1990 Reunion Reports
This article was published in:
June 2-3
On June 2nd and 3rd, militants of the party and sympathisers from different parts of Italy, Britain, France and Switzerland assembled for the regular working reunion. As ever, our meeting was not about launching new programmes and political lines. That kind of thing is more the province of the bourgeois party congresses where self-criticism and self-analysis serve merely as a cloak, as highly convenient expedients for preserving the same structures, and the same ideologies which were already threadbare I5O year ago when we condemned them in our manifesto.
The duty assigned to the Marxist party isn’t bringing the doctrine up to date to accommodate to unforeseen new phases of capitalism (an alibi that has served as cover for a whole historical range of betrayals from Stalin to Gorbachev) rather it is to act as custodian of the class doctrine for the still revolutionary proletariat of the future. It is a doctrine which negates economic mercantilism and political democracy, and will always be alien to both monopolistic western capitalism and eastern state-capitalism. Furthermore, it is hostile to both in equal measure.
Despite the discordant caterwauling of cynical and demented bourgeois propaganda, hesitant but nonetheless genuine class reactions are emerging; serving to remind our enemy that its historical condemnation has merely been postponed. These class reactions will be attentively considered and assessed by the party during the necessarily difficult (and by no means short) process of their orientation.
At the organizational meeting on Saturday morning, packs of the party newspaper and the latest issue of “Comunismo” were collected (“Comunismo” containing full transcripts of some of the reports given at the last meeting in February). We considered projects for publishing party periodicals and texts, along with related technical and financial problems, and also evaluated the considerable efforts and successes, which despite their modest dimensions due to the minimal forces available to us, continue to uphold and defend the tradition of the Marxist Left in its uncorrupted entirety, and therefore the uniqueness of its methods.
The first speaker gave a far-reaching exposition of the history of the Left: the theme being the Fraction abroad and the other groups opposed to the policies of the International.
The Fraction was very wary about establishing contacts with these other groups (which formed everywhere to a certain extent, and which exhibited a vast range of differences between them) since their theoretical elaboration was either totally unsatisfactory or entirely lacking. No-one had taken up unequivocal positions on the fundamental questions of “party and class”, the “united front” and the “worker and peasant government”; the result being that such unresolved issues would turn into veritable Trojan Horses with which the counter-revolution could penetrate the Communist International and destroy it from within.
That being said, the Fraction could not fail to recognize that these groups contained sincerely revolutionary proletarians seeking to prevent the definitive triumph of Stalinism.
The Left therefore assumed a hermetic stance towards attempts at organizational pacts and accords proposed by various parties. At the same time, it remained available to engage in the serious work of re-orientating these comrades towards the Left, above all by laying bare the insufficiencies of the positions of other groups. Indeed, the very fact that there were so many opposition groups was an extremely negative factor in itself, not merely because it caused fragmentation, but because it meant that there existed a multitude of ideologies which it would have been useless to try and hold together in the name of anti-stalinism. Anti-stalinism couldn’t in itself guarantee the re-organization of the revolutionary proletariat.
The Fraction invited the various groups to abandon the alluring temptation of immediate successes, and invited them instead, like the Italian Left, to engage in an attentive analysis of what had caused the International to degenerate, and on the basis of these conclusions, elaborate a platform for action; only after a constructive comparison of each others programmes could a meeting be really constructive.
However, the Fraction’s attitude to the Russian Opposition was entirely different because this organization had elaborated systematic directives of action, and had never parted company, on central questions, from the politics of Lenin.
In the 2nd half of 1929, when direct links were formed between our Fraction and Trotski, it seemed, despite old tactical differences remaining, that we should be able to travel far together on the basis of our similarities. Soon, however, these relations were destined to become strained through Trotski’s impatient wish to form an International organization immediately; despite all the deficiencies – recognized by Trotski himself – of the various anti-stalinist groups.
The situation would be further aggravated by the formation of the group calling itself Nuova Opposizione Italiana, which was composed of a small number of expelled ex-leaders of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and dedicated, above all, to a petty politicism lacking in any principles or scruples.
After a short break, we turned to the subject of economics; a topic which we have examined at several reunions on the basis of the 1956 report on the course of World capitalism. We are, incidentally, in the process of republishing this text, with added statistical information and commentaries; it will be updated until 1988 – no mean achievement! This time we dealt with steel, an industry which dominates humanity, in both war and peacetime, in this millenary epoch of its prehistory. To reverse this dominion, so that the living organism dominates over metal, industry needs to be seized by the disinherited from the “iron masters”. The tables of figures, that will appear in the text mentioned, cover the entire cycle from 1870-1988, a period which corresponds, for the old industrialisms, to their complete decadence, whilst for the younger ones it covers their birth, ascent and decline. Capitalism, in ever greater parts of the Earth is going through its juvenile progressive phase, and weighing down heavily on capitalism as a whole. On the global level however, all the world requires is to be freed from it altogether.
We were told about annual steel production, (figures were given for each country in millions of tons with a figure of 100 set as total production for all countries in 1913) and the rates of annual increase indicating the succession of industrial cycles.
Another table of figures (our calculations – and over the same period), covered the percentage contribution of every country as part of gross steel production. This stimulated numerous observations on the relation of forces between capitalisms, and their respective evolution over the period in question. Attention was drawn to the late appearance of Italy and Japan, both of which, even at the outbreak of the 1st World War produced only a minimal amount, with the other five countries holding uncontested domination. During the period in question, this re-division has shown notable changes percentage-wise, whilst as for gross tonnage produced, expansion has obviously been enormous, a thousandfold – at an average rate of 6,5% increase per annum between 1870 and 1979. From then on up to the present, steel production has decreased. Russia is the country which has experienced the biggest increase (times 13,500!) followed by Italy (times 5,925) both starting out from virtually nothing. France, Great Britain and Germany increased less as iron and steel industries were already established by 1870.
As regards the fight for world supremacy, we noted how Great Britain was undermined from its dominant position in 1888, and the United States in 1971. Finally we remarked on the series of crisis years.
These two reports brought the Saturday afternoon programme to a close. The next day the sitting opened with the continuation of the examination of the workers’ movement in the British Isles, arriving at the stage where cooperativism is unmasked, both its assumptions and practices, as pro-bourgeois and conservative. In the first period of cooperativism, as we saw at the last reunion, we could recognize that it had certain merits i.e. it demonstrated in practice that the labouring classes have no need of the bourgeoisie to ensure the efficient organization of production and distribution. It was a useful polemical proof. But as time went by, they would also show that no one organizational form could ever gradually replace the social relations of the market and wages: in fact, cooperativisn, with its delusions of being a bridge to Socialism, was solidly anchored in the society of the day – was aiming at running the factories “better than the masters”. Evidently the proletariat would never manage to seize power from the bourgeoisie and landowners by such means.
The Workers’ cooperatives constituted themselves, even in the formal sense, into undiluted capitalist joint-stock companies up to the point where they even employed wage-earners: and parallel to that, there arose the first unions for cooperative employees to resist their own comrade-bosses.
We note that the legal form of cooperatives is very similar to agricultural and industrial enterprises in Russia: it is no accident that perestroika heavily depends on the cooperatives as part of the so-called democratization of the work-place.
From its motherland in England, the capitalist cooperative spread its tentacles through the vast colonial empire and showed itself no less piratical than the individual owners of capital.
Next, as part of our Nature and Revolution series, there followed the “anti-ecological” report in a polemic against the latest Redcross-type whingeing of the “environmentalists” which (as the reunion was in progress, yet another referendum was being voted on) does all it can to disguise the fact that the one alternative facing humanity is either capital, or non-capital; the latter meaning the “rational and far-sighted management of the Earth as common property”. Their aim is always the same: to deny the class struggle with the utopia of a governing ‘Biocracy’ which “forbids interspecies conflict”. Under the cover of the incredibly vague slogan “back to nature”, they deny that history moves under the impulse of the struggle between classes.
We were the first to apply the methodology of the natural sciences to human history: the very same method which the Bourgeoisie has been obliged to apply in order to increase the production of profit.
Darwin demonstrated that conflict takes place both within and between species, between the more and the less adapted: this doesn’t mean to say that forces of collaboration don’t exist over and above the individual as well.
Whilst ecologism doesn’t reach the level of species consciousness, the revolutionary party does: it alone is the depositary of the past history of the classes, and it alone can glimpse the future. Meanwhile ecology chatters away about mere marginal change.
It is not by chance that when we make projections about a future society different from today’s, we include chemistry and nuclear energy. Nor are we inconsistent when, through studies of the past history of the oppressed, we reclaim the arts and beliefs of the ancients, the lost paradises of all religions, and share in them to the extent of seeing them as born of the need, from the possibility, of classless communism.
The rest of the reunion was dedicated to reporting on our activity amongst workers struggling against the traitors in the unions and the bosses. We were given an account firstly of the recent railway strikes which, unfortunately, were organized in various committees based on separate categories. Such committees revealed an incapacity to struggle together, even when faced with the harsh and co-ordinated attack by the bosses with their anti-strike laws. We then heard of the COBAS movement among the school workers and of how it is mobilizing much less during the present phase. The tradition embodied in its name remains; along with a practice that for every worker signifies a struggle both resolute and outside of bourgeois parameters. The reformist style platform was fought against by our comrades in the national assemblies. Further information appears in “II Partito Comunista” No.184, about relations amongst the railway workers; in the same issue we have reprinted the document that we are distributing among the school workers against notions of interclassist co-management and their deforming influence. A translation of the latter is available in the English language on request.
September 29-30 Bolzano
On the 29th and 30th of September 1990, we held another general party reunion at Bolzano in northern Italy. Participating in this meeting of our organization, small though it is, were comrades from Italy, France and England. We have our local comrade on the spot to thank for the excellent hospitality and organisation, which corresponded exactly to our needs, and which meant we were able to carry out our work methodically and without any timewasting.
Our efforts are directed towards continuing the fight in defence of authentic marxist doctrine, of its battle order, and its reading of historical facts. These days, marxism is a doctrine denied by everybody; but, in days to come, the proletarian masses will embrace it once again in a reborn world communist party. With the forces available to the communist left today, we confront the predominant bourgeois lies and threadbare Stalinist and reformist opportunism with the science of a large, global social class; deprived of its voice today only through a historical accident. Our present function, and general “workplan”, is that of forming a link in the chain which connects past and future generations of revolutionaries: the “thread of time”. This thread is unravelled by rejecting nostalgic or intellectualist positions and replacing it with a partyist and socially-combative attitude – even if it is just in the pages of a review.
As is our usual custom at reunions, we started off by agreeing on what future work is required, and confirmed proposals for the publication of reviews and texts in the different languages. Soon to appear in English will be the pamphlet Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia, and, in Italian, The Course of World Capitalism is about to be republished with a large number of statistical tables. These tables being intended not only as support for the main text, but as a basic tool for future party studies on the generalized crisis of capitalism.
The Origins of the Communist Party in Great Britain
In the afternoon, reports on our work of the past four months commenced with a translation of a study on the origins of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the way in which it emerged from an earlier confluence of socialist parties and movements. Unlike the Italian party born at Livorno in 1921, the British party managed neither to prevent itself from becoming subject to the majority Labour Party, or to clearly perceive the latter as the long arm of the bourgeoisie in the working class. This error, supported by the directives of the International itself, would become apparent – though regrettably too late – during the General Strike in 1926.
The report described the various left-wing components which went to make up the party on its formation. Firstly the party made the error of basing itself on the British Socialist Party tradition; then there was the Socialist Labour Party: dubbed ‘impossibilist’, which forecast left-wing unions and confused union with party functions; the Workers’ Socialist Federation led by Sylvia Pankhurst, a combative organisation of London East-end workers, with anti-parliamentary tendencies and later on anti-union tendencies as it came under the influence of the Dutch and German left; and the South Wales Socialist Society, a league of Welsh miners, also anti-parliamentary. From these four organizations, the last three born as a reaction to the sickening reformism of the first (though on an insufficient basis) it would be difficult to derive a really sound communist party; let alone one that was steady enough to put up a resistance to the crisis which raged in the International from 1926.
Report on the Russian Economy
The study entitled “The impossible reform of capitalism in Russia” (see il Partito No.175 & 187) continues with the publication of agricultural statistics. These confirm the comparative economic backwardness and social viscosity of the kolkhoz sector, which opposes any capitalist modernisation and is a reservoir of conservatism. Resurgent Slavism is the ideal of this sector.
The report turned to an analysis of the economic transition we are currently witnessing. It was briefly recalled that a century of capitalist accumulation has now taken place in Russia, an accumulation which has now matured with generalisation of the sale of labour-power and appropriation of surplus-value by enterprises. State-control of large-scale industry and nationalisation of agricultural land are steps towards capitalism (and not towards socialism as the social-democratic and stalinist vulgate would have it), similarly, perestroika (which is allegedly opposed to it with its “privatisations” and “liberalisations”) is a continuation of capitalism in that it pursues the one historical tendency towards the concentration of scattered productive forces; towards further expropriation of the securities and reserves of kolkhozians, co-operativists and proletarians: from a state monopoly, that exists more in the law books than in reality, on to a real and direct monopoly of capital.
Russian capitalism needed the armour of the state behind which to grow, but now, what little of it remains has become a hindrance to further expansion and plunder and merely hinders its “wheelings and dealings”. The rational market and planned capitalist production is a utopia, especially in times of crisis.
The “radicals” are an expression of the wealthy classes; of the Russian bourgeoisie who can now appear in the living flesh, cast the veil of the “bureaucracy” aside, and finally demand complete unlimited freedom to exploit the proletariat. Gorbachev represents the State of All the Russias, and in true cowardly fashion, the bourgeoisie ends up by submitting to his discipline despite all the tumult and noisy shouting: it is a state which tends to make gradations of impoverishment amongst the poor classes (in thoroughly opportunist fashion) for fear that they rise up in rebellion.
The one great unknown in this phase of the Russian crisis is a not impossible military coup, which, even were it to sack Gorbachev, would carry out his delayed capitalist programme. And, of course, there is the gigantic and concentrated force of the proletariat, unrepresented in the new-born parliament, who, impelled by the sufferings inflicted on them by the capitalist crisis, might just recall the heroism of their fathers and grandfathers.
Communism and Ecology
In this next report, another comrade continued our polemic against the ruling class ideologies which defend the “naturalness” of the present mode of production. Amongst these, we find so-called environmentalism, one of many similar trends which have this much in common at least: they are all horrible petty-bourgeois monstrosities. Perhaps we can detect a slight decline in their popularity now.
The ecologists’ inability to resolve the relationship Mankind-nature is characteristic of the bourgeoisie in general. The bourgeoisie has arrived only at Darwinism, which explains the evolution of living species. Marxism however, whilst appreciating Darwinism in its own sphere, doesn’t apply this theory to the society of human individuals which evolves according to historical laws which are far more complex: we don’t share in human evolution through gradual individual selection, and not even through class selection.
Neither individuals nor classes create the external world, and even today we can’t produce our own complete theory about it. Human intervention into the external world, real “ecological reforms”, will be postponed until the monoclassist society that follows on from the era of anti-bourgeois dictatorship. Neo-malthusian ecologism, which accuses the well-heeled of causing “consumerism” and “destroying the environment” is the new glue of class collaboration.
Preparations for the Gulf War
The Saturday session concluded with an evaluation of the state and class forces fielded in preparation for the imperialist war in the Persian Gulf. The possibility of war appears merely as the necessary final phase of a gigantic production cycle, with its financial and industrial centre situated mainly in the imperialist capitalisms of East and West. The Gulf region – at a cross-roads between continents, and a reservoir of black gold – will never find peace within the national and mercantile framework; causing suffering to disinherited Arabs, countless ethnic groups and the Jews. Only a coordinated uprising of the global proletariat will be able to sweep capitalists aside simultaneously on both sides of the wars’ changing frontlines.
The Party-Class Relationship
First thing the next day, a young comrade, re-proposed a projected study on the question of the party-class relationship and its schema; designated by us by the term “reversal of praxis”. The theme will be treated in more depth, and related to the particular – but very important – union question.
History of the Communist Left, 1928-1930
The next report was on the history of our fraction abroad, which formally constituted itself from the time when it was judged that the Left’s work had become impossible within the International.
We were always very wary about accepting the repeated invitations towards unification put out by the others groups opposed to Stalinism since all such groups based themselves on criticisms of only certain aspects of the degeneration, and were therefore very heterogeneous. Exception was made for the Russian Opposition led by Trotski. But even the latter would not draw up a critical balance-sheet of the tactics of the Third International since they understood the strategy adopted in Russia to be applicable in Europe. The fact is, the Russian opposition were co-responsible for the direction taken by the C.I. up to 1923 and the theses of the first four congresses. Our fraction, in contrast, called for the completion of the necessary Bolshevik tactics, against the old democracies.
However, in order to carry out a possible work of clarification together, and given our common ground of marxism, and struggle, we would have accepted the coexistence of our fractions’ positions with those of the opposition. But this would be prevented by the various pint-sized trotskis with all their little diplomatic manoevres; we didn’t provoke the break with the opposition, we had it inflicted upon us.
The report went on to describe how the same methods arose in the Opposition, which were so depreciated in the Stalinised international. In a similar vein, the gradual slide of Trotski himself into tactical positions identical to Stalinism was highlighted, that is, the idea of democracy as a necessary transition between fascism and the dictatorship of the proletariat in Italy and Spain.
Finally two articles were read from a 1931 issue of paper “Prometeo” which condemned the newly arisen Spanish Republic.
The Communist Left and the Third International
Still on the theme of the history of the Left, the final report of the reunion was a translation prepared by our French-speaking comrades which took the form of a summary of the relations between our current and the Third International between 1919 and 1926 (see this issue for the full report). These relations involved a whole series of fundamental tactical points; applicable not only for those times, not only for present communists, but which project forward into the future, to the time when plans will be made for the social war of the world revolution.
The reunion drew to a close with final agreements on impending work, and arrangements for publishing full versions of the reunion reports in the party press.