... and the Current Situation of the Working Class - Statement of the IBRP

The fact that the recent war in the Balkans took place in Europe itself plus the way it was fought (both during and after the NATO bombings) shows that we have taken a significant step towards generalised imperialist war. The wars which have broken out in Daghestan and other former Soviet Republics are yet another step. Here Russia is opposed to guerrilla movements operating under a radical mixture of nationalist and religious ideologies, but which in reality are encouraged by competing imperialisms.

In the face of this escalation of war the passivity of the proletariat still persists. Yet the conditions which have led to that escalation make the strengthening of the revolutionary internationalist forces within the working class even more urgent.

This is the context for resisting the dramatic twists in civil and political life which war always brings. The revolutionary programme alone constitutes a solid reference point for the proletariat which before, during and in the immediate aftermath of war, can and must begin to react as a class.

The imperialist phase of capitalism has made the alternative obvious: it is either war or revolution. This does not mean that the onset of war ends the possibility of revolution. The events of World War One (1914-18) and the October Revolution (1917) demonstrate this.

Without getting into a sterile debate about its likelihood, revolutionaries must prepare for all eventualities, including war. To start with, we have to consider the mortal danger of finding ourselves so weak that we will be reduced to silence, and swept away by the storms of war.

The central, most important, task is to begin building the revolutionary party starting from the present condition of dispersal of revolutionaries and the confusion amongst them as well as the dead-weight of arguments from the past. The issue of war, including the kind of opposition revolutionaries carry on against it, is the best way to select those forces capable of contributing to the future party. This will be within the framework of some fixed principles which we indicate here. They are the non-negotiable basis for our political initiative aimed at reinforcing the revolutionary front in the face of capitalism and its wars.

The present period

1. The present stage of capitalism is imperialism. It opened at the beginning of the century with the characteristics demonstrated by Lenin in his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and is characterised today by capitalism’s increasing difficulty to achieve a sufficiently rewarding rate of profit.
2. Imperialism is therefore the way of life of capitalist production, and maintains all its fundamental characteristics, including the anarchy of production, production for profit, the absolute priority of the search for profit above any other consideration or political, ethical or humanitarian motivation, the competition between larger and smaller accumulations of capital (on a regional, national or multinational basis) and the incessant struggle between them, in the same search for maximum profit and the maximum exploitation of the proletariat.
3. Today the unequal balance of economic forces between states - or rather between the state organs of the national and regional fractions of the bourgeoisie - reflects the characteristic features of the imperialist stage: from the varying levels of accumulation achieved and, above all and consequently, to the neccessity to participate in the carve-up of global profit.
4. Some national bourgeoisies will have a smaller or almost non-existent share of global profits but this does not in the least contradict the fact that they are an integral part of imperialism. As such they are naturally and irreconcilably opposed to the idea of freeing the working class from the chains of wage labour.
5. Thus, the notion that clashes between different bourgeoisies are moments in the weakening of imperialism is a fundamentally reactionary one which obscures the very nature of imperialism and would tie the proletariat to the weaker factions of the bourgeoisie. This would postpone the emergence of any autonomous revolutionary class perspective and force the proletariat onto one or other of the imperialist war fronts.
6. The collapse of the Soviet imperialist front was due to the same crisis which struck world capitalism from the beginning of the 1970’s, at the beginning of the downturn in world capitalism’s third cycle of accumulation.
7. The fall of the USSR has opened up a new political period. New relationships are being established between states as the attempt to resolve the crisis brings them into conflict with each other and moves them towards the recomposition of the fronts.
8. The main motive for the Second World War was the struggle for supplies of raw materials and markets for investment which corresponded to that period of imperialist development. Today, on top of this can be added the urge to control the mechanisms for appropriating revenue (with control of oil foremost) and the labour market. These are both striking products of globalisation and part of capital’s initial response to it.
9. The crisis is violently shaking whole areas of the world economy and makes state rivalries become more rapidly acute. Thus, the tendency towards the re-establishment of imperialist blocs involves competition on a world scale for financial revenue, raw materials, oil and labour. The wars in ex-Yugoslavia, as well as those in the Caucasus and in Asia in general, have all taken place in this context.
10. In principle we have to rule out and combat as counter-revolutionary any suggestion of support for one or other of the combatants in any such war - no matter how it is disguised or ideologically justified because this already means lining up with one side or other of imperialism.
11. Equally, we have to reject any theory re-echoing the old idea of super-imperialism which - instead of seeing the enemy as the capitalist system (whatever stage it might have reached) - sees it as one or other capitalist state (particularly the USA) against which any opposition or war would be welcome.

War and the Working Class

1. In any case, whatever may be the future line up of blocs, states throughout the world today are free to manoeuvre and wage war whilst the working class within every country remains overwhelmingly the passive object of bourgeois manipulations.
2. On the other hand, one of the reasons why the crisis phase has lasted so long is the acquiescence of the class in the comprehensive process of restructuring which has taken place. This has involved heavy attacks on workers with substantial devaluation of the value of labour itself and the robbery of the indirect wage via cuts in so-called social services in both the metropolitan and peripheral countries. This acquiescence is due to a number of factors amongst which are the collapse of the USSR, the reactionary role of social democracy and the lack of a clear political reference point for the working class. The international bourgeoisie has used these factors effectively to grip the working class in a vice from which it is hard to escape.
3. The collapse of the USSR did not mean the end of the Stalinist counter-revolutionary deception that state monopoly capitalism is the same as socialism. The mystification lives on with the consequent rejection by a whole generation of proletarians of socialism and its premise: class solidarity against the bourgeoisie and capital.
4. It is this subjective condition of the class which makes it difficult for a significant enough proletarian movement to revive and threaten capitalism’s course towards war. However, the first signs of a generational change within the proletariat are emerging which, freed from the dead hand of Stalinism, carry the hope of a return of class activity and struggle, even if only of a defensive kind. Putting the accent on the future proletariat isn’t just a generational question or due to lack of knowledge of Stalinism but above all depends on the economic situation which the younger generation of the working class will be faced with. The future relationship between capital and labour, of which we have already seen the first devastating signs, will be characterised by the absolute servitude of labour in comparison to capital. This means concessions on work norms, lower taxes, and incentives on the one hand, unemployment, short-time working and starvation wages, on the other - without social security and without the real possibility of building even a minimum pension.
5. It is not possible to predict with certainty if the re-emergence of proletarian initiative will precede a generalised imperialist conflict (regardless of the form this may take) or will be a consequence of it. In either case it is only on this basis that the slogan of revolutionary defeatism will become real.
6. Concretely, therefore, the defeatist activity of revolutionaries focusses, by all possible means that are compatible with the long-termm goal, on another revival of class initiative, against the national and intentional bourgeoisie and their political and trade union lackeys. Proletarian action never trails after a bourgeois faction because it happens to be under attack or because it is a weaker player on the imperialist chessboard. That would mean being swallowed up by one of the war blocs in the name of a fake anti-imperialism. The only possible anti-imperialism is that which passes through the struggle against capitalism, wherever it happens to be and whatever ideology is used to justify it.
7. The revival of the working class will come, if it does come, outside and against the official unions and all the other more or less “radical” forms trades unionism might take.
8. The appalling process of restructuring of production with its consequent destruction of the old structure of the working class is the prelude to a political reconstitution of the class from a different basis which will open up new perspectives for the work of revolutionaries, but will also favour a return of unionism, even if in new and seemingly more radical forms.
9. Whatever the form trade unionism takes today (once synonymous with reformist haggling over the price and conditions of the sale of labour power within the capitalist system, now openly helping the system to survive by implementing capital’s self-preservation policy of sacrifices inside the working class), wherever it crystallises into mass organisations it inevitably means acting on behalf of the bourgeoisie and therefore supporting one or other fronts in imperialist war. Trade unionism must therefore be fought on the political as well as the organisational level. The next revolution will be made over the dead bodies of the trades unions.
10. It is the task of revolutionaries to appeal for the revival of proletarian initiative from below, via mass assemblies, strike committees, and a struggle directly controlled by them. In this way revolutionaries can both contribute to the revival of the proletariat itself, as well as the reinforcement of the revolutionary party.

Which Revolutionaries

It is twenty three years since the first international conferences of the communist left called by Battaglia Comunista. In order to open the dialogue amongst the groups who go back to the general internationalist line defended by the communist left in the second half of the Twenties, it is possible - and, therefore, now right and proper - to draw up a balance sheet of what we are faced with.

More than two decades of capitalist crisis have passed, in which one imperialist bloc has already shattered into pieces. This period of crisis, due to the increased difficulty of realising capital profitably (valorisation), has taken place through a very deep process of restructuring of production, coinciding with a genuine technological revolution. This has led to a brutal attack on labour, the swelling of the financial and speculative spheres of the economy to proportions hitherto unimaginable. and the sharpening of competition via war and devastation. All this has accelerated the process of decantation of the “proletarian political camp” excluding from it all those organisations which, in one way or another have fallen into support for war and who have thus abandoned the principle of revolutionary defeatism.

Other political elements in this arena, although not falling into the tragic mistake of supporting one of the warring parties, have, in the name of a fake anti-imperialism or because of historically and economically impossible progressive visions, equally distanced themselves from the methods and perspectives of work which lead to regroupment in the future revolutionary party. They are beyond saving and are victims of their own idealist or mechanistic frameworks, incapable of recognising the peculiarities of the explosion of the perennial economic contradictions of modern capitalism. They are more ready to wait messianically for the revolution or, in blind invariance, they cannot grasp the specifics of the present situation, whether in terms of the crisis and capitalism’s responses to it or in the changing relations between capital and labour over the intervening years.

Not one of the components of these currents has made an examination of capital and its relations with the working class which takes account of the real capitalist dynamic. All therefore appear to be lagging behind - above all because they lack method and adequate instruments - in relation to both current events and future perspectives.

How far the revolutionary movement is behind in its task can be measured by the delay of a part of it to definitely detach itself from the swamp in which they vainly try to move and where they multiply like photocopies in a neurotic syndrome of severe micro-partyism.

We remain certain that there are living elements of the class movement which can appear and regroup on the basis of the method, the analysis and the revolutionary positions defended by the IBRP in open battle against the suffocating rule of capital, and its course towards barbarism.