Summary of the General Meeting Reports

The summaries from all four General Meetings are brought together under the headings below. 

TRENDS IN THE ECONOMY

At each of our meetings there is an exposition of data relating to global trends in the world economy, derived from official statistical reports (UNO, OECD, WTO, etc).

The global slowdown of the industrial upturn which came after the brutal recession of 2009-10 was confirmed.

In Europe industrial production shows a fall, and in France and Italy the figures for 2013 are likely to be lower than in 2009. In Greece, Spain and Portugal the recession is getting worse year by year. In Great Britain the fall in industrial production in 2012 was such that it now finds itself below the 2009 level (-15.8% against -15.1%).

In Asia as well there is a marked slowdown in Korea, China, India and Japan. To relaunch the productive machine the Chinese state is once again intervening with major infrastructure projects, without wanting to repeat what happened on the previous occasion when it created a bottomless pit of debt, considerably aggravated by speculation in property and raw materials, and provoking high inflation.

In Latin America Brazil, after having recovered from the fall in production in 2009, is once again in recession. In Mexico as well there is a marked slowdown, but it benefits from the fact that it hosts numerous subcontractors to the United States.

A new recession is therefore to be expected in the main imperialist countries in 2013.

This general slowdown in industrial production is reinforced by the slowdown in global trade, with the monthly figures for the exports of the major imperialisms tending toward zero growth and those for imports becoming clearly negative.

The graphs and tables displayed at the meeting confirmed our previous forecasts i.e., that global capitalism isn’t in a condition to emerge from the 2008-9 recession. We are in the fifth year of the recession and 2013 will be the six^th. It is by far and away the deepest recession since the Second World War, and the longest. The only one to surpass in duration and intensity was the one which followed the crash in 1929.

The global bourgeoisie and its apologists hope for a revival in 2014-2017. Is that likely? If there is it will be short and weak. All the conditions are in place for a massive crisis of over-production and deflation.

China is on the brink of a crisis of overproduction. It continues plough hundreds of millions of dollar investments into major works, which, as we know, can’t go on for ever. And you can’t change reality just by manipulating statistics.

The length of cycle between two consecutive peaks is from 7 to 10 years, which takes us to 2014 -2017. We can therefore expect a new crisis within the next 5 years or so, paving the way to the war our Party has long predicted.

The only exception to this general trend is the USA, which is nearing its 2007 peak: showing 2328 against 2372, which is to say -1.8%. It has benefited from three factors: a currency devalued by around 30% against the Euro; low labour costs; cheap energy resulting from the large-scale extraction of gas and oil from shale. All of this has allowed it to regain second place, moving slightly ahead of Germany.

However American capitalism, like China’s, is being propped up by artificial means. The Fed has started to “quantitatively ease” again, i.e. print money, and it will continue with its “twist” operation, which consists in buying up bonds linked to property while maintaining a low rate of interest between 0 and 0.25%.

At the Meeting in May we continued the examination of the more significant features of the financial crisis which, between peaks and troughs, has now gone on for five years.

In this session the speaker covered two specific topics.

Firstly, set in the context of the sudden and violent stock market crash which followed months of relentless growth, there was an examination of the financial policy of the Japanese government. This is the so-called ‘Abenomics’, named after the premier Abe, and it is a policy which has been the object of much interest throughout the world in relation to the corresponding policy of the FED. The theme of the presentation, which followed on from a previous report, concerned the contrasting behaviour of the Central Bank of Japan and the FED, organisations which have a centralised State behind them, and the ECB, which claims not to represent any particular national State but rather to express a generic financial ‘policy’ of the member States; a policy which isn’t so much decided by agreements between the constituent countries, but by the requirements of the strongest State within this union of unequals – and could it really be any other way in this world of capitalist States!

The FED (or Federal Reserve, the Central bank of the United States) is continuing – despite some tentative official denials which had an immediate negative effect on stock market prices – to bolster liquidity in the financial system by acquiring State bonds and ASB (Asset Baked Securities, financial instruments similar to bonds) at a rate of 85 billion dollars per month, a quantity of money which is pushing stock market prices up to insane levels without inducing any significant inflationary tendency. The Central Bank of Japan has continued to support the plan of doubling the monetary base from 28% to 56% in two years (2013-2014), by acquiring State bonds for 1,400 billion dollars.

The operation, combined with a competitive devaluation of the Yen of 30% against the dollar, has caused a rise in the GDP and boosted profits in the export industry, raising fears of inflation – which however remains at a low level for now.

In May the crazy growth of the Tokyo stock market suffered a collapse as dramatic as it was unexpected. In fact the evidence that 70% of the Japanese public debt is held in banking portfoglios, securities, and pension and private funds, is threatening to burst the financial bubble.

For the European Union, which has no unitary direction, or rather a direction decided by Germany’s interests, and which furthermore is composed of States with differing needs and perspectives, it isn’t possible to go down the road of “quantitative easing”.

One fact is significant on a global scale and offers cause to reflect on the real scale of this global crisis: nowhere, as much in those areas which continue to flood their markets with liquidity, as in those which actually are, or claim to be, enforcing a strict monetary policy: in none of them are we seeing an inflationary process.

From the USA-Japan scenario the presenter then moved on look at what is happening in Europe, which at the moment seems (although not as far as us Marxists are concerned) the epicentre of a crisis as serious as the one in 2008 due to the so-called unsecured-loans.

The presenter went on to describe the complex instrument of control and computation of the economic flow between the member States of the European Economic Union known as Target 2 (Trans-European Automated Real-Time Gross Settlement Express Transfer). Concerning this he also illustrated the accounting system of the financial streams within the monetary system. From it emerged a shocking picture of how the whole European financial system, centred on Germany, works, unmasking the alleged unity of this fraudulent union of a motley collection of countries.

The presentation of the mechanism, which avoided getting bogged down in technical detail, clarified the major financial movements and the situation of economic fragility hidden by a surplus on current accounts. The “German miracle” is based on the weakness of its economic partners, but once these countries are plunged into crisis it will bring the Union’s hegemonic capitalism down with them; and along with it all the waffle about its strong State, virtuous economy, low public debt and powerful export system; all just words, which in the light of an honest reading of the official figures certainly need to be considerably toned down.

All the Union’s member states find themselves having to treat the Euro as a currency which is, to all intents and purposes foreign, for all of them. Even if for some States it is less foreign than for others. It is issued by none of the central banks and its issue isn’t subordinated to the particular requirements of any State.

In the case of inter-State operations within the Union, and contrary to what happens in commercial operations, any movement of money brings in to the State that receives the money a debt for which the Central Bank is liable.

All’s well until the outbreak of the loans crisis in 2008, when the trans-national accounting mechanism was employed to keep the Euro monetary system solvent, and in particular the banking mechanisms of the nations in the greatest difficulty, with a flow of capital from the German Central Bank, that is until the flow of capital assigned in Euros, an essentially financial movement, came to considerably predominate over movement driven by trade.

The problem of the sustainability of the Euro is determined by the movement of capital within the Union, and the consequent explosion of the domestic balance sheets. Nominally this process of accumulation of balances should be limitless, but in fact it is limited by the total amount of credit that the ECB decides to allocate to the countries with a deficit via credit concessions to the banking system – and acquisitions of State bonds on the market.

MARXIST ECONOMIC THEORY

It is necessary to shore up the foundations of our doctrine’s complex edifice In order to oppose our powerful programme to the poisonous doctrines of opportunism. The trench separating us from our enemies we continue to make ever deeper and wider, and have no intention of filling it with the stagnant water of compromises and platitudes.

In Marxism economics isn’t the same as it is in bourgeois society, where it is all about losses and surpluses; instead it is to do with the production and reproduction of the species, that is to say, of the material means of ensuring life. To study economics, then, is to investigate the mechanisms which underlie a given social formation.

From the superstructural point of view, studying capitalist economics is equivalent to investigating the fetishes of this society. This is the field in which Marxism rips the veil asunder and denounces the worst lies. The bourgeoisie senses that it is here that our doctrine delivers its most effective blows and it is forced either to discredit it or, more often, to ignore it, and conceal it under a thick layer of dust and ignorance.

The exposition of the subject opened with some initial considerations on our working methods.

Let us reconstruct the continuity of the long drawn-out work in which the party is engaged, for the party can traverse the proletarian generations only by remembering what it is and what it is for. Al though shaped by the delimited individual atoms who are its militants the party has to constantly relive its entire historical journey to make sure it doesn’t proceed blindly. For just as philosophy and art are incomprehensible outside the history of philosophy and the history of art, and outside history in general, so too, in order to define the party, you need to know about its history; about the increasing precision of its programme over time, but also about its real existence, its successes as well as the phases of crisis and degeneration it has been through.

It is Marx’s Capital, which provides the framework for the party’s economic work, the line to follow. As in the Manifesto, Capital has to be ‘turned on its head’ and converted from being a description of capitalism to programme of the communist society. Capital is the programme for the destruction of capitalism. It isn’t a cold description of bourgeois economics and Marx isn’t just the scientist who dissected the cadaver of capitalism: every page we write in our ruthless analysis of history’s most bloody and infamous mode of production is a mirror reflecting the image of communism, the mode of production which capitalism will ‘give birth to’. Each of capitalism’s contradictions is resolvable, and analysing them means to indicate how to resolve them: the solution to capitalism is communism.

The metaphysical approach is to discuss method in general, to establish a general set of rules applicable on every occasion, and procedures which supposedly pre-exist the object which is the focus of the enquiry. It is an idealistic way of approaching the question. In extreme cases just thinking about reality is supposed to bring it into being. The empiricist approach, on the other hand, is restricted merely to registering facts as they occur, rejecting the possibility of identifying the links between them, and thus the possibility of predicting future developments. In relation to capitalism, which is continuously shaken by crises, its superficial phenomena may be registered but its internal workings remain unknowable.

The correctness of our method isn’t established by assessing how logical it is, by establishing its internal consistency. The method is dialectical because it involves a study of relationships, and how these relationships change. Thus theory becomes the ideal/intellectual representation of transformations that are occurring in reality.

Constructing a Marxist theory of knowledge involves studying the relationship between a changing reality and the corresponding representations of that reality within the collective intelligence; within the general intellectual heritage of the human species.

Marxism is the scientific method applied, for now, to economics and history in particular. The science of the future will be integrated and reflect the essential unity of matter, which is the object of all scientific studies. We believe the scientific method is applicable in all fields of human knowledge.

The Marxist party applies its method to every field, in trade union work, in studying the relations between States, etc. Clearly when dealing with particular areas of work, it takes an enormous effort to discriminate between contingent non-essential phenomena and what is really important.

This study also intends eventually to draw up an index of the party’s work on economics, modelling it on one we are already preparing on the trade unions. This is to assist comrades researching the subject to navigate their way round the mass of material elaborated over the course of our far from short history. Marxism, and Marxist economics, is not easy. It requires application and study and it can’t be reduced to bullet points: in its critique of political economy there is contained a comprehensive critique of the capitalist mode production as a whole.

The party has never been too worried about the presentation of its works conforming to the canons of regularity and symmetry. This is because we aren’t an academy but an organ of battle, conditioned by the contingencies that arise in the course of the class struggle. We hurry to stop the leaks which the oblique blows of the counter-revolution have opened up in Marxism’s armour coating. Each attack can compromise the resilience of our entire system, which resists or falls as one. The subject matter of our work testifies to this, often interrupted, or only sketched out, and always considered as ‘work in progress’. What is more, the various subjects covered in our various expositions are already linked, in anticipation of the ‘unique’ communist science of the future.

We moved on next to a recapitulation of Marx’s work on economics, preparing the way for a presentation of our ‘theory of economic crisis’, which stands in sharp contrast to the explanations given by the various bourgeois schools, whether classical or vulgar.

First, the series of different ways in which Marx planned to order his exposition was described. Capital is composed, in the edition edited by Marx himself and then continued by Engels and by the then orthodox Marxist Kautsky, of four volumes. The first deals with the process of production of capital; the second with the process of circulation of capital; the third with the process of capitalist production as a whole; and the fourth with the history of economic doctrines.

This final division of the work as a whole is the result of various alterations over time, some of them of considerable importance and resulting in a redesign of the general structure. They shouldn’t be seen as revisions, reappraisals or corrections of previous assumptions and thinking, but as a necessary delimitation of the field of exposition to the fundamental phenomena of the workings of capitalism.

The comrade speaker focused our attention on the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, a text which – though incomplete – contains a well-defined description of the method of communist science.

The manner in which scientific findings are expressed requires a passing from the abstract to the concrete, and consequently reproduces them as something mentally concrete, and thus ‘recreating’ reality in thought. Thanks to this process it is possible to arrive at what Marx defined as concrete thought, a combination of many determinations, unity of diverse elements.

Bourgeois political economy, on the other hand, merely provides a confused and indistinct description of reality. Its method is the opposite to that used by Marx in Capital, where he ‘lays bare the intimate social essence of the commodity and of money and proceeds from there to arrive at an elaborate and complete definition of the entire political, social and economic apparatus of the capitalist mode of production, in order to then retrace his steps and define and clarify all the consequent phenomena, above all revealing that capitalism can be characterised as neither definitive or eternal’ (Marxism and Knowledge, Comunismo, 1986, 20).

In Marx, capitalism is conceived of as a living organism (whereas classical economics, drawing on the methods of the enlightenment and encyclopaedist thinkers, only took the most superficial social relationships into consideration). It would be ‘unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society (…) The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society. Even less is it their sequence ‘in the idea’ (Proudhon) (…) Rather, their order within modern bourgeois society’ (Marx, Grundrisse).

Dialectics as science of relations: ‘Relations exist between one thing and another, between one event and another in the real world, and thus there is a relationship between the reflections (more or less imperfect) of this real world in our minds’ (On the Dialectical Method, Prometeo, 1950/1).

The analysis of capital in general comes down to a study of the determining factors which are common to all capitals, through which is expressed the historically determined character of the capitalist mode of production. It is impossible to pass directly from labour to capital (which would involve identifying capital with production in general, with no discrimination between the use of wage or slave labour or freely associated producers, etc.) In order to be able to bring this analysis to a conclusion we mustn’t set out from wage labour, but from the exchange value that brings forth surplus value.

The object of the study is first and foremost material production, with the term understood to mean the reproduction of the species. In the Preface Marx develops a very compact investigation into the reciprocal relations between production, distribution, exchange and consumption, leading to the conclusion that these are in fact moments within a unitary process, nothing but internal differentiations within a unitary mode of production.

Having disposed of metaphysics, it will be up to the revolutionary proletariat to decree the death of the class that has raised altars in its honour.

The doctrine of the modes of production thus represents a fundamental part of Marxist materialism. In order to tackle the subject, and find a way round the immense mass of material available to us, our main resource is the collection of notebooks gathered under the name Grundrisse, or Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. This veritable gold mine, divided into two great books, on Money and Capital, retraces the course of the formation of capital as a mode of production, examining how exchange value can be transformed into capital and then how it produces this capital in general. The logical and historical geneses of capitalism continually merge and overlap. How does capital arise from simple exchange value? How can exchange value, which is derived from circulation, where an exchange of equivalents takes place, create surplus value? And once formed, how does capital reproduce its own conditions of existence?

The historical route which led to the birth of the most devastating mode of production of all is painted in broad strokes in order to arrive at the study of the fundamental contradiction of the bourgeois social formation: the antithesis between capital on one side and labour-power on the other. Capital needs labour power in its pure, abstract form. How do the two poles form? On the one hand, how does capital originally accumulate? On the other, how are the producers freed from any kind of property and the old personal bonds?

The comrade stressed that the red thread linking these notebooks is the analysis of the historical course which led mankind from primitive communism to modern capitalism and which will necessarily lead him to the higher phase of communism.

In the writings of scientific communism in which capitalism is put under the microscope it is always possible to discern the distinctive traits of the society to come. Capitalism is a contradictory process in motion, the resolution of which isn’t imported from outside but exists within the process itself. Communism is the solution to the capitalist equation. By understanding the functioning of the capitalist equation, we can deduce that communism will have certain traits and not others.

For centuries bourgeois philosophy and historiography have corrupted proletarian minds with the thesis that history is nothing more than the spreading of the idea of Liberty. The Grundrisse, The Notebooks, demolish this assumption once and for all and convert it into its opposite. Human history should be interpreted as a process which commences with the dissolution of the ancient ties to the community; in capitalism individual Liberty seems to have been achieved when in reality it is negated and the individual is tied to capital by an accentuated division of labour, both technical and social.

The description of the great historical course which separates the modes of production preceding capitalism, and its ruthless critique, do not end in a moral condemnation of these earlier modes, but with a recognition that only on the basis of large-scale industry is communism made possible. It is from when bourgeois production appears, which goes on to transform the entire world in its own image, that the material conditions exist for the transition to communism. From this point on the proletariat has only to put into effect the death sentence which has been passed on the last of the modes of production based on value.

THE MILITARY QUESTION

The study continued with an examination of various military episodes from the mid-nineteen^th century.

One of them was the ‘Spedizione dei Mille’, the Expedition of the Thousand, as Garibaldi’s 1860 campaign in southern Italy has come to be known.

To continue the process of Italian unification three problems needed to be tackled: the securing of new allies against the Hapsburgs, as the French could no longer be relied upon; a resolution to the question of the Papal State; and to the situation in the South. In Sicily, masses of peasant farmers and rural labourers were pressing for an alleviation of their intolerable living conditions. A section of the nobility and the small progressive bourgeois class wanted to cast off Bourbon domination and to this end it was prepared to support the Savoy dynasty; another section, not wishing to relinquish their ancient privileges, was ready to make compromises of various sorts.

The popular rising of October 1859 would be suppressed by the police, as was the bloody rising in April the following year, in which some rebels were shot.

The news of it convinced Garibaldi he should organise an expedition to Sicily to lead the seemingly imminent revolution.

The Savoy government played a double game, assuring the European powers that it was containing the republican movements while secretly supporting Garibaldi with money, arms and assistance. French and English diplomacy also supported the expedition because of its anti-Hapsburg aspect: a united Italy would constitute a strong southern front against the Austrian Empire.

The Thousand set out on night of 5 May 1860. English naval vessels and Sicilian fishing boats warned them of the presence of Neapolitan ships in the port of Sciacca and advised them to land at Marsala, an English trading base. The landing was favoured by the fact that the Bourbon land forces, fearing a general insurrection, had been called back to defend Palermo.

The Bourbons could deploy an army which was 93,000 strong, the biggest in Italy, and it also had the largest and most modern navy in the Mediterranean. However it lacked combat experience with analogous formations and was based on light infantry, a model that had been developed to tackle banditry, peasant uprisings and political revolts.

The first clash, in the week after the landing, took place at Calatafimi. The strong local garrison had just about gained the upper hand when the commandant ordered his men to fall back towards Palermo. In their retreat, at Partinico the Bourbons were guilty of looting and of massacring the local population, which had risen up to defend itself.

Engels would remark that once the road to Palermo was cleared, Garibaldi showed his strategic bravura. With the aid of Sicilian volunteers he embarked on a bold plan of attacks, false retreats and withdrawals with the aim of drawing out the enemy. The battle lasted four days with the Neapolitans carrying out acts of reprisal against the insurgent districts and people. Finally, the Bourbons would abandon the city and set sail for Messina.

The bravery of the Garibaldini, the Sicilians and the 3,500 fighters from other regions who fought alongside them, is beyond dispute. English weapons from Malta arrived as well. The Neapolitan army rapidly disintegrated, many of its members entering into the new formation either through conviction or the promise of a job in the new Savoy army.

Support came from many of the Sicilian volunteers was because Garibaldi promised to divide up the large landed estates. These were broken promises, as evidenced by the episode of the peasants’ revolt in Bronte. Here, an insurrection broke out with arson, looting and the killing of 16 notables, landed proprietors, and administrators of the dukedom of the descendants of Horatio Nelson (received in recompense when his fleet assisted to restore order in Naples in 1799). Despite the collapse of the revolt, a special tribunal in a trial lasting only 4 hours with 150 accused issued harsh death sentences, seeking to reassure the landlords, as well as English businessmen and the government in London, that landed property would remain inviolable.

The Neapolitan troops abandoned Sicily and the Garibaldini headed north without encountering any major resistance; entire Neapolitan divisions would lay down their arms without a shot being fired. Garibaldi made his triumphal entrance to Naples, already abandoned by Francis II, who was taking refuge in the Gaeta fortress. The last battle took place beside the River Volturno, consisting of a series of clashes lasting four days between 50,000 Neapolitans and 24,000 Garibaldini.

In order to unify Italy the North had to be linked to the recently liberated South by detaching territories from the Papal State. With that end in view a Piedmontese army of over 39,000 men had assembled to meet the papal army of 10,000 regulars; these were derived from at least seven Catholic countries and had pledged to protect the Pope’s temporal power, and were supplemented by a further 10,000 Austrians stationed at the fortress in Ancona, summoned there by the Pope following the 1849 rebellions.

In order to cut the supply lines from Rome, the Piedmontese advanced on Ancona and along the Tiber valley. The protests of the European powers were placated by the diplomatic manoeuvrings of France and England. At Castelfidardo a short battle ended in total defeat for the papal army, which the following day surrendered en masse, arms and equipment included. A few months later the besieged Gaeta fortress surrendered and the court of Francis ll fled to Rome.

The opportunity of joining the new Italian army and maintaining their rank was offered to all land and maritime forces, but some would opt instead to join the robber bands, which over five years of fighting had been harshly repressed in a no holds-barred struggle.

A further chapter of the study looked at the Austro-Prussian War (or the Seven Weeks War as it is also known), in which Prussia allied with Italy against Austria.

The process of Italian unification moved forward more through the interventions of foreign diplomacy, mainly by the French, than by means of military victories, which were at best narrow, when not punctuated by outright defeats. This third war of independence, which may be considered the southern front of the more important Austro-Prussian War, is another example of absolute ineptitude on the part of political and military leaders.

From the Congress of Vienna in 1815 arose the German Confederation, with the same borders as the Holy Roman Empire of 1648 and composed of 39 states and statelets. In two of the most important ones, the Austrian Empire and Prussia, the process of customs union got underway, within which Prussia emerged as the leading state. From its industries would emerge the first rifled cannons in cast steel and the first breech-loading guns produced on a mass scale; the Prussian army was reorganised and boosted both qualitatively and quantitatively through conscription. Some quotations from Engels were given, which described this evolution.

Bismarck, the Prussian Prime Minister, forged alliances on several fronts to avoid having to mount a simultaneous defence against both the French and the Russians. In 1864 Prussia allied itself with Austria in order to resolve the question of the strategic provinces of Schleswig and Holstein, occupied by Denmark since 1848 but inhabited by ethnic Germans. After a short war Denmark ceded both of the provinces: the northern province of Schleswig with the important port of Kiel to Prussia, the southern province of Holstein to Austria.

The new Italian army arose in 1861 as a fusion of the various regional armies. But there was only minimal integration of the ex-Bourbon army and the Garibaldini volunteers, despite their experience acquired on the battlefield, were to all intents and purposes excluded, considered unsafe because of their republican ideas. Eventually national service would be introduced, with the drawing up of the conscription lists entrusted to local mayors who had access to parish baptism records, ensuring 40 to 50 thousand new recruits each year. All formations were uniformly equipped with the latest breech-loading rifles.

The line-up of the armies consisted of 500,000 Prussians, supported by 13 of its allied statelets, superbly armed and led by the very able General von Moltke; the Austrian forces which, along with their 13 minor allies, numbered 600,000, of which a third were destined for the southern front in Venetia; and the Italian forces, composed of 270,000 reasonably well armed men.

The Italian strategic plan envisaged a diversionary action by General La Marmora and the King to pierce the fortress complex known as the Quadrilatero. This was supposed to draw off the bulk of the Austrian army while Cialdini, after passing below the river Po, would attack from Ferrara heading towards Venezia, Udine and Trieste. Garibaldi with his volunteers, plus regular troops, would then head north to liberate Trento. However, La Marmora and Cialdini would disagree to such an extent that there effectively existed three armies on the Italian side, all operating separately and totally lacking any co-ordination. La Marmora’s advance would be blocked unexpectedly by the Austrians on both flanks, rendering him unable to mount an effective counter-offensive. He then beat a disorderly retreat across the Mincio, despite the clear numerical superiority of the Italian forces.

But meanwhile, at Sadowa on 3 July 1866, the Austrians suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the Prussians. The following day they called for a general armistice and offered to relinquish the fortresses of the Quadrilatero and Venetia.

At sea the Italian navy had 30 warships; the Austrian navy was slightly inferior numerically and not as well armed but with an able leader in Admiral Tegetoff. During the landings on the isle of Lissa the Italian navy was unable to effectively counter the attack of the Austrian fleet, which suddenly appeared drawn up in battle formation and proceeded to ram the Italian ships whilst unleashing a heavy and concentrated bombardment. The battle lasted an hour and some of the Italian ships didn’t even intervene, with one sunk, one blown up, and others seriously damaged. All of the Austrian ships, although damaged, took shelter at Pola. It was the last naval battle in which deliberate ramming would take place, and the first between armoured ‘ironclad’ ships.

Austria relinquished to France, as in 1859, Venetia, and a large chunk of Friuli and Mantova, which France transferred to Italy.

Only 25% of those with a right to participate in the ratification of the plebiscite attended. The Venetians were saddled with all of the Austrian public debt through the imposition of new taxes, including the ‘macinato’, the grist or flour tax. The textile mills and the shipyards received no new orders and, with aid withdrawn and loans more difficult to obtain, the general population sunk into a profound crisis. A deadly cholera epidemic broke out again, spreading from the port of Ancona as troops returned from the Crimea, and for many of the ‘liberated’ Venetians permanent immigration, in particular to Latin America, seemed the only way out.

The third report on the Military Question covered the Franco-Prussian War.

In our doctrine this war, which culminated with the fall of the Second Empire in France, was followed by the proclamation of the Third Republic and finally by the glorious experiment of the Paris Commune, marks a watershed: the end, in Europe, of the common struggle of bourgeoisie and proletariat against the previous feudal regimes. The direct struggle of the armed proletariat against the bourgeoisie, to destroy its state and its economic and social system, starts here.

The experience of the workers’ movement had already been concentrated into two important theoretical pillars: the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, and the first volume of Capital in 1867. In 1864 the International Working Men’s Association was formed in London. From then on, in Europe, the various nationalisms would become reactionary, and the alleged ‘completions’ of the bourgeois democratic revolutions and ‘struggles for independence’ would become merely the pretext for kitting out proletarians in various national uniforms before sending them off to be slaughtered.

In relation to this question some excerpts were read out to the meeting from the First Address of the General Council of the I.W.M.A on the Franco-Prussian War (July 1870), and from the responses to it given by the workers’ assemblies in Saxony and by the Berlin committee of the International, which called for solidarity between the workers of the warring countries. Proletarian solidarity was feared by the major states because it could sabotage even the best laid strategic plans. Such would not occur in the trenches, but there were significant mass desertions: after the first phase of the Battle of Le Mans on the night of January 11, 1871, 50,000 French soldiers deserted, bringing the fighting to the south of Paris to an end.

For Prussia – now part of the 24 million strong North German Confederation, which united 22 of the 39 German states – the causes of the war were the need to complete the process of unification, which its powerful industrial development required, but also to detach the German speaking, and iron-rich, territories of Alsace and Lorraine from French control.

Each mode of production has its own military organisation: the capitalist one is based on the large-scale industrial production of commodities; powerful armies with military conscription by now general and obligatory in all states; all firearms now with rifled barrels and breech loading, allowing a rapidity, intensity and precision of fire never before achieved. This determines a different approach to military planning and organisation: the Napoleonic experience bequeaths the principle of ‘marching separately but fighting together’; henceforth it is impossible bring a conflict to a victorious conclusion with one great battle, as had happened in the period of the feudal wars. Now it is only possible to obtain victory after a series of partial actions on several fronts, with various secondary battles fought to wear down the enemy, encircling its central core and cutting off its supply lines to prevent it from taking further action. Only then can the final battle be fought to a conclusion.

The powerful French war machine of the Napoleonic era had gradually become weaker and less effective and it was now seriously inefficient, disorganised and at the mercy of rampant corruption. Some quotations from Engels and Trotski were read out to illustrate this point. The Prussian army, the expression of a young rapidly growing productive system was, on the other hand, fitted out with great precision and much attention to detail, with astute use made of the French railroads to move the invasion troops rapidly to the front.

And yet Napoleon III, pressurised by the military wing of the bourgeoisie and grievously miscalculating the actual forces in play, disrupted what war plans were already in place and decided to attack with half the necessary forces.

All wars are initiated by the bourgeoisie on the internal front. To finance their costly armies they have to resort to ‘war credits’, a combination of economic measures including the issue of bonds by the banks, producing a situation in which the lenders of capital, great and small, have a direct interest in the military outcome. A. Bebel and W. Liebknecht voted against the credits in the German parliament and as a result they, along with others, would be imprisoned. The French bourgeoisie, with the third trial against the French members of the International, would deprive the French working class of many revolutionary leaders.

The first known border violation was by the French on 31 July, portrayed by the Paris press as a rapid ‘drive’ toward Berlin. But two days later the French were forced into a disorderly retreat, having learnt from the English press, and not from their own inefficient information services, that the Prussians were preparing for a powerful attack to the south, near Weissenburg (Wissembourg). On 4 August, the French suffered heavy defeats at Wörth and Spicheren, from where the Prussians swept down in two waves, cutting off the Verdun-Paris road. A map was used to illustrate this to the meeting.

French lack of strategic decisiveness and a change of government meant precious time was lost, which was exploited by the Prussians to complete their advance on Paris. The indecision led to a concentration of French forces in the fortress at Metz, where they would be besieged. Two months later, in October 1870, they surrendered, with 180, 000 taken prisoner and the loss of considerable war materials.

Paris, so as not to admit defeat and in order to head off any revolutionary movements, issued orders for far-fetched counter-attacks, the aim being to alleviate pressure from the north by opening a front to the south-east. The remaining troops, those not disarmed across the border in Belgium and in Switzerland, were induced by Prussian manoeuvring to concentrate at Sedan. On 1 September it became the scene of a major battle as the powerful Prussian artillery mercilessly pounds the encircled French, as illustrated by a map of the battlefield. ‘Order, counter-order, disorder’ characterised the French. In the afternoon Napoleon III took the decision to surrender. He was imprisoned in Frankfurt, thus bringing the Second Empire to an end.

As one by one the other fortresses fell, the Prussians, now in control of nearly a quarter of France, completed their encirclement of Paris with 200,000 men, moving as much of their artillery there as they could.

Meanwhile, on 20 September, profiting from the difficulties of the French, the Savoy army opened the ‘breech’ of Porta Pia ‘conquering’ the historic national capital.

Paris at the time numbered around 1.85 million inhabitants. 300,000 were in the National Guard, a force created to defend the city, a further 100,000 were enrolled in the Mobiles. It was a rare case of the besieged being in a clear majority with respect to the besiegers.

A division of sailors was distributed across the circle of 18 great external forts, which according to the previous system of defence was supposed to keep the fighting away from the main stronghold, as illustrated with another map.

A reading from Engels showed that he thought the Prussian forces couldn’t force Paris to capitulate with bombardments alone, which was more political than military in its effect, despite the massive destruction caused by their use of long range shells.

During the siege, on January 18, 1871, William of Prussia was crowned Emperor of Germany at the palace in Versailles, thus setting the seal on his country’s unification.

After the failure of a major attempt to break the siege, the Prussians’ onerous terms were accepted: the army would hand over all weapons and stores; the military occupation of the forts and the six districts would continue until an indemnity of 5 million gold francs was paid in full. French losses had been very high: 140,000 dead, 140,000 wounded, 200,000 cases of frostbite, 600,000 taken prisoners and an enormous quantity of materiel, testimony to the powerful industrial development triggered by the war. The Prussians on the other hand had 47,000 dead, 80,000 wounded, 13,000 taken prisoner and they lost only six cannons.

In Paris the severe economic conditions imposed on the people, including the stopping of pay to the National Guard, the only formation defending public order which was still armed, generated powerful demonstrations, which metamorphosed into the proclamation of the Commune in Paris on March 28, 1871. The report concluded with some quotes from Marx and Engels, including, ‘This war has shifted the centre of gravity of the continental workers’ movement from France to Germany’.

In the theoretical field the milestones of the glorious experiment of the Paris Commune are: The Address of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, written by Marx in the last days of the fighting on the barricades; the two manuscript drafts of The Civil War in France, letters, notes and documents by Marx and Engels, the many writings of Lenin, Trotski and the Italian Left.

The proclamation of the Paris Commune was propelled by political and military events, requiring the kind of prompt and decisive decisions that only a revolutionary party, solidly rooted and secure in its historical role, could have taken. Such was not to be, not least because, as Marx had warned in earlier letters, the French sections of the International had been emptied due to the arrest or flight abroad of its best members. It is now possible for us to understand the mistakes that were made.

We presented a chronology divided up into periods, the first of which ran from the military defeat at Sedan to the proclamation of the Commune, from 1 September 1870 to 17 March 1871. With Napoleon III prisoner in Frankfurt and his regime over, a national Committee of National Defence was formed which favoured the continuation of the war at the same time as a major boost was given to the call for a Republic. Meanwhile a still powerful pro-monarchist party wanted to surrender immediately to the Prussians in order to hang on to power.

In the end the Prussian siege comprised more than 235,000 men and 900 cannons, each supplied with around 1000 rounds. The Defence Committee tried to alleviate the pressure by opening other fronts and enrolling new recruits, but all attempted sorties were in vain, on top of which the French suffered their latest defeats in the South. The only victory was that of the troops commanded by Garibaldi at Dijon, although it wasn’t sufficient to reverse the situation.

On 5 January the bombardment of Paris began, more for show, Engels would write, than with any real hope of it bringing the capital down. Meanwhile the French army fell apart, a good part of it fleeing unarmed to Belgium and Switzerland, hundreds of thousands of them taken prisoner by the Prussians. On 26 January an armistice called for the surrender of all the forts in the outer defences and the disarming of the army; the hundred or so battalions of the National Guard were the only forces left to defend the capital, as its civic guard.

The Prussians allowed enough time for the election of a new National Assembly, able to negotiate a legal settlement with Germany. Elections in the non-occupied territories gave the monarchist right a clear majority, while in Paris the composite republican front prevails. The national government (now in Bordeaux and headed by the same Thiers who had ferociously repressed the republican movements in 1832) immediately stopped the pay of the National Guard and ordered them to hand over their cannons. It also revoked the freeze on rents and commercial debts, conceded in July 1870 owing to the major demolition works initiated to achieve the capital’s new town plan, including the construction of gigantic thoroughfares to neutralise the effect of possible revolutionary barricades.

Delegates of the National Guard organised themselves in a federative system around a Central Committee, with the various battalions deployed in the 20 municipalities retaining their autonomy and maintaining the prerogative of electing their own leaders.

General Vinoy, a faithful Bonapartist, appointed military governor of Paris by Thiers, received orders on 17 March to sequester the cannons of the National Guard, but his blundering attempt was foiled by the local residents and the neighbouring battalions of the National Guard. At the order to fire on the crowd, many soldiers and junior officers refused and fraternised with the people. Vinoy ordered the retreat and fled to Versailles with the greater part of the government and the army; other functionaries abandoned Paris as the first barricades went up.

The Central Committee of the National Guard puts itself at the head of the revolt and the insurgents occupy all the political and military offices abandoned by the fleeing government officials and over the Hotel de Ville the red flag is raised.

The Central Committee of the National Guard was not a single political party with a clear revolutionary programme but rather a combination of different forces, with Blanquists, Proudhonists, Bakuninists and Communists of the International strongly represented. This was the great contradiction, which generated the series of major errors analysed by Marx in The Civil War in France.

There were two major errors. The first, not to have given an armed response to the disorderly retreat of Thiers’ army and not to have marched immediately on Versailles – left without any organised defences – in order annihilate Thiers’ power structure. The second was the Central Committee of the National Guard being too quick to relinquish its power to the Commune.

The Commune had made no military plan in advance of the insurrection, nor did it come up with one to defend it. The federal autonomy of the hundred or so battalions persisted. The absence of an effective central command weakened its military efficiency and its capacity to make quick decisions whereas, over the ensuing days, the Versailles forces immediately occupied the strategically important fort of Mont-Valerian. Garibaldi would write: ‘The Paris Commune fell because no authority existed in Paris, only anarchy’.

While the Commune organised its government at a political level but neglected its military organisation, Thiers launched his offensive with the help of Bismarck. The latter allowed back thousands of imprisoned French soldiers and officers, and also allowed the recruitment of new forces in the rural provinces such that the number of soldiers in the Versailles army reached 130,000.

In response to a first assault by the Versailles forces the Communards mounted an ill-conceived sortie against Versailles on 4 April, but they were pushed back. Many of the captured Parisians were summarily executed. Over the following days the Commune issued its decree on hostages: for every Communard prisoner summarily executed the Commune would execute three hostages which it held; a decree partially carried out only in the final days.

On paper the Commune had at its disposal 130,000 men in the National Guard with at least a minimum of training, although in practice only 40,000 or so soldiers took part in the fighting. Due to disorganisation there was no effective plan of rotation of troops in the forts and the trenches and, despite there being no serious shortage of various materials and armaments, the organisation of supplies to critical points was ineffective.

From the forts of Vanves and Issy, on the high ground, Paris was hit by incendiary bombs; the Commune responded by burning down the palaces which symbolised the old regime.

On 21 May, with the aid of a spy, the Versaillais entered Paris and started to occupy the outer quarters. The Committee of Public Safety, nominated after the last serious military defeats, was informed about it too late and the last fatal mistake was made: it allowed the councillors to return to their respective Municipalities in order to organise their defence, district by district. Not even at that critical juncture was a centralised plan thought necessary. There was no central plan to erect barricades, nor even a system to take the assailants by surprise by demolishing the internal walls of the palaces at key points in the city. Thus barricades were thrown up that were improvised and badly defended.

Day after day the Versaillais occupied the city while the bourgeoisie was emboldened to take shots from their houses at the defenders of the barricades, which fell one by one. All of the surviving prisoners were summarily executed. In the afternoon of 28 May the last barricade fell.

The repression by Thiers, supported by the entire European bourgeoisie, was truly terrible; as terrible as their fear of a victorious Commune enflaming the whole of Europe. In the days that followed more than 20,000 prisoners were shot, including, along with the combatants, those merely suspected of sympathising. After summary trials many thousands were deported to New Caledonia, many of them perishing from illnesses contracted during the five month voyage.

There was certainly no lack of courage on the part of the Communards or of their determination to fight for the emancipation of the oppressed classes, but what they did lack was a genuine revolutionary party, unique and centralised, which, with rational use of the Commune’s forces, could have defended its victory and enflamed the proletariat of Europe.

HISTORY OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN THE USA

Our study of the American labour movement, having got to the end of the 19^th century, described an American trade unionism that had already assumed its definitive form, lending itself to the class collaboration that would distinguish it over the ensuing decades.

The shining example provided by the miners in those years was worrying the A.F.L. leaders because the success of the miners’ struggle highlighted the power of industrial trade unionism, which united skilled and unskilled and workers of every faith, colour and nationality. The trade unionism of the A.F.L. certainly could not be characterised in this way. Indeed, during this period it was increasingly moving in the opposite direction, adopting a framework which sought to organise mainly specialised workers, and which was based on trades rather than the sector of production, and which was indifferent, if not downright hostile, towards unskilled or semi-skilled workers, blacks, women and immigrants.

Over these years the A.F.L. expanded, and by 1901 it had almost 800,000 members; but millions of other workers, the ‘underdogs’, were excluded.

One reason for the increased membership was the decline of the Knights of Labor, for until then the leaders of the A.F.L. had had to reckon with a rival organisation which, for all its defects, had the merit of accepting all proletarians without distinction. After the fall of the K.L. the only choice, workers had was to join unions affiliated to the A.F.L.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the A.F.L.’s policy was a key component of a programme of class collaboration with monopoly capital, able to guarantee skilled workers a minimum of security and wealth at the expense of the unskilled and non-organised. The leaders of the A.F.L. walked arm in arm with the trusts and indeed would become their most ardent defenders. In exchange for small guarantees conceded by the gigantic monopolies they would agree to do absolutely nothing to organise the overwhelming majority of workers, who were exploited by these same monopolies, namely, immigrants, blacks and women.

Even the Spanish American war, verbally condemned by the union leaders before it had been declared, was later supported by the A.F.L. as ‘glorious and progressive’.

In spite of the depression, during the 1890s the United States had emerged as the leading industrial power. Already in 1890 it was the main producers of iron and steel; by 1899 it was also the main producer of coal. At the same time the USA increased its export of capital. Small firms were swept away by bigger and bigger, but fewer and fewer, ‘corporations’. It was a global power from the military point of view as well. By the end of the century it had already built an empire, thanks to wars in Spain, Central America and the Pacific, and exerted political and economic control over many countries in Latin America as well.

But for the working class there wasn’t much to be happy about. Despite the fruits of the ‘unprecedented prosperity’ the crisis had hit it hard. In 1900 wages were still 10% below what they were before the 1893 crisis. Therefore, over these same years there was a vigorous revival of the labour movement: from less than half a million in 1897, the trade unions increased their membership to more than 2 million in 1904; the great majority, 80% in fact, joined the A.F.L. Over the same period the number of strikes doubled, and in the majority of cases were successful.

Throughout the 1890s, and especially towards the end of the decade, the bosses in some sectors started to display a certain willingness to reach agreements with the trade unions on wages and hours. It was the period when monopoly capitalism was expanding very rapidly; the newly formed monopolies needed to control production and prices, and in this they were frustrated by the competition of businessmen who weren’t part of the monopoly; these had to be crushed and got rid of, and here the trade unions could be used as a weapon to obtain this result.

Thus towards the end of the century some bosses started to recognise the closed shop. Businesses agreed to take on only those who were members of the union, and in exchange the latter guaranteed that none of its members would work for companies which weren’t part of the bosses’ associations. In some cases, unions even went so far as to get workers in these companies to go out on strike.

But nobody talked about the rising cost of living; price increases could be imposed by monopoly capitalism, which virtually wiped out any wage increases. The A.F.L. chiefs didn’t want to know about the reality of working class conditions. They talked of the ‘Era of Good Feeling’ between capital and labour, which from a materialistic point of view is nonsense that can only be violently opposed.

However, the crisis of 1893 favoured the resumption of the anti-trade union offensive. The watchword was the open shop, the negation of the closed shop: employees wouldn’t be forced to join a trade union, in deference to the much-trumpeted American myth of individual freedom; an abstract notion which, as well as bearing no resemblance to material reality, was never respected in any case and especially by the bosses, who were quick to close ranks when it came to fighting the workers.

In the West there was an organised reaction to the A.F.L., and to its neglect of the miners and other trades. We have already seen how the Western Federation of Miners arose on the correct class basis. This union encouraged the formation of two trade union federations in succession, the Western Labor Union and the American Labor Union, which would go down in history for their determined struggles against the dual enemy, the capitalists and the mandarins of the American Federation of Labor. Their decline was just a prelude to the birth, in 1905, of the Industrial Workers of the World.

The speaker outlined the history of the Industrial Workers of the World at the following general meeting. The I.W.W., popularly known as the ‘Wobblies’, would play a hugely important role from around 1905 to 1920. It was thanks to this organisation, which had arisen through the special efforts of the Western Federation of Miners, that the workers in the West, where capitalism had taken root in its most modern and ferociously exploitative form, would finally be able to oppose the big companies in a compact front in which there were no distinctions of race, nationality or colour, and in which the most unskilled, most oppressed, and most combative workers would come to predominate – in complete contrast to the by now corrupt A.F.L.

To the I.W.W. we owe the great strikes in the steel mills in 1907, in the lumber industry in 1911, in the textile industry (Lawrence in 1912) and particularly in 1913 in the silk mills; to it we also owe the powerful movements in the copper, lumber and iron and steel industries during the First World War, when the practice of generalising struggles in pursuit of union demands, of solidarity between different sectors, of abstention from work with no set time limits (the Patterson strike lasted 7 months!), when the firm resolve not to retreat in the face of the police and eventually the army, neither in peace of war, made the democratic rulers of the USA tremble, the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie foam at the mouth, the official orators of the ruling class and their opportunist lackeys thunder forth from their rostrums and the priests of a thousand and one churches and sects fulminate from their pulpits while police bullets mowed down hundreds of militants, and the prison gates were flung open to incarcerate thousands more. In all of these respects it is a roll of honour, which the I.W.W. filled with the names of lowly proletarians, brave and passionate, who dared to inscribe on their banner: Abolition of wage labour!

In the post-First World war period the activity of the I.W.W. entered a period of decline. Its numbers were decimated by the repression of the forces of order; it was disowned by trade union and political leaders; and it must also be stated, it was undermined by its theoretical and programmatic insufficiencies, which were reflected in serious organisational weaknesses,. And yet, in the stifling atmosphere of the Stars and Stripes Republic, its voice remained one of the few signs of real class combativeness.

However, although recognising the tradition of great, heroic struggles, of relentless continuity in the grey world of the dollar, of openly professed faith in the revolutionary task of the working class, of incessant a relentless critique of the opportunist trade unions who ‘set one group of workers against another in the same industry’ and nurtured ‘the false belief that the working class has interests in common with the class of entrepreneurs’, we cannot blind ourselves to the inconsistency of the theoretical and programmatic foundations of the I.W.W, which were substantially the same as those of European anarcho-syndicalism and, in some respects, Gramsci’s ordinovism.

It was this inconsistency which, even in turbulent years of 1920-21, would prevent these combative organisers of the workers not only from finding the road to communism, that is, from equipping itself with a party to join the Third International, but also from joining the Red International of Labour Unions. They are for ‘direct action’ and for the ‘general strike’ but they reject the political struggle and its organ, the political party. They see the general strike as a magic weapon which on its own can bring down the system by totally paralysing production. They are essentially immediatists: they reject the mediation of the party-form, and thus of the state-form (the dictatorship), as a ‘superimposition’ of ‘leaders’ over the ‘masses’, a ‘substitution’ of an extraneous ‘will’ over the immediate will of the class, but they fail to see that the class, whose sanctity they seek to preserve, is not just ill-defined but entirely shapeless without its political party to explain its historical role, and plot out the road ahead.

They reject ‘violence’, and therefore revolutionary terror, because these destroy the means of production, whereas direct action aims ‘to render the means of production useless to the exploiters, by preserving it for the use of the workers once the bosses have been deprived of its control’. They therefore relapse, despite the best of intentions, into a type of gradualism and reformism: we are maintaining the machinery in good order because one day it will be ours! That the I.W.W. should consider not only the industrial unions but also the existing co-operatives as cells of the new society within the old is entirely logical.

Like the anarcho-syndicalists, the response of the I.W.W. to parliamentary degeneration and to the opportunism of the old workers parties and trade unions, now openly breaking strikes and supporting bourgeois institutions, is to reject all party organisations and all state forms. They fail to understand (as the Third International observed in a letter in January 1920) that ‘In order to destroy the edifice of the capitalist State, to break the resistance of the capitalist class and to disarm it, to seize the property of the capitalists and to hand it over to the workers; for these tasks to be achieved they need a government, a State, the dictatorship of the proletariat by means of which the workers can break the enemy class with an iron hand’, and all this actually presupposes the organisation of the political party, even before the bourgeois regime itself is overthrown. They fail to understand that either the general strike is transformed into an armed insurrection or it just runs out of steam; they fail to see that the new society cannot be built within the old because nothing can be ‘built’ before power has been seized and used to crush the resistance of a business class which won’t just vanish into thin air because we have downed tools.

And, like the anarcho-syndicalists, they believe that a particular form of economic organisation – in their case, one based on the industry rather than the trade – is in itself revolutionary: they mistake a question of power and content for a question of form, failing to realise that any immediate organisational form can be turned to either to revolutionary, or to reformist and therefore counter-revolutionary ends, according to whether the political forces and programmatic content which predominate within them is reformist or revolutionary. Indeed this is clearly shown in America when the principle of organisation by industry rather than trade was taken up by the C.I.O., which ended up completely aligning itself with the reformist conservatism of the A.F.L.

The I.W.W. would be repeatedly torn apart by internecine struggles between ‘politicals’ and ‘apoliticals’, ‘centralisers’ and ‘decentralisers’ without however ever attaining the maturity of Marxism. The merits of the I.W.W. are its sense of solidarity, its rejection of any distinction on grounds of race or nation, its recourse to the methods of direct action, up to and including the general strike, but it was restricted by the pre-Marxism that inspired it.

OIL AND IMPERIALISM

This report considered the history of oil, from its discovery gushing from the banks of Oil Creek in Pennsylvania in 1859, until today. It is a story of commercial, financial and diplomatic wars, almost always involving armed conflict. An incessant and complex dynamic in which we see competition and monopolies, protectionism and free trade, and the nationalism and internationalism of capital constantly opposing one another.

To begin with, the concentration of oil interests was so overwhelming it provoked a governmental reaction in defence of competition. But the consequence of this was actually to strengthen the big trusts. It would take just two months for Rockefeller and Co to counter the blow. For appearance’s sake the empire was broken up into several companies, but these were headed by nominees.

The report expounded a number of quotes from Lenin’s Imperialism which already describe this phenomenon as an ineluctable feature of late capitalism. Free competition inevitably generates monopoly and the more there is the freer it is. Other phenomena are the export of capital in place of the export of commodities and the establishment of a union between banking and industrial capital in the form of finance capital.

The development of the market receives a further boost when there is a transition from the lighting market, satisfied by electricity, to that of petrol

Across the sea, in Russia, the refining of oil had started as early as 1820 in Baku, in Russian Azerbaijan, where the existence of oil wells was known about since the 17^th Century. The Nobels, Swedish immigrants in Saint Petersburg, owned immense concessions and numerous refineries linked to the railways via pipelines. At Baku the French bankers, the Rothschild brothers, were also active as major exporters of capital to Russia.

In 1891 the Rothschilds joined forces with English businessmen to export oil to Asia with a fleet of nine oil tankers built specially to ease transportation through the Suez Canal, stealing a march on Standard Oil. In the Far East, Indonesia soon became an important producer and marketer of oil. In Borneo, Royal Dutch from Holland, English Shell and American Standard Oil all competed to build pipelines and refineries in order to sell on the Asian markets.

If at the turn of the century most oil production derived from the United States, Russia and Indonesia, these producers would later be joined by the tormented region of the Middle East and some South American countries. With the global development of capitalism, the race to access this new source of energy, which would prove more economic than coal and better adapted to the requirements of industry, would quickly be transformed into a relentless battle between the major imperial powers.

A no-holds barred trade war would break out. Imperialist capitalism’s zone of influence is the entire world. The economic power of the big companies is such that they establish relations on a par with those of state machines, which they increasingly bend to their interests. Hugely powerful business relationships are established both with those States where the big companies are based, and, with even greater reason, with the governments of the small and often backward countries where capital is invested and from which the raw material is drawn.

The report next moved on to consider the major events of the 19^th century, broken down into a number of interesting sub-headings for ease of interpretation: the endless struggle in the Middle East, in Persia, in Iraq after the communist revolution in Russia; the decline of the old imperial powers to the advantage of the USA; the 1929 Depression and the economic crisis in Germany; the suffocation of Japan’s energy needs; the huge oil deals struck during the Second World war; the new world order centred on the USA and Russia with the entrenchment of the power of the big oil companies, the so-called ‘Seven Sisters’, and the bids for independence from Italy and France, in particular in Libya and Algeria; the failed bids of pan-Arabism; the birth of OPEC and the Arab-Israeli wars.

THE WAR IN SYRIA

A first short report gave us a summary of the Party’s evaluation of the war in Syria as reported in its recent press, going on to provide us with a general survey of events in the country. On the one hand the escalation of the war and on the other a phase of stalemate, in which none of the contending parties can or wants to obtain significant victories, taking into consideration the military supremacy of the regime’s forces.

The perpetuation of the conflict has been concentrated and intensified in the big cities with out and out battles taking place and the use of armoured vehicles by Assad. Over the past few months thousands have lost their lives, many of them civilians killed by government artillery. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled the country, mainly to Turkey but also to Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

In the capital the army has been scouring the outlying districts for several weeks in search of rebels and arms. It is here that the regime is strongest and most solidly rooted with respect to the other major centre of conflict, Aleppo, where, over recent months, the rebels have often managed to take control of various parts of the city. To be noted are the struggles between armed groups in Tripoli in the North of Lebanon: here Alawite and Sunni militiamen fight each other, perpetuating old rivalries from their respective districts.

American imperialism has frequently emphasised that it is opposed to the Assad government. Russia, along with China, has threatened the United States by declaring that unilateral action by the West is unacceptable. Behind the assemblies, votes and democratic vetoes, bourgeois diplomacy is acting to ensure that the war continues along that line of friction between the blocs.

In identifying the various classes taking part in the protest demonstrations and the various domestic and foreign participants, and the respective weight of the working class and the bourgeoisie, we need to emphasise the non-existence, during this imperialist phase of capitalism, of what the opportunists like to call the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’, even if camouflaged as anti-imperialists. There exists today no revolutionary bourgeois class or under-class which the proletariat should support. Overthrowing imperialism without destroying the underlying cause, capitalism, is impossible, an illusion. The only genuine struggle against imperialism is the anti-capitalist one. The rival bourgeois factions fighting for power in Syria today, whether led by Assad or the opposition forces managed and manoeuvred mainly from abroad, are indisputably enemies of the Syrian, Middle Eastern and international proletariat.

We then gave an outline of the complex situation in Syria, looking both at the domestic causes, rooted in the international crisis of capital, and external ones, including the factors that drove the colonialism of the recent past and which still affect imperialism today.

The war began after the cessation of the anti-government demonstrations that were repressed by the regime, and continues as a struggle between Assad’s army and the heterogeneous groups of the opposition. The conflict has intensified as a result of the amount of weaponry received by the rebels, and its improved quality. Damascus and Aleppo are the theatre of daily bloody conflicts, as are other anti-government strongholds under siege by forces loyal to the regime. President Bashar al-Assad has rejected the proposal put forward by the British Prime Minister of a safe-conduct to leave the country, secure in the knowledge that he is supported by Teheran, Moscow and Beijing. Declaring Syria to be the last bastion of secularism in the region, his response is to hurl counter-accusations against the Western powers.

The country’s system of production, paralysed for almost two years, is being brought to its knees by the conflict, and all to the detriment of the greater part of the people, who have also been hit by high inflation. The effect of the embargo on oil products imposed by the USA and the European Union has produced its first results: public transport at a standstill and a shortage of gas for heating in some cities. Many factories can no longer operate, the workers haven’t received their wages for months and food shortages are becoming more frequent.

Among the loyalist troops, who are still the better equipped, there have been no major defections, thus enabling Assad to repel any attack more or less easily. However, it is very clear that a military solution has been prevented right from the start and a state of stalemate maintained: the variegated opposition has received from abroad just the right dosage of arms and fighters, many of them linked to groups of Islamic fundamentalists.

In Turkey a unified command has been elected, around two thirds of which is composed of Muslim Brothers and Salafites. Over recent months dozens of brigades have been formed, organised on a local basis and with only fairly loose links between them. They carry out incursions then retreat. Since December Obama has formally recognised the Syrian opposition as the official ‘voice of the resistance’. But the fighters of the Al Nusra Front, considered to be close to the Iraqi arm of Al Quaeda, are still on the USA’s blacklist. A CIA group in the South of Turkey decides as to which of the numerous rebel factions it will equip, one by one, with automatic weapons, rocket launchers and anti-tank missiles.

In early December the American aircraft-carrier Eisenhower, with 8,000 troops and several fighter bombers on board, arrived off the Syrian coast. But the joint attack plan, which was supposed to include Great Britain, France, Turkey, Israel, and possibly Jordan and a few other Arab countries, was withdrawn. Russia confirmed its support for the Syrian president, a declaration which was quickly endorsed by BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Even though the petro-monarchies in the Gulf are pushing for a radical solution to the Syrian crisis, the White House might decide to take its time and look at other scenarios. Perhaps the United States is reminded of its intervention in Libya, where they still haven’t managed to find, or to create, a political opposition capable of replacing the regime.

In January, NATO approved the deployment of Patriot missiles and American personnel along the frontier with Turkey.

At the subsequent meeting the reporting comrade gave an update on the situation. During the course of our meeting, in fact, as the eastern Mediterranean filled with warships and it seemed missiles were about to be launched, Russian and Chinese diplomacy was mobilised and came to an agreement with Washington on the destruction of the Syrian army’s chemical weapons, thereby warding off armed intervention. The agreement represented a slap in the face for the USA, which had decided on military intervention, even if limited. The decisive joint action of Russia and China, whose vital interests were threatened, managed to stop the belligerent dynamism of the United States and force it to backtrack, something which didn’t happen in Libya a few months before.

It is further evidence of the rapid changes in global power relations, and also of the fragility of US imperialism, whose military strength, by far the greatest in the world, is founded on an economic base which has now lost its hegemony.

After the agreement on the destruction of chemical weapons was reached, the Syrian question virtually disappeared from the international media. But the civil war, with its attendant massacres, indiscriminate bombardments, arrests, torture and assassinations and the hunger and cold suffered by millions of human beings forced to abandon their homes, has continued, fomented precisely by those who claim they want to stop it, whether it is the states who have the gall to call themselves ‘friends of Syria’, or those who support Assad, primarily Russia, Iran and China.

The eleven ‘friendly’ countries (United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan) met in Paris on 12 January to declare their wish for the Syrian president to step down in order to kick-start a ‘political solution’, new elections, etc. And they have invited the organisations of the Syrian opposition to participate in the Geneva 2 Conference. For its part, Russia insists that Iran should participate in the Conference and rules out any regime change in Syria.

Both sides, of course, continue to supply arms and equipment to the contending parties, and the war goes on, fomented, if ever there was still a need for it, by atrocities committed against the Syrian people by the fundamentalist groups in the pay of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Assad regime. It is a tactic which has been used before, in ex-Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan …

Assad’s regime, like Saddam Hussein’s, but also like Al Maliki’s (the current president of Iraq), is essentially the dictatorship of a clan, which carves up the wealth of the country by exploiting proletarians and poor peasants, and forcibly prevents other bourgeois factions from gaining power. But this clan in power also represents the interests of national and international capital. The era of progressive democratic revolutions has been over for some time and in the present phase of mature, decadent imperialism is dead and buried throughout the world; and not just as far as we communists are concerned but for the bourgeoisie as well. All that now remains are the tired old electoral rituals, whose only function is to ensnare the proletariat in the myth of democracy. Today, far more than was the case a century ago, it is criminal to try and convince the proletariat that democracy is an objective worth fighting for or defending.

Those taking part in Geneva 2 will waffle on about peace, democracy and human rights but its real business will be about further wars, defending new and old dictatorships, forging even heavier shackles to keep the international proletariat in chains.

COMMUNISM AND DEMOCRACY IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN ITALY

This series of reports was prompted by the need to demonstrate one of our doctrine’s fundamental concepts: that democracy and communism are irreconcilable and totally opposed. The report continued with an examination of the impact of the Paris Commune in Italy and the great excitement it caused within its variegated revolutionary movement. But the latter soon proved not to have solid foundations, causing the Italian sections to break with the General Council in London. In fact it was with remarkable speed that the entire internationalist movement in Italy accepted Bakunin’s secessionist positions.

The Italian movement identified with the anarchist theories due to the backwardness of the social environment. It was Italian social conditions which determined and influenced Bakunin’s entire theoretical edifice and not the other way round.

The bloody defeat of the Commune caused a crisis in the proletarian international no less serious than the one caused by the defeats of 1848. The situation would radicalise the divergences already present within the International and bring about the definitive break between the Marxist and anarchist schools, whose differences by now had become irreconcilable.

Anarchism, that backward form of socialism with respect to the dialectical position of Marxism, had been allowed into the International at the very beginning in the expectation that it would grow towards scientific socialism. When Bakunin assumed its leadership, providing it with an organised structure as a fraction and a programme which was prejudicial to Marxism and the International as a whole, it became a serious threat to the movement. It was necessary to stop the International from being reduced to a network of squabbling cliques. What was required instead was to refine theory even further in order to combat the petty bourgeois and opportunist distortions of which anarchism was one of the first manifestations. Then as now it was not a matter of chasing after useless, and dangerous, momentary successes, but of keeping the doctrinal heritage of the party intact and transmitting it to future generations of revolutionaries.

In this connection, during the presentation of the report, important passages by Engels were quoted, which stressed the importance of sacrificing momentary successes to more important things, namely the safeguarding of the revolutionary programme and doctrine as established by the balance sheet of the Paris Commune, even at the cost of provoking splits. Engels was responding to all of those, still with us today, who preach unity but who, in terms of what they actually do, act like out-and-out sectarians and secessionists.

Almost contemporaneously with the Congress of the First International in The Hague, the anarchists met in a separate congress on 15 September at Saint-Imier, explicitly refusing to recognise the authority of the General Council, which, for its part, expelled them from the congresses. From then on there were two internationals, one influenced by Marx, and one which took an ‘anti-authoritarian’ line, which, even if in slightly altered form, was actually the continuation of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy founded years earlier by Bakunin, and which he claimed to have dissolved in order to join the International.

The anarchist Congress of Saint-Imier denied that congresses had the right to deliberate and thus rejected the resolutions of The Hague Congress; it asserted the autonomy of federations and sections and proclaimed that ‘the destruction of every type of political power is the first task of the Proletariat’.

Anarchism represents one of the first forms of opportunism and all subsequent degenerations arise from the same old demands for ‘freedom’ and ‘self-sufficiencies’ of various sorts, whereas orthodox Marxists have always stuck strictly to centralism. Autonomism is the negation of the Party. Opportunism doesn’t vary its positions either.

For its part the General Council, which had demonstrated the prime importance of a single centre of global revolutionary strategy with its Addresses on Paris Commune, rejected the claims of the autonomists and defended the irrevocable concept of organisational centralism, a cardinal point of our revolutionary programme.

Following the Congress at Saint-Imier the Italian internationalists held their own national congress, at which they reasserted the line of strict anarchist intransigence and made a total break with the General Council in London. It was resolved that each federation, section, group and individual would be completely free as regards political activity and the formulation of its own particular programme. To sum up, each of them was free to carry out ‘its own’ revolution, and, if that was the political programme of the anarchist movement, we have to recognise that it proved to be very effective, in producing complete anarchy.

The year 1873 was marked by shortages and a deep economic crisis. Impelled by hunger there were numerous strikes and popular revolts. All this represented very fertile terrain for revolutionary propaganda. The police, for their part, launched a campaign of anti-proletarian persecution, which included making indiscriminate arrests on a massive scale with a view to breaking up subversive organisations, or those deemed to be such, and the prohibition and active prevention of meetings. But the persecution didn’t succeed in putting a break on the activity of the anarchist movement led by three indefatigable militants: Carlo Cafiero, Andrea Costa and Enrico Malatesta. One Congress followed another and a succession of provincial federations arose. Not only were the police powerless to eradicate the ‘weed’ of internationalism, but they were unable to limit its spread and reproduction.

Over the same period there began the anarchist conspiratorial activity in what must be considered the centre of international irradiation of the libertarian revolution: Bakunin’s famous villa in Switzerland.

1874, in the mind of the Italian agitators, would be the year of the great anarchist revolution which, once it had broken out in Italy, would ignite the whole of Europe. The Italian internationalists assured Bakunin that 10 federations had been organised for several months and were just waiting for the word to take action. These were Piedmont, Lombardy, the Veneto, Romagna, Liguria, Tuscany, the Marches and Umbria, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia. Now was the time to pass ‘from words to action’: the ‘propaganda of the deed’.

This slogan proved more than enough to differentiate Marxism from anarchism, and from all future forms of revisionism yet to come. It isn’t theory (i.e. the party) that should guide practical action; on the contrary, theory must come afterwards, its spontaneous birth determined by action, by ‘deeds’; therefore the lack of need for, indeed the noxiousness of, the party.

A consequence of this approach was that the Italian Federation ceased almost all public acts, either through newspapers or poster campaigns or by any other means, and concentrated all its energy in conspiratorial activity.

By the spring of 1874 the economic situation had got even worse and food riots were spreading through Italy. The moment was deemed ripe for the revolutionary insurrection. Andrea Costa would secretly return to Rome from Switzerland to synchronise the activities of the various revolutionary groups in preparation for the insurrection. Meanwhile, Malatesta went into action in Puglia, Calabria and Sicily.

The revolutionary action was to start in Bologna, with the insurrection fixed for 8 August. Bakunin wanted to be present at the victory of ‘his’ revolution and, arriving in Bologna under an assumed name, he met the same evening to settle the final details with Costa, who had just returned from a long organisational tour.

In spite of the fact that anarchist activity was supposed to be based on conspiracy and maximum secrecy, the police knew everything about the preparations, down to the smallest detail.

What was to have been the great Italian revolution turned into a spectacular failure. In brief: on the night of August 7-8, a hundred conspirators, mostly unarmed, headed out from Imola towards Bologna. They were intercepted and 43 of them were immediately arrested, and the rest over the following days. Elsewhere in Italy absolutely nothing happened. On 12 August a priest, freshly shaved and wearing dark glasses, limping, entered the station, with a cane in one hand and basket of eggs in the other. It was Bakunin fleeing Bologna. Thus ended the anarchists’ first revolutionary dream.

The Bologna trial of 1876 against Andrea Costa and 78 other anarchists for the much awaited 1874 insurrection concluded with their sensational acquittal and with popular demonstrations on their release from prison. In less than a month many of the anarchist sections closed down by the police had reformed and were already capable of calling a regional conference in Bologna on 16 July.

But by this time the Romagna socialists had already begun to detach themselves from anarchist ideology. While the congress would reaffirm its faith in the ‘ideas professed by Michael Bakunin’, it also agreed to consider the general statutes of the International as an integral part of its programme and the ‘terrain on which the workers of all countries can meet’. What is more, it indicated that it was going to form the ‘great revolutionary socialist party’.

Meanwhile thanks to la Plebe, the sole Italian socialist newspaper which still supported the General Council in London, the Lombard Federation of the International Workingmen’s Association was formed. On 1 July 1876 the Federation issued a manifesto in which it clearly distanced itself from insurrectional conspiracies which ‘can only serve as a pretext for an implacable repression’. It ended up by calling for a ‘great Italian Labour Party’ as the foundation for ‘a powerful International Federation’.

Criticism of the anarchist approach and of ‘ill-advised insurrections’ also came from Palermo: ‘ours is not a banner of fruitless impromptu agitations, nor an emblem of the impatience of individuals, it is the banner of the proletariat, not of any faction or clique’ (Il Povero, 25 October 1876).

If the audacious participants of Florence-Tosi National Congress of the Italian Federation in 1876, held in the woods and in the pouring rain, would reaffirm their strict anarchist faith, the Congress of the Federation of Alta-Italia, held in mid-February 1877, would make a clear break with the anarchist movement. The congress declared allegiance to the Statutes of the International and, even if it didn’t transform itself into a party, it did declare that the necessity for it and its class-based character. Furthermore it declared that trade union organisation was the remedy both for impotent mutual aid and for ‘revolutionary romanticism’.

Engels, who had always followed events in Italy with great interest, was enthusiastic about what emerged from the assembly: ‘Finally in Italy as well the socialist movement has been placed on firm ground and promises a rapid and victorious development’. He highlighted how the congress had proposed ‘with the maximum precision three points which are decisive for the Italian movement: 1/ that in order to ensure the movement’s success every possible means must be employed, therefore including the political; 2/ that socialist workers must form a socialist party, a party which isn’t dependent on any other political or religious party; 3/ that the Federation of Alta Italia […] on the basis of the Statutes of the International, considers itself a member of that great organisation […]. Thus, political struggle, organisation of a political party and a break with the anarchists’.

If by now the current headed by Andrea Costa repudiated conspiratorial practices, another current, led by Cafiero, kept his anarchist faith and continued to propose the insurrectional movement as the only possible strategy. Despite the failure of the plot in 1874, Cafiero and his followers set about organising another action, which this time would be centred in the mountains of the South of Italy. But on this occasion as well the police knew, down to the smallest detail, what was being planned by the Banda del Matese, as it came to be known. And this second bizarre experiment in guerrilla warfare was also extremely brief. In the space of a few days the troops surrounded the anarchists who, half dead from cold and hunger, were arrested without a shot being fired.

The only positive aspect of this insurrectional bid was that Cafiero, during his 15 months of incarceration, commenced his famous summary of Capital, which was highly regarded by Marx himself.

But the so-called ‘San Lupo Movement’ gave the government the pretext they needed to unleash a wave of violent repression against everyone who gave off even the faintest whiff of socialism. All of the International Association’s federations, sections, clubs and groups were dissolved, its offices closed and anything found there sequestered. Searches and arrests were carried out on a massive scale throughout the whole of the peninsula. In many places the army occupied towns and villages and bivouacked in the piazzas. A series of trials took place in different regions of Italy: in Florence one life sentence was imposed, two were condemned to 20 years and four to 9 years in prison.

In the trial that opened in Bologna on 9 November 1879, among the defendants there was an outstanding individual who would take on a very important role in Italian socialism over the ensuing years. This was Anna Kulisciov, whose level of political maturity even then can be gauged from these statements by her made in the course of her cross-examination: ‘revolutions cannot be made by the internationalists at their convenience, because it isn’t within the power of individuals either to make them or to provoke them; it is the people that make them: therefore revolt by means of armed bands is not appropriate […] Socialists must take part in popular movements, as in every other manifestation of popular life, in order to direct them, but they cannot create them themselves […] Socialism must be ready to take over the leadership of the movement, transforming the instincts, the sentiments that are latent amongst the people, into socialist forces’.

On the initiative of Andrea Costa, who by now had set down in the Marxist camp, on the 30 April 1881 in Imola the first Avanti! Weekly Socialist Periodical appeared; the significance of the choice of name being that it is a direct translation of the German social-democratic newspaper, Vorwärts.

A few months later a clandestine congress took place in Rimini attended by around fifty delegates representing clubs and sections from the Romagna and the Marches: from this the Revolutionary Socialist Party of the Romagna would be born, first stage in the formation of the Italian revolutionary socialist Party. To the new party, which made a clear break with anarchism, goes the merit of having introduced into the Italian socialist movement the concept of the necessity for the class dictatorship in order to ‘triumph over the resistance of the enemy and to install the new social order’.

Notwithstanding the anarchists’ ferocious polemics against the ‘traitors’, soon workers organisations from all over Italy, including from the countryside, would join the P.S.R. The rural proletariat had never been organised, or called to unite in struggle with other workers, until then.

In 1882 the Italian parliament passed an electoral reform which conceded the right to vote to males who could read and write: 6.9% of the population. The government knew that the majority of the population was hostile to the monarchist state, that the proletariat was expressing a firm revolutionary will and that universal suffrage would allow the revolutionary parties to be strongly represented in parliament.

The P.S.R. immediately declared that it would present protest candidates to exploit the propaganda opportunities offered by the electoral meetings and explain that the use of the electoral campaign didn’t mean the revolutionary perspective had been abandoned. In Milan as well the Labour Club (Circolo Operaio), which tended to attract the city’s more educated and advanced proletarians, had created an electoral division. There were thus two declaredly class parties which took part in the 1882 electoral campaign. The electoral programmes they put forward didn’t differ much from those of radical democracy apart from the call for freedom to strike and the use of the strike as a weapon to defend workers’ rights.

The new democratic laws didn’t prevent the increasingly violent police repression that the left bourgeois governments had unleashed against the proletarian parties and organisations: newspapers regularly sequestrated, meetings broken up both by official means and by the use of arms; socialists arrested and subjected to long periods of preventive detention while awaiting trial.

But despite all the persecution it was subjected to, the P.S.R. continued to grow. By 1884 it had sections in various parts of Italy so the question of a change of name was raised at the Party’s Third Congress on July 20 1884 where, by acclamation, the new name of Partito Socialista Rivoluzionario Italiano was decided upon.

Meanwhile in Milan, at the beginning of 1885, the Partito Operaio Italiano was resurrected and in April and May it would hold its first congress.

HISTORY OF EGYPT

The exciting and at the same time tragic events which have shaken Egypt over the last couple of years have prompted us to look a lot more closely at this country, which is certainly the most important in North Africa, not just because of its position as guardian of the Suez Canal but because of its population, which is now approaching 90 million.

Our study drew on an excellent party work entitled ‘Productive Base and Class Struggle in Egypt’, which was published in our newspaper in the August 1977 to April 1978 editions and is also available on our website. This work covered the capitalist development of the Egyptian economy, both industrial and rural. It highlighted the bourgeois nature of the coup d’état by the young officers headed by Nasser and the essentially anti-proletarian nature of the new regime. It described the limitations of the agrarian reform promulgated in 1958 and the worsening of working and living conditions for the city and rural proletariat that occurred in the seventies and the following years under the impulse of capital’s crisis. The study concluded by examining some notable struggles in which the Egyptian proletariat had engaged and predicted a period of reorganisation.

The current work brought us up-to-date by examining Egyptian economy and society over the last thirty years, with particular attention paid to the events of the last two, which saw a sharp increase in the number of strikes for higher wages and improved conditions along with robust street demonstrations against the government.

The birth of a number of combative independent trade unions, the fall of ‘the pharaoh’ Mubarak, the army taking power, the electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood Party and the rapid decline in its credibility, these are the main events of the past few months.

The situation is also critical because the country’s finances are in a total mess. For the International Monetary Fund to agree to new loans, it wants reforms and guarantees. In the current social situation these are impossible because they would only heighten the social tension which is already at breaking point.

There seems no way out for the bourgeoisie, which nevertheless knows it can still count on the army to defend its power. The proletariat must therefore continue its struggle to preserve and extend its organisation on the trade union level, gaining the awareness that in order to free itself from bourgeois oppression it will have to reconnect with the invariant programme of international revolutionary communism.

THE REARMING OF THE STATES

An article in Il Sole 24 Ore of 9 July highlighted that the White Book on Defence, published by the Japanese government last June, no longer employs its habitual neutral tone and has no qualms about stating that ‘China represents a threat and is violating international law’; and that Japan needs to increase its military expenditure and change its strategy by pressing forward, this year, with the creation of a marine infantry corps with enhanced amphibious capacity. What is more, the White Book applauds the fact that, after 11 years of stalemate, the first increase in military expenditure has been launched, ‘against a backdrop of growing dangers to national security’.

And this is just one of many indications that underline what is emerging from the analysis of world military expenditure on the basis of the data (updated to December 2012) that was circulated by SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) in early April 2013.

The initial fact highlighted by the speaker is that between 2011 and 2012 global military expenditure, at US$ 1,753 billion, fell for the first time since 1998, in real terms by 0.5%. In 2011 as well global expenditure had stayed at more or less at the same level as 2010.

But it is not of course ethical motivations of a pacifist variety that lie behind this stagnation, rather the explanation is to be sought in the world crisis of over-production, which has forced many of the big imperialist states, above all the United States of America and the European powers, to try and reduce their military budgets along with all the other expenditure for which the State is responsible (health, education, welfare, etc.)

It isn’t the same everywhere however: while on both sides of the Atlantic expenditure is tending to fall, elsewhere, and in particular around the Pacific, it is going up instead, and very rapidly.

The rapid growth of the military power of China is of concern not only to the neighbouring states (in particular, Japan) but to the United States too, which has openly demonstrated its wish to increase its military presence in the region, posing as the defender of the status quo.

And Russia has also been moving in this direction, making no attempt to conceal its nostalgia for the glory days of the ‘Soviet’ empire.

In Latin America, central Asia, Africa and Australia as well, military expenditure is on the rise.

The stagnation in global military expenditure between 2012-13 doesn’t mean that the various States have renounced arming themselves in a principled march towards ‘peaceful co-existence’; it means on the contrary that the economic and social crisis is causing rapid changes in the balance of forces between states and is exacerbating competition between them, preparing the way to a new world war. It is up to the proletariat, organised as a class to defend its interests, to foil these catastrophic designs affecting the whole of humanity by preparing for an international class war against the bourgeois enemy.

TOWARDS A STUDY OF INDIAN CAPITALISM

The comrade presented an initial report on India, part of an ongoing study which will look firstly at its history from its origins in the ancient Indus civilisation up to present-day independence: from primitive communism to the Asiatic mode of production, from feudalism to capitalism. We will look closely at the conquest of India by Britain, the rise of nationalist movements and the birth of the modern proletariat, taking into consideration the verdicts of Marx and Engels in their writings and correspondence, and the conclusions reached by our current over the years. The guiding principle framing our study of Indian capitalism will be that production and the exchange of products are the basis of every social order in every historical period.

Like all of our work, it isn’t intended to be simply an intellectual or historiographical essay but rather a weapon in the revolutionary struggle, useful to the party. One of the main aims of this work is to draw lessons from the counter-revolution, recognising and unmasking the faithful allies of all-powerful Capital, namely the false workers’ parties and the regime’s unions.

The Indian Republic, which came into being on 26 January 1950 with the implementation of its Constitution, is showing itself to be ambitious in the international theatre, sure of its place in the dynamics of world capitalism, and wanting to increase its weight both at the diplomatic and on the economic and military levels. Despite its religious, ethnic and caste legacy, this enormous country is a shining example of how capitalism is unequivocally international in character and everywhere dictates its own rules, its own morality. As well as the one path to follow: the pursuit of profit.

In the report the comrade gave an initial survey of the present consistency of the modern Indian state, packed with contradictions both on the level of relations between the classes and between the various ethnic groups of which it is composed.

India is a huge country in southern Asia, subdivided into the Indian subcontinent and the Iranian plateau. The Indian subcontinent is separated from the rest of the continent by mighty natural obstacles, much more so than those which separate Europe from Asia. To the north there extends the powerful mountain chain of the Himalayas, beyond which there is the Tibetan plateau and the boundless expanse of the Gobi desert, natural obstacles that have made communication between India and China difficult. In the East too, the jungles, hills and the large and numerous rivers flowing into the Gulf of Bengal establish formidable natural barriers, in particular to armies, the only historic exception being the Japanese army in 1943. The western side, on the other hand, is easily accessible and over the course of the centuries this has allowed intense commercial traffic and access to armies and entire peoples.

Beyond these barriers the Indian sub-continent is divided into two main zones: the North, formed by the Indus-Ganges Valley and the Thar desert and the centre-south formed by the Deccan peninsular.

For a number of years now India has been a member of BRICS, an acronym referring to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, all characterised by growing economies. India is also one of the largest countries in the world in terms of geographical area and with more than 1,200 million inhabitants it has the second largest population, half of whom are under 25 years old.

In numerical terms India’s military strength is impressive. Around 3% of its GNP is dedicated to defence. Various public enterprises produce the armaments that equip the three forces. The main naval shipyards are in Mumbai and Calcutta. India has been a nuclear power since 1974 and presently has between 60 and 90 nuclear warheads for fighter-bombers and missiles. The army is composed of more than 1,200,000 men, but some of its weaponry is dated. The air force, on the other hand, is equipped with effective fighter planes such as the MiG 29 and the SU 30 acquired from Russia. The Indian navy, with more than 200 ships, is amongst the biggest in the world.

India possesses the second largest labour force in the world with more than 500 million wage earners, 60% of whom are employed in the agricultural sector and the industries linked to it, 28% in the service sector and 12% in the industrial sector proper.

The Country’s industrial weight on the world scene is still weak. If we look at its production of electricity we may estimate this as around 4% of the world total, as opposed to 27% for the USA, 16.5% for China, 12.5% for the whole of Europe, 5.7% for Japan and 5.1% for Russia. The major industries are active in the automobile sector, cement, chemical products, electronic consumer goods, food processing, machinery, mining, oil, pharmaceutical products, steel and textiles. The most important industries are located in Udaipur, Gujarat, and, on the border with Bangladesh, Jamshedpur and the region of Damodar, to the extent that the latter area is considered the Indian Ruhr. The computer industry, concentrated between Hyderabad and Bangalore, dubbed the Indian Silicon Valley, is considered a lynchpin of the economy: many western firms have moved their data processing centres here: Microsoft, General Motors, British Airways, Deutsche Bank and in part Ericsson, among others. The production of jute, wool and silk yarn and cloth are also important.

India will soon become the fourth largest consumer of energy in the world, after the United States, China and Japan. Currently the production of electricity, mainly thermal in origin, is not enough, and interruptions to the supply are hitting a large part of the industrial sector. India is dependent on oil for 33% of its needs and imports more than 70% of it. Its capacity to refine oil is still limited.

The weakness of its infrastructure, in terms of roads, railways, ports and airports is still very much in evidence and proving to be a severe handicap. The port of Nava Sheva, near Mumbai, which is comparable to the big American ports in terms of container throughput, remains an exception.

The growth in industrial production over the past few years reflects the global crisis and is in clear decline, falling from 8.2% in 2010 to 2.9% in 2011 and 0.6% in 2012.

Despite the definitive entry of India into the leading circles of global capitalism, a quarter of the population is still below the poverty line, that is, survives on less than US$ 0.40 per day.

TRADE UNION ACTIVITY

The reports on trade union activity at the general meetings gave detailed accounts of workers’ struggles in Italy and of what is happening in the rank-and-file trade unions and what we refer to as the ‘regime unions’ (that is, those unions who have come to a permanent accommodation with the capitalist regime and have become more or less incorporated into it) in terms of their relations with the class, the bosses and the State.

The topics covered in detail were:

1.The general strike of rank-and-file trade unionism on 22 June, 2012 was prompted by the so-called ‘reform of the labour market’, which is the latest in a series of attacks on the working class in Italy driven forward by the current bourgeois government in response to the State’s worsening financial problems.

That strike, as we have already remarked upon in our Italian press, had one positive aspect: it was supported by almost all the rank-and-file unions (with the exception of Confederazione Cobas). What this signalled, after a two-year gap, was a return to united action on the part of rank-and-file trade unionism.

But the extreme delay in finally getting to the point of going on strike has revealed the grave uncertainties which beset rank-and-file unionism. And it is precisely around unity of class action that the current leaders of rank-and-file trade unionism are hesitant, fearing, wrongly, that this would prevent the workers from clearly differentiating between the base unions and the regime unions. As a result base trade unionism has missed another fairly easy opportunity both to bolster its still relatively small influence over the working class, and to weaken that of flag-waving tricolore trade unionism.

2. That the bourgeoisie is aiming to destroy national contracts is well known. The bosses want to decide wages and working conditions on a firm by firm basis, all the better to divide the workers, get them to compete amongst themselves, lower their wages and slow down the increasingly irresistible fall in the rate of profit.

Against this attack, very important in class terms, the regime trade unions, as ever, have failed to organise; in order to protect their function as intermediaries between the working class and the bosses, a role guaranteed by the industry heads as a useful means of preventing industrial strife, they are offering instead to co-manage the attack, by making it more gradual.

True to itself, not out of choice but of necessity, the metal workers union, the FIOM, is suffering continuous defeats, and worse still, so are the workers. During the big demonstration on 15 October, 2010, with tens of thousands of workers assembled in the piazza, the left inside the FIOM hoped the union might assume leadership of the great force they had managed to muster and take charge of the struggle; but their illusions were to be shattered once again.

The CGIL would tacitly prop up the FIOM’s inertia by failing to organise any supporting actions either for the metal workers or for FIAT workers.

3. The European ‘strike’ on 14 November, 2012 was arranged from on high, that is, by the European Confederation of Trade Unions, with the calling of a European day of mobilisation against so-called austerity. The Confederation is nothing more than a representative office for the main regime trade unions in Europe and is an organisation that has no contact with the working class. In Italy the CGIL, CISL and UIL (the regime’s main federations) are all members. The content of the platform around which this organisation was calling for mobilisation were those of regime trade unionism, that is, rules to be imposed on capitalism impossible of application or useless in terms of workers’ defence, and supposedly to be obtained by means of a ‘social pact’, that is with social peace and negotiation and without a struggle.

In several countries the mobilisation was reduced to small pickets, but in Greece, Spain and Portugal many trade unions announced their participation by calling for a general strike. Thus despite the bourgeois ideology of the European Confederation of Trade Unions, the day would see the workers going out on strike in a few European countries at the same time, in an intimation of the international union of the working class.

In Italy the Confederazione Cobas was the first to join the mobilisation, by proclaiming a general strike for the entire day, then the CGIL declared a strike of just four hours. The other base unions, USB (Unione Sindacale di Base) and CUB (Confederazione Unitaria di Base), once again betrayed the principle of workers’ united action, stating as justification that the strike platform was against the workers’ true interests.

They fail to understand, or claim not to understand, that during a strike the stronger the workers feel the more momentum they acquire to sweep aside the false objectives and methods of regime trade unionism and take up the watchwords calling for a struggle to defend their real interests. It is for this reason that the CGIL not only takes strike action less and less often, but even when it does, it makes every effort to make them as inoffensive as possible. USB and CUB – but also Cobas which on 14 November organised separate demonstrations – are dividing the strikes and weakening them because they are depriving the demonstrations organised by the CGIL of the most combative workers, who are the members of the base unions, and thus they are helping to make these actions even more bland and controllable, and thereby supporting the regime unions.

In the USB, the militants of our party who are members of that union drew up and distributed an ‘Appeal to the Leading Organs of the USB to join the European General Strike’. This is analogous to our previous interventions in three other strikes over the last year and half, in which we didn’t address the leadership but rather the workers, union militants and union members, setting out a correct trade union line based on long-term working class interests.

4. The metal workers national contract. In October 2009, after having rescinded this unitary contract, FIM and UILM (FIM is the metalworkers union linked to the CISL; and UILM the one linked to the UIL) signed a separate three-year contract with the bosses, which therefore expired at the end of 2012.

In defence of the unitary contract the FIOM (linked to the CGIL) organised two general strikes, one on 16 November, which later merged with the European general strike on 14 November, and the other on 5 December. Significantly, while the FIOM leader Landini was speaking from the podium in Milan during the last strike, the FIM, UIL and UGLM (the metalworkers union linked to the neo-fascist party) were signing a new national contract on behalf of the metalworkers even worse than the last one, marking a decisive victory for the employers in their battle against the national contract.

FIOM’s reply was emblematic: faced with Capital’s objective of dividing the proletarian class by insisting on different contracts at the company level, the FIOM launched its watchword of struggling, divided, factory by factory, against the application of the new contract. This effectively means opposing the bosses by adopting their objectives!

Regime trade unionism since the Second World War, and unfortunately successfully at that, has played a game of confusing the workers with fake ‘splits’ and rediscovered ‘unity’. The FIOM says it prioritises the objective of the joint contract which, in its words, would be a guarantee against worse contracts and from the dismantling of the national contract as a whole. But the history of trade unionism shows otherwise. It isn’t the joint signatures of FIM, FIOM and UILM which guarantee contracts favourable to the workers, but workers’ struggle. If FIOM was a class union, a ‘good contract’ wouldn’t be a ‘joint’ one but one which corresponded to a separate platform of its own imposed on the bosses, and also on the FIM and UILM, by means of a genuine strike movement. Such an approach is explicitly ruled out by the FIOM, revealing it to be actually the left-wing of regime trade unionism.

The FIOM’s third strategy, that of the strike, has served to keep up its image as a combative trade union. The strikes it has announced have been small, inoffensive and divided between general actions and mobilisation on a factory by factory basis, thereby debasing the fundamental weapon of workers’ struggle by reducing it to mere impotent manifestations of opinion.

5. Trade union democracy and the agreement on representation. On 31 May, 2013, the employers’ federation, Confindustria, and CGIL, CISL and UIL signed the ‘memorandum of understanding’ on ‘representation’. The gist of the accord is to put a new barrier in the way of the rebirth of the class union by reinforcing the control of the regime unions over the workforce.

This result has been obtained by the bosses and regime unions in the name of trade union democracy. This is the banner of all the currents, whether political or trade union, in the CGIL or in rank-and-file trade unionism, which say they want to fight for the rebirth of the class trade union. Our party alone, distinct from all others, warns the workers against making trade union democracy into an objective of their own, as though it were a magic wand able to protect them from every defeat, from every betrayal and degeneration by the trade union organisation.

The key factor which distinguishes pro-employer unions from authentic proletarian trade unions is the class struggle. The call for democracy is insidious through its very ambiguity; indeed it is a common thread running through the entire range of trade union organisations, from the fascists of the UGL through to the rank-and-file unions.

Within the trade union movement democracy can sometimes be a useful method, a mechanism which enables decisions to be made, but this is different from observing democracy as an abstract principle. As a method it is necessary because the class union, due to the fact that it organises on the basis of a social condition – that of the modern wage-earner – has within it a plurality of trade union and political lines that have to both coexist and confront one another.

The Communist Party, on the other hand, which if not degenerated is based on complete theoretical and programmatic homogeneity, as well as on a well-tested definition of and sharing of tactical instruments, isn’t divided into sub-parties, currents and factions, and therefore it has no further need of resorting to the democratic mechanism. Its centralism isn’t so much hierarchical and based on discipline as it is organic, that is, self-evident, spontaneous and natural. It is a result acquired through historical evolution, like the erect posture of the human animal. As it will be in the future communist society.

In capitalist society, divided into classes with material conditions and interests which are opposed and irreconcilable, democracy is instead an infamous fraud, and the best weapon the dominant class has to mask its political dictatorship and to guarantee its economic exploitation of the proletariat.

The trade union organisation constantly runs the risk of being ensnared in the bourgeois regime’s network of opportunist and reformist currents within the trade union movement. Its best defence against this happening, its best way of remaining faithful to the working class, is not by being rigorously democratic in the way it functions but by following a correct trade union policy, which is the one proposed by the communists. When workers’ organisations for economic struggle adopt bourgeois policies they inevitably end up as instruments of the capitalist regime, whether internal democracy is formally observed or not. The battle fought by militant communists within trade unions to get them to adopt the party’s trade union policy will, if successful, be the best guarantee against their degeneration.

The Communist Party, after it has brought the trade unions under its control, both before and after it takes power, will practice with them a policy that ensures them unity of movement and which keeps them open to all workers, of whatever ideological persuasion. And it is certainly not the case, in pursuit of this wise and prudent course, that the leadership will feel obliged to rigidly observe the canons of electoral majority rule.

Today, with the ‘representation reforms’ on the agenda, all of the trade union currents which make trade union democracy the keystone of their strategy against regime trade unionism have given the CGIL, CISL, UIL and UGL a magnificent Trojan Horse, with which these fake trade unions can obtain a new victory and bolster their defences.

As for the bosses, they remain free to negotiate with whomsoever they choose. Big business can continue to ignore the rank-and-file unions – until the latter are able to muster the forces of labour to the point that they can force the bosses to the negotiating table by means of strikes. When it suits big business, as was the case with FIAT and the metalworkers, it can fall back on the FIOM, playing on the false opposition between the regime unions.

These new obstacles erected to defend regime trade unionism against the future resurgence of class-based trade unions will certainly have their effect, but only for as long as the workers’ impulse to struggle remains weak: when the energy building up inside the class, because of worsening conditions, reaches a critical level it will certainly ignore all these barriers. Indeed, by setting up a system of rules increasingly designed to exclude the workers’ defensive organisations, the bosses and the regime unions might actually stoke up the class struggle, by preventing the class from getting entangled in the legalistic formalities of their ‘representation’. Workers should devote their energies to getting organised and engaging in strike action, not to trying to win votes, because, at the company level as much as at the trade and national level, it will be by the power of strike action, not ‘official’ votes, which will force the bosses to negotiate with the new class-based trade union organisations of the future.

Whilst the new trade union regulations around representation in the workplace may present an obstacle to the rank-and-file unions and to any new class organisation to begin with, in the end it will favour the correct path towards a territorial organisation of the workers, which, like the glorious Chambers of Labour at the start of the 20^th century, break down the barriers in the workplace, which spell death to class struggle, and bring workers together as a class.

It will be the development of the class struggle in defence of the workers’ basic standard of living, around the keystone of defending pay, which will overturn this new barrier and render the agreement unserviceable and useless to the bosses themselves.

6. At the following meeting the speaker described the mechanisms implemented by the State, bosses and FIOM to split the struggle of the Fincantieri workers in the shipyards of Marghera, who are threatened with dismissal.

On the basis of these non-classist collaborationist trade unionist mechanisms, FIOM and the CGIL have worked to isolate and undermine its most combative delegates. The agreement reached with FIOM, little better than the one signed by FIM and UILM, signals a further regression in working conditions and bears no correspondence to the forces that were deployed during the struggle. It is no surprise that in the referendum on the agreement that took place on 29 August, in which around 250 workers didn’t vote because on leave, 202 were against and 228 for.

The FIOM delegates, who had made a name for themselves in the Rappresentanza Sindacale Unitaria elections (RSU: a group of at least three workers elected by all workers and usually consisting of union members, but which might include non-members) with their intransigent rejection of the content of the new agreement, and who on this basis had won the confidence of the most combative workers, have thus weakened this relationship and above all the combativity of the workers. As in every struggle, what counts is not the contingent result, whether positive or negative, but rather the greater degree of power, unity and workers’ confidence that emerges from it.

This latest episode in the Fincantieri affair, along with everything else that has happened up to now, confirms the need for workers, or the most combative workers anyway, to organise outside and against the FIOM and outside the CGIL as a whole, representing as they do the greatest obstacle to achieving a unification of wage-earners which goes beyond the boundaries of shipyard and company.

When the workers launch a struggle, at Fincantieri in Marghera, as elsewhere, they must first try to establish contact with other workers, in neighbouring firms, among the contractors within the shipyard, in other departments of the same firm, in order to establish permanent organisations with which to fight a joint battle; marking a return to the tried and tested methods of reciprocal picketing of each other’s firms with a view to common strike action. Until this course of action is taken we cannot really talk of a reconstituted working-class trade union.