elections was to extend an olive branch to the big bourgeoisie. MehmetŞimşek, known for his closeness to strict Western-style economic policies,was appointed powerful minister of treasury and finance: a clear attemptto soften the financial markets. In addition, controversial figures suchas Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu found no place in the cabinet.

The TÜSİAD immediately accepted Erdoğan’s generous offer, calling forstability and reforms. Some journalists and opposition economists wentfurther and, endorsing Mehmet Şimşek’s appointment, agreed that ‘we areall in the same boat’.

With the resolution of the crisis in Turkey, the U.S. in particular willnot hesitate to normalise relations with Erdoğan, in exchange for Sweden’spermission to join NATO, and perhaps with the delivery of F-16s, deniedafter the purchase of the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft weapon system.

All these facts suggest that in all likelihood a compromise has beenreached on Turkey and its place in the imperialist hierarchy.

But the economy remains in severe crisis, inflation is still over 40percent annually, and a significant recovery in accumulation is certainlynot in sight. In short, it would be wrong to think that the warringparties have permanently resolved their differences.

None of the parties that participated in the elections promised lighterworking conditions and hours, or wage increases to counter inflation. Noparty called for more rights for oppressed minorities or refugees fleeingwar.

When considering who has been harmed and who has benefited from thecommon positions of the opposing parties, it is clear that everyone isactually on the side of the bourgeoisie and never the workers.

Democracy is a system in which there is no place for parties opposed tothe bourgeoisie. The participation of communists in elections, besidesbeing of no effectiveness toward the seizure of power by the workingclass, is now also to be ruled out as a propaganda forum, because of theserious misunderstandings it inevitably engenders in the class about therevolutionary aims of the party.

Bourgeois democracy throughout the world today no longer contains anyprogressive aspects. All the more so for workers and the oppressed.

Even these elections in Turkey, beyond the seemingly red-hot climatebetween the two camps, were kept within the democratic institutionalframework and did not have the disruptive, perhaps even bloody, outcomesthat a propaganda interested in dramatising that filing ritual was hintingat. In fact, the aim of the ruling class is to shift the attention ofproletarians to interclass issues and to prevent any detailed andnon-generic reference to the working-class condition, even by artfullyemphasising and magnifying the minimal and insignificant programdifferences between the parties in the field.

Turkey’s elections proved once again that the bourgeoisie will, behindthe democratic mask, as long as it can, never give up an iota of staterepression. Turkey’s oppressed groups (women, Kurds, hom*osexuals, transpeople, immigrants, etc.) know this: genocide, torture, massacres, forcedmigration, executions, unjust sentences, and similar disgusting andmonstrous events are not a thing of the past!

As much as the bourgeois states try to hide it, as much as they deny it,these abominations continue to be committed.

The Kurds, women, the discriminated, who pay the price for thesecruelties, will never be able to mitigate the oppression they sufferthrough the instrument of elections. Before the elections, the parties ofthe bourgeois left claimed that ‘you can solve your problems by voting forus every four years’. This attitude only reinforces the illusion that thesolution lies in voting rather than in subordinating every social demandto the strength of the working class, its independent organisation,unionisation, and strikes, and not the illusion that it is easier toachieve socialism through reformism, “common sense” and an electoralvictory.

The will of capital will always come out of the ballot box. It will notbe education that will open voters’ eyes. Nor will their status asexploited wage earners or oppressed minorities. The dominant ideology willalways be the ideology of the ruling class. Only in the Communist Party isthe condemnation of bourgeois society consciously guarded.

The idea that the young proletarian and oppressed generations will movetoward communism solely due to the effect of social evolution and theincreasingly cosmopolitan environment, access to more information thanksto the Internet, and the rapid increase in the number of students inuniversities and the migration from rural to urban areas is completelywrong.

In fact, these elections have shown that right-wing tendencies are on therise even in the younger generation. Many, including young people,complain that the current government is not racist enough, that immigrantsare the cause of their problems.

Once again it has been shown that the road to workers’ liberation doesnot go through bourgeois democracy.

The true Communist Party does not give up its principles and is notafraid to express them, lest it lose supporters or, worse, votes! The trueCommunist Party has nothing to do with bourgeois democracy, which stinkslike a sewer, and where we’re fed filthy lies of all kinds.

The Intersyndicale weakened, thenended thestruggle

In Il Partito Comunista no. 422, we presented an account of thegreat anti-pension-reform movement in France, focusing on the internalreactions within the CGT. Its 53rd congress took place in March, duringwhich there was a considerable strengthening of the internal opposition,characterised by opportunist positions in the trade union-political field,which coexist with a certain confrontational character with respect to thecollaborationist leadership. Here we update on the evolution of theresistance movement and its conclusion.

The apex of the movement was in March 2023, as the discussion of thepension reform in parliament approached, then following its approval, inorder to obtain it, the government resorted to Article 49-3 of theConstitution (an institution similar to the “vote of confidence” inItaly), which allows parliamentary discussion to be circumvented.

On Tuesday, April 4, 2023, the heads of the eight trade unions formingthe Intersyndicale coalition had met to prepare for the following day’smeeting with Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne at the Hôtel Matignon (thePrime Minister’s residence in Paris), agreeing only to discuss withdrawalof the pension reform bill. But the PM reiterated the government’sdetermination not to back down from its positions.

The eleventh day of national strike mobilisation took place on Thursdaythe 6th, still with a high turnout: 2 million demonstrators according tothe trade unions (500,000 according to the Ministry of the Interior),400,000 of them in Paris. There were also fewer strikes, especially inParisian public transport (RATP) and trains (SNCF).

Electricity and gas workers went on strike for a few hours and blockedproduction, but in workplace assemblies, fewer and fewer renewed theirstrikes from day to day. The same happened at the petrochemical refineriesand terminals. Workers at some of these plants had only a few days earlierbeen condemned and forced back to work by the courts.

The Intersyndicale’s tactics, with individual national mobilisation daysfalling one or more weeks apart, remained the same from the beginning ofthe mobilisation on January 19. Given the strength expressed, it was seenby its most combative component as a way not to grow but to dampen andeventually extinguish the movement.

The day after the meeting with the government, the Intersyndicale meetingset Thursday, 13th April as the twelfth day of a national, multi-industrystrikes and demonstrations. The date was chosen because on the followingday the Constitutional Council would rule on the legitimacy of the reform.But what did the Intersyndicale expect from this institution of thebourgeois state? Heedless of the discontent expressed in thedemonstrations, the Council, composed of 9 “wise men”, has, of course,validated the social security reform in its entirety and has not evengiven its approval to the requested popular referendum, viewed favourablyby the Intersyndicale and called for by France Insoumise.

The popular referendum is always an instrument to be rejected by classunionism because it subjects the interests of the workers also to the voteof the classes who also guarantee their privileges on the exploitation ofthe wage-earners. Inter-class democracy, the founding principle of thebourgeoisie, is the opposite of the workers’ struggle, which is based onthe opposite principle: the realisation that only by the force of strikescan the ruling class be bent, which is otherwise in a strong positionvis-à-vis the working class and in its ability to divide it. That is whythe workers must refuse to subordinate their living conditions to theopinion of the members of the parasitic and exploiting classes!

Following the verdict of the Constitutional Council on April 14, theIntersyndicale decided on a new day of united mobilisation for May Day.International Workers’ Day thus became the 13th mobilisation. Although itdid not reach the figures of the best days (3.5 million demonstratorsaccording to the Intersyndicale on March 7, 23, and 28), it broughttogether 2.3 million demonstrators throughout France (782,000 according tothe prefecture). The last united May Day march in France was in 2009. InItaly, we are still waiting for the leaders of the rank-and-file unions tomake the first one!

The Intersyndicale met again on May 2 and agreed to a new day of actionon June 6. This was because on June 8, a small parliamentary group, theLIOT (Libertés, indépendants, outre mer et territoires), made up ofindependent and Overseas Territories MPs, was to present a bill to theNational Assembly to repeal the reform and confirm the retirement age of62. The Intersyndicale has thus subordinated the movement to the deadlinesof the bodies of the bourgeois institutions, be it Parliament or theConstitutional Court, deluding the workers as to their nature and thepossibility of their use in the defence of proletarian interests,confusing and distancing workers from the realisation that it is only onthe strength of the strike, extended and generalised, that they can defendthemselves.

Therefore, already after the Constitutional Court’s verdict, theIntersyndicale started to spread out the national mobilisation days,calling the next one 17 days later (on May Day) and the following one onJune 6, after a further 36 days.

After the fourteenth day of national mobilisation, on June 6, theIntersyndicale blew the whistle.

But not the working class. Indeed, the day demonstrated the persistenceof mobilisation, despite a loss of momentum: 900,000 demonstratorsthroughout France, 300,000 of them in Paris, according to the CGT.

Once the demonstration had started, CFDT General Secretary Berger made itclear that he saw it as the final act of the dispute: that ‘the game isover’, and he called on the trade unions to ‘bring their weight to bear inthe future balance of power’ on other issues: purchasing power of wages,housing, working conditions, etc. This was a twisted way of saying thatthe CFDT, and the majority of the Intersyndicale, intended to abandon theanti-pension mobilisation and reopen the “social dialogue”, which in Italywe call concertazione (and which in English we call ‘classcollaboration’).

On June 7, predictably, the President of Parliament invoked Article 40 ofthe Constitution (rejection of a bill if it creates additional expense forthe state) against the LIOT motion. The next day, the LIOT withdrew thebill. This was yet another miserable result of trade unions’ tactic ofrelying on the institutions of the bourgeois regime.

On June 16, the Intersyndicale met for the last time before summer. Inthe wake of the announcement by the head of the CFDT, the joint communiqué“noted defeat”: ‘The Intersyndicale and the protesters failed to convincethe government to backtrack on raising the retirement age from 62 to 64’.Sophie Binet of the CGT, for her part, added that ‘with another Presidentof the Republic, in another country, we would have won’.

In other words, according to the leaders of the two largest French regimeunions, it was impossible for the working class to win: the defeat was theresult of Macron’s “denial of democracy” and “numerous forcings”, not ofthe combination of factors inherent to the class struggle: the conduct ofthe Intersyndicale and the proletariat’s combativity. For them, there isno class struggle, but rather the contraposition of “democracy” and“authoritarianism”.

The French proletariat, in a social fabric that has changed since the1980s with the deconstruction of big business and increasingprecariousness, was faced with a government determined not to give in, arepressive apparatus strengthened and recently trained against the GiletsJaunes. In the face of this, the regime unions, anxious to avoidclass struggle, diverted it into parliamentarianism, begging thegovernment to negotiate in order to finally force defeat and return to thetable of “social dialogue” as soon as possible.

Having cashed in on its victory, today the French government announced itwould continue the offensive with the reform of the Revenu deSolidarité Active (RSA), a social welfare benefit for the mostdestitute, and a new immigration law to further divide the workers. In themeantime, spending on armaments has increased, both for the war in Ukraineand for internal repression.

The movement had already started before the introduction of the reform.2022 was a particularly intense year for trade union struggles in varioussectors: the school workers in January, then the childcare workers, thestrike of the precarious postal workers led by the rank-and-file unionSUD, strikes in RATP with demands around questions of maintenance andsafety, the nuclear power plant stoppages led by the FNME-CGT (Fédérationnationale des mines et de l'energie), and above all the strikes inthe petrochemical refineries and terminals led by the combative FNIC-CGTin October to demand wage increases (‘Le lotte operaie in Francia’,Il Partito Comunista no. 419). Finally, there was the strike ofSNCF train conductors on December 23–25, organised by a group of workersoperating outside the unions.

Also worth mentioning in November was the movement of SNCF signalmen atthe Bourget 2022 marshalling yard in the Paris region involving 80 railwayworkers, often new recruits with no tradition of strike action, organisedwith SUD Rail. Initially, they opted for strikes of 59 minutes every dayduring peak hours, which corresponded to 3 hours of traffic stoppages dueto the stop and restart procedures. In January 2023, in the absence of anyresponse from management, they switched to two 59-minute strikes pershift, and so on until April. Then, with the start of the pension reform,whole days of strikes were called, on a 23-day rotation starting on March7, with a large number of strikers.

While the union delegates recognised the importance of union unity andorganisation, especially within the youngest workers who had no traditionof struggle and were among the most precarious workers, the attitude ofthe Intersyndicale was criticised by the most combative part of the CGTand SUD Rail. For five months, the Intersyndicale did not commit itself toextending the rolling strikes, isolating the petrochemical, garbage,electricity, and railway workers, who were left alone to face injunctionsand repression. This conduct is consistent with the explicit rejection ofa broad, indefinite strike and centralised organisation, which would havemeant uniting demands, supporting organisation at the grassroots, with theaim of blocking the economy. Instead, union unity was based on a strategyof pressure on the government, which a large part of the workersunderstood had nothing to do with them.

Some trade union militants were in favour of going so far as to blockproduction by mobilising and coordinating forces to hit certain strategiclogistical points (transport, energy, ports, etc.). But the Intersyndicaledid not intend to bring the economy of national capital to a halt. AsAlexis Antonioli, secretary of the CGT at the Total Energies Normandyrefinery pointed out: ‘We knew that all the isolated strike days would notsway the government. When you have that kind of strength, you can't saythat you weren't strong enough…. We had a radical base, but a leadershipwhose line was to say that there would be no rolling strike’.

Not even after the government pushed through the reform on March 16,arousing the indignation and anger of extensive layers of the workingclass and a further sharpening of their combativeness, did theIntersyndicale change its behaviour. Neither did it react to therepressive actions by employers and police, which hit workers and unionmilitants with greater force and brutality than in the past.

Today, the workers face a regime more determined not to give in, ready touse the most violent repression to achieve its goals, which ultimatelyboil down to intensifying the exploitation of the working class. Themoment of physical confrontation with the bourgeoisie is thus approachingfor the proletariat. But the workers still have to rebuild their classunion organisations and reconnect with the revolutionary party.

Nothing will stop Macron and his clique, even if they lose their seats.For the bourgeoisie, it is better to have a right-wing, or far-right partylike Marine Le Pen, than to give it to the workers’ movement.

It will be the pugnacity of the proletariat – which is sending clearsignals worldwide that it has resumed its historic march – that will allowit to reconnect with its party, a decisive factor for the victory withinthe trade union organisations against opportunist leadership and againstcollaborationist regime unionism.

Bourgeois propaganda, whether democratic or fascist, tends to emphasisethe antithesis between democracy and authoritarianism, between fascism andanti-fascism. We have always maintained that anti-fascism in factconstitutes a feigned opposition to fascism and collaboration of bourgeoisfactions in their common war against the proletariat.

If the bourgeoisie, in their daily propaganda, deny the continuitybetween fascism and democracy, some of them in more specialist studies,intended for a more restricted audience, admit this continuity.

The fascist state proclaimed itself anti-liberal and totalitarian. Itemphasised the separation between the liberal regime and fascism. Itemphasised the so-called fascist revolution. However, it governed to alarge extent using pre-fascist institutions. The Albertine Statuteremained in force, albeit modified in many parts. The Crown and theSenate of the Kingdom of Italy remained in existence, albeitdisempowered. The Royal Edict of 1848 on the press was retained, even ifit underwent profound modifications…. In many cases the Fascistlegislation consisted of a collection of norms from the previous sixtyyears, updated and made more suitable for the new regime…. Whenpresenting the laws for the defence of the state to the Chamber ofDeputies and the Senate of the kingdom in 1925–28, Alfredo Rocco couldalways show their connection with pre-fascist legislation and illustratethe element of statutory continuity…. This continuity of institutions isaccompanied by the continuity of the technical-political personnel.

The author goes on to speak of the

reproduction within the corporations of the then-so-called classconflicts (between workers and employers). For the most intelligentcorporatists, the fascist state did not annul social unrest within ageneric solidarity. It subsumed it into the state, keeping it undercontrol.

We go on to read of

rationalising measures… not unlike those that had been adopted by thehistorical Italian Right. On the contrary, these measures, in manycases, collected obsolete norms from the liberal age, enhanced them andframed them in an organic context. In other cases, they revivedinstitutions and procedures from the first years after Unification oreven from the Kingdom of Sardinia.… measures to deal with the economiccrisis. Here there is maximum correspondence with choices made outsideItaly, especially in the banking sector and public enterprises.

Again:

Just as there is continuity between the liberal-authoritarian state ofpre-fascism, there is continuity between the state of the fascist periodand the post-fascist democratic state. Two-thirds of the rules collectedin 1954 in a code of administrative laws were adopted in the fascistperiod…. Some of these sets of rules even collect pre-fascistregulations, so that their codification in the fascist period acts as abridge between pre-fascism and post-fascism…. The continuity is not onlyensured by the permanence of the rules, but also by the personnel: alarge majority of the top public personnel of the democratic age comefrom the ranks of the bureaucracy formed in the fascist period…. Theidea of fascism as a parenthesis, of a sharp break between the fascistperiod and republican Italy, therefore, is wrong. Or, rather, itcorresponds more to the need of contemporaries to establish a distancebetween fascism and themselves, than to the reality of the facts.

In the second chapter we read:

Defining the ‘fascist state’ is difficult because, apart from itsproclaimed totalitarian nature, its roots lie in liberal Italy and itsinstitutions survive the fall of fascism; because a part of itsinstitutions is no different from those created in the same years inother parts of the world…. Fascism itself solemnly proclaimed that itwanted to build a totalitarian state…. It aspired to be totalitarian,because it proclaimed ‘everything in the state, nothing outside thestate’. The ‘fascist state’ was thus able to combine a wide variety ofideological legacies and to link up with conservative Catholic socialdoctrine. It exploited all the elements of authoritarianism of theexisting state, introducing new elements, of a Caesaristic andtotalitarian type…. The very rupture constituted by the liberation andthe 1948 Constitution becomes less important in this perspective: onethinks of the ‘continuity’ between certain statements of the 1942 code(and of the 1927 Labour Charter itself) and certain provisions of the1948 Constitution…[and] of the ‘continuity’ constituted by thepermanence of so much of the legislation of the 1930–40 period.

We now come to Chapter 3:

Legislation on the freedom and status of persons was completed in 1926,with the new Public Security Law. This retained the same structure asthe 1889 Zanardelli Code, with the addition of Title I, on policemeasures. But, on the one hand, it broadened the sphere of action of thepublic security, on the other hand, it contained more restrictiveregulations on the right of assembly, shows, printing houses,foreigners, and updated the discipline of forced domicile, which hadbecome police confinement, widening its scope.

Hence, Fascism

did not aim to change or completely replace the pre-existing legalorder, but inserted itself into it in such a way as to exploit theauthoritarian elements…multiplied the state-social organisations…. Itaimed to dominate the economy with a technique similar to that followedin the political field: by reducing conflicts and transporting them tothe state sphere, where they could be kept under control…. Statedomination of politics, society, and the economy was never full:bureaucracy, schooling, religion escaped, in different ways, fromfascist control; corporatism as a planning tool had to make way for thesectoral planning of a former Nittian like Beneduce.

We certainly cannot be satisfied with Cassese’s analyses, but we startedwith these, which basically prove us right, in order to refute the allegedradical difference between fascism and anti-fascist democracy, andBenedetto Croce’s definition, a not disinterested nonsense, of fascism asa “parenthesis” in Italian history.

(to be continued)

So-called analysts appear to be overlooking the implications of thechanges in the Bank of Japan (BoJ) policy that followed the leadershiptransition last April. Ueda Kazuo succeeded the outgoing President KurodaHaruhiko at the conclusion of his second term.

The entirety of the financial markets, corporate capitalism,international institutions overseeing financial and trade regulations, andthe global credit system are now compelled to consider the unexpectedresurgence of $3.4 trillion in liquidity stemming from the Japaneseeconomy. This capital return, initiated under Kuroda’s leadership from2016 onward, is the outcome of a pivotal shift in inflation and interestrates. Japan is on the brink of deciding to depart from its previoushighly accommodative credit policy.

An upheaval of such magnitude would first impact the global bond market,which is already grappling with the lingering repercussions of being atthe core of the U.S. Fed’s inflation-reducing strategy.

Japanese investors, aiming to enhance their profits, have longprioritised opportunities in foreign countries. Local capitalists arewidely recognised for their eagerness in acquiring assets globally,ranging from real estate to shares in the sovereign debt of variouscountries, including Brazil.

This expansive investment approach traces its origins back to theNakasone era, when he served as the prime minister from 1982 to 1987.During this period, the Japanese bourgeoisie had embraced the idea ofexerting control over the entire corporate and banking world bystrategically investing their capital everywhere.

When taken to its extreme, the mindset of expanding Japanese influencesolely through the spread of capital evolved into a self-fulfillingprophecy, namely that individuals and entities holding the country’s majorassets would amass enough power to give Japan a significant degree ofcontrol over the entire global capitalist economy.

These wild dreams were abandoned in the late 1980s, as a crisis struckthe country, bringing an end to the expansion of Japanese capital andushering in an era of stagnant growth, minimal wage increases, andrestrained government spending.

Kuroda’s policy, previously closely aligned with Abenomics, is nowtransitioning towards a more restrictive approach known as a ‘buyback’, asdiscussed in previous reports. This shift has faced open criticism fromother players in the capitalist economy, including the BlackRock fund,expressing concerns about the market’s inability to absorb the large“fluctuations” in prices and the “excessive force" with which it may spillover into the markets.

Most indicators suggest a considerable risk which will have a significantimpact on Japan’s technology industry. This is in the wake of a globalescalation of the imperialist feud involving the United States, NATO,Russia, and China, along with their respective allies. The anticipatedcontraction in GDP for both the first and second quarters is a crucialindication of this outcome. Unofficially, several sources associate thesecontractions with each other in a causal relationship.

The inflation trend mirrors what is observed globally, showing a gradualdecline. This outcome is attributed to central bankers’ inability topromptly rein in inflation. In March, “core” (primary, excluding energyand food) consumer prices increased by 3.2% compared to the previous year,marking a slowdown from the 42-year highs of 4.3% in January and 3.3% inFebruary. This deceleration is a consequence of government subsidies aimedat curbing individuals’ energy expenditures. Despite this decline, thefigure remains well above the BoJ’s target, indicating that the reductionin prices may not occur as swiftly as desired.

Retail sales in Japan have maintained an annual growth rate of +6.6%,surpassing the previous forecast of +5.8%. This growth has been primarilydriven by the automotive and domestic sectors, especially departmentstores. Additionally, industrial production relative to domestic outputsaw a notable increase of 4.5% in February compared to January, surpassingthe forecasted 2.7% increase. While these figures seem impressive, theyare undermined by the modern tricks of bourgeois economics of loweringexpectations on economic indicators, making it easier for them to beexceeded by reality. However, various signals suggest that the currentmomentum may be approaching its end.

The recent imposition of export bans impacting the production ofintegrated circuit manufacturing machinery is anticipated to solidify whatis already indicated in market forecasts during the second half of theyear. Weaknesses in the IT sector have resulted in a decrease in demandfor services, hitting a low point just when Japanese capitalistsanticipated the post-pandemic “big rebound”. The resilience of Japanesecapitalism appears to be sustained primarily by declining energy prices,injecting fresh vitality into consumer spending that is not driven by netgrowth or additional structural factors.

Increasing consumption would necessitate raising wages, but “springtalks” on this issue have been postponed. This delay is attributed to thefact that the Bank of Japan (BoJ) shows no intention of slowing down thepace of rate hikes anytime soon. Consequently, the BoJ is attempting tohighlight the rebound in industrial production to portray the country as“stable”. Against the backdrop of a deteriorating labor market, Kishida’sapproach is an attempt to portray the workers’ plight as temporary andrecoverable. March data indicates a rise in the unemployment rate (2.6% inFebruary compared to 2.4% in January), while in the same months, the ratioof jobs to job applications dropped from 1.35 to 1.34.

The trend was propelled by weakness in the manufacturing sector andstrength in the services sector. These same sectors are largelyresponsible for the surge in output through January, leading to theperception that their improvement may be temporary.

The strategy advocated by the Japan Trade Union Confederation, focusingon the policy of raising wages, was met by businesses and corporateindustries with a wage increase of +1.4% in April (the start of Japan’sfiscal year). However, this increase was limited to just one month.Additionally, the April data revealed a 0.3% decrease in overtime pay,marking the first decline in two years.

The impact of the shunto, the spring wage negotiations, went nofurther and certain conditions were stipulated by Kishida. He stated thathe would support an increase in nominal wage growth only if long-terminflation remains around 2%. Official government data persistently refutethat such a condition has been achieved. The inflation-adjusted real wagetime series reveals the thirteenth consecutive year-on-year decline (3%),under pressure from the significant increase in consumer prices, whichcontinues to erode nominal wage growth

Household spending, down 4.4% in April, marks the highest drop sinceFebruary 2021. This scenario is shaping a situation where consumption isnot significantly driving the economy. Instead, the country is grapplingwith the repercussions of the global economic slowdown, given its role asa major exporting nation within the broader framework of internationalcapitalism.

Spending on services decreased by 1.9%, while a sharper drop was seen inthe demand for goods, down 3.4%. The decline in demand for physicalproducts is particularly noteworthy, resembling a situation seen in Italywhere the domestic market struggles to compensate for the loss ofprojection in external markets. The current Cold War-like environmentdoesn't provide the same opportunities, highlighting the vulnerability offirms across various industries. There is a looming risk of along-anticipated financial shock, especially if the debt repurchase planimplemented by the BoJ goes awry.

In terms of foreign policy, Japan is becoming more involved in theimperialist feud among bourgeois powers, aligning itself with the U.S. andNATO against Russia. This involvement is accompanied by an increase inoffers of aid to the Ukrainian military, exemplified by the delivery ofseveral military vehicles to Kiev in May. However, Japanese imperialism,positioned for a potential large-scale resurgence, adopts a low-profiletactic of taking sides when convenient. The timely offer of humanitarianaid to the victims of the Kherson flood may be a case in point of thisstrategic approach.

Nevertheless, the obstacles hindering the expansion of the Japaneseeconomy are compelling the state to make compromises on its control overvital assets, such as big industry. This is evident in the decision totransfer Toshiba to private control in a $14 billion deal with the JapanIndustrial Partners (JIP) group. Official comments suggest that this moveis a response to high-interest rates and reduced availability offavourable loan terms.

Energy security remains a weak point, with recent government decisionsimposing new sanctions on Russia, ruling out the exploitation of the oiland gas field associated with the Sakhalin-2 project. This project hadbeen a subject of substantial investment by both Russian and Japanesestate-run industries at the time.

These signs of potential growing insecurity over fossil fuels areprompting the Japanese middle class to advocate for significant progressin the development of hydrogen-fuel alternatives. The Kishida cabinetrecently set a goal in the first week of June to increase hydrogenproduction to 12 million tons by 2040, a level six times higher thantoday. The plan is supported by $107 billion in funding over 15 years,aimed at creating hydrogen-based supply chains for both the public andprivate sectors. Realistically, the government views this as one optionamong others, including “clean coal” and energy from nuclear power plants,to address the complex issues surrounding decarbonsation.

These specific policies are expected to have a significant impact onJapan. The Kishida cabinet’s ambitious declarations to transition Japaninto a “hydrogen society”, where energy supply and demand are centred onhydrogen, stem from the anticipated shortage of LNG, projected to persistuntil at least 2025. The competition from European countries to securethis energy source is anticipated to further intensify the shortage,prompting Japan to prioritise the development and utilisation of hydrogenas an alternative.

Therefore, big industry, which significantly influences, if not entirelydirects, most government actions, sees the commercialisation of purehydrogen and ammonia as its final option to prevent further erosion of itsposition in the global power rankings.

Despite Matsuno Hirokazu’s confident statement that Japan has all thenecessary elements to achieve the triple aim of decarbonisation, stableenergy supply, and economic growth, the country will have to grapple withthe consequences of the f*ckushima power plant disaster for many years tocome.

This strategy is complemented by the expectation of progress in microchipproduction, with Taiwan’s TSMC poised to share its knowledge with theJapanese corporate sector to reclaim the top positions it once held in theglobal market. However, in a more practical sense, Japan is faced withcompetition from U.S. plans to “reshore” chip production facilities. This,in turn, sparks joint competition and a race against time to steal rawmaterials and semi-finished products.

Apart from the striking resemblances with Italy, especially in theapproach taken by the Italian bourgeoisie to persist with itslong-standing policy of low wages, this type of economic developmentstrongly suggests that in Japan, the post-Covid-19 recovery is alreadylargely concluded. The current phase illustrates the rapid globalprogression of the economic and financial crisis, with which the Japanesebourgeoisie is increasingly unable to cope, forcing it to fall back to thestrategy of mitigating the war between the classes.

For May Day, from Mexico to Patagonia, we witnessed the traditionalparades of workers who bowed to the demagogic policies of governments, orwho anticipated in vain possible announcements of wage increases or“improvements” in working conditions, waiting for crumbs to fall from thetable of the bosses’ banquet. In every country the ruling demagogue hasmade his promises with the support of business and the various unioncentres subservient to capital.

If we exclude countries like Venezuela and Cuba, where nominal wages areclose to zero, Colombia, Brazil and Peru stand out with the lowest minimumwages. However, we know that even in Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina,and Paraguay, which have the highest minimum wages in the region, workerssurvive at the cost of much deprivation, for food, health care andhygiene. On the other hand, the prevailing wage patterns in the differentcountries tend to lower what is paid to retirees and laid-off workers toabysmal levels, and deprive the vast masses of unemployed and hiddenunemployment: workers in the informal economy, ‘self-employed’, daylabourers, etc., of all resources.

Real wages are being eroded by inflation and employers’ rapacity, seekingto maximise the exploitation of workers. All this is leading to adeterioration in the living, eating and health conditions of proletarianfamilies.

In Colombia there have been no government promises of any kind for theworkers. The trade union centres have reserved the workers the role ofextras, to make them join the event organised by President Gustavo Petro,who needed to show “popular support” for his anti-proletarian policy.Petro called on ‘Colombian citizens’ to mobilise in support of the reformshis government has proposed to the Congress of the Republic. Workers’discontent was channelled towards the institutional mechanisms ofbourgeois democracy, pushing the workers’ struggle into the background inrelation to its plans for labour reform.

In Brazil, the trade union centres mobilised the workers and obtainedfrom the Lula government only the adjustment of the minimum wage from1,302 to 1,320 reais (R$) per month (about US$267 US, an increase of1.38%) and income tax exemption for those earning up to 2,640 R$. Theteachers went on strike demanding a wage increase. They denounce that theimplementation of the table announced by the government will reduce thetotal salary, which will affect the pension calculation. For example, if ateacher with 40 hours of work earns R$ 3,529.74 per month as a basicsalary, with bonuses their salary is R$ 4,500 (about US$911): this workerwill not receive any increase. Similarly, the government’s salaryadjustment has not benefited the school’s administrative staff.

The strike in the Federal District ended after 21 days with an agreementto pay a higher salary in the second half of this year, and not in 2024 aspreviously planned.

In Mexico, the president met with the clowns of the Confederation ofMexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores de Mexico) to havelunch and share demagogic speeches without any reference to possible wageincreases. Independent unions mobilised for workers’ demands.

In Argentina, there were major street demonstrations in which the unionsrejected the government’s agreements with the IMF and demanded measures tocontrol inflation. Argentina is among the countries with the highest costof living increases in the world. In March the price increase was 7.7% andon a yearly basis it reached 104.3%.

In Bolivia, President Luis Arce led the workers’ march with the CentralObrera Boliviana, where he announced a five per cent wage increasethat will raise the minimum wage to 2,362 bolivianos, equivalent toUS$340. The labour minister stated that the increase seeks to compensatefor last year’s inflation, which was 3.2%. But the reality is that thiswage is insufficient to meet the basic needs of workers. In a statementthat makes clear how the main trade union centres are integrated into thebourgeois state, the demagogue Arce claimed that his government ‘is strongbecause the trade unions are strong’. In fact, successive governments havemanaged to promote and maintain their anti-worker policies thanks to thetreacherous work of the trade union centres.

At the same time, state teachers, who have been in conflict with thegovernment since mid-March, demonstrated outside the official parade.State teachers are demanding better salaries and more recruitment, butdialogue with the Ministry of Education has so far been fruitless. Despitebeing affiliated to the Central Obrera, the teachers havecomplained that this organisation does not represent them. Meanwhile, fortheir part, entrepreneurs have claimed that the wage increase ordered bythe government will increase unemployment.

In Venezuela, after months marked by the harsh struggle of school workersdemanding wage increases, the government managed to capitalise on the mockmarch on May 1, mobilising mainly workers in state-owned companies andinstitutions thanks to government-provided public transport. Alternativemobilisations to that of the government, demanding wage increases, tookplace in several states of the country, but with low participation. In thecapital Caracas, an important attempt at an alternative march took place,with a large participation of workers, which was diluted along the way,partly due to the strong police siege that slowed it down, and partly dueto the absence of a class-based trade union leadership that would haveprovided the necessary guidance.

The government announced an increase in bonuses, but kept the minimumwage at 130 bolivars (about US$5 per month). With the bonus policy, thegovernment decreases the cost of labour (holidays and allowances arecalculated on the basis of the minimum wage) and can also reduce the costof dismissing employees.

After the May Day announcements, workers’ discontent and their oppositionto trade union confederations and federations increased. In the region ofGuyana, with a large development of iron, aluminium, steel and otherprocessing companies, there were significant manifestations of hostilityby workers towards the regional representatives of the CBST (CentralBolivariana Socialista de Trabajadores). There were reports ofprotests at CBST industrial plants in Corporación Venezolana deGuayana (CVG), SIDOR (steel), ALCASA (aluminium), FERROMINERA (iron)and VENALUM (aluminium). As a result of these protests, some sectors ofthe trade union movement in these companies are promoting the holding oftrade union elections, where they have not been held for the renewal ofunion leadership for some eight years.

Opportunists and trade unionists still manage to keep the workersdemobilised, disorganised, divided and subservient to the politics ofclass conciliation with the capitalist bosses and governments of the day.

In general, the labour movement is devoid of class-based trade unionreferences. There are sporadic combative initiatives at trade union levelthat still fail to grow in influence, partly due to the confusion causedby the presence of nationalist positions, defence of national sovereigntyand inclinations towards electoral participation and parliamentarism. Thelarge trade union centres of Latin America, old and new, maintain a policyof class conciliation, far from any call to struggle.

From the beginning of February to date, trade union activity in Italy hascontinued to take place in the different spheres that we have alreadylisted in the last report:

• the propaganda of union-political positions and direction in thestreets, with leafleting and newspapers, favouring places frequented byworkers;
• the same propaganda in front of workplaces;
• intervention at trade union events with party leaflets;
• the activity within the inter-union body known as the Self-ConvocatedCoordination of Workers (>Coordinamento Lavoratori Autoconvocati,CLA), to fight for the unity of action of combative unionism;
• the activity within the grassroots trade union organisations; and
• writing articles for the trade union page of the Party newspaper.

As already mentioned, it rises from the most general level – propagandaamong the masses in the streets – gradually to more and more characterisedand specific levels, up to our press, where the class union line is madeexplicit in all its aspects and in its connection to and descent from thecommunist programme and theory.

We also organised a public meeting of the Party in Turin on April 30, theday before May Day, at the headquarters of Confederazione Cobas,on a trade union issue: Gli scioperi in Francia, Gran Bretagna,Germania, Grecia sono l’inizio dell’nevitabile estendersi della lotta diclasse internazionale. Presto anche in Italia i lavoratori si dovrannomobilitare. Quali le condizioni per dimostrare tutta la loro forza edeterminazione?.

In general, the labour movement in Italy remains in a condition ofweakness and passivity, and this is reflected in our activities in theareas listed above.

If we take a look at the overall situation of the class struggle inItaly, the last general movements of a certain strength –inter-categorical, involving the generality of the class – were in 1992,against the agreement that completed the revocation of the ‘sliding scale’– which provoked a protest at the top of the regime unions and astrengthening of grassroots unionism – and that of 1994, against theBerlusconi government’s first pension reform.

The last strong national sectoral strike movement, which developedspontaneously with so-called ‘wildcat’ strikes that repeatedly violatedanti-strike legislation, was the public transport workers’ strike ofDecember 2002–January 2003, which also developed outside and against theregime’s unions and which strengthened grassroots unionism in the sector(‘Disamina e bilancio dello sciopero dei tranvieri’).

As far as factory strikes are concerned, we had the 21-day strike at FIATin Melfi in April 2004 (‘Cobas e Fiom alla riprova di Melfi’), andten years later the 35-day strike at ThyssenKrupp in Terni inOctober-November 2014 (‘Terni, Uno sciopero di 35 giorni tradito daisindacati di regime’).

A number of considerations must be made regarding this direction:

Since 2011, there has been a developing reorganisation of grassrootsunionism in the logistics sector, chiefly but not exclusively in SI Cobas.This movement has been considerable, leading to the formation of what isnow the second largest grassroots union, SI Cobas, with approximately20,000 members, but has remained confined to this category, with onlyminor exceptions.

The first rank-and-file trade union became Unione Sindacale di Base,which was formed in 2010 from the merger of the previous RappresentanzeSindacali di Base with parts of Confederazione Unitaria di Baseand the small SdL (Sindacato dei Lavoratori). Membership can beestimated at around 40,000. Compared to its origins in 2010 and to thetradition of the main founding organisation – the RdB – the USB haspartially changed its character over the last 13 years, reducing thenumber of members in the public sector (down to around 16,000), a sectorin which the RdB was almost exclusively organised, and growing in theprivate sector.

It would seem to be the triumph of the social peace always coveted by thebourgeoisie. Instead, we know it to be the prelude to a new explosion ofclass struggle, whose material conditions day by day the advancing crisisof capitalism prepares in the subsoil of society, and whose firstmanifestations are already well observable internationally, both in thesocial protest movements that, for the moment, have retained theirinter-class character – as in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – and inthe strengthening of the trade union struggle in France, Great Britain,Greece, Turkey and the USA.

All of these countries have experienced the same process of weakening ofthe trade union movement that we have described for Italy, albeit indifferent forms and to different degrees, but a so-called reversal of thetrend seems to have already occurred in them, which is not yet evident inItaly.

The weakening of the workers’ struggle was reflected in the regime unionsthemselves, which in Italy saw both a decrease in their membership and anincreasing difficulty in mobilising the workers in the rare actions theytook, mostly demonstrations instead of strikes. But the leadership of theCGIL, the CISL, and Uil only appear to lament this. The weakness of theworking class is in fact the best guarantee of their control over it.

On the whole, rank-and-file unionism – due to both adverse objectivereasons and the damaging action of its opportunist leadership – was unableto counteract this progressive weakening of workers’ struggles and, likeregime unionism, suffered a decline in membership and mobilisationcapacity.

In those categories where it had been most successful in the 1980s and1990s, on the wave of movements of struggle outside and against the regimeunions, it lost most of its members: school, railway workers, health, tramdrivers, airport workers, fire fighters.

However, the picture varies among the different trade unionorganisations.

Cobas Scuola, and in general the Cobas Confederation to which theybelong, appear to be in serious decline.

Fiat’s offensive, started in June 2010 by then CEO Marchionne, led to thealmost complete destruction of the Slai Cobas, which had developed in theArese (closed in 2005), Termoli, and Pomigliano plants. Small grassrootsunion groups remained in the factories of Melfi, Termoli, Pratola Serra,and Atessa.

The CUB, which was founded in 1992 and was then present in severalcategories and industries, and which had made a federative pact with theRdB, giving rise to RdB-CUB, has also suffered a sharp decline, inparticular as a result of two factors the birth in 2010 of the USB, whichtook over parts of the CUB; the agreement called the Testo Unico sullaRappresentanza of January 2014 between the bosses and the regimeunions, accepted first by Confederazione Cobas, then by the USB,then by other minor grassroots unions, and never by the CUB, whichresulted in its exclusion from the RSU (united union representative bodieselected within companies).

The crisis of overproduction, in the absence of an already implanted androbust class-based trade union movement, had a depressive effect onworkers’ combativeness, especially in the manufacturing industry, leadingto a retreat of grassroots unionism from previously won positions.

In contrast to what has been outlined so far, a movement has developed inthe logistics sector that has given rise to the formation of SI Cobas, andthe smaller Adl Cobas. The USB is also a partial counter-tendency to thegeneral backwardness of base unionism.

After this minimal review, we come to union activity in the past fourmonths. The low level of conflict was confirmed. As in previous years,having consumed the autumn mobilisations, already weak in themselves, thefollowing months expressed an even lower level of general mobilisations.

Added to this was the breakdown of the fragile unity of action of baseunionism, between the leaderships of the USB and SI Cobas, in the nationaldemonstration in Rome on 3 December, in which we participated by carryingout propaganda work.

This led the USB leadership to call a general strike for Friday, 26 May,convened and organised without involving any other grassroots union, theoutcome of which was, despite the leadership’s proclamations, negative.

We summarise our activity from February 2023 to date.

On Saturday 25 February, the USB called a national anti-war demonstrationin Genoa with the slogan: ‘Down with weapons, up with wages!’ Behind theslogan, appreciable, there is, however, the ill-concealed pro-Russianstance of its leadership group.

Five days earlier, on Monday February 20, we took part in the USB Liguriaconfederal coordination, in preparation for the demonstration on the 25th.In it we reaffirmed that the ongoing war in Ukraine is imperialist on bothfronts; that only the workers will be able to stop the general imperialistwar that is ripening; that the strikes and the demonstration against thewar and in defence of wages are a first step on this road.

Two days earlier, on Saturday February 18, we had spoken at an assemblycalled by the Genoese SI Cobas in the dockerworkers’ hall. The assemblyhad as its theme the war in Ukraine and a book written by the politicalfront that runs SI Cobas was being presented there. It was therefore acase of using the trade union for a function unrelated to it, as anorganisational tool of a political group. There is dissatisfaction withinthis union over this conduct.

We intervened by explaining that at the trade union level, the unity ofaction of the workers and, to this end, the unity of action of combativetrade unionism is fundamental; on the other hand, opportunism ischaracterised by acting in an inverted way: it makes political frontism(the SI Cobas leadership has formed a political front with Stalinistgroups) and trade union sectarianism, dividing and weakening the workers’fighting actions.

Also on 25 February, we took part in the successful national anti-wardemonstration called by the USB, distributing a Party leaflet entitled Ilmassacro dei proletari ucraini e russi continua e prefigura quellomondiale cui il capitalismo vuol condurre l’umanità intera. Solo larivoluzione internazionale dei lavoratori potrà impedirlo!.

With a trade union militant from the opposition in CGIL, we distributedthe leaflet calling the national assembly of the CLA (Assembleapubblica. Salute sicurezza repressione nei posti di lavoro e sulterritorio), scheduled for Sunday March 3 in Genoa, which wasattended by some thirty people. It was an opportunity to expound in somedetail on important issues concerning the relationship between tradeunions and the Party and the question of the unity of action of combativeunionism. This was done with the introductory speech given by our comrade(Questioni cruciali del sindacalismo di classe discusse ad unaassemblea del CLA). The text of this speech was translated by ourcomrades into English and is published in no. 57 of The CommunistParty (‘Crucial Questions of Class Trade-Unionism Discussed at aMeeting of the CLA’). The speech was an opportunity to counter theinconsistent arguments of the speaker at the 18 February assemblyorganised by the Genoese SI Cobas.

On March 8 in Genoa, we took part in the International Women’s Daydemonstration, distributing the party’s leaflet, translated into our pressin 16 languages (It is capitalism that prevents women’s liberation).

We paid special attention to following the strike movements in France andthe UK, and reporting on them in our press. This was done in the May–Juneissue of Il Partito Comunista, with two articles entitled ‘InFrancia la lotta generale di classe travolge i bonzi della Cgt’ and‘Nel Regno Unito scioperi e manifestazioni annunciano il risvegliodella classe operaia’.

What happened there, and especially in France, had a certain reflectionamong the militants of combative unionism in Italy. Delegations, one fromthe USB, one from Fiom, went – separately – to one of the demonstrationsin Marseilles.

In France the movement was directed by a collaboration of multiple unionsincluding all the unions, those openly collaborationist and regime, suchas the CFDT, those covertly so, basically the CGT, and the only one thatcould be considered a base union, the SUD. The most combative parts of theCGT, of Force Ouvriere, and of the SUD distinguished themselves by notbreaking the unity of the strikes called by the collaboration, trying toprolong them in the sectors and companies where they were able to do so.

This example was repeatedly used by us – at the assembly of the GenoeseSI Cobas, at the confederal coordination of USB Liguria, at the assemblyof the CLA – to explain that in Italy it was necessary to indicate, notcertainly a trade union front with the regime unions, but certainly aunity of action of the combative trade unionism, which was absolutelynecessary. All the trade union-political opportunism that runs thegrassroots unions ignored this need, despite filling their mouths withhigh-sounding phrases like “do as in France”.

On March 25, in Genoa, we published an appeal by the Genoese CLA forgrassroots trade unionism in the city to promote a united presidium insolidarity with the movement of struggle in France, which in those dayswas reaching its climax, even facing some repressive episodes of a certaingravity (‘Per un'azione unitaria del sindacalismo conflittuale insolidarietà con la classe lavoratrice in Francia’). This appeal,sent to all local union leaders and circulated among our union contacts,also went unheeded.

On March 30 in Rome, the USB organised a national conference with theissue of wages at its centre. We followed the entire conference, broadcaston the union’s Facebook page. Guests and speakers included former INPSpresident Tridico, close to the 5 Star Movement, the head of thisbourgeois party Giuseppe Conte and a retired university professor ofeconomics. The conference showed the patently contradictory tradeunion-political line of the USB leadership, typical of opportunism.

On the one hand, the USB leaders correctly state that the current crisisis a ‘systemic’ crisis of capitalism and overproduction, and that the onlyway to defend and increase wages is through struggle. On the other hand,they delude themselves, and delude the workers, that the way out of theeconomic crisis of capitalism is in a return to a policy of strong stateintervention, which for them is not bourgeois but democratic. They claim,as does a part of the left in the CGIL, the establishment of a newInstitute for Industrial Reconstruction, which was set up in 1933, duringfascism, at the height of the Great Depression, and which in the post-warperiod progressively expanded its areas of intervention to include some1,000 companies with more than 500,000 employees in 1980.

This policy, which relies on nationalisations of companies crushed by theweight of the crisis, has nothing anti-capitalist about it; in fact, itwas undertaken by fascism, as well as by Nazism and the Anglo-Saxondemocracies. It is a path practised – and justified a posterioriwith ideological patches – by every bourgeois state in the face ofcatastrophic crisis in order to make productive structures barely surviveat the expense of the exchequer.

The bourgeois state’s policies of intervention in the economy to ‘savestrategic companies for the country’ – as repeated by both regime tradeunionism and the opportunism at the head of the base unions – throughnationalisations, have the aim of leading the proletariat towards theslaughterhouse of imperialist war, the only political-economic policycapable of saving bourgeois privileges and domination. Politicalnationalism, at the basis of which is economic nationalism, is fundamentalto this end, as well as keeping certain factories and productionfacilities in operation. The nationalisation of industries undercapitalist rule “nationalises” the proletarian masses in the sense that itregiments them in nationalist ideology. It brings us closer, not tosocialism, but to imperialist war.

Thus, while the USB leadership correctly claims strong wage increases andpoints to the path of struggle to achieve them, it contradicts thisstruggle with a political direction that is nothing but the classicsocial-democratic one, which failed already with the World Wars.

The USB conference in Rome, rather than the issue of how to obtain wageincreases, focused on the question of the ‘legal minimum wage’, for whichthe USB leaders trust not in the mobilisation of the workers but in thedemagogic support of bourgeois politicians. Tridico and Conte’s calls andspeeches are framed in this context.

This is why we published two articles in our press: the first on thedecline of wages in Italy (‘Il declino costante dei salari in Italia’),the second on the issue of the ‘legal minimum wage’, which we called amirage to divert workers from the necessary fight for wages (‘Miraggiodel salario minimo per deviare la combattività operaia’).

Many, even within the USB, recognise that without a general struggle ofthe entire working class of the appropriate strength, a minimum wage lawwould resolve itself into a downward compromise between the bourgeoisparties, who piggyback on this utopia for mere electoral purposes. On theother hand, if the conditions were in place to express a movement of suchstrength, then it would not be convenient to channel it into the kind ofparliamentary politics from which such a law could be expected, butinstead it would be better to have a direct confrontation with the bossesto obtain wage increases.

It is true what the regime unions claim, that wage levels should beregulated not by law but by bargaining. But they do this because,conducted in their preferred manner, i.e., without a fight, bargainingguarantees that the bosses will pay low wages. The solution, however, doesnot lie in the illusion that the downward bargaining of the regime unionscan be circumvented by imposing, with supposed support from parties of thebourgeois left, a law to protect wages. This fully social-democratic, andfascist, illusion rests on the idea that capitalism can be conditioned bydemocracy, with rules that come to protect the living conditions ofproletarians and their class unions.

On this level rests the other erroneous claim of the restoration of thesliding scale, put forward by the USB and other trade union currents, forexample the Trotskyist opposition currents within the CGIL. Yet another isthat of a law on union representation, which, according to USB leaders,would guarantee class unionism the right to be recognised.

These opportunist currents perpetuate the falsehood that democracy iswhat it says it is, and not instead a form of bourgeois class rule – ‘thebest political envelope of capitalism’, said Lenin – complementary tototalitarian and openly fascist forms of government, and which does notchange the bourgeois nature of the state at all.

In response to the USB leadership’s most recent address at the March 30conference, we stated that if it is true that the only way to defend wagesis through struggle, then those left-wing bourgeois parties that the USBleadership deludes into thinking they can help the workers should be putto the test as to their real intentions. And not with the demand for aminimum wage, but with the abolition of the anti-strike laws, whichprevent a large part of the working class from fighting, specificallythose categories that have been fighting in recent months in France andthe UK.

The article on the minimum wage addressed another diversion used, in thiscase by regime unionism, to keep workers from returning to the struggle:that of “tax reform”. At the final assembly of the 19th Congress of theCGIL, in Rimini, General Secretary Landini called it ‘the mother of allbattles’. The main exponent of the trade union fraction that headsFiom–CGIL in Genoa, which declares itself combative and held its congressin Genoa in December 2022 under the slogan ‘For a class union’, agreedwith this statement by the great piecard. In the article we also denouncedthis opportunism that masquerades as class unionism.

We distributed the party newspaper at the May Day event in Turin.

On May 13 in Florence, we took part in a demonstration called by the SICobas of Prato against the police repression of its two young localleaders. We distributed a specially prepared leaflet to the 600 or soparticipants (Per la rinascita di un forte movimento sindacale di classecontro sfruttamento e repressione). The workers in the procession showedgreat attachment and trust in their union.

Three major strikes took place in logistics. One on April 7 in the majorcouriers (Brt, Gls, and Sda), members of the employers’ association Fedit,which succeeded in causing substantial delays in their activities. Asecond took place at the Coop warehouse in Pieve Emanuele, south of Milan.A third important strike was conducted by the smaller Adl Cobas, which hasbeen supporting SI Cobas for years, at the warehouse of CommitSiderurgica, a steel company in Veggiano, in the province of Padua.A fourth major strike took place at the Stellantis plant (formerly Fiat)in Pomigliano d'Arco, in the province of Naples. We reported and commentedon these struggles in the July–August 2023 issue of Il Partito Comunista(‘Ultime dal sindacalismo di regime in Italia’).

In Italy there remains a general condition of passivity and resignationof the wage-earning masses, with sporadic struggles that are still unableto trigger a widespread, let alone general, movement.

The same applies to what cannot even be called opportunism, but ratheropenly patronistic politics, conducted in Italy by the leaders of theregime unions: CGIL, CISL, UIL, UGL.

This condition persists despite the general weakening of the trade unionmovement and the organisations controlled by the pro-bourgeois trade unionfractions at the head of the regime’s trade unions, and opportunists atthe head of the combative trade union bodies, i.e., the opposition areaswithin the CGIL and the grassroots unions. The weakening, produced by theobjective conditions of capitalism, is aggravated by such leaderships.

In July, the CGIL metalworkers’ federation, Fiom, called a four-hourstrike divided by region. We drew up a leaflet which we distributed at thestrike demonstration in Genoa on July 7.

Just as we witnessed the smallest demonstration organised for the generalstrike called by CGIL and UIL in Genoa on December 16, 2022, with evengreater certainty we can say the same for the procession organised for themetalworkers’ city-wide strike: never so few in number.

Our leaflet, which we published in no. 424 of our Italian-languagenewspaper, Il Partito Comunista, pilloried and hit out veryeffectively at both the national leadership of Fiom–CGIL and theopportunism of the trade union fraction of the political group running theGenoa Fiom. This local political union leadership had celebrated theFiom–CGIL provincial congress in December under the slogan: ‘Conscience,struggle, organisation. For a Class Union’

Our leaflet first of all attacked the Fiom national leadership. This,like the confederal leadership, on the one hand denounces low wages, toshow the workers that it is a bastion in their defence, and on the otherhand does not demand real wage increases, i.e. on the basic wage and paidby the companies, but a reduction in taxes on wages. In fact, in the Fiomleaflet for the 7 July strike, one of the demands was not for ‘wageincreases’ but for ‘enhancing and supporting labour income’.

In Italy, the leadership of the CGIL has not used the term ‘workingclass’ for years and even tries not to talk about wages, but about‘income’ The work of demolishing every idea, principle and practice ofclass, begun by its leadership since the reconstitution from the top ofthe union in 1944, continues to this day and advances towards ever newfrontiers of shameless disavowal.

In our leaflet we commented: ‘They don't even have the courage to namethe wage, which they call income, as what’s pocketed the parasitic socialclasses who live off the backs of the working class’.

A month before the July 7 strike, at the beginning of June, the Fiomnational secretary had praised the metalworkers’ labour contract signedtwo years earlier together with FIM and UILM because, according to him, it‘defends the purchasing power of wages’. This was because an averageincrease of about 6.6 per cent had been triggered in May because thecontract provided for an automatic adjustment to inflation through aperiodic review. But the increase started in June and was not retroactive,i.e. it did not recover the purchasing power of wages lost from the end of2021 to May 2023, i.e., since inflation had started to run. In addition,the adjustment was based on the HICP index. This consumer price index,proposed in 2009 by the CISL and UIL and initially rejected by CGIL, onlyto accept it completely as of 2012, does not include the prices ofimported energy goods. Which, as is well known, are a key component of theinflation of the last two years in Italy.

On the editorial side, in the July and September newspapers, we publishedarticles on the youth revolt in the French suburbs; the repression againstworkers’ struggles by the Venezuelan bourgeois regime, cloaked in“socialism”; strikes in the USA, particularly in the UPS and autoindustry; strikes in Argentina and Brazil; and, finally, in Fiume,Croatia, where garbage collectors organised to fight outside the regime’sunion.

In Italy, activity in the Coordinamento Lavoratori Autoconvocaticontinued. On June 8, a communiqué was published in solidarity with the CoordinamentoMacchinisti Cargo (CMC) in view of the ninth strike organised bythis organisation, called for the following day.

On June 25, an assembly was held in Florence, on the theme of Health,Safety, and Repression in the workplace and in the territory, at the endof which a motion of solidarity was drawn up with the workers in struggle,organised with SI Cobas, at the Mondo Convenienza company in CampiBisenzio (Florence), and €350 was collected to give to the workers. At theassembly it was decided to work on a mobilisation in September/October onthis theme as well as in the direction of the establishment of a broadercoordination to work on this issue.

On July 19, the CLA issued a new communiqué in solidarity with the CMC,for the tenth strike scheduled for July 21.

On July 23, an extended meeting was held, in person and online, toimplement the commitments made at the June 25 assembly in Florence. Theminutes of the meeting were published on July 30. A mobilisation day inBologna, in front of the court, was decided for October 12.

On September 2, a communiqué was published about the railway massacre inBrandizzo (Turin) two days earlier, in which five railway maintenanceworkers lost their lives.

In addition to the trade union report, presented at the end of September,we add here the fact that, since the day of mobilisation promoted by theCLA and other organisations, a permanent collaboration between thesebodies has sprung up, which for the time being has given itself the name‘Coordination of 12 October’. It includes: the CLA, the CMC, the tradeunions SGB, CUB Trasporti, and Sol Cobas, activists of the CGIL group ‘LeRadici del Sindacato’, families of the victims of the Viareggiorailway massacre and the Torre piloti in Genoa, the Assembly of 29 June,and Medicina Democratica.

from Il Partito Comunista nos. 12–14, 1975

(Part 1 of 3)

Economic struggle andpoliticalstruggle

Continuing to elucidate the question of the united front, let us returnto the basics of our Marxist conception. The working class is compelled tostruggle against the capitalist regime by the need to defend itsconditions of existence, its wages, its labour, its very life. Thisstruggle, which takes place on the terrain of the economic conditions ofthe workers, is transformed at certain critical moments into a politicalstruggle, into a struggle for the conquest of political power, because atsuch moments the very defence of the workers’ living conditions can onlybe done by wresting political power from the hands of the bourgeoisie, byestablishing the dictatorial power of the proletarian class, on the basisof which alone is possible the destruction of the capitalist mode ofproduction and the reorganisation in a communist sense of the economy andsociety. The conduct of the political struggle can only be entrusted to afighting organism that has arisen and is suited to this purpose: the classpolitical party.

The first consequence that follows from this Marxist approach to theproblem, and which is verified by the entire history of the proletarianmovement, is the objective necessity, because it is not dependent onindividual will, of the manifestation of proletarian action andorganisation on the terrain of economic struggle. This defensive action ofthe working class is common to all workers regardless of their ideology,their political convictions. Its root lies not in a fact of ideas or will,but in the real material circ*mstances in which workers live. This actionis expressed in an appropriate organisational form: the economic, tradeunion organisation, which brings workers together as wage-labourers, asthose subject to the material pressure of the capitalist mode ofproduction. The workers’ organisation for the conduct of the economicstruggle, therefore, does not bring workers together on the basis ofadherence to a purpose, to a political programme, but brings them togetheras workers, as wage-labourers who are in the same material situation, whofeel they have the same immediate interests to defend.

The final end, the acknowledgement that the economic struggle itself isinsufficient and must therefore transcend into a general politicalstruggle of the entire class for the conquest of power, and the provisionof material and ideal means for this struggle, is the proper task of thepolitical party. The Party, therefore, is not defined by its socialcomposition, nor by the environment in which it recruits its members, norby an organisational structure placed on the surface of the working classby category or by workplace; it is defined, on the contrary, precisely byits tendency towards an end and therefore by its revolutionary politicalprogramme. One adheres to it only insofar as one accepts its theory,programme, principles, aims, and one can be a worker or non-worker. Onebecomes, in Lenin’s formula, a ‘professional revolutionary’.

There is thus a clear distinction between organisations that qualify asbeing of workers, i.e., bringing together all the wage-labourers of agiven company, production category, or industrial sector, with a view tothe defence of contingent interests common to all, and the politicalorganisation of the proletariat, characterised by its positions and aims.A clear distinction, which in no way signifies the absence of relationsand reciprocal bonds, but rather the execution of class functions thatcannot coincide in the same organisation, just as in the human body thebrain does not coincide with the stomach, although there is a very closeand indispensable connection and reciprocal influence between one organand the other.

In fact, the political consciousness of the working class, of its generalaims, surpassing companies and categories, and historical aims, thussurpassing the very succession of generations of workers, is materialisedin a specific organ, the class political party, which brings together onlya minority of the class, on the basis of adherence to a goal, a programme,and specific political positions. This political organ ‘imports’ (Lenin’sformula) political consciousness into the strata of workers that thesituation sets in motion.

But this importation does not take place in the sense of a dissolution ofthe political party in the workers’ organisations, nor does it resolveitself in an ‘educational’ work that should raise the consciousness of theproletarian masses until the moment when the special party organ is nolonger needed, or this will be reduced to a simple technical element ofconducting the struggle. On the contrary, it comes about through an actionthat tends to influence the workers’ organisations, to establish theclosest links between them and the party organ, to strengthen this sameorgan through the passage to it of those proletarians who acquire, in thecourse of the struggle itself, the consciousness of the Party’s aims andwho accept its positions integrally and en bloc.

The proletarian class manifests its existence historically and materiallyin the famous pyramid form that expresses the complexity of its classstruggle and organisation: Party–Soviet–Union. None of these class organscan be considered useless or “outdated”: it is in the existence of allthree, and in the intersection of their relationship and vicissitudes,that the class struggling for its complete emancipation manifests itself.

In our 1951 text Revolutionary party and economic action, wedefined the factors of the revolutionary process as follows: 1) a large,numerous proletariat of pure wage-earners, 2) a sizeable movement ofassociations with an economic content including a large part of theproletariat, 3) The presence of the specific class party organ and itsinfluence on the economic bodies of the class itself through its organisednetwork of communist groups in the economic organisations.

On the same basis and in the same sense is our classic assertion: onlythe political Party represents the revolutionary purpose of the class. Theother class organisations, which are so insofar as they bring workerstogether, can be influenced and subjugated to non-revolutionary,bourgeois, social-conservative, even counter-revolutionary directions andperspectives.

This happens not only because the bourgeoisie tends to influence theworking class with all its powerful material and spiritual means, and tocorrupt it in a thousand ways, the most damaging of which is always thatof opportunism, but also because, at least on an immediate and partiallevel, the interests of individual groups and strata of workers are not atall incompatible with the permanence of the capitalist mode of production,with bourgeois rule, even if on a general and historical level theycontradict the interests of the class as a whole. It is only at certaincritical moments in history that even immediate and partial interests ofworkers’ groups come into open contradiction with the capitalist mode ofproduction, and it is at these moments that the only body that has ahistorical and global vision of class interests can usefully win over theimmediate workers’ bodies to its influence.

This applies not only to trade union, economic organisations, but also tobodies, such as soviets, that express the workers’ tendency torevolutionary struggle.

All workers’ organisations must therefore be won over to therevolutionary perspective by the action within them of the revolutionaryorganisation, the political party. Otherwise, they are powerless from therevolutionary point of view, while remaining workers’ organisations.

We find here a fundamental and constant line of the Marxist approach.Workers as such can at best arrive at the consciousness of the need todefend their living conditions and to organise themselves for thisdefence. The transition from this elementary, ‘trade unionist’consciousness to political, socialist consciousness only takes placethrough the intervention and influence of the political party. Otherwise,the economic struggle and economic organisations may be subject tonon-revolutionary perspectives and directions, may be directed accordingto bourgeois politics. Trade-unionism, Lenin says, is the bourgeoispolitics of the working class.

These elementary notions we have recalled are the result of theexperience of the entire world proletarian struggle over a century. Theywere the basis of the gigantic work carried out by the CommunistInternational. We quote from Theses on the role of the Communist Partyin the proletarian revolution (1920):

2. Until the time when state power has been conquered by theproletariat, and the proletariat has established its rule once and forall and secured it from bourgeois restoration, until that time theCommunist Party will only have the minority of the working classorganised in its ranks. Until the seizure of power and during the periodof transition the Communist Party is able, under favourable conditions,to exercise undisputed mental and political influence over all theproletarian and half-proletarian layers of the population, but is notable to unite them organisationally in its ranks.…

3. The concept of the party and that of the class must be kept strictlyseparate. The members of the “Christian” and liberal trade unions ofGermany, England and other countries are undoubtedly part of the workingclass. The more or less significant sections of workers who still standbehind Scheidemann, Gompers, and company are undoubtedly part of theworking class. It is very possible that, under certain historicalcirc*mstances, the working class can become interspersed with numerousreactionary layers. The task of communism does not lie in accommodatingto these backward parts of the working class, but in raising the wholeof the working class to the level of the communist vanguard. Theconfusion of these two concepts – party and class – can lead to thegreatest mistakes and confusion. Thus it is clear, for example, thatduring the imperialist war, despite the moods and prejudices of acertain section of the working class, the workers’ party had to opposethese moods and prejudices at any cost and represent the historicalinterests of the working class, which demanded that the proletarianparty declared war on war.…

The rise of the soviets as the basic historical form of thedictatorship by no means decreases the leading role of the CommunistParty in the proletarian revolution. If the “Left” Communists of Germany(cf. their appeal to the German proletariat of April 14, 1920signed ‘The Communist Workers’ Party of Germany’) declare: ‘That theParty too adapts more and more to the idea of Soviets, and takes on aproletarian character’ (Kommunistische Arbeiterzeitung, no. 54),then this is a confused expression of the idea that the Communist Partymust dissolve itself into the soviets, that the soviets can replace theCommunist Party.

This idea is fundamentally false and reactionary.

In the history of the Russian revolution we experienced a whole periodin which the soviets marched against the proletarian party and supportedthe policies of the agents of the bourgeoisie. The same thing could beobserved in Germany. The same thing is also possible in other countries.

On the contrary, the existence of a powerful Communist Party isnecessary in order to enable the soviets to do justice to their historictasks, a party that does not simply “adapt itself” to the soviets, butis in a position to make them renounce “adaptations” of their own to thebourgeoisie and White Guard social democracy, a party which, by means ofthe Communist factions in the soviets, is in a position to take thesoviets under the leadership of the Communist Party.

We have reported this long quotation in order to compare it with the Theseson trade unions and workers councils because, from the admissionthat only the party is the revolutionary organ of the class, communistshave never implied a devaluation of the importance of the immediateorganisms of the class itself, but rather their exact characterisation:organisations, the trade unions and soviets, whose function does notderive from their more or less revolutionary nature, but from theircharacteristic as workers’ organisations which become organs of therevolution only insofar as they subordinate themselves to the politicaldirection of the Party.

We are on two globally opposite and divergent paths, we, and all“leftists” then and now. We are on the side, with the International andwith Lenin, of the ‘most precise and sharpest distinction between thenotions of party and class’. The Party, the political organ of the class,is the sole repository of class consciousness insofar as it possesses, asa collective organ, an interpretative theory which allows it to read thefacts of history, it possesses a set of principles and aims which arebased on this theory, a programme which describes the entire cycle of theproletarian revolution, a set of tactical lines which are correlated tothe principles, the aims, the programme and according to which thefighting organ orients itself in the various contingent situations. Thishistorical heritage, which is nothing other than the condensation of theteachings of the practical struggle of the proletariat on a world scaleand over the course of more than a century, cannot belong to any workers’generation, to any workers’ group driven to the struggle by contingentdemands. It can only belong to a historical organism that has never ceasedthe battle by maintaining a continuity of thought, action and organisationin the ups and downs of the class struggle and that has thus been able todraw the lessons of all past struggles and forge on this basis a clear andinflexible direction for the conduct of future struggles.

Representing the preservation, defence and utilisation in practicalstruggle of this monolithic block of positions, the Party can only beclosed and strictly delimited in its organisation. The political directionof the Party is indispensable to lead the proletarian struggle in therevolutionary sense, but it is a result of the historical and globalcourse of this struggle, it is not something that can be questioned ordemocratically submitted to the approval of each group or category ofworkers that the situation pushes to the struggle. One accepts it, evenwithout understanding it individually, recognising it as the irreplaceableweapon of the revolutionary class struggle. And only those who accept itentirely and globally enter the party organisation. The Party is thereforean organism closed to all those, even proletarians, even combatants, whodo not accept its positions en bloc.

Workers’ organisations, both economic and political of the soviet type,have a useful function in the class struggle because they are open, i.e.,they are constituted in such a way as to include as many workers aspossible from a company, category, or locality. For the same functionsthey propose, they need to unite all the workers who are in the sameeconomic conditions or on the same territory. A workers’ organisation thatexists for the purpose of conducting the economic struggle against thebosses, which is not suitable for bringing together in principle all theworkers of the category to which it is addressed, would thereby nullifyits function. The same can be said of Soviets which, being territorialbodies of the workers in order to exercise power, must necessarily be opento all workers in a given locality.

Not only that, but as these bodies are open to all workers, to theexclusion of those belonging to other social classes, they must alsonecessarily be open to all political ideologies within the proletariat, tothe influence of all proletarian parties. They cannot discriminate againstworkers on either a political or religious basis. Only in this way canthey fulfil the function for which they were born and live in the eventsof the class struggle.

Communists, advocates of the utmost closure of the class political organ,have always been those who have not only always understood the nature andnecessity of the immediate workers’ bodies, but have also always beenthose who have defended their working-class, i.e., open, character againstall deviations, not only opportunist, but also “leftist”.

Naturally, just as there is a class delimitation in the physical sense,whereby only those belonging to a particular class, that of wage-earningworkers, organise, so there is a delimitation from the organs of thebourgeois state, from the influence of openly bourgeois parties that denyin principle the workers the real right to defend their living and workingconditions through class struggle and autonomous class organisation. Thatis, they deny the very function for which the immediate organisationsarise. But this is the only organisational delimitation of these bodies.

Far be it for us to draw a parallel between the “leftism” that we couldcall serious, the “leftism” of the Germans, who were roundly condemned in1920 by Lenin, and who to a large extent represented, like the earlierItalian or French anarcho-syndicalism, a response of large groups andstrata of workers fighting against the betrayal of social democracy, andthe "leftism" of the more or less numerous fringe groups of today’s“leftists”, who represent nothing more than petit-bourgeois burst that hasnothing to do with the working-class movement. The only accomplishment ofthis “new leftist comic opera” has been to divert the small number ofworkers who felt the need to oppose the unbridled opportunism of thenational, official Communist parties into their various false and impotentpositions.

We draw the parallel only to demonstrate the irreversible and totaldivergence of the Marxist Communist Party’s approach from that of thesealleged “neighbours”, showing that it dates not from today but from fiftyyears ago, and taking into account the proportions and seriousness of thematter.

The “leftism” of the German communists in 1920 started, like that oftoday’s “leftists”, from a pole opposite to our Marxist one; from the mostcomplete ‘confusion of the concepts of party and class’. This confusion,which is tantamount to being out of the Marxist mainstream forever, ledthe German KAPD, like the Italian Ordinovists, to a failure to understand,on the one hand, the primary function of the Party and the necessity ofits existence as a centralised and disciplined organ for directing therevolutionary struggle, and on the other hand, and consequently, to adenial of the function of the immediate workers’ organisations.

Avid supporters of the Party “dissolving into the Soviets”, of “workers’democracy”, of the Party and the dictatorship “not of the bosses, but ofthe masses”, they at the same time argued for the “destruction of tradeunions” as outdated forms of proletarian organisation, and were for theformation of workers’ organisations based on ideological foundations.

The proletarian party had to “open up”, the immediate workers’organisations had to “withdraw into themselves”. The same trait – here isthe validity of the historical parallel – characterises all the “leftists”of today. While they doggedly fight against the dogmatism and sectarianismof the party, they are incapable of understanding the necessity of theimmediate economic organisations of the proletariat, and invent variousforms of workers’ “committees”, “collectives”, “leagues”, which arenothing but the trade union duplication of their political organisations.

When we talk about immediate working-class bodies we are faced withanother question from the usual “form-researchers”.

Are these immediate bodies to be the Soviets or the trade unions?Economic organisms or political organisms? The appearance of the Sovietform in fact made a big impression since 1917 on the petty-bourgeois whosaw the class struggle as a theatrical performance. It was said then thatthis was the new form finally discovered of proletarian organisation andthat this form would render both the political party and the trade unionuseless.

It is hard for the petit-bourgeois to think that the struggle between theclasses arises from the stomach, i.e., from the immediate, everyday needsof the masses and not from ideas, and he finds it very hard to convincehimself that the workers arrive at the “heroic” act of attacking bourgeoispower and founding a new society from the vulgar fact of not wanting tostarve. Consequently, trade union organisation has always been frownedupon by the petit-bourgeois, who in his heart strives to “overcome” it andmove directly to “superior” forms of struggle. We will spare the readerthe myriad alleged demonstrations concerning ‘overcoming the struggle fordemands’, the ‘trade union form itself’, etc., with the corollary thatonly adequate “education” can lead workers to revolution. He has,unfortunately, perhaps more knowledge of them than we do.

In any case, the question has arisen and is posed thus:

The Soviets are thus the organisms that the working class forges for theconquest of power and the exercise of dictatorship, a conquest andexercise that is, however, only possible insofar as these workers’organisations that express such need and necessity are permeated andinfluenced by the political party, the only organism that can trulyconquer power and exercise dictatorship.

The Soviets, therefore, are not characterised by their orientation ortheir intrinsically revolutionary nature, but by their workers’ structurewhich makes them suitable, once they are conquered by the party’sinfluence, to assume and exercise political power. But above all, and thisis what we want to emphasise, they do not constitute a substitute form forworkers’ organisations of an economic, defensive, trade union nature.

They represent a different function of the class which in a thousand wayscan be combined with the defensive, economic function, but which does notannul it or render it useless. Leaving behind the mechanism of “forms oforganisation” and aiming at the substance, we would say that workers needclass economic organisations to conduct their daily struggle against theeffects of capitalist oppression, and therefore on the economic terrain (athousand forms, a thousand possible combinations; one and irreplaceablefunction: to be organisms constitutionally accessible only to workers, toserve the defence of wages, of workplace, of daily bread). Whereas inperiods when the social struggle is close to turning into a struggle forpower, workers need, and therefore arise, workers’ organisms suitable forexercising the state functions of the proletarian dictatorship.

In terms of forms, it can even be the workers’ economic defenceorganisations themselves that, as the struggle radicalises and under theinfluence of the party, can assume the function of the political assaulton bourgeois power and the destruction of the bourgeois state.

When we speak of the immediate organisms of the working class, wetherefore mean to speak, beyond the specific and contingent forms, of theorganisms that the class is forced to give itself, driven by itsunavoidable needs. We speak of functions and needs rather than forms. Andto argue that the working class can do without immediate economicorganisms is no more or less to argue that it can do without the strugglefor demands. It means denying the fundamental assumption of all Marxismthat political struggle is nothing but the critical precipitation atcertain moments, and under the influence of the party, of the verystruggle that workers wage to defend their living conditions.

In another respect, our Marxist vision combats the mechanistic approachof the “form-seekers”. If without revolution the Soviets become a parodyand are condemned to die, if their tendency to conquer political power canonly find its outlet, its realisation only under the direction of therevolutionary class party, degenerating otherwise to empty forms powerlessto realise themselves, the same, a fortiori, applies to theworkers’ economic defence organisations and to the economic struggleitself. Workers’ struggles and organisations are rendered null andineffective, they close themselves off in the defence of narrow corporateinterests, in the defence of one group of workers at the expense ofanother, they become powerless to the very function for which they arosewhen they are influenced and directed by bourgeois, conservative,anti-revolutionary politics. Their very function of economic defence isonly ‘completed and integrated’ when the class political party is at theirhead, just as the immediate results that the workers wrest from theirdaily struggles only become stable and real achievements through theproletariat’s conquest of power.

Immediate economic bodies can only fully perform their function bysubordinating themselves to the revolutionary orientation, and are subjectto becoming powerless to perform this same elementary function bysubordinating themselves to a bourgeois or opportunist orientation.

But this reality cannot be disentangled in formal terms by hypothesisingworkers’ organisms per se capable of not being influenced by theclass adversary, constitutionally or physiologically suited never tobetray even immediate class interests. The contradiction is resolved inthe heart of the historical dynamic of the class struggle that drivesworkers to forge weapons for the defence of their daily bread and seesaround these class organisms the death struggle between the politicaldirection of their subjection to the demands of social preservation, tothe bourgeois state, to the point of becoming a cog in the machinery ofthe state, and the direction that tends to bring them into the field ofrevolution and therefore also to strengthen, extend and deepen theiraction.

If today’s tricolour trade unions are the result of the subjugation ofworkers’ organiations to fifty years of reactionary bourgeois politics,the Red unions of 1921–26 were the result of the conquest of the immediateworkers’ organisms to the revolutionary direction. Historically, theeconomic organisms of the working class are faced with the alternative:either submit to bourgeois politics, and thus become, in the long run,ineffective for the very purposes of class defence on the economicterrain, or submit to the revolutionary orientation and lead the economicstruggle to its historically culminating and definitive point: theconquest of political power, the establishment of the proletariandictatorship.

But while this may be distasteful to those who view history in amechanistic and formalistic manner, this does not detract from the factthat, in reality, economic struggles and workers’ economic organisationsform the concrete, material basis of revolutionary action. Historically,the bourgeoisie has always attempted to subjugate the workers’ movementand economic organisation to its interests, knowing full well that therevolutionary political struggle of the proletariat could be grafted ontothis ground, which is ineliminable because it springs from the very bowelsof capitalist society. Historically, the Communist Party has counteredthis process step by step, knowing full well that without the party’sconquest of the network of immediate economic organisations it isimpossible to undertake the conquest of political power.

Historically, the revolution has lost its battle on the world scale, andthe consequence has been, and could not but be, the enfeoffment to thebourgeois state of the workers’ organisms. But the party knows that thewheel of the revolutionary process will be set in motion again to theextent that the working class will be capable of expressing its organismsof economic struggle once more, thus re-proposing the real terrain onwhich the clash between revolution and counter-revolution will be playedout once more.

This is how the Theses of the 2nd Congress of the International ontrade unions and workers’ councils re-proposed the Marxist view ofthe relationship between the party and economic bodies. The task of thecommunists was not then, as it is not now, to invent “new forms” oforganisation and struggle, but to work on extending their influence intoall the immediate organisms of the proletariat, knowing that only thisaction of the party can transform them into organs of the revolutionarystruggle. And since the workers were organising and fighting in thereactionary unions, led by the worst opportunists, the task of thecommunists was to remain in these bodies and win them over to the party’sinfluence:

In order to gain victory in the economic struggle, the great workingmasses who hitherto remained outside the trade unions are flocking totheir ranks. In all capitalist countries there is a strong strengtheningof the trade unions, which are now an organisation no longer of theadvanced part of the proletariat alone, but of its great masses. Byflocking to the trade unions, they seek to make them their fightingweapon. The increasingly bitter class contrasts force the trade unionsto take the lead in strikes, which engulf the entire capitalist world inmighty waves and constantly interrupt the process of production andexchange. By raising their demands in parallel with rising prices andincreasing misery, the working masses upset the foundations of everycapitalist calculation, this elementary assumption of every orderlyeconomy. The trade unions which, during the war, had become organs ofinfluence of the working masses in the interests of the bourgeoisiebecome organs of destruction of capitalism…

In view of the influx of powerful working-class masses into the tradeunions, in view of the objectively revolutionary character of theeconomic struggle that these masses wage in opposition to the tradeunion bureaucracy, communists must in all countries enter the tradeunions to make them organs of struggle for the overthrow of capitalism,for communism. They must take the initiative in setting up trade unionswhere they do not exist.

Any voluntary alienation from the trade union movement, any artificialattempt to create particular trade unions without being forced to do soby exceptional acts of violence by the trade union bureaucracy(dissolution of local revolutionary groups in the trade unions byopportunist centres) or by its narrowly aristocratic policy, whichprohibits large masses of low-skilled workers from joiningorganisations, represents a grave danger to the communist movement. Itthreatens to hand over to opportunist bosses working in the service ofthe bourgeoisie the most advanced workers, most endowed with classconsciousness.

The weakness of the working masses, their indecision, theiraccessibility to the fictitious arguments of the opportunist bosses, canonly be overcome, as the struggle intensifies, to the extent that thebroadest strata of the working class learn, through their ownexperience, through their victories and defeats, that on the basis ofthe capitalist economic system human living conditions can no longer beachieved; to the extent that the advanced communist workers learn to be,in the economic struggle, not only the propagandists of the ideas ofcommunism, but also the most decisive leaders of the economic struggleand of the trade unions…

Since communists attach more importance to the aims and nature of tradeunion organisation than to its form, they must not retreat from a splitin the trade union organisations, if renouncing the split were to amountto renouncing revolutionary work in the trade unions, renouncing theattempt to make them an instrument of the revolutionary struggle,renouncing the organisation of the most exploited sectors of theproletariat. But even if such a split proves to be necessary, it mustonly proceed if the communists succeed, through a relentless struggleagainst the opportunist leaders and their tactics and through the mostactive participation in the economic struggles, in convincing the broadworking masses that the split is being undertaken not for remoterevolutionary objectives still incomprehensible to them, but for theconcrete and most immediate interest of the working class in thedevelopment of its struggles for demands. Communists, should a splitbecome necessary, must consider with the utmost care whether it will notlead to their isolation from the working masses.

The tendency to create factory councils, which animates workers invarious countries more and more every day, originates from the mostvaried causes (struggle against counter-revolutionary bureaucracy,demoralisation after defeats in the purely claiming struggle, effort tocreate organisations that embrace all workers), but it always andeverywhere leads to the struggle for control of industry, the specifichistorical task of factory councils. It is therefore a mistake to wantto organise factory councils with only workers already on the terrain ofthe dictatorship of the proletariat. On the contrary, the communistparty’s task is to take advantage of the economic ruin to organise allworkers and arm them for the struggle for the dictatorship of theproletariat.

From what is written in the Theses we reconfirm a conclusion found in allour post-World War II texts. It is not the political line of the tradeunion, however fetid it may be, that determines the exit of communistsfrom it. Communists must soldier on in the economic organisations, even ifthey are directed by a counter-revolutionary policy, and work to win themover on other conditions: 1) That they be allowed to carry out the work ofrevolutionary influence in the union (in other words, that the union infact allows the expression of political currents within it). 2) That nopreclusion be placed on the organisation of all workers in a particularcategory or branch of industry. Given these conditions, the communists donot pursue the break-up of the existing trade unions, but work within themto undertake their conquest, ‘perhaps with a beating’.

Should these conditions no longer exist in a given trade union body(which in fact means that it is losing its very nature as a trade union)communists do not advocate the organisation of only those workers whofollow party policy or adhere to certain positions, but rather the rebirthof economic bodies open to all workers and within which they can carry outtheir revolutionary work.

The Profintern, in line with the above, did not aim to unite only thoseworkers who accepted the principles of revolution and communism, but thosetrade unions and economic bodies of all workers (factory, trade, industry)that were won over and submitted to the revolutionary direction.

Its Statutes state in point 4:

Any economic organisation of a revolutionary class character whichaccepts the following conditions may become a member of theInternational of Red Trade Unions:

1) Recognition of the principles of the revolutionary class struggle;

2) Implementation of these principles in the day-to-day struggleagainst capital and the bourgeois state;

3) Recognition of the necessity of overthrowing capitalism by means ofsocial revolution, and of establishing, in the period of transition, thedictatorship of the proletariat…

7) Unity of action with all revolutionary organisations and with thecommunist party of its country, in all defensive and offensive actionsagainst the bourgeoisie.

The trade union bodies that adhered to the Red International remainedworkers’ bodies open to all workers of whatever opinion or ideology theywere. It was these same economic bodies of all workers that recognised theinfluence and direction of the communist orientation, without losing theircharacter as trade union bodies. This was completely opposite to the claimof the “left” then, as now, to create bodies that brought together onlythose workers who shared revolutionary principles. The Theses of the RedTrade Union International itself (voted on at its First Congress in 1921)raged against this anti-Marxist position:

The gathering of revolutionary forces in the trade union movement mustbe done through factory and enterprise councils. These councils must beelected by all workers in a given firm, regardless of their politicaland religious views. The attempt to create factory and enterprisecouncils in the form of cliques of members of the same tendency, as isthe case with the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund inGermany, constitutes in itself a caricature of factory councils anddiscredits among the masses the very idea of such an organisation.

In reality, under the pseudonym of factory councils, the AllgemeinerDeutscher Gewerkschaftsbund merely constitutes its fractionnuclei, an indisputable right for every organisation: but it is uselessin this case to attach such pompous labels to these nuclei…

The anti-revolutionary attitude currently being adopted by the tradeunion bureaucracy, the help it has given to the repression of theworkers’ revolutionary movement, has led a section of proletarians andrevolutionaries throughout the world to break away from the trade unionsand create new, purely revolutionary organisations of their own, hencethe watchwords ‘destroy the trade unions’, ‘outside the trade unions’which find a certain sympathy among the most desperate revolutionaryelements, made pessimistic by the inertia of the masses. Such tactics ofdriving out the revolutionary elements, and abandoning the trade unions,millions of proletarians, to the unchallenged influence of the traitorsof the working class, play into the hands of the trade union bureaucracyand must therefore be decisively and categorically rejected. Notdestruction, but conquest of the trade unions, i.e., of the massesorganised in the old trade unions: this is the watchword around whichthe revolutionary struggle must be organised and develop…

The advocates of the Red International would be making a most seriousmistake… if they abandoned the trade unions and shut themselves up inthe small revolutionary trade union groupings. The workers expelled fromthe unions must not disperse, but must remain organised in the sameframework to which they belonged before their exclusion, continuouslyacting as a regular and legitimate member of the union that expelledthem…

The task of the revolutionary elements of the trade union movementtherefore consists, not in detaching the best and most conscious workersfrom the trade unions and forming small organisations of them, but ininfusing the trade unions with a revolutionary spirit by remainingwithin them, claiming the revolutionary aspirations of the working-classday by day, and thus trying to transform them into instruments of thesocial revolution.

All organising work in the old trade unions must be aimed at combatingthe passivity and betrayal of the trade union bureaucracy in the courseof the struggle for the day-to-day interests of the workers. Conqueringthe trade unions means conquering the workers’ mass, which can only beconquered by systematic and stubborn work, by continually highlightingthe contrast between the tendency of compromise and class collaborationand our strictly revolutionary tendency. The motto ‘outside the tradeunions’ prevents us from conquering the masses and thus distances usfrom the social revolution'.

Another blow to the “form-worshippers”, this time to the“union-form-worshippers”, who are still numerous today. The Theses in factcontinue:

But it would also be a mistake to regard trade union organisations asan end in themselves. Trade unions are not an end, they are the means tothe end; and so, while we reject the watchword of ‘outside the tradeunions!’, we must in the most resolute way also assert ourselves againstthe fetishism of organisation and the watchword of ‘unity at any costand without reservation’. Conquering the unions does not mean seizingthe union treasury and union property, but conquering the souls of unionmembers. Many comrades forget this distinction, often confusing theunion with its premises, its till, and its management. Such point ofview must be categorically rejected by the revolutionary class unionsThese are for unity and against the split, but they do not fear thesplit: here is a point that must be clear to each of us.

Fifty years of unchallenged opportunist domination of the workers’ unionscombined with the capitalist tendency for unions to be subservient to thestate and its machinery, and the almost absolute absence of theproletariat from the revolutionary struggle, have undoubtedly giventoday’s unions a far more reactionary characteristic than those of 1921,have managed to deform their practice and organisation itself in a farmore deleterious way than what the opportunists of the first post-warperiod could do, pressed behind by a proletariat in struggle at theEuropean level. The tricolour unions of today are certainly not the classunions of 1921. This changes the terms of the party’s tactics towardsthese unions, but it does not at all change the general terms of theparty’s position towards the class economic bodies that the workers,having returned to the struggle, will be forced to reconstitute. Along thelines of its Marxist tradition the party, unlike all otherpseudo-revolutionary groupings, points to the resumption of class actionon the economic terrain and the rebirth of class economic organisationsconquered by the party and open to all workers as the road to theresumption of revolutionary struggle.

(continued in the next issue)