A condensation of the reports made at general meetings

COURSE OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS [GR109 to 113]

At each meeting we listen to an update on the progress of the world economic crisis, with detailed graphs and tables presented to illustrate the various statistical series which we keep meticulously up-to-date, and which form a sound basis for the presenter’s commentaries and explanations. Phenomena which are studied include production, foreign trade, national and private debt, and mainly relate to the United States, Germany, Japan, France, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Brazil, Greece, Portugal and Spain. In addition the past and recent history of gold production and gold prices was covered.

We have therefore been able to establish that a contemporaneous wave of the same shape and form can be used to describe the current crisis in all of the countries under consideration. The preceding anti-node occurred in the winter and spring of 2009. The recession was everywhere extremely serious, ranging from a -40% annual drop in Japan to a decline of between a quarter and a third in Germany, Italy, South Korea; -22% in France; and around -14% in the USA, Great Britain, Russia and Portugal.

There were already signs of recovery by the spring-summer of 2010 but the growth was sluggish and certainly didn’t compensate for the crash of the previous year.

There is then a progressive slowdown of growth expressed in annual rates. This is more marked in Germany, Italy and Spain but it affects most countries, with the exception of China.

But if we measure the 2010 recovery not in relation to the previous year, but to the maximum previously achieved by each country, as it is logical to do, we are obliged to point out that the void provoked by the crisis of 2009 hasn’t been filled by anybody, Germany excluded. The USA are still down by -5.4% compared with their 2007 peak, and France by -8.6%.

The present slump in production was also compared with the previous one in 1975, by superimposing the curves of industrial production for the major capitalisms over the two periods.

1974-1975 saw the end of what capitalism’s various propagandists like to call “the glorious thirty”, that is, the period founded on the massive destruction and massacres of the Second World War, which aone allowed capitalism to escape the consequences of the 1929 crisis and to spin out another long cycle of sustained accumulation. Meanwhile there has been growth in the sectors of production newly invaded by capital, with all those still remaining at the petty bourgeois stage (in agriculture, the crafts, in small businesses, etc.) being eliminated. Thus the contradictions typical of capitalism – the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the overproduction of commodities – have paved the way for new more powerful crises.

Over the world today is hovering the spectre of a gigantic crisis of over-production, which is dragging it into an endless spiral of deflation of prices and massive depreciation of capital. Capital has already experienced this in the past, for example in 1848 and 1929, two dates that still cause the bourgeoisie to break out in a sweat.

To avoid this the bourgeoisie in the various industrialised countries has no option but to squeeze the proletariat ever harder, in order to increase the rate of surplus value in the hope of offsetting the fall in the rate of profit. The economic and social measures adopted by the various States (dismantling of welfare systems, reduction of wages, job insecurity) and by the bosses (transference of production to where labour costs less and a dramatic increase in work-loads) cannot eliminate the spectre of the crisis but only temporarily postpone it.

In contrast to the first great global crisis of over-production, the one in 1929, in the post Second World War period a sudden precipitous deflation and decline in production didn’t happen, but rather a succession of recessions, 4 or 5 depending on the country. Today several factors appear to indicate that this time the world bourgeoisie has played its last card and the moment is approaching when it can no longer avoid the much feared deflation.

So, we are heading into a crisis of 1929 like proportions. The various great industrial centres, China included, have only narrowly avoided such a crisis, and that has only been thanks to the intervention of the various States and their central banks, which have injected thousands of billions of dollars into the economy to save the banks and bolster production. Today some States, such as Greece and Ireland, are already on the brink of bankruptcy; others like Portugal and Spain are not far off it. All of them are making the proletariat foot the bill in the forme of austerity measures. These measures will not even prevent the major States, like France, Japan and the USA, from going bankrupt. All they can do is slightly reduce the rate at which debt is increasing, but they can’t reverse it.

From 1973 onwards the average duration of the cycles of growth and crisis has been between 7 to 10 years. If world capitalism manages to emerge from the present crisis, the next maximum is due between 2014-17. And this time no State will be able to repeat what it has done because by then, whatever austerity measures they might have taken, they will be totally submerged in debt. And, what is worse, China will no longer be in a condition to acquire European and American debt. The American and European States will then be forced to declare themselves bankrupt, or be forced into a new war.

Our hypothesis is that the impending world crisis which we are expecting to happen, that is, one compounded by deflation, will in the meantime have already hit world capitalism, Russia and China included. Despite the massive injections of cash by the central banks, despite the Keynesian measures aimed at kick-starting industry through endless public works, or with so-called ‘quantitative easing’ in which the States dole out hundreds of billions of dollars, the result has been failure.

Even the Chinese State has been forced to use the same recipes as the Western bourgeoisies to postpone a deflationary crisis: a massive injection of liquidity at extremely low rates of interest; State intervention to support industry, etc., and the only difference is the Central Bank and the Chinese State are not forced to take out onerous loans like they are in the West. But the crisis will come, all the prerequisites are there: rise in the price of raw materials and agricultural products; thousands of houses unsold; inexorable rise in the rates of interest. It could also happen that the great crisis happens earlier than expected and is triggered by China. And when the crisis comes knocking at China’s door it will no longer be able to prop up the American debt by buying its treasury bonds. Then the American State will be forced to declare itself bankrupt. Or it will be forced to go to war.

All the conditions are in place for a massive global crisis of over-production to occur simultaneously in Asia, Europe and America. It will be a crisis the destructive force of which has never before been, whose deflationist spiral will spell ruin for that foul social quagmire formed by the middle classes, and a part of the big bourgeoisie. It is the petty and big bourgeoisie who are ruined by deflation rather than the proletariat. But rather than facing ruin, the bourgeoisie, to its eternal shame, still prefers war as its way out.

Alongside these objective conditions there is also maturing of the subterranean subjective conditions. These are needed if the international communist party is to return to the social scene and for a revival of the revolutionary class struggle; which will sweep from its path every bourgeoisie, and every State.
 
 

MARXIST ECONOMIC THEORY – The 3^rd Volume of Capital [GM107 – 108 – 109 – 110]

The propaganda of every government today is obsessed with concealing the full extent of the progress of the capitalist crisis. A constant stream of news items, denials and over-optimistic data downplays the extreme gravity of the current situation, and an asphyxiating mantra about the stabilisation of the financial system and the recovery which is “just around the corner” blasts out at us from all sides.

The present degree of instability of the capitalist world, more bloated with commodities and finance than at any time since the great crash of 1929, seems to be clearly confirming our predictions about how this present phase will end. Already our school has obtained a formidable theoretical victory, if only because the crisis was triggered, and is continuing to develop, in just the way our researches led us to believe it would. Even if the bourgeois world manages to curb the crisis this time too, we can still boast of another major empirical corroboration of Marxism.

This work which we, modest followers in a long tradition of study and struggle, stubbornly insist on pursuing, has this as its aim: to verify in a rational way the validity of our historical and economic theorems in the light of the evidence.

With that end in view, we continued our rational exposition of the 5^th Section of the 3^rd Volume of Marx’s Capital, as edited by Engels.

Chapter 28, “Medium of Circulation and Capital; Views of Tooke and Fullarton”, along with Chapter 26, “Accumulation of Money-Capital. Its Influence on the Interest Rate”, develops a critique of the two bourgeois schools of political economy which were battling it out in the second half of the 19^th Century, a time characterised by a profound crisis of over-production and a bursting of the bubble – ‘financial’ bubble as it would be called today – which prompted the transformation of the Bank of England from a private into a central bank, as understood in the modern sense of the word.

The speaker described briefly the distinctive elements of the two schools, the ‘metalists’, who harked back to the previous ‘bullionist’ doctrine, and the ‘bankers’, represented at that time precisely by Tooke and Fullarton. What was called ‘Bullion’ was gold in the form of bars of various sizes. In the bullionist theory, derived from mercantilism, the wealth of a nation was set by the quantity of money and precious metals it possessed. Whenever the monetary foundation of the English State appeared inadequate, the solution proposed was to block imports and increase exports.

It is evident that, after over a century of crises, revivals and further crises, great theoretical ‘novelties’, upheavals and wars, birth and collapse of imperial powers, the various economic schools which guided bourgeois finance, economy and politics in the second half of the twentieth century can ultimately be traced back to the old debate about issuing money and its relationship to the paradigm of reference, the value of gold.

Like nowadays, the cause of upheavals in the economy and crises in the market, and ways of preventing them and possible remedies, were sought in the sphere of the circulation of money, that is to say in the outer, abstract sphere of the process of capitalist production.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Marx is studying a system based on the issuing of banknotes backed by gold; nowadays arguments for the same type of thing are back in fashion, with ultra-bourgeois theories calling for a “return” to an issue and circulation of currency backed by gold. Their arguments are certainly nothing new.

Capitalists and retailers sell on credit and their commodities are alienated before being transformed back into money and as such flow back to them. On the other hand they also acquire on credit, and therefore the value of their commodities has already been retransformed for them both into productive capital and into commodity-capital before they have actually been converted into money, before the deadline for paying for the commodities has expired and price for them has been paid. Refluxes of credit stand in for refluxes of money. This is of great importance in the process of circulation, and is something of a permanent feature even in ultra developed capitalism.

The relationship between the issue of banknotes – the modern day “quantitative easing” – and the amount of money the banks lend out becomes of supreme importance. Today it is easy: the treasury issues bonds and the Central Bank buys them, with the money it printed. Somebody will pay the debt … later on. In the good old days of finance based on gold it wasn’t so simple, or so potentially catastrophic.

In Chapter 29 Marx investigates banking capital. The underlying argument put forward here is that banking capital, that is, the amount held in capital account by the banking system, consists in large part of mere symbols of value.

Interest bearing capital takes a form such that any definite and regular monetary revenue appears as the interest on a capital, whether it actually derives from a capital or not. The actual physical, logical course by which value is generated is turned upside down and mystified in this process. The formation of such fictitious capital is called capitalization. “Any regular periodic income can be capitalized by reckoning it up, on the basis of the annual rate of interest, as the sum that a capital lent out at this interest rate would yield (…). In this way, all connection with the actual process of capital’s valorization is lost, right down to the last trace, confirming the notion that capital is automatically valorized by its own powers”.

In all countries of capitalist production, there is a tremendous amount of so-called interest bearing capital, or “moneyed capital”, that takes this form. And accumulation of money capital must be taken to mean the accumulation of these claims on future production, or the accumulation, at the market price, of the illusory capital value of these claims.

A crucial point about all capital is synthesised thus: “In so far as the rise or fall in value of these securities is independent of the movement in the value of the real capital that they represent, the wealth of a nation is just as great afterwards as before”.

The banks’ reserve funds consist of deposits, money existing as a hoard, which normally consists of paper, mere drafts on gold, which have no value of their own; the greater part of the banker’s capital is therefore purely fictitious and consists of instruments of credit, government securities and shares. The money value of this paper languishing in the banker’s vaults is fictitious and is determined differently from the value of the actual capital that it, at least partially, represents.

We have followed Marx’s investigation of banking capital in the sphere of the circulation of deposits and loans, and have seen how in the credit system everything is magically duplicated and multiplied. But the same goes also for the bank’s reserve fund, which one might expect to be solid and substantial.

With the development of interest-bearing capital and the credit system, each capital seems to duplicate itself as though in a hall of mirrors, due to the various ways in which the same capital or even the same instrument of credit appears in different forms and in different hands. The major part of this money capital is therefore entirely fictitious.
 
 

COMMUNISM AGAINST DEMOCRACY IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN ITALY [GM108 – 109 – 110]

Some preliminary remarks on democracy served as the introduction to a series of reports on the birth and rise of the labour movement in Italy up to the formation of the Socialist Party in 1892. Making ample use of quotations drawn from the classical texts of Marxism, the irreconcilable nature of communism and democracy, of collaboration and class struggle, was once again brought to the fore.

According to revolutionary Marxism the proletariat can only really be considered a class when it has acquired a political party, because only through the party can it gain consciousness of its general interests and historical aims. Class consciousness doesn’t reside in proletarians, either taken as individuals or as a statistical mass; a concept, this, which further negates the very notion of democracy, even of “proletarian democracy”.

The proletarian doesn’t enter the struggle because consciousness prompts him to take action. Quite the contrary. Material need forces him to struggle before he is aware of it. It is social struggle which opens proletarian minds to the point they can sense their own interests as class interests, allowing them to acquire “consciousness” through their link with the party.

The report then went on to discuss how the labour movement took off in Italy, how it took its first initial steps and became progressively more able to free itself from every democratic, that is inter-classist, impediment, finally arriving at the stage of the constitution of the party. The final phase in the formation of the Italian Socialist Party (1892) falls immediately after the formation of the Second International. From that point on no-one can say the Italian labour movement and its party, in terms of its political maturity, lagged behind its European brothers. But the road by which it got there was neither short nor direct, having gone through a long process whose origins take us back to when Italy didn’t yet exist as a nation and back to the years before 1848.

This is the period in which we find the first workers’ associations attempting to overcome the old organisations of a corporative type. They will go through a lively and progressive evolution which will see the old philanthropic type associations going into decline and socialist ideas starting to appear, along with, inevitably, practical class struggle.

This evolution is shaped to begin with by the struggle between the bourgeois political currents to maintain their control over the working classes: either by excluding the workers associations from politics altogether (moderate liberals) or by attempting to use them as the rank-and-file of a democratic party (Mazzinians then radicals). Then there is the battle to establish the labour movement’s political autonomy, which senses the vital necessity of freeing itself from the tutelage of the bourgeois parties.

The backward conditions in Italy meant that anarchism would represent the labour movement’s first form of rebellion against the bourgeois democracy and its State. But anarchism, which rejects the very concept of the class party, would end up rejecting the class struggle itself, and, since it even rejected any kind of organisation of its own, it would relapse into inter-classism.

The key turning point in the history of the Italian labour movement is the formation of the socialist party. Only when the class struggle has equipped itself with its own party does it declare that, more than just defending itself, it wishes to turn to emancipating itself from capital.

The essential moments in this historical process appear at the workers congresses where key decisions are sanctioned. They can be summarised in four political splits extending over four decades: 1861, the Mazzinians split from the moderates; 1871-2 the Internationalists split from the Mazzinians;1879-80, the first split of the socialists from the anarchists; 1891-92, second split of the socialists from the anarchists.

These four stages in the labour movement’s evolution towards socialism are not all of equal importance. The really decisive development happens between 1880 and 1890, when the concept of class struggle becomes firmly established. The requirements of class struggle produce profound changes in the type of organisations which the workers need to equip themselves with, determining their transformation from mutual aid societies into organisations devoted to resistance and the struggle for emancipation.

In Italy the first rudimentary forms of workers’ organisation were formed at the end of the 1840s in Piedmont and Liguria. Their formation is encouraged by the Piedmontese government, fearful of the threat of revolution.

The report shed light on the various congresses of the workers’ societies in the Kingdom of Sardinia up to the formation of the Kingdom of Italy: Asti 1853, Alexandria 1854, Genoa 1855, Vigevano 1856, Voghera 1857, Vercelli 1858, Novi 1859. Not until the 6^th Congress (1858) would issues of clear interest to workers, such as the length of the working day, dangerous working conditions and child labour, come up for discussion. At the Milan labour congress in 1860 the call for universal suffrage would be proposed.

The congress commenced its proceedings on October 26, the same day as the meeting at Teano between Garibaldi and Victor Emanuele.

Garibaldi’s expedition was enthusiastically followed and described by Engels. The Piedmontese government saw to it that the revolution failed, which under Garibaldi’s leadership had conquered Sicily, prompted an uprising in Calabria, and had no intention of stopping until it reached Rome and liberated it; a revolution which, left in the people’s hands, might not only have put the throne of the Bourbons and the Pope-King in jeopardy, but also that of the Savoy. The fear of the Piedmontese government that the social revolution would graft itself on to the national revolution was certainly not without justification, for in the South the social question had just entered an extremely acute phase.

The unification of Italy wasn’t accompanied by economic improvements for the workers; in fact from one end of the new nation to the other their situation immediately got considerably worse. This provoked a general reawakening of class antagonisms. Strikes of entire categories of workers became frequent and widespread, and were violently repressed by the government of the kingdom.

The orientation of the new workers’ societies now took on a clearly democratic and republican character, and their formation was often the result of the activity of members of the Mazzinian party. Indeed Mazzini maintained that the proletariat was a formidable instrument for obtaining the goals of the national revolution. The advanced elements of the working class weren’t deaf to such appeals to begin with, and in large measure they detached themselves from the liberals and the Catholics.

After previous attempts at the congresses in Florence (1861) and Parma (1863), the statute of the workers’ associations, the Mazzinian “Act of brotherhood”, was finally approved at the Naples congress of October 1864. But at the same congress there were already the first signs of moving beyond Mazzini’s programme, with the call for Italian workers’ associations to join together with the workers’ societies of other nations. The reference to the International Working men’s Association, which had just been formed in London, is very clear.

In August 1865 Il Proletariato, a paperwhich declared itself socialist, was published in Florence. It declared the proletariat to be a social class which was distinct from other classes and with separate interests from those of the bourgeoisie, and it carried news of the activities of the International Association. Almost contemporaneously in Naples Libertà e Giustiziacame out, straightaway declaring in its first number its wish to function as an international organ to link up the Italian associations with the London International.
 
 

THE MILITARY QUESTION [GM107 – 108 – 109 – 110]

The exposition of the chapter on the American war of Independence continued from the last meeting.

After the loss of New York and the retreat to Pennsylvania many considered independence to be a lost cause.

In London the War Office decided to take more resolute action. Their plan envisaged a contemporary attack by three columns. A first column, led by Burgoyne, would drop down from the South, descending the Hudson Valley from Canada and taking back control of New England, a second column, from Lake Ontario, would head east and link up with the first, while the third, from New York, would head up the Hudson to complete the encirclement of the American forces.

The American victory at Saratoga caused Paris to drop any of its remaining qualms about intervening in the conflict, which thus assumed a much broader significance. France in fact had been moving in this direction for some time, despite strong internal opposition which feared a second and harsher defeat than that recently suffered in the Seven Years War. Its aim was to expand into the territories to the West so it could compete with, if not the replace, England in the American market.

Spain then entered the conflict as well in order to recover territories in America and in the Mediterranean.

The American army, led by the bourgeoisie, was composed of a heterogeneous mix of classes and strata of the most varied sort: old colonists, and new ones in search of land to farm; Hessian deserters, artisans with entrepreneurial aspirations, liberated black slaves and escapees fearful of being handed back to their owners, and then there were the native Americans, often used against each other, who were trying to stop the invasion of their ancient lands. It was an agglomeration of interests and peoples that could only be held together by continuous victories.

London gave the order to abandon recently conquered Philadelphia and to concentrate the troops in New York and Newport, the base for all English operations, and to disembark the troops to the south in order to drive wedge through the United States troops, splitting them in two. The English held New York and Yorktown on the mouth of the Delaware in the South, and a few other strongholds like Charleston and Savannah.

The Americans’ preferred strategy remained guerrilla warfare. Most of their troops were concentrated in the siege of New York.

After winning an important naval battle the French fleet gained control of the seas, preventing the transfer of English troops. The war on the seas now shifted to the Caribbean.

Washington was insistent that New York should be attacked first, a course which would have drastically altered the outcome of the war, but the French commander Rochambeau wanted to attack Yorktown first, then transfer all of the troops to New York. The American assault on Yorktown was simple because they had considerably more artillery. The fall of Yorktown marked the last of the battles on land and the start of peace negotiations. The war on the seas however continued.

And yet the English home front was the decisive factor, where it was decided that continuing the war was simply too costly, given the ineffectiveness of the loyalists and the growing support for the Americans amongst its own troops; but above all it feared losing control of the seas, the oceanic highway for the transportation of its commodities.

With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States obtained complete independence. Spain recovered Florida and Minorca in the Mediterranean but had to abandon Gibraltar once and for all. France retained the possibility of continuing its expansion into the American West, but this huge economic commitment would aggravate its own domestic crisis, smoothing the way for the bourgeois revolution six years later. In the Caribbean it had Trinidad and Tobago, in Africa Senegal, and in India a few ports, important for the conquest of Indo-China.

Despite its defeat England remained the foremost sea power of the age with a huge fleet but France was definitely snapping at its heels in terms of control of maritime traffic. The Americans, who had no navy under the old colonial contracts, took to privateering and intercepting the English convoys. The English war fleets, once disengaged from America, were moved to the Indian Ocean where they continued the maritime war for control of the trade routes, mainly after the closure of some of the Dutch bases.

The report concluded with a list of initial conclusions:

1. as our school teaches, the causes of war were economic: unrestricted liberty of the bourgeoisie to produce and trade combined with the French Enlightenment, a potent mix.
2. neither of the fronts ever pushed the struggle to the bitter end, both in view of eventual peace treaties and for economic reasons. England because it was already engaged on other fronts in its immense empire; the thirteen colonies because they hadn’t yet formed themselves into a State, because it was their first military experience and because they lacked absolutely everything needed to conduct a war. Prevarication and ambiguity on the part of the Governments generated contradictory orders from the military leaders. Also, according to 18^th century custom, a few set battles and a certain level of attrition were usually enough to get treaty talks underway.
3. from a historical point of view we are at the crucial moment of the passage from the feudal to the bourgeois capitalist mode of production: although this transition had already happened in the United Kingdom it had yet to spread to continental Europe. Feudal warfare, with its rules and set piece battles, aimed to contain resources and to keep military expenditure, which was often considerable for the smaller States, as low as possible. Modern warfare, based on capitalist production, throws into its conflicts a hitherto unthinkable quantity of every type of weaponry, dictated by the requirement to produce and reproduce all of its commodities on an ever increasing scale, to realise ever greater profits.
4. on the military plane it was a battle of two asymmetric forces. The English forces were powerful, experienced, well-trained and mainly mercenaries, but they were organised, nevertheless, according to out of date precepts which were no longer suitable in the new type of conflict. The American forces were voluntary, and due to their grievous lack of resources they adopted guerrilla tactics. This asymmetry meant neither of the fronts could ever achieve a decisive victory.
5. The conflict was only brought to a close after the French and Spanish allies had balanced out the fronts which could face each other in open battle on an equal footing. Guerrilla tactics initiated the conflict, wore down the adversary and put obstacles in its path, but they couldn’t end it, as in the vast majority of similar cases.
6. Originally local, the conflict spread, drawing in other States on other fronts into a battle for control of colonies and distant markets as the outlets for European goods. For young and ambitious capitalisms, which have to expand their range of action so the cycle Money-Commodity-Money can be repeated in the four corners of the globe, wars are the passe-partout for opening every door.

Illustrated with maps of the theatre of operations, the report moved on to give an account of the Crimean War; a war in which diplomatic intrigues predominated over military strategy. Even the bourgeois leadership would admit that incredible errors were committed on both sides. Supported by relevant quotations from Engels’ writings, we define the Crimean War as the first imperialist war, because of its economic objectives, the control of markets and raw materials, and because of the number of States involved rather than its territorial conquests.

The Vienna Congress had redrawn the map of Europe to keep France in check. Russia, at the expense of the tottering Ottoman Empire, had extended its territory by annexing Finland to the north and Bessarabia to the south. Indeed the Sultan hadn’t even been even invited to the Congress because of the unresolved “Turkish Question”, i.e. the carving up of his European territories, that is, the entire Balkan peninsular south of the Sava and the Danube, by the major powers.

The “Principle of Intervention” was established, in other words the possibility of military intervention by foreign powers against feudal States menaced by internal rebellions. Uprisings across Europe would be drowned in blood. The clock, however, couldn’t be turned back.

England, which at the time was the major economic power in Europe, had throughout the nineteenth century been pursuing an expansionist policy centred on controlling the access routes to India: with Gibraltar in 1704, Malta in 1802, Aden in 1840, Cyprus in 1878 and Suez in 1882, the sea route to Bombay was guaranteed, whereas from Syria the caravans parted for Persia and India.

Russia, whose backward economy was predominantly agricultural and dependent on serf labour, required continuous new conquests and access to the southern seas, and its southward expansion was beginning to conflict with England’s schemes. In the Balkan Peninsular, Russia exploited the Ottoman Empire’s every weakness with a view to acquiring territory and above all controlling the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. In Asia it was expanding as well, spreading towards Turkestan in order to access the Indian Ocean through Afghanistan. In both directions it was coming up against England.

England was, on the one hand, trying to dismember the Ottoman Empire, as in the case of its support for Greek independence of Greece, from whom it obtained the Ionian Islands and the transit of its freighters through the Black Sea; on the other hand it was supporting it in order to oppose Russia’s designs.

France would intervene in the “Eastern Question”, both to confer prestige, with a short war in the East, on the new “imperial” regime of Napoleon III, and to bolster the expansion of its young capitalist system. It then went on to form an alliance with England against Russian and the Porte.

Within this context the Crimean War was fought to prevent Russia from gaining control of the land route to the straits. The conflict got underway in 1853, the ideological cover being an old dispute over control of the holy places in Palestine! Turkey declared war on Russia and in November the Turkish fleet was destroyed by Russia off the port of Sinope on the Black Sea. This was the pretext for the French and English navies, already assembled off the Dardanelles, to send their warships in.

Engels analysed the respective strengths and weaknesses of the various armies deployed. The French army was conscripted, well-organised and well-disciplined and equipped with effective artillery. The English army was voluntary, and “like old England itself, rotten to the core”. The Russian army was numerically strong but distributed over vast territories and long frontiers. It used neither railways nor telegraphy and suffered from the effects of belonging to a society which was still feudal. The multi-ethnic Turkish army also had to be distributed over a long frontier, from the Danube to the Caucasus, and its troops, with their mountaineer traditions, were not adapted to modern warfare. Engels described the Piedmontese army as well trained and effectively led whilst the latter was not the case as far as the Prussian army was concerned.

The allies launch an attack to destroy the important Russian naval base at Sebastopol. It was an objective which Engels criticised because of its uselessness from the general strategic point of view, and because of the notorious invulnerability of the place. Also, the rest of the Russian army had withdrawn across the River Chernaya.

It was here that a new defensive system based on trenches was introduced for the first time. It would soon prove its effectiveness: with a reduced number of men it was possible to stand up to a much stronger adversary.

During the long siege of the fortress the Russian land army launched some battles in order to break the encirclement before the much feared arrival of winter. Intense cold and cholera would decimate the troops on both fronts. The Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 marked the first attempt by the Russians to relieve Sebastopol. Ten days later there was the Battle of Inkerman: after an initial victory, following a nocturnal attack through thick fog, the Russian forces, five times greater than the allies, were eventually defeated and suffered enormous losses. Then winter got the upper hand.

With the death of the old tsar, his successor had to manage what would eventually become a defeat. In August 1855 the Russians crossed the Chernaya and attempted to attack the besiegers from the rear (a battle in which the Piedmontese bersagliere took part, already decimated by cholera since their arrival). Here again, after initially breaking through the Allied lines, the Russian attackers didn’t manage to withstand the counter-attack and were pushed back across the river again.

Engels made these comments about the new way of conducting warfare: “We witness no time wasting, no fighting to wear the enemy down. The fate of the battle depends on the outcome of one or two attacks. This method of fighting seems a lot more audacious than Napoleon’s (…) in reality it reveals a serious lack of strategy and leadership on both sides.”

After several days of bombardment the final assault on the fortress was set for September 8^th, but during the night the Russians unexpectedly evacuated the base, removing everything they could and destroying anything that was left.

But the Fall of Sebastopol didn’t mean the war was over; it continued in the Trans Caucasus where the Russians captured, possibly with English approval, the fortress of Kars, keystone of the Asiatic trade routes.

In fact the only useful outcome was halting Russia’s advance to the Bosphorus.

Our tally sheet of this first true “world war”, which we describe as imperialist because of its economic and political characteristics, as well as its sheer destructiveness, is as follows: the Russian front consisted of 700 thousand men plus 4 thousand Bulgarian volunteers; allied front, 300 thousand Turks, 400 thousand French, 250 thousand British and 20 thousand Italian volunteers and Piedmontese troops, making a grand total of almost a million. An acknowledged and reliable estimate calculates the total death toll as a million dead, including combatants and civilians, with most of the deaths caused by typhus and cholera.

“Never, as long as there have been wars, has such brilliant bravery been thrown away for such inadequate results as in this Crimean campaign. Never have such numbers of first-rate soldiers been sacrificed, and in such a short time, too, to produce such indecisive successes.” (Engels, ‘The European War’, January 1856).

The ongoing series of reports on the Military Question moved on to examine the wars of independence in Italy.

Marx’s damning assessment of the house of Savoy, of its equivocation and its double-dealing, was read out.

The 1848 revolutionary movements in Europe prompted revolts in the big Italian cities as well. The first one is Palermo, and the whole of insurgent Sicily would drive the Bourbon army across the Strait, proclaim the republic and reintroduce the 1830 constitution. Then the cities under Habsburg domination, including Venice and Milan, rose up, and managed to expel the occupying troops by their own efforts. The serious political and military miscalculations of the newborn Venetian Republic were the reason for its defeat. Milan liberated itself after five days of uneven struggle. Radetsky opted to retreat into the complex of four fortresses know as the Quadrilatero, given the probable necessity of having to rush to the aid of Vienna, where an insurrection had also broken out.

King Carlo Alberto’s decision to rush to Milan’s aid was not due to risorgimental passion, but because he considered it the “lesser evil”; his constant concern was to stop the republican movement from gaining the upper hand, and sweeping, one by one, the various monarchies aside.

There were few actual battles. The Piedmontese army entered a liberated Milan and drove on towards the River Mincio with some minor victories such as at Goito. Major contingents were immediately sent by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Bourbon Kingdom and the Papal State to support the Savoy army, and there were many volunteers from each of the regions as well. However Pius IX would recall his troops, as did the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the King of the Two Sicilies immediately afterwards. Nevertheless, most of the troops, the best generals included, ignored the order and put themselves at the disposal of the Piedmontese army.

Profiting from the general confusion in the Italian camp, Radetsky launched a sudden offensive, but was stopped in time at Curtatone and Montanara by the Tuscan volunteers, paving the way for the Piedmontese to win a second time at Goito.

Profiting from an error in the disposition of the Piedmontese troops, Radetsky defeated them at Custoza. Defeat was transformed into a rout and the Piedmontese front completely fell apart. During the night a disarmed Carlo Alberto, with the furious Milanese taking potshots at him, abandoned the city, taking the bank reserves with him.
 
 

HISTORY OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN THE U.S.A. [GM107 – 108]

Between the 70s and the 80s a new organisation appeared and made significant inroads within the working class: the Knights of Labour. The organisation was formed in fact in 1869, when it adopted a sectarian structure, with initiation rites and deeply held religious convictions. Initially secret, towards the end of the 70s it started to open its ranks to broader sections of labour, including categories which had historically been discriminated against by the major trade unions such as women and black workers.

The goal of emancipation of the working classes, according to the founders, would not be attained by economic struggles so much as by co-operation and education. Therefore the strike weapon, although tolerated, wasn’t favoured. In fact, throughout its existence there would be continuous conflict within the Order between a combative rank-and-file and a pacifist, legalitarian and slightly fanatical leadership. Thus groups of workers would join, only to leave when they realised the Knights were doing little to help them obtain better wages. The way it was organised, however, gave it the appearance of an organisation with a broader, national reach just at the time the traditional trade unions were dissolving under the impact of the economic depression.

The circumstances in those years weren’t at all propitious. In1883 a new depression had begun and, despite the birth of a new rival organisation, the AFL, the class would have to come to terms with a series of trade union defeats. The real turning point came after two events in 1885, the success of the boycotts and the victorious strikes against three railway companies owned by the infamous Gould; who, along with other ‘robber barons’ and unscrupulous plutocrats such as Carnegie, Morgan and Rockefeller, was a characteristic representative of America’s rampant capitalism at the close of the 19^th Century; a capitalism as rapacious as it was ruthless.

The report spoke at length about the strikes of 1885-6. Although these would be successful they would be followed shortly afterwards by searing defeats, caused not by any lack of combativity on the part of the class but by the incompetence, if not the downright betrayal, of the leadership.

The latter’s scornful attitude towards direct action and its total lack of comprehension of the real needs of the working masses laid the basis for the class to progressively abandon the Order, a good part of which went on to join more modern trade unions like the American Federation of Labour.

Maybe one of the main reasons for the success of the KL, in organising so many workers and creating so many sections with respect to the unions which had come before, was that up until then it had been difficult to bring together a sufficient number of proletarians in the same trade at the local level, due to the intrinsic nature of North American society and its capitalism. The Order overcame the problem by creating inter-professional sections, and also admitting semi-skilled, unskilled and day labourers, and women and black workers (the latter in 1886 forming 10% of the membership).

But leadership of the KL was capable, in a very short time, of destroying an organisation that was without precedent in terms of the effect it had in raising the morale and the hopes of an entire generation of proletarians, who had begun to glimpse a future very different from that preached by politicians, craft trade unionists, priests and bourgeois intellectuals. And it was this that would predispose the class to accept the doctrine of socialism which at that time, based on the European model, was once again starting to penetrate America.

But the obstacles presented by the “better dead than anarchist or socialist” attitudes, the constant attempts to win the bosses’ approval, the barely concealed antipathy towards the craft unions, who were nevertheless admitted into the Order, spelled the end of the movement. Even the movement’s positive aspects, which received a cold reception within the A.F.L. would be lost, and only recovered after many decades, the main one being its openness to all proletarians.

The report than went on to describe the revived movement for the eight hour day, which in the first half of the 80s roused and united proletarians across the whole of the United States. The movement culminated on the fateful date of May 1^st, 1886, when a general strike of all categories throughout the country, was due to impose a general reduction of the working day on the bosses. Struggles had already started to spread in the months before, and virtually everywhere they met with resounding success, insofar as the bosses could hardly refuse to make concessions when faced with a movement which was so widespread and so determined. And all this, despite the passive resistance and the boycotting by the KL’s leadership. Finally the proletariat, guided by the best trade union organisations and with the support of the political movements then extant, most notably the anarchists, abandoned the attempt to obtain results by putting pressure on politicians (which had shown itself to be entire bankrupt), and passed to direct action.

Several workers’ struggles would be met with ruthless repression on the part of the bourgeois forces, which had no qualms about shedding proletarian blood in the process. One such episode was a massacre during a demonstration in Chicago on May 3^rd. During a mass protest meeting held the following day in Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown which killed a number of policemen. The bourgeois press responded by whipping up popular hysteria against the working class agitators, anarchists and socialists. In the space of two days the police raided no less than fifty alleged meetings. Of the hundreds of workers arrested, eight were eventually selected to be sent for trial; chosen because of their central role in the struggle. Then, in a trial which was truly farcical, they would be condemned to death, even if there was no proof at all that the had anything to do with the bombing incident. Four of them would eventually be hung, and a fifth died in prison, by his own hand according to the official account.

Due to the extremely harsh reaction which followed, the workers’ movement would suffer a temporary setback, but in less than ten years it had recovered. Already there was a new organisation, the American Federation of Labour, which had drawn useful lessons from the failure of the KL and which would take its place not just as a short term phenomenon, as had happened with the earlier national trade union federations, but as an organisation destined to remain, for good or ill, as part of the American labour movement up to the present day.
 
 

DIFFICULTIES IN THE FOUNDING OF THE CLASS PARTY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA [GM110]

This study marks the initial instalment of a party work on the political tradition of the working class in the United States. It is meant to complement our other ongoing investigation of the History of the American Labour Movement (see above), which mainly concentrates on workers’ struggles and the trade union movement. The latter study has reached a more advanced stage and the early instalments have already been published in Communist Left, including in the present issue, translated from the Italian.

The report used a letter from Marx to Bolte, dated 23 November 1871, as its point of departure. In it the political movement of the class is defined, and its importance for the class. When, a year later, the General Council of the International was transferred to America, the ideas sketched out in the letter would continue to be acted on and defended by the new Secretary General, and Marx’s loyal friend and follower, Friedrich Sorge.

The position taken by the Lassallean faction, which was very influential at the time and had a significant presence within the International, was very different: economic struggles were condemned to inevitable defeat because, in their view, wage levels were imposed by immutable economic laws. For the Marxists, on the other hand, there was no such law, and no contradiction in expecting the political organisation of the working class to include defensive struggles alongside the conquest of political power.

At that time the hypothesis that this conquest might be accomplished by peaceful means, through elections, was not totally excluded, even if the definition of what constituted political struggle for Marxists was considerably broader, and included many activities which were defensive, such as the struggle for the eight hour day. In 1872, the day after the Hague Congress of the International, Marx maintained that in America and England there was a possibility that “the working people may achieve their goal by peaceful means”, although he recognised that “in most of the continental countries it is force that will have to be the lever of our revolutions; it is force that we shall some day have to resort to in order to establish the reign of labor”.

But it would be precisely in the United States, where the franchise was first extended to broad strata of the working class, that the ‘peaceful’ way to working class power would soon be shown to be impossible. The Marxists were quick to notice this change and by 1876, at the foundation congress of Workingmen’s Party of the United States, it was already noted that “The ballot box has long ago ceased to record the popular will, and only serves to falsify the same in the hands of professional politicians”. The class was invited to abstain from the ballot box and direct their efforts towards organising themselves to improve their standard of living and working conditions.

Unprepared to abide by the International’s resolutions, the Lassalleans split from the International in 1874 and established the Workingmen’s Party of Illinois in the West, and the Social-Democratic Workingmen’s Party of North America in the East. The report then went on to discuss the differences between Lassalleans and Marxists, which were directly derived from the discussions going on almost contemporaneously in the German party, and Marx’s critique of the “Iron Law of Wages”.

Whilst these discussions were continuing the great uprising of 1877 broke out, and success at the polls in the same year appeared to confirm the Lassallean perspective. Over the opposition of the former internationalists, the Lassalleans gained complete control of the party. The Socialist Labor Party was born.

The Marxists would nevertheless continue their trade union activity, eventually leading to the formation of the International Labor Union, the first effort to organize all workers, including the unskilled, into one union extending across the whole of the national territory, irrespective of nationality, sex, race, creed, colour, or political opinion.

Meanwhile the new party, now reorganised with a view to conducting ‘political’, that is, electoral campaigns, met with considerable success at the polls during the spring and fall elections in 1878. But the following year the tendency was reversed, and the Lassallean leaders, having realized that their major successes had only occurred where the trade unions were mobilised, had to recognise the importance of the labour movement.

But the road was strewn with temptations which the Lassalleans were unable to resist. One of these was an alliance with the ‘greenbackers’, supporters of currency reform, and this caused a split with elements, above all those in Chicago, who would nevertheless slide towards anarchism.

Another explanation of the split derived from the stance the Executive had taken towards the Lehr und Wehr Vereine, the ‘Educational and Defensive Societies’, workers’ militias organised by the socialists of Chicago and Cincinnati from around 1875. These organisations, originally composed of members of the SLP, became much more widespread in the wake of the repression following the Great Strike of 1877, during which the combined forces of the police, territorial militias and the federal army launched violent attacks against the workers. In Chicago the workers were the target of a particularly brutal repression due to the highly organised support they had given the strike. The national executive was opposed to these essentially military organisations, and in 1878 all members of the SLP in the clubs were ordered to leave.

In November 1880, a number of members of the New York sections of the party left the organization and formed a Social Revolutionary Club, which adopted a platform modelled in the main after the Gotha programme of the German Social Democratic Party, but interspersed with some violent anarchistic phrases. Thus the platform of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, as it soon came to be called, urged the organization of trade unions on “Communistic” principles and asserted that aid should be given only to those unions which were “progressive” in character: a classic case of the confusion of roles between economic and political organisations, a confusion which the Marxists energetically resisted. The new party’s platform also denounced the ballot as “an invention of the bourgeoisie to fool the workers” and recommended independent political action only in order to prove to workers “the iniquity of our political institutions and the futility of seeking to reconstruct society through the ballot.” The chief weapon to be used in combating the capitalist system was the “armed organizations of workingmen who stand ready with the gun to resist encroachment upon their rights”. The character of the new movement therefore remained rather indefinite, and vacillated between socialism of a more radical colour and outspoken anarchism.

The new anarchist movement, reborn on American soil with a more pro-union stance, would prove a tempting outlet for the workers’ anger and revolutionary sentiments, but, as ever, its individualist actions and violent propaganda would play into the hands of the State it so despised, and prove a useful excuse for the severe clamp down on the worker’s movement which followed the Haymarket events in 1886.

We will trace the sequence of events leading up to those events in a subsequent chapter, and also plot the later course of the Socialist Labor Party as it navigated its way through these events.
 
 

THE REARMING OF THE IMPERIALIST POWERS [GM107]

The reports have highlighted that while the current crisis of over-production is currently causing a major contraction in production and foreign trade, the arms trade is one of the few branches of industry that isn’t suffering. Arms production has been steadily rising over the last decade, as has the percentage of the various national budgets devoted to ‘defence spending’.

The withdrawal of troops from Iraq [in 2010] continues but the United States are leaving behind them a formidable network of military bases and around 50,000 men; a considerable force, allowing Washington at any time to interrupt the supply of oil to other countries. On the other hand, the Iraqi State has managed to keep the oil revenue for itself, leaving only the industrial profit to the big oil companies, including American ones, while the exploitation of the major wells has been assigned, on conditions acceptable to Baghdad, mainly to Chinese, Russian and European companies.

The planned withdrawal of the troops from Iraq has been accompanied by an increase in the military presence in Afghanistan. This “new” strategy hasn’t however, up to now, brought any significant results as far as territorial control is concerned, chiefly due to the contradictory nature of American policy in the region.
 
 

THE REVOLT IN TUNISIA [GM109]

There was a brief report of the revolt in Tunisia which was underway at the time (January 2011). Following prolonged protests and demonstrations throughout the country against the price of essential foodstuffs, President Ben Ali fled the country. The riots and popular uprisings which occurred in the lead up to these events were described, as well as a brief account of the political parties and trade unions in Tunisia.

Foreign investment, mainly Italian, has contributed to the modernization of the country and the installation of numerous industries, in particular within the textile sector, and to the formation of a modern proletariat.

The party’s underlying forecast was shown to be accurate, regarding: 1) the social maturity of the countries of North Africa, where the presence of the working class has rendered necessary defensive actions and organisations of a trade union type; 2) the similarity of the Arabic countries in the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean, in terms of their historical, developmental and social conditions, that predispose their unitary organisations to a possibly convergent movement; one which the proletariat of Israel could also eventually get drawn into.
 
 

IMPERIALISM’S WAR IN LIBYA [GM110]

There followed a description of NATO’s military intervention in Libya. The air attacks from NATO and the attacks on the ground from the rebels were supposed to bring down the discredited regime of General Gaddafi in just a few days, but after three months of daily bombardments there still seems no end in view [as of May 2010].

This war was provoked by the global economic recession, which sparked off social revolt and weakened the Libyan regime from within. It was also given impetus by the wave of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. But in Libya things immediately took a different turn. For a start, a significant part of the power structure profited from the revolt by immediately betraying Gaddafi and his clan, playing on the traditional regional division between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, and knowing they could count on the support of the United States, France and Great Britain. Thus the revolt was straightaway emptied of any class content and it immediately took on the character of a war, both on the domestic and external fronts. This caused the exodus of nearly two million proletarian immigrants, who fled the country en masse for fear of getting caught up in the fighting, but above all because there was no concrete offer of solidarity from the Libyan proletariat to persuade them to stay.

During the early days of the conflict it was easy for France, Great Britain and the United States to drive the game by focussing on military intervention, possibly already planned in advance. But, in the days that followed, it would not just be bombs exploding, but a series of contradictions between the interests of the countries involved, which never so much as on this occasion presented themselves ‘in open order’ to such a extent, each eager to grab the biggest part of the booty for themselves.

However the pickings are so tempting that everyone wants a piece of the action. The western oil companies present in Libya before the war were Eni, BP, Total, Royal Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Occidental petroleum and Statoil. There were also various Asian oil companies: Pertamina, Oil India, China National petroleum and Nippon Oil.

Germany didn’t wish to participate in the attack, thereby providing further evidence that Europe, considered as a political and military entity, is non-existent. Those who actually participated in the aerial bombings were Great Britain, France, Italy and Canada, along with the USA’s remote controlled planes. Norway, which took part in the first phase of the conflict, declared that it wanted to pull out of the war at the beginning of August.

It should be noted that counsellors, military trainers and small squads of elite troops were already working alongside the militias in Benghazi.

Keen to guarantee that their ‘humanitarian’ loans are repaid, the mean-spirited usurer-invaders have clearly stated that: “the future government of Libya will have to honour the financial obligations which the CNT have taken on. The credit provided to the CNT will be assumed by the future government”. The humanitarian war, as is ever the case, will be paid for by those who have been ‘humanized’; by those who today, in such a human way, are being targeted by bombs, amongst whom the proletariat of Libya.

Meanwhile Washington appears to have placed in the hands of its man in the CNT, Ali A. Tahouni, the management of Cyrenaic finances and oil. Indeed the first contract for the export of Libyan oil, 1.2 million barrels worth, has been concluded with a United States company, the Tesoro Corporation, and an oil tanker has already transported the first batch of crude to the USA.

Even Russian diplomacy has been stirred into action. The Russian envoy in Libya, after meeting representatives from both the CNT and the official Libyan government, couldn’t come up with a pathway to peace negotiations, but did declare that Russia wants to see Libya as one independent, sovereign and democratic state, which functions as an integral part of the Arab world and as an inalienable part of the African Union. The message is directed at the countries of the west, who may favour the separation of Cyrenaica (which possesses 80% of the petroleum deposits) from Tripolitania, which although more highly populated is poorer in terms of its natural resources. And such a separation is by no means ruled out.

China keeps a close eye on the Libyan situation. 11% of Libyan oil is exported to China and over 30,000 Chinese workers were employed in the country at the time the war broke out. Beijing is emphatic about its opposition to terrestrial military intervention and wants to be part of any eventual peace negotiations in order to defend its economic interests in Libya. But the Western coalition, above all the United States, will be aiming to utilise the crisis to reduce China’s inconvenient presence in the region.

The global proletariat, particularly in North Africa, is currently an impotent witness to the imperialist military exploits of the various States and coalitions, which, propelled by the need to react to vicelike grip of the economic recession which is proving so lethal to capitalism, are increasingly prepared to resort to military force to defend their economic and strategic interests.
 
 

THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY’S SOUND ORIGINS[GM107]

This second chapter of the report started with a general picture of China in the early 20th Century. Then the Communist International’s presence in the country, post 1919, was described, and the establishment of relations, after1917, between the Russian State and the government in Beijing (in the hands of the Warlords), and with the government in Canton (treaties with Sun Yat Sen).

We then moved on to make a critical examination of the International’s policy towards China, based on contemporary documents, some of them recently discovered and translated by ourselves.

The formation of the C.C.P, with much support from the International’s emissaries, gave rise to a young party which necessarily had little experience and whose theoretical positions were more intuitive than methodical.

Nevertheless the Chinese communists would immediately highlight the International’s devaluation of the role which the C.C.P could and should have played shortly afterwards, faced with the enormous development of the productive forces and of the proletariat. And the International would certainly overestimate the revolutionary bourgeois role of the Kuomintang, which had already shown it would betray any consequent democratic revolution.

The amount of work carried out by the minuscule Chinese Communist Party was enormous, above all in the unions, and amongst women and young people.

At the Second Congress of the C.C.P. in July 1922, both the principles and the spirit of revolutionary parliamentarism, as set out in the Theses of the Second Congress of the C.I., were accepted and rigidly applied. In the Manifesto of the Second Congress of the C.C.P. it was correctly stated that: “The proletariat has its own class interests. With the democratic revolution the proletariat will simply gain a few liberties and rights, but not complete liberation (…) Therefore the proletariat must immediately attend to the bourgeoisie, installing the «proletarian dictatorship in alliance with the poor peasantry»”.

In conclusion, attention was drawn to the C.C.P.’s resistance to the interference and pressure on China from the Russian State, and put into effect by the agents of the C.I. as well.
 
 

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF ITALY’S STANCE ON THE TRADE UNIONS: FROM ‘IL COMUNISTA’ IN 1922 [GM110]

As first usage of our recent reproduction of the complete series of press organs issued by our current, the comrade gave a first reading from the trade union pages of Il Comunista, the P.C.d’I.’s official daily paper between 1921 and 1922. Out if the four pages in each number, one was dedicated to workers’ struggles in Italy and one to trade union matters in the rest of the world. The Italian pages included several articles on the ‘united front from below’ which, then as now, is our watchword in the trade union field.

The articles clearly state that such a stance doesn’t imply any second thoughts regarding the split from the Socialist Party. On the contrary, separation from the reformists and maximalists was the indispensable condition for achieving unity amongst proletarians on the basis of class positions. The trade union united front had precisely that aim and it was therefore opposed by the socialists, or accepted in a formal terms as in the case of the Labour Alliance, but solely with the aim of getting proletarians back behind the reformists again.

In an article published on 9 February 1922, entitled “One … Socialist Front”, the socialists’ view of unity is made clear by referring to a poster they issued in the proletarian stronghold of Piombino, and which was signed by a priest, a monk, an anarchist, 32 socialists and the secretary of the local fascist group.

In the 10 February number, in the article “The Labour Alliance”, it states that the party favours such a project of proletarian unity in the trade union field; and that is why we turned down an invitation from the Railwaymen’s Union to a meeting with the Socialist Party, Republican party and the Anarchist Union, even though it was about the Labour Alliance,. What was being attempted was an operation similar to that in 1945, when the C.G.I.L. was formed by the bourgeois parties.

In later issues, we find several articles on the Unione Sindacale Italiana, a proletarian trade union mainly composed of anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists. The class stance adopted by this union and the fact it adhered to the Red International of Labour Unions was very much approved of by us communists. However, we were obliged to harshly criticise those aspects of its ideology which turned it into a kind of party trade union controlled by the Anarchist Union, which was calling on it to leave the R.I.L.U.

We continued to support the minority, composed mainly of revolutionary syndicalists which had stuck to class positions and wanted to stay in the R.I.L.U. And we would even advise communist members to remain in this trade union and join the minority, without creating a communist fraction. In another article we also invited those communists who ended up in the U.I.L (Italian Workers’ Union), a yellow union par excellence, not to leave it, if possible, but to try and get it to join the Alleanza del Lavoro, thereby encouraging contact with the main body of the proletariat.

We continually stressed our principle that in the unions we wouldn’t demand that proletarians adhere to the communist political program, although we would continue to propagandise on its behalf, but we would demand their adherence to a class programme, without which the trade union would effectively betray its raison d’être.

There are then various articles on the struggles of the Milan and Turin metalworkers which remind us of what’s happening now. The declarations of the reformist Buozzi, who maintained that the leadership of the struggles should remain in the hands of the metalworkers’ union F.I.O.M., and not of the Alleanza del Lavoro, are condemned as at odds with the necessity of broadening them out as far as possible.

In the June 2 issue, a few lines from our paper in Turin, L’Ordine Nuovo, are quoted: “Communists hold firmly to their conviction that disputes over wages must above all be planned and resolved on the basis of the workers’ right to life. Whatever the situation in industry might be, workers must defend their sacrosanct right not to die of hunger”.

And just think, here we are, us communists, surrounded by today’s fourth rate polemics, still repeating the same old message ninety years later!
 
 

TRADE UNION ACTIVITY [GM108 – 109 – 110]

At each meeting we listen to a statement, prepared by comrades involved in this crucial area of party work, which aims to give a general background to workers’ struggle and the present difficulties it faces in mounting an effective defence against the effects of the crisis; in response to the continuous deterioration of working conditions that are being imposed by capital.

In line with communist tradition, and consistently and continuously upheld in of our organisation since its reconstitution after the 2^nd World War, this involves the party making a considerable effort to understand the many-sided opportunist alignment, which, from within the trade union movement, works to block or disperse the proletarian reaction and to prevent it reorganising in a new and more effective form.

The main goals of our policy in the trade unions were also set out. It is a policy we have never failed to address directly to the class, even during the most modest of its attempts to mobilise within the constraints of the regime’s trade union front.

A comrade gave us an exhaustive and incisive report on the demanding work carried out by our trade union group, a job that is thoroughly appreciated and supported by everyone in the party.

By “Communist trade union group” we mean not a generic group of “communist workers” who periodically exchange views and opinions, but rather a party organ, with a structure of its own and specific research and organisational tasks. It carries out one of the party’s central functions, it is part of the party and it observes party discipline. Its importance is difficult to exaggerate, concerned as it is to establish, defend and strengthen the main transmission belt, as envisaged in our theses, between the party and the class in motion.

The necessity for a working instrument such as this, which is far from being a novelty in the organised life of the communist party and the Left tradition (and to these precedents there will be dedicated a special historical study) derives above all from the objective difficulties involved, and the great variety and complexity of the situations which may arise, both as regards how to evaluate them in general historical terms and as regards their particular and contingent manifestations.

It is possible to master the question only by having at one’s disposal: 1) a solid theoretical framework, founded on Marxist materialism; 2) a consistent and reliable tradition of party evaluations and practical interventions in the field, that can be found in our past and present press, and coherent positions and attitudes which are known and agreed; 3) research into the present conditions within which the social struggle takes place, and the forces in play; no mean feat considering the complexity and changeability which both present.

This is an important and ongoing commitment, providing us with the necessary experience to develop the capacity, the party’s collective “sensitivity”, to the vibrations rising up from society’s subterranean depths so it can detect them in advance and predict when eruptions will happen; and to develop the party’s capacity to anticipate the effect its directives could have on the movement’s growth and maturation.

With the aim of continuing on this tried and tested path, our comrade gave us a clear and analytical description of key events in the workers’ struggle in Italy, of how difficult it is to evaluate some of the thousands of alternatives and choices which recent spontaneous battles have thrown up, and yet how it is still possible to come up with responses and directives which are coherent and unequivocal, and which the party as whole can agree on and incorporate into its propaganda.

There was a detailed report about the strikes and trade union related events that have occurred since our last meeting, and how our party described to the class the concrete situation in which its struggles are taking place and the general direction in which the movement is moving.