Living Marxism

IT IS CHINA WHICH SUPPORTS THE WORLD ECONOMY NOT THE AI BUBBLE. (Including an analysis of Q3 Chinese data)

When revolutionaries say that are for the destruction of the Zionist state they are called anti-Semitic. What is the difference between Zionism and Judaism? What is the difference between Zionists and Israeli workers who are prepared to fight for the Palestinians right to self-determination? Does the call for the end of Israel today mean that the “Jews will be driven into the sea?”. We reprint our analysis of Zionism especially its most ‘left-wing’ sections, first made in 1998, to answer these questions.

Israel recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. The ‘peace settlements’ have pushed the PLO leadership, Egypt and Jordan to recognise Israel. It seems that Syria and other Arab states will do the same.

There are almost 4 million Jews in the State of Israel and many elements of a Hebrew-speaking nation. Is it the time to abandon our demand for the destruction of the Israeli state and its replacement with a secular, multi-ethnic, democratic and Soviet Palestine, and to advocate a united front with the Lutte Ovrier and the Zionist left in order to achieve a bi-national state or a two-state solution to the Arab-Iraeli conflict?

This article will examine the programmatic positions of the most left-wing Zionists. We will explain what the Marxist position on the Palestine question must be and why we cannot recognise any national rights of Israel.

Left Zionism’s backward evolution

In the early years of the Communist International, Poalei Zion (Workers Zion) participated as observers in some of its activity. This current tried to fuse Marxism with Jewish nationalism. For them the Jews where a nation without a territory. In order to make a socialist revolution the Jews needed first to create its own state and multi-class society.

Poalei Zion initially accepted the possibility of a bi-national Arab-Hebrew state but later they backed the division of Palestine and the creation of a pure Jewish state. Poalei Zion became one of the pillars of the MAPAM, which achieved around one fifth of the votes in the first Israeli elections. The MAPAM initially combined Marxist and Leninist phraseology with its active integration in the Hagana (Israeli army), the Histadrut (Israeli anti-Palestinian corporate union) and the Labour Zionist cabinets. They built many kibutzim and they believed that these islands of rural collectivism where the seeds of socialism.

MAPAM survived as the left wing of Zionism and many Labour governments. It backed Israel in all its wars against the Arabs. In the late 1940s MAPAM capitalised on the pro-Moscow sentiment that was created all over the world resulting from Hitler’s defeat and Stalin’s backing the creation of Israel. Before the creation of the Israeli state many thought that the Jews where in general an oppressed people despite that the Zionists wanted to transform them into colonial settlers against the Arab native population. However, Israel became an oppressor whose existence was based in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians, and the founding of a US pillar against all the anti- imperialist movements in the Middle East.

A “Marxist” movement that adapts to forms of third-world nationalism can survive with some radical proposals. However, a socialist movement that became an apologist of an expansionist and colonialist power would become more and more reactionary. Moving to the right MAPAM was loosing its initial roots and became confused with the pragmatic Zionists.

Around ten years ago MAPAM, Shilumit Aroni’s Ratz and Shinui created Meretz, a political front that in 1997 became officially a united party. Ratz was a movement in favour of constitutional rights and Shinui was an ultra-liberal organisation committed to Thatcherite economics in a context of liberal concessions to the Palestinians. The Shinui believed that the best way to develop an open `free market’ was to allow Israel to be a county at peace with its neighbours and with the capacity to export capital to them.

On February 1997 the founding convention of the new Meretz Party adopted its `Basic Principles’. In it there is no mention of the struggle against imperialism or for socialism and for a working class based party. MAPAM simply abandoned any class reference. Meretz proclaimed the combination of `the values of enlightened liberalism and democratic socialism’. A few countries had already experienced the fusion between their political extremes on economic issues. Just as it is impossible to fuse oppressive nationalism with any form of socialism, is it not possible to combine Thatcherite economics with any form of progressive economic reforms. The former Zionist collectivists abandoned their initial goals and accepted a neo-liberal agenda.

MAPAM gave up all its former demands for state intervention and rural collective expansions. Now it accepts neo-conservative economics. “Initiative, profitability, and fair competition between all sections of the economy will be facilitated”. Meretz is in favour of privatising some of the companies that the `left Zionists’ put under public ownership. They only oppose privatisation of natural monopolies, education, postal service and the welfare state. The rest, transport, communications, industries, arm production, etc. could be sold.

For an exclusionist state

In all of its Basic Principles Meretz does not mention the struggle against anti-Semitism. The main purpose of Zionism is to “struggle against assimilation which threatens the existence of the Jewish people in the Diaspora”. Assimilation means that Jews should abandon their religious-cultural values and became assimilated into the nations in which they live. They want to stop that process. In places in which the Jewish workers are struggling alongside their own class brothers and sisters against the bosses, they want to divide the workers. The Jews have abandoned other workers to migrate to Israel in order to help Zionist capitalists to build their own state.

“The Zionist objective of the State of Israel is to provide an open door for any Jew. Aliya [mass Jewish emigration to Israel] is also a source of reinforcement for the State of Israel. Meretez wants Aliya to Israel, with the goal of gathering the majority of the Jewish people in the state”. Meretz wants to move the majority of the fifteen million Jews all over the planet to Israel. Eight million Jews in Israel would be a strong basis for maintaining a state.

Its aim is doubly reactionary. On the one hand they try to dislocate many Jews (some of which were the basis of many socialist and progressive movements in their own countries) from their own homelands and to divide the working classes. On the other hand they want to use the Jewish as colonial tools to consolidate a state founded on the expulsion of its native population.

Regarding the Arabs, Meretz is the most `heretical’ of all the Zionists. It is in favour of granting the right to create a weak state in a minority of their former lands for “the Palestinian Arab people, which has lived in this land for generations and which is now beginning to realise its right to national self-determination”. The ones who are starting “to realise its right to national self-determination” are, precisely, Meretz. The Palestinians fought for their own state in the 1947-48 wars and even before (like in the 1936 upheavals). It was the Zionists who destroyed their aspirations.

In which territories will Meretz grant a Palestinian state? “In a context of the permanent settlement, Israel will be obliged to vacate most of the territories occupied during to the Six Day War.” Before the mass expulsions of Palestinians after the creation of Israel, two thirds of Palestine where inhabited by Arabs. In 1947 the UN resolved to divide that land in around two halves. In 1967 Israel managed to conquer around 40% of the Palestinian half. Therefore the territories that Israel occupied after 1967 represents a small fraction of Palestine.

For the left Zionists the Palestinians should accept not only the loss of the majority of their land but also of some of the post-1967 occupied territories as well as their historically claimed capital. For the Palestinians Jerusalem is their capital. For the Christian and Islamic Arabs it is one of their holy cities where they were the majority of its population from the beginning of the first millennium until 1948. Until 1967 Eastern Jerusalem (which includes the historical city) was in Arab hands. Since then the Zionists have tried to buy Arab land or to expel Palestinians. For Meretz “Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, will never again be divided.”

First the Zionists expelled the Palestinians. Next its left wing `discovered’ that they want national rights. Now, its most radical wing is prepared to concede a sort of independent Bantustan for them. For Meretz the new Palestinian State should occupy less than a half of that half of Palestine that the UN undemocratically resolved to give them in 1947. The Palestinians should give up 100% of Jerusalem and at least 75% of the land in which they where the majority of the population when the British left 54 years ago.

The new Palestinian State will not have a contiguous territory and between its two main areas (Gaza and the West Bank) Israel will be allowed to maintain a heavily guarded territory. The Palestinian State not only would have to accept the ethnic cleansing of its own people by Israel but also to be an impotent and unarmed scattered country surrounded and patrolled by Middle East’s main Nuclear Power.

Meretz is also in favour of keeping and developing the strength and superiority of the Israel army: “The protective might provided by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is the main guarantee for Israel’s security, even in an era of peace. The strength of the IDF and its technological and personal superiority over all the other armies in the region must be ensured.”

Israel a reactionary military machine

Israel has one of the most reactionary military machines. It destroyed the Palestinian State in 1948 and led to millions of Palestinians being forced to live in the worst humanitarian conditions. Israel sided with France and the UK against Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. It invaded Egypt in 1956,1967 and 1973; Jordan and Syria in 1967 and 1973. It helped the Kingdom of Jordan’s bloody repression of the Palestinians in 1970. It occupied southern Lebanon in the 1980s.

It unconditionally supported every US and NATO reactionary movements against any regime that has had clashes with imperialism in the Middle East (Libya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, etc.). It backed Turkey against the Kurds, the largest nation without a state. It was one of the main enemies of all the de-colonising and anti-imperialist movements through the entire planet. It legalised torture and killed many Arab children in the Intifada [and continues to do so in Sharon’s current invasion] and in its terrorist bombing and incursions into Lebanon. It helped the anti-`terrorist’ commands in Somoza’s Nicaragua and in Peru. And what does it mean to “ensure” IDF’s “superiority”? Perhaps to develop more nuclear and bio-chemical weapons which can be used to make a holocaust that could be a thousand times more devastating than Deir Yassin?

In a country that has a very strong Jewish colonialist-fundamentalist camp, Meretz appeared as the most extreme Zionist force concerning civic rights. In the state of Israel every Jew who was born in any other part of the globe can have citizenship automatically. However, a Palestinian whose family inhabited that land for centuries, is a second class citizen and does not have the right to return to the land or home from which he/she was expelled in 1948 or 1967.

No Palestinian occupies any leading position in any Israeli government, the state or the army. Who decides who is a Jew? It is not a secular entity or even any Jewish religious congregation. That right is in the hands of the most orthodox and archaic rabbinate. This is such a reactionary body, that even the US Conservative Jews are to its left. The State of Israel does not have a constitution because it is based on a Jewish religious code.

Meretz ‘radicalism’ is limited to “the separation of religious institutions from the institutions of the state”. Israel should be “governed by the rule of law, rather than by the rule of the Halakha.” Nevertheless, Meretz vindicates that “Jewish heritage and the Jewish legal core are a cornerstone of our national culture and a source of inspiration in our lives and in creativity”.

As we saw, Meretz’ programme does not have any reference to the working class. It has very reactionary goals. It wants to keep a Jewish identity based in elements of Jewish religion. It tries to separate progressive Jews from their non-Jewish compatriots and to transform them into colonial settlers, dispossessing a native population. It wants to maintain a purely Jewish exclusionist state. It has a neo-liberal anti-working class economic programme. It differs from the hard-liners only in the sense that it is prepared to soften the rabbinical influence on the state institutions and allow Palestinian ‘self-determination’ in the form of a fragmented and powerless ‘independent’ Bantustan.

The Oslo peace accords, instead of pushing ‘socialist Zionists’ to the left, are causing a backward evolution towards neo-liberalism and reaction. Despite the possibility of organising common demonstrations and actions with them against the colonialist settlers and hard-liners, it is impossible to make any kind of anti-imperialist united front with currents that are advocating an imperialist and segregationist solution to the Palestinian question.

Zionism has no single progressive aspect

The doctrine of Zionism was created by Theodor Hertzl. He wanted to convince the Tsar and all the great powers that the best solution to the `Jewish question’ was to provide the Jews with a state. Instead of being persecuted, the Jews could `expand ‘Western civilisation” against `barbarians’. Hertzl offered his services to transform the Jews into a colonialist tool against native peoples.

When Zionism was born (one century ago) hundreds of thousands of Jews were very active in the labour and anti-capitalist movement and many socialists were Jews (as was Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Zinoviev, Kamenev etc). Zionism was also used to divide the Jewish workers from their fellow classmates. If Marxists advocate the unity of all the workers of all nations and communities against the capitalists, the Zionists advocated the unity of the Jewish workers with and behind the capitalist Jews and their imperialist associates against other peoples. The Zionist emigration to Palestine had a reactionary goal. Jewish capitalists, unions and co-operatives excluded the natives from their ranks. Arab lands where purchased and given to Jewish colonial settlers. The Arab population felt that they were being driven away from a new colonialist movement.

After the holocaust the imperialist powers and the USSR where prepared to give the Jews a state in Palestine. In 1947 the UN partitioned British Palestine and created two states. In its war against its neighbours, Israel captured many Arab lands and the rest of the Palestinian lands were taken by Egypt and the Transjordan kingdom (since then it became Jordan).

Comprising less than 10% of the world’s Jewish population Israel was created as the homeland for all the Jews. The Jewish minority in Palestine (most of them where settlers born in Europe) took most of the country. Zionism managed to transform a persecuted people into Western colonialists.

Zionism did not end with anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it produced the expulsion of most of the Jews from the Arab world (a region which had a much less anti-Jewish traditions than the West). Zionism became another form of anti-Semitism. A new state was created expelling and oppressing a Semitic people (the Palestinian Arabs).

Marxists need to address the Israeli Jewish working class. A big difference that we have with the Arab nationalists and fundamentalists is that they don’t want to create a bridge or form an alliance with the Jewish proletariat. We should support the Hebrew workers struggles for better wages and labour conditions, against privatisation and for de-militarisation and civic rights.

However, we need to understand that imperialism can create communal privileges amongst one ethnic section of the working class against another section. In South Africa and Northern Ireland the White or Unionist workers achieved better social conditions than the Black and Republican workers. Some of the most reactionary terrorist forces where recruited amongst that layer of privileged workers.

We need to address the most oppressed sections of the proletariat. The anti-Unionists in the six counties and the Black workers in South Africa are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist movement. The actions of these layers should influence workers from the privileged communities. The only way to win the workers from the oppressor states is to win them to solidarity with the most oppressed sections of society and to show them that, instead of maintaining their privileges, they need to fight together with all the working class against their common enemies: the capitalists.

Marxists are champions of the right of self-determination for every nation. However, we can deny such rights in some concrete circumstances, like when the national right of one community would clash with the rights of another community. In Northern Ireland and South Africa that would mean an attack on the oppressed population. The same principle we apply to Israel. We are against the right of the Protestant Unionists and the Afrikaners to form their own states because, like the Israeli nation, they would have their inception in the oppression of the native population.

A society created on discrimination

While the Boers and Ulster Protestants can show that they were the majority of the population of some part of their lands for many centuries and that they had some historical-territorial continuity, the Israeli Jews only started to arrive in Palestine in this century. They arrived from all the corners of the planet.

The Jews from Western or Eastern Europe, Yemen, Mesopotamia, Maghreb, Central Asia, Kurdistan, the Caucasus, South Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Australasia, India or Ethiopia had different histories, cultures, histories, traditions, religious practices, languages and races. Some of them evolved in a near complete isolation from other Jewish communities. There are tens or even hundreds of different Jewish religious congregations.

The only thing that unites all of them is their common belief in the first Testament and in a common vindication of the old Jerusalem faith. Hebrew, a ‘dead’ classical language only used for religious rituals and education, was modernised and transformed into the new `national’ language. In order to develop Hebrew, Zionists undermined Ladino, the traditional Jewish mother tongue of the Jews in the Ottoman empire based in old Spanish, and Yiddish, the traditional European Jewish language based in old German. The Bolsheviks, on the contrary, massively promoted Yiddish Publications, Higher Education institutions, schools and even set up a territory (Birobidjan) for the development of the Yiddish culture and language.

Arabic was the language spoken by the overwhelmingly majority of the population in Palestine until 1948. Around half of the Jews that came to Israel after 1948 came from Oriental countries where most of them had Arabic as their mother tongue. Like all discriminatory societies Israel has a system based on different levels of privileges. The Arabs are the most oppressed. Among the Jews, Oriental Jews are oppressed by Azkanazim Jews of European origins. The Black Jews (Falasha) suffer racism and discrimination. The Chief rabbinate does not fully recognise Falasha as having Jewish status. They are a sort of inferior Jew.

Israeli society is also divided amongst religious believers. The most orthodox minority (like the small Naturei Carta) is against the Israeli state because they think that a Jewish state could only be created with a Messiah and that the present state tries to eliminate the Jewish traditional community in order to create a modern secularised state. The majority of the orthodox (the `crows’) wants a fundamentalist Talmudic and segregationist state. They even attack non-orthodox Jews when they drive cars on the Sabbaths (holy Saturdays) or when they see women with `improper’ clothes. Many Israelis wants a modern and secularised life.

Most nation-states were created claiming the continuity of a people that lived in the assigned territory for many centuries. Most of the nations, despite having an official religion, adopted some secular and non-confessional legal basis. Pakistan was divided from India around religious allegiances. However, most of the people that inhabited Pakista

In India Marxists are against the creation of Khalistan. A Sikh state could be based in a community that is the majority of the population of certain parts of the Punjab. However, it would be created under religious and communalist basis and would became a reactionary tool against the most secularised Sikhs and the Indian population.

The Israeli nation cannot offer any territorial-historic continuity. Until the last century less than 5% or even 1% of Palestine were Jews. The Jews who arrived in that land had different histories and they and their immediate ancestors lived mainly in other countries or continents. Their only territorial claim to that land was that of descent from the old Israelis who inhabited that land 2,000 years ago.

The Welsh, Gaelic and Bretons could claim Britain and even most of Western Europe because the Celts where the majority of the population 2,000 years ago. Different regions in the Balkans and Eastern Europe could have been claimed by Albanians, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Germans, Hungarians, Turks or Polish because only one century ago they used to be the majority of the population. With this kind of territorial claim the Canaanites or the Philistines, who inhabited Palestine before the Jews -as the Bible related- bloody invaded them, could have better claims. In fact, the Palestinians can claim to be the direct descendants of them.

A Jewish state can be created only around some religious allegiances because that is the only thing that all Jews share in common. A secular state would mean a republic based on a constitution in which every citizen has equal rights. In the Bolshevik Soviet Union, Jews, who were only 2% of the people, were allowed to lead the Red Army, the two main Soviets and the ruling International Party.

Would an Israeli entity allow an Arab to become Prime Minister, mayor of Jerusalem or chief of the army? This is impossible because the state is founded on religious segregation. A Jewish state in a territory that was populated by a heterogeneous Jewish minority for less than half a century and founded on the expulsion/oppression of its native population, can only survive by means of its Apartheid character.

Can we recognise the right of a Jewish nation?

Palestinians (and progressive Jews) should not recognise the right of Israel to exist. A two-state solution would imply that the Palestinians must renounce most of their lands from which they were pushed in the last five decades.

In Argentina, Australia and the USA the native population was largely wiped out and new modern White settler nations where created on the basis of massive European emigration. We cannot demand that these big countries should be given back to their original peoples. The indigenous populations where reduced to few hundreds of thousands. On the other side tens of millions now constitute industrialised societies. In these countries we defend the First Nations rights to use their mother tongue in their education and every day life, to have lands and even to achieve self-government in the areas that remain under their control.

Palestine does not offer the same scenario. The Zionists could not annihilate large chunks of the local population. There are more than four million Palestinians living under Israeli control or in neighbouring countries. The Palestinian working class and intelligentsia are among the Middle East’s most enlightened and militant ones. Palestinian fighters are at the forefront of the region’s anti-imperialist struggles. Palestinian demonstrations are a major source of inspiration especially for the hundreds of millions of Arab and Muslim masses.

The idea that the Arabs have to accept the colonist entity as a nation with the right to have its own state, is a demand to surrender made by the most pro-imperialist wings of the ruling classes. The left-wing Palestinians are resisting that capitulation. If the Arab left came to terms with Israel it would reinforce the Islamic fundamentalist attempt to monopolise the anti-Zionist Arab sentiment. That would be a colossal tragedy.

A bi-national Israeli/Arab State would be an unworkable contradiction. Palestine is the historical denomination of a territory. It does not have an exclusive, segregationist or religious connotation. Christians and Muslims, and even some non-Zionist Jews, also use that name. Israel means by its name the desire to create a separate and pure Jewish communalist state. It is possible to talk about a bi-national or bi-lingual country in Belgium or Wales. In these places different linguistic-cultural communities developed alongside each other without any strong degree of discrimination.

In Spain, Iran, the Andes, India and other countries it is possible to argue in favour of the right of self-determination for all its components or even for a multi-national federation. Basque, Kurds, Quechuas, Tamils are oppressed nationalities which had historical roots in territories in which they were the majority of the population for centuries.

A bi-national Israeli-Palestinian state would not be based on the equality of both communities. The Arabs have the worst jobs and do not have the same rights as the Zionists. Israel and Aliya are inseparable. Israel needs to grant citizenship to every Jew no matter if he/she was born in Argentina or Australia and has never been in the country before. Israel provides housing, jobs and benefits to the Jewish emigrants while the Arab native population are denied their rights to return to their lands or homes and they cannot have important positions in the state, the police or the army.

Marxists oppose Aliya. We are, of course, in favour of free frontiers and against people’s displacement. We want open borders for all the Jews, Gypsies and other peoples who suffer discrimination. However, we have to oppose colonialist emigration. We opposed the French or Italian attempts to resettle poor peasants or workers as colonial tools in Northern Africa. We rejected the Rabat’s kingdom mass march on Western Sahara because they wanted to solve a land problem in Morocco at the expenses of the Sarahui local population. A democratic secular Palestine should welcome citizens from all countries but they could not accept émigrés that try to create a segregationist state at the expense of the original people.

In Ecuador the Council of Indian Nations (CONAI) demand that this state should accept its multi-national character. The achievement of that goal would imply a great conquest for all the Indian peoples. In Palestine the native population is not fighting to be considered just one of several cultural and national components of the state. Israel is, by definition, based in a Jewish supremacist and segregationist doctrine and in the necessity to ethnically cleanse Palestine. The Palestinians are claiming their land back. Their historical aim was to refuse to recognise the state that deprived them of their lands and citizenship.

We are not in favour of a bi-cultural Northern Ireland or of a bi-national White/Black South Africa. It does not mean that we are in favour of a clerical Catholic all-Ireland or for expelling all the Whites from South Africa. It means that the former privileged community has to accept that they should stop considering the rest of the population as inferior and to accept that they should be an equal minority.

We are for the destruction of a purely Jewish segregationist and confessional state. But that does not mean that we want to drive all Jews into the sea or to support yet another genocide. We want to convince as many Jews as we can that the best thing for them is to unite with the Arab workers in order to create a secular non-religious and non-racist egalitarian republic.

The Bolsheviks promoted the Yiddish culture and they designated a territory for Jewish colonisation. The Jews did not arrive in Birobidjan as a racist segregationist colonist who tried to exclude the native peoples. They coexisted peacefully with the locals. Today, for example, Birobidjan’s Slav majority is very keen to retain the Jewish identity of that country as a means of attracting investment, technology and people.

In countries where the Jews constituted a compact oppressed majority in some territories (like the Falasha in Ethiopia) it was possible to advocate their right of self-determination, including autonomy or separation. However that right cannot be extended to a group of people that wants to come into a new country to ethnically cleanse the local population.

Zionism needs to trample on the rich cultural and linguistic traditions of the Arab, Ladino, Yiddish, Falasha and other Jewish communities in order to create a new Hebrew oppressive nation which is forged in bloodiest battles against the Arab natives. We need to emphasise the fact that the Israeli Jewish community is, in fact, a multi-ethnic amalgam. Zionists try to unite them against a common enemy: the native Arab peoples. We should not help them in doing that.

We need to defend many of these communities against the Zionists attempts to deny some of their most progressive traditions (like the Yiddish working class movements) and its discriminatory conditions in Israel. Begin and Likud tried to use the Oriental Jew resentment against the Azkenazim in a reactionary way: trying to transform them into the most patriotic anti-Arab pro-Israeli force. We should address the oriental Jews explaining that their enemies are not the Arab neighbours or natives but the capitalists and Zionists.

A socialist, secular, multi-ethnic Republic

Our demand is for a socialist, secular, multi-ethnic and democratic Palestinian republic. In that country there would live scores of communities: non-religious Jews and Arabs, secularised Russian-speaking Jews, Ladino-speaking Jews, Yiddish-speaking Jews, Arab-speaking Jews, Hebrew-speakers; non-Talmudic Jews (Samaritans, Falasha, Karaite), as well as Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews; various Christian congregations (Armenians, Copts, Catholics (Roman and Orthodox); Maronnites, Protestants, etc.); Muslims (Shias, Sunni, etc.); Druses, Bedouins, Bahai, etc.

All these communities should have equal rights. No single community should impose its own religion onto the state. A secular constitution with a secular civic code should regulate their activities. There would not be special treatment for those of the same religion that come from other countries. Palestinians should have the right to return.

A democratic multi-ethnic Palestine could only be achieved as a result of a socialist revolution based on workers councils and militias. It would also be part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. In that context not only Palestinians would have the right to return but also Arab Jews would have the right to return to Syria, Morocco, Iraq and other Arab countries. Kurds, Assyrian and other nationalities would achieve self-determination and equal rights.

LCMRCI December 1998

From Class Struggle 44 April/May 2002

Bipolar World – Socialism or Extinction! Down with Capitalist War! For a Socialist World!

The 1917 February Revolution in Russia was led by striking women

From Crises to Wars

As Marx once said the old order is dying but the new order is yet to be born. Capitalism is a finite society which goes from its birth in Europe in the late 18thC to maturity in the late 19thC century, the ‘Late stage’ capitalism in the 20thC finishing in ‘End Stage’ capitalism in the 21stC. The basic contradiction between Capital and Nature brings the death sentence to Capital. As the contradiction intensifies it speeds up events driven by class struggle. Capital’s destruction of the material conditions for its own existence becomes visible as chaotic forces such as slumps and ecological collapse. There is no way out for the ruling class. It can no longer rule in the old way because the working masses have nothing to lose and refuse to be ruled. Workers refuse to starve or die in wars of mutual destruction to give the breath of life into capitalism. As Trotsky said, workers are natural dialecticians, they see the objective reality of capitalism destroying itself, creating the chaos of destruction of nature and humanity, and subjectively begin to become conscious of the necessity for socialist revolution.

The new socialist order exists inside the dying capitalist order in embryonic form as the precondition for socialism. The working class is now the big majority, and its advanced productivity can produce enough material plenty for a good life for all. But while it is conscious of itself, it is not yet conscious for itself as the only class capable of building a new socialist order. Workers need an international revolutionary party and program based on Trotsky’s Transitional program of 1938 that subjectively transcends the objective situation. The program teaches them that class struggle will prove that even their most basic needs for life and liberty cannot be met short of the overthrow of the capitalist system. Yet since capitalism will not die of its own accord it has to be overthrown. In what follows we outline our method and program for making that historic transition from the death agony of capitalism to the birth pangs of socialism. We begin with the analysis of the war in Ukraine.

The Lessons of the Ukraine War

The war in Ukraine is the chaotic manifestation of the underlying contradiction between Capital and Nature exploding to the surface in the inter-imperialist war for Ukraine.  Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism – the epoch of crises, wars, and revolutions. The war is the result of the terminal crisis that leads to war which in turn creates the conditions for revolution. Lenin, in Imperialism; the Highest Stage of Capitalism, argues the limits to profitability in the advanced capitalist countries forces them to export surplus capital to the colonies to extract enough labour value, by driving down the value of wages, to restore the rate of profit in the ‘motherland’. Marx explains in Capital that this is caused by the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF) due to the rising ratio of Constant capital which does not create value, to Variable capital which does produce value (c/v). The export of surplus capital is a counter-tendency to the LTPRF and drives the redivision of the world among the big powers competing to maximise super profits/absolute rent.

Ukraine is a perfect example. Applying Marx’s law, in the post WW2 boom period the US and the EU powers experienced falling profits. To create the conditions for a new boom in production it was necessary to massively destroy existing c and v as the equivalent to another world depression or world war to restore the rate of profit. Neoliberalism was launched in the 1980s to ‘restructure’, i.e., destroy fixed assets and wages in the semi-colonial world and the imperialist heartlands. But the real prize of neoliberalism was the restoration of capitalism in Russia and China in 1992 opening up the former Degenerated Workers States (DWS’s) to world capitalism and a massive devaluation of c and v. Yet by 2000 the Western Powers had failed to replace the state monopoly capitalist (SMC) regime in Russia then under Putin and gain access to devalued assets. Similarly, in China they succeeded in opening up the restored capitalist economy for Western investment, but failed to break the monopoly state’s control over its banks and key economic sectors. Even the ‘boom’ of the 1990s was due more to credit and speculation than real value growth. All up neoliberalism failed to return the rate of profit to the post-war boom level and the so-called “End of History” was history.

Neoliberalism privatised state-owned property and drove down wages in the existing capitalist states, but ultimately failed to re-colonise the newly restored capitalism of the former Soviet Union and capitalise on the re-valuing of assets and labour to counter the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF). So long as the former DWS’s resisted colonisation by Western imperialism it was Russia and China which capitalised on their massive territories and economic resources beyond the super-exploitation of Western finance capital. The US/EU then resorted to an aggressive expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, using the membership of Georgia and Ukraine as a weapon to provoke a war. The object was to bankrupt, force a regime change and breakup Russia as a stepping stone to recolonising the ex-Soviet Union (SU) and the whole of Eurasia. This plan backfired dramatically as Russia’s economy is now growing faster than Germany’s. 

The imperialist ruling classes are in denial. Ideology and the propaganda war in both camps dress up their imperialist rivalry with slogans about personal/national freedom (US) and equality/win-win (China). The reformist left pimps the bourgeoisie’s propaganda – for US imperialism or for Russian and Chinese imperialism. This is the social imperialist left – living off the super-exploitation of their colonies and semi-colonies. Most advocates of US social imperialism defend Ukraine from Russia on the grounds of supporting Ukraine’s independence. Those who deny the proxy character of the inter-imperialist war, put Ukraine’s national rights ahead of defeating US militarism. US social imperialists justify the killing both Ukraine and Russian workers in uniform in a war which risks breaking out into nuclear war.

In reality, inter-imperialist war sharpens the contradiction between bourgeois democracy/ equality, and the underlying bourgeois dictatorship. It exposes the hypocrisy of praising Western democracy against Eurasian dictatorships when both evolve into imperialist monopoly capitalist states to manage inter-imperialist war. US military invasions since 1991 push the propaganda of ‘democracy and freedom’ against Russia’s ‘equality and sovereignty’ and China’s ‘socialist win-win’ narratives. All are crisis-driven projects that serve their bourgeois sovereign ‘right’ to restore profits by any means necessary. The cannon fodder gets no say in this proxy war in Ukraine as it affects both individual rights and national rights of minorities. Ukraine’s right to national self-determination, and the rights of national minorities such as Russian speakers in the Donbass, are sacrificed to the inter-imperialist war. This subordinates these national rights to the reactionary right of rival imperialist powers to go to war over Ukraine to decide which one will exploit the strategic resources of their victims.  

Geopolitics: From Eurasia to Africa and Latin America

Imperialism arises from the shift from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism where finance capital concentrates and centralises into fewer, bigger imperialist powers to create state monopoly capitalism. As mentioned above, it is the reaction to the limits set by nation states by exporting capital to capture super-profits and absolute rent to counter the crisis of falling profits. But 100 years later when neoliberalism has failed to restore profits, the structural crises of the 20stC Late Capitalism has become End Stage Capitalism’s terminal crisis in the 21stC as it crashes into the limits imposed by Nature. We define the terminal crisis as capitalism destroying its conditions of existence. It can no longer activate measures to counter the LTRPF without destroying nature. The terminal crisis spreads from the top to bottom to download the cost of the crises onto the workers and poor farmers in the semi-colonies and the imperialist rivals, as they compete for the shrinking sources of strategic resources.

As the terminal crisis intensifies it picks up speed and spreads globally creating the impression of chaos among nations. But ‘chaos’ is a bourgeois tag which does not penetrate to the underlying causes of the terminal crisis which is the decay of global capitalism. Lacking a Marxist analysis, the bourgeois fail to see that their national sovereignty like their individual sovereignty is a fetish. Nations were formed to protect national capital, but capitalism since the late 19thcC was forced by the LTRPF to escape national borders to restore the rate of profit. All wars since have been in the interests of one or other imperialist power. That is why the war in Ukraine cannot be a war confined to Ukraine and Russia and must overflow into a global war. It is currently the major front marking the fault line between Europe and Asia – a proxy war on both sides that must spread to other fronts across other continents to repartition the world and reset the imperialist pecking order. We scratch below the surface of trade deals, coups, special military operations and there we find the US/EU facing off against China/Russia. 

The speed and intensity of this global war drive cannot be explained other than by Marx’s dialectical method. The US and EU powers as declining imperialisms exhibit a failing capacity to produce value at home caused by the LTRPF. The export of excess profit to compensate for falling profits at home then determines their relative competitiveness in the world market. To make super-profits abroad the US and EU have to build branch plants in countries with cheap labour and compliant states. As we argued above the US/EU were desperate to recolonise the SU and China as new sources of strategic resources and markets to save their massive capital stocks from devaluing. They poured in masses of Foreign Direct Investment  (FDI) to take advantage of the natural wealth of these countries only to be faced by protectionist barriers imposed by a newly evolved form of state monopoly capital. The outcome is that the US/EU economies in decline not only failed to recolonise them, they had to face the prospect of failing to compete with them on the global market.

As the war in Ukraine heads for a stalemate Russia and the US are negotiating with advanced weaponry over a new border between Eastern and Western Ukraine.  Both are under pressure from their allies to end the war. The EU cannot sustain more economic damage from the blowback from the war and China has to make preparations for what it sees as the coming war with the US. The US sees China as its mortal enemy globally as each competes to expand their spheres of influence at the expense of their rival. The Ukraine war on the Eurasian front is now ‘pivoting’ into a wider war with Russia and China in East Asia over several fronts. While Taiwan is the main target as the US Pacific ground zero, South East Asia and the whole Asia Pacific is being drawn into the fallout.  In Europe, Poland is mobilizing at the Belarus border as Wagner parks its troops there. At the same time new fronts are developing in Africa and Latin America. 

Such fronts in South East Asia and the Asia Pacific are being built to encircle China as the US bullies countries in the region to sign up to NATO East to oppose China’s growing economic influence. The object is to boost friendly regimes like Myanmar and  regime change unfriendly ones such as Thailand. Australia’s Labor Government is in AUKUS and  NZ is attending the meetings of NATO East. In East Africa the latest coup in Niger has thrown up a new front where a proxy war between US/France and Russia for control of its uranium appears certain. The US has long supported Uganda and Rwanda in a covert war in the DRC to contest China’s grab of vital minerals like diamonds and Cobalt. Other African countries are being forced to take sides or stay neutral.

In Latin America the US is bullying Brazil and Argentina to abandon BRICS as the BRICS meeting draws closer. In all the Latin American regimes, the fractions of the bourgeois that side with one or other great powers, will create opportunities for the US to intervene to stage color revolutions and coups that end in proxy wars. All these wars are blatantly about whether the US or China dominates the control of global strategic resources like uranium, gold, lithium etc., to further plunder the Global South and impoverish its peoples.

As the global terminal crisis of capital deepens, imperialism unloads the cost of paying for its crisis onto the shoulders of the poor masses of the global south. They have no choice but to fight for their existence. In the past the Western powers subdivided the world into their own spheres of interest. Both world wars arose when a declining power Germany went to war to rebuild its global position. Today, the whole West is in decline. Germany’s GDP has fallen behind Russia as it pays the price of the EU backing the US/NATO war on Russia. Ironically Russia has taken its place as the economic sanctions and the Ukraine war has forced it to develop a close strategic alliance with China.

So, while Western imperialism declines, the new imperialism of the East continues to grow. In End Stage capitalism as we have argued, all wars will tend to become a world-wide war with many fronts. Since both imperialist blocs are equally destructive of humanity and nature, both must be opposed by the world’s workers. Yet the revolutionary left either does not recognise Russia and China as imperialist, or retreats to the defence of one against the other as being the more ‘progressive’, suppressing the organisation of an independent working-class position on imperialist war. We now move to an analysis of the prospects for a growing resistance to inter-imperialist wars, to the alliances between imperialism and pro-imperialist bourgeois regimes, and the need for the new world party of socialist revolution and program necessary to lead the global masses to overthrow imperialism and build socialism.

The Global Imperialist Popular Front

The vast majority of the ostensible revolutionary left include those from Stalinist, Maoist or centrist Trotskyist origins. They are the modern Mensheviks who believe that imperialism has the capacity to be reformed in stages. This strategy calls for popular fronts, in which workers ally with the progressive petty-bourgeoisie and the liberal bourgeoisie, to take the parliamentary road to managing any crisis in the interests of workers. Historic examples abound of such imperialist popular fronts (IPF) betraying the workers to imperialism and preparing the ground for fascist reaction. Both WW1 and WW2 were sold to workers by Mensheviks as gigantic IPFs. Workers were rallied around the national flag of one or more imperialist powers against the enemy imperialist powers. 

The historic betrayal of the Menshevik 2nd International in not opposing WW1 was condemned by Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky at the Zimmerwald conference in 1915. Lenin and Trotsky guided the Bolsheviks through the first four Congresses of the Comintern to counterpose the Anti-Imperialist United Front (AIUF) to the IPF. The Stalinised Comintern after 1924 transformed the AIUF of the Second Congress into an imperialist popular front. Stalin’s first great betrayal was the ‘block of 4 classes’ with the bourgeois KMT which led to the massacre of the leadership of the Communist Party in 1927. Later, following its ultraleft block with Hitler against the German revolution in 1933, Stalin flipped into a popular front with social democracy and the centre parties in the European imperialist states to forestall socialist revolutions in Europe and prevent the political revolution against the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. 

It was in this period that Trotsky warned that in Latin America the Popular Front Party (PFP) was the governmental form of the IPF, betraying the revolution in Latin America in the interwar period. With the rise of Russia and China in the 21stC our tendency was the only one to argue that the Bolivarian movement of Chavez joined with Castro’s ‘socialism’ in the ALBA states, to form an IPF with the emerging Russian and Chinese Imperialism.  The rise as a ‘progressive great power bloc’ was  sold to the masses as the ‘socialist 5th International’ alternative to Western imperialism, and an escape route from the crisis of capitalism wrought upon the global south entirely by the US/EU powers.

We predicted that the Bolivarian IPF would become an example for more betrayals across all the continents. The Mensheviks in the West (aka social imperialists) put off action to defeat their own ruling classes into the future. In Ukraine, the Russophiles pretend that the war is not a proxy war between imperialists because Russia is not imperialist. Those who recognise Russia and China as Great Powers refuse to acknowledge that they are imperialist in the sense of plundering the Global South for strategic resources and pumping out surplus value immiserating the working masses. They say Russia is only defending itself from US regime change and NATO encroachment with the help of China and other allies. They conveniently pass the task of defeating US imperialism to Russian workers in uniform in a military front with their national bourgeoisie. It is not surprising then, that as the war spreads to more fronts on other continents, that the prevailing position in the Global South is inspired by the Bolivarians. The US hegemon is held responsible for all the reaction in the post-WW2 period and Russia and China are progressive states defending themselves.

The formation of two blocs around the US/EU and Russia and China exist only because  members regard theirs to be the more ‘progressive’. We have seen how this applies to the Western bloc’s propaganda proclaiming dedication to democracy and human rights. It is equally clear in the Eastern Bloc. If we take the case of BRICS+ which is undergoing rapid expansion, we hear the same message from the pro-Russia/China national bourgeoisies. It runs like this. ‘Russia and China do not sanction or threaten to go to war with their partners. They do win-win deals where both sides get a fair share of the profits. Their models of economic development since the restoration of capitalism continue that of the Soviet policy of economic and military aid. It represents the historical model for the Global South where state to state deals are done without political strings attached.’ The bi-polar military front opening up over Niger vindicates this model when the Coup leader preaches the evils of US/French colonialism and the benefits of alignment to Russia.

This Bolivarian model is presented flamboyantly by Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters  (EFF) in South Africa.  He campaigns like an African Hugo Chavez for a united Africa which can become equal partners in the development of capitalism with the help of Russia and China. His statement that “Africa is open for investment” is clearly directed mainly at them because, unlike Western imperialism, they supposedly do not behave like imperialist powers. We reject the popular front narrative of Russia and China engaged in win-win diplomacy and economic fair shares with their colonies and semi-colonies. The slogan of multipolarity rather than bipolarity is a cover for BRICS as a union of oppressor and oppressed countries as if they were equals. We argue that the win-win deals are between the imperialist ruling classes and the semi-colonial ruling classes whose ‘fair shares’ in the plunder cost the workers and poor farmers their lives.

‘Win-win’ deals or ‘fair shares’ steals

Let’s unpack the delusion of the ‘win-win-fair shares’ model which sends the message that Russian and Chinese imperialisms are ‘progressive’. Much of the appeal of this model is the history of both as ‘socialist’ states. Julius Malema speaks effusively of China’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. We heard that often from Castro and Chavez. We argue that all that remains of this legacy today is the centralised bureaucratised capitalist state. The state monopoly capitalism (SMC) of Russia and China is subject to the law of value and defends that law. Their states’ ability to moderate the free market is designed to maximise profits in the interests of state capital-in-general. In other words, any advantage they have in competing with the US/EU powers owes nothing to ‘socialism’, past or present.

It took Western imperialism 200 years from birth to maturity to become imperialists exporting capital to super exploit the world’s workers to restore profits. China (and Russia after the lost decade of the 1990s) has had to take the same path from restoration of the market to a high-tech global value chain in 30 years. But it is the same imperialism, the same relations of production, and the same underlying laws of motion.  It follows that as SMC regimes Russia and China must compete with their Western rivals to prevent the LTRPF from driving down profits. This means that any sharing of profits with partner regimes will be based on China’s own experience of capitalist development but presented as ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.’  Aid and debt forgiveness then is made to appear as part of a state socialist plan to gain popular approval for equal shares in ‘progressive’ win-win state-to-state deals. 

Therefore, mimicking China’s developmental plan requires similar SMC regimes. State-to-state deals between Russia and China and their economic partners must share the ‘characteristics of state capitalism’. In the name of ‘state socialism’ the partner states will eliminate the problem of private property, a major unnecessary cost to capital, by nationalising property rights. Malema is a big fan because he knows that the ‘win-win’ deals depend on taking the workers along.. To win popular support for ‘state socialism’ the working masses must believe that they will get a fair share of the win-win deals like Chinese workers with the provision of infrastructure, jobs, health, housing, living incomes etc. shifting millions out of poverty. China was able to do this by allowing Western imperialism to profit from FDI with cheap inputs from Chinese and global labour in exchange for technology transfer. 

But critically, China never allowed imperialist private direct investment to spread from high tech manufacturing to control of the state, finance and state-owned land. Russia since 2000 has rolled back foreign investment to restore a centralised state-run economy. But now Russia and China are becoming their imperialist partners, they will not be able to retain sufficient value to control the economy except as the agents of imperialism. So while Russia and China’s partners in the Global South may technically become economically independent but not as Malema promises on ‘our terms’, rather ‘their terms’. Those terms will be dictated by the making of profits that are necessary to allow Russia’s and China’s stock of surplus capital to be reproduced at a long-term profit rate that allows the further accumulation of capital. Any apparent ‘advantages’ over the US/EU bloc resulting from win-win deals with Russia and China of the US/EU will be determined not by goodwill, or ‘socialism’ but by the efficiencies of state capitalist long-term planning.

Therefore how can Russia and China deliver on promises made by the client regimes to the working masses? There are many risks. The ‘long term’ plan is subject to constant disruption by the terminal crisis of capital, the prospect of unending wars, and more importantly, revolutions. The terminal crisis affects all imperialist states, democratic or autocratic. Russia and China are not immune from the terminal crisis of capital, made worse by climate emergency and the threat of more pandemics. Capitalism on its last legs and nature on the brink of collapse does not contribute much to reducing the risk of permanent crises leading to war and revolutions. 

Therefore, any advantages that Russia and China have to displace the US/EU as the ‘lesser evil’, if not ‘progressive’ imperialist bloc, are subject to economic laws of motion that will mobilise an intensified class war between the capitalist and working classes on every front. This high risk of mounting class struggle is factored in by all imperialists when preparing contingency plans for risk management of investment. The new imperialists carry some soviet era goodwill baggage with them which once exhausted cannot offset the risk of the working masses rising up in revolution. This baggage has the name of the IPF used to trap, disarm and divert workers from revolution. This raises the urgent necessity of building an international anti-imperialist united front (AIUF) to challenge and smash the counter-revolutionary IPF. 

The Anti-imperialist United Front

AIUF is a UF of workers and poor peasants against imperialism that embodies the permanent revolution in the epoch of imperialism. We recognise that after Lenin’s death the Stalinists turned it into a pro-imperialist popular front. For this reason, Trotsky abandoned it for his concept of permanent revolution after the defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1927. But it remains an accurate concept today, provided it consciously excludes petty bourgeois and bourgeois forces in the UF.

We justify this practice first, by Lenin’s characterisation of the epoch as imperialist where national self-determination is not possible without the defeat of both the national bourgeoisie and their imperialist masters. Second, by our recognition that Lenin shared Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution in Russia which Trotsky, after the lesson of China, then applied to all the colonies and semi-colonies. Only revolutionary workers can resolve the unfinished program of the bourgeoisie by means of international socialist revolution. Hence the AIUF applies the method of the UF to the theory/program of permanent revolution in the epoch as a whole.

This is why in the first decade of the 21stC End Stage capitalism, when the new imperialisms of Russia and China are presented as the ‘progressive’ or ‘socialist’ friends and partners in the revolution, we opposed the Bolivarian IPF posing as a AIUF in front of the masses to trap, defeat and divert the workers and poor farmers. Hence, we recognised the Venezuelan PSUV and the Cuban Communist party as the same reactionary Popular Front Parties (PFP) that Trotsky identified in Latin America in the 1930’s. And this is exactly the model adopted in all colonial and semi-colonial bourgeois regimes in Asia and Africa. In fact, they describe the class composition of all ‘populist’ parties including the Peronist party, the South African ANC, and the Communist Party of China (CPC). In every case it is necessary to confront the PFP as the agent of imperialism with the AIUF to break the workers and poor peasants from the petty bourgeois and bourgeois classes.  

The AIUF therefore is formed politically to break the workers from the bourgeois PFP particularly when it controls the government and hence legislative power.  The object is not to create an independent workers’ party to contest elections but to build a revolutionary party. The AIUF can critically support workers’ parties inside government unless they are in a governmental popular front where the bourgeois partner dominates and provides an alibi for betrayal. When workers parties put up candidates they stand as tributes to promote the program, not to join in parliamentary circuses. Revolutionaries do not spread illusions in worker majorities, or in workers’ ministers,  pushing a government to the left.  This is the classic strategy of all shades of reformists who believe that workers can take power by winning control of the parliamentary executive. The object is not to participate in the government but to smash workers’ illusions in reforms and break workers from the PFP.

Marxists know that the state is the organising committee of the bourgeoisie. State power is not concentrated, nor separated, in the legislature, executive and judiciary. Bourgeois parliaments are the democratic front for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Once exposed the dictatorship will dispense with democracy and resort to the use of state forces to repress revolution. Therefore, the AIUF must be based on the independent organisations of the working class. It must be armed to defend itself from state and parastatal institutions/forces in order to win dual power and prepare for socialist revolution. Yet while the AIUF is the unity of a workers’ front for an action, specifically to break and destroy the popular front, it is composed of workers at different levels of consciousness. Reformist workers and trade union conscious workers remain trapped at the fetishised level of relations of exchange. Revolutionaries use the AIUF as a tactic to put transitional demands on the reformist leadership of the labour movement to expose their role as agents of the class enemy and transform the reformist workers and trade union conscious workers into class conscious proletarians. 

From War to Revolution

The AIUF to be effective has to be guided by revolutionaries. And revolutionaries cannot exist outside a revolutionary party and its revolutionary program. The revolutionary party is the subjective force acting through its program to change objective reality.  The AIUF is a tactic in the Transitional Program to break workers from the bureaucracy and from the bosses.  We argue that the AIUF arose out of the discussion around the Left Zimmerwald Manifesto of 1915 which called for the defeat of both imperialist sides in war. In 1916 Liebknecht made his famous demand, “workers turn your guns on your own ruling class.”  The Left Zimmerwald program on the war was summed up first as “turn imperialist war into civil war”,  and second,  “build a new international” to replace  2nd International which liquidated itself into social imperialism and social chauvinism.

The 3rd international was therefore also conceived at Zimmerwald. The AIUF tactic was next applied in the Bolshevik program that led to the October Revolution in Russia and the formation of the 3rd International in 1920.  The Left Zimmerwald program was now part of the Bolshevik Party program “to turn the guns of the workers and peasants” in uniform on the Russian imperialist ruling class. After the February revolution led to the fall of the Tsar, the Bolsheviks applied the AIUF against the bourgeois Provisional Government. It was put to the test against the counter-revolutionary coup attempt by the white Russian (Tsarist forces) led by General Kornilov in August. The Bolsheviks formed a tactical military bloc with the bourgeois government  against Kornilov to prove to reformist soldiers and trade unionists that the bourgeois government’s real class enemy was the Soviets not the Tsarists backed by the imperialist powers.

Then came the “turn imperialist war into civil war”. As the embryonic Red Army, the Soviet forces easily outmaneuvered and defeated the Kornilov coup as a preliminary to the Civil War that began almost immediately after the revolution. Workers and poor peasants staged the insurrection in October 1917, formed a workers and poor peasants’ government, and negotiated for peace at Brest-Litovsk with the German high command in the attempt to spark the revolution in Germany. This tactic did not wholly succeed as the Germans invaded southern Russia occupying around a third of the old Russian Empire, forcing an end to the negotiations on March 3rd 1918.  As a result, this changed the character of the war in Soviet Russia into that of the national defence of the revolution in the Civil War against the imperialist powers.

Moreover, the Bolshevik’s stalling tactic at Brest-Litovsk may have helped incubate the wave of mutinies in the German armed forces that first broke out exactly eight months later in the navy at Keil on 2rd November 1918, setting off the German Revolution. Armed soldiers and workers set up soviets in several parts of Germany and turned their guns in their defence. But there was no revolutionary general staff to take the next vital step of armed insurrection, that is, to aim their guns strategically at the ruling class. The soviets were suppressed by ‘special forces’ of the defeated Germany army led by proto-fascist white guards. What was lacking was the next vital step, an established Bolshevik-type party that could stage the break from the treacherous social democracy which formed the popular front Weimar Republic.

The small Spartacist League of Luxemburg and Liebknecht came too late and was too small to make a difference. The general staff, revolutionary party and program, was missing in action. The ruling class suppressed the German revolution but feared its return unless the Soviet Union was destroyed. The imperialist powers buried their differences after the capitulation of Germany, invaded the Soviet Union to wage a civil war from 1918 to 1921, until they met an historic defeat at the hands of the Red Army. This stalemate made another world war inevitable, once more creating the conditions for revolution out of crisis and war to decide which class rules. The old world was still dying, the new world was born, but smothered by “all the old shit” of the old world.

The AIUF tactic was first formulated officially by the 3rd International led by the Bolshevik Party at its Fourth Congress in November 1922. It was part of the turn towards the United Front (UF) as a result of the failure of the workers revolution to spread to Europe and the rest of the world. The Congress balance sheet of this failure isolated the missing ingredient. It was the inability to break the social chauvinist and social imperialist IPF between workers and the bourgeoisie formed by the SPD as part of the  executive of the new Weimar Republic. The way forward from 1922 was through the application of the United Front tactic led by Bolshevik-type parties in all the European powers to win the majority of reformist workers to class consciousness and the revolution. However, at that point the revolution was already isolated and degenerating under the influence of a growing bureaucratic leadership under the influence of the  weight of the peasantry. 

As the revolution degenerated under the influence of the bureaucracy, it became the task of Trotsky, and the Left Opposition, to take up the battle for the UF against the PF in the years between the WW1 WW2 against the bureaucracy in the SU and the rise of fascism. After the victory of fascism in Germany in 1933 Trotsky set out to build a new international. It was founded in 1938 on the Transitional Program based on the method of dialectics which shone through the writings of this period, many published in the book  In Defense of Marxism.  Here we have the living Marxism of Lenin and Trotsky raising the flag of the vanguard party firm in principle but flexible in tactics, preparing for WW2 and arming the worlds’ workers with the program to stop the war by turning our guns against the ruling classes and the imperialist war into civil war.

The application of the AIUF in WW2 continued that of WW1 but was now strengthened by the lessons learned by the victorious Bolshevik revolution. Two demands were fused together at its heart; the dual defeatist position in inter-imperialist war to turn the war into a civil war, and the unconditional defence of the Soviet Union.  Dual defeatism required the arming of the working class to join with the ranks in the military to turn their guns on the ruling class.  Revolutions in the imperialist states would empower the international workers army to unite with Russian workers and soldiers and stage a political revolution against the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. In the US Trotsky devised the Proletarian Military Policy  to arm the trade unions and unionise the official army.  It was grounded in the lessons of the historic betrayal of 1914, the Manifesto of the Zimmerwald left of 1915, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and of the defeats of the German revolution at the hands of social democracy, Stalinism and fascism.

These are the ‘principles’ of the program against imperialist war rooted in Marxism that are the basis of any assessment of the application of the AIUF in WW2. All the preconditions for turning war into revolution were there in the program, but not in practice. The vital factor, the revolutionary leadership of the 4th International after Trotsky’s death, was lacking. The assessment of our tendency is that even more so than during  WW1, the Bolshevik-type party was missing in action. Despite valiant struggles against the imperialists, Stalinists, and their own ruling classes, by the militant ranks, especially in Greece and Indo-China, the leadership of the main sections in the US and Europe capitulated to social chauvinism, and the war against fascism. Instead of turning their guns against their imperialist ruling classes the leadership of the 4th International turned their guns on the fascists in an IPF with imperialism and the Stalinist Soviet Union.   

The lessons learned from this history of the AIUF in its struggle against the IPF are what shape our response to the war in Ukraine as the first of many wars towards a 3rd Imperialist war.  In summary, we call for a New Zimmerwald and a new Proletarian War Policy embodying the principles of Lenin and Trotsky in a new AIUF. The old world still lives in all its reactionary barbarism and its counter-revolutionary IPFs. There can be no confusion here. The conditions for international revolution are now so overwhelmingly objectively present in the capitalist destruction of its ecological foundation in nature.  Humanity survives only in the capacity of the working masses to put an end to rotten capitalism. Yet the subjective will of the working masses which is bursting through the cracks to rise up, overthrow capitalism and restore nature in harmony with humanity, is blocked by the liquidation of the revolutionary Marxist party and its program. The new revolutionary international is still missing in action. We call on all those exploited and oppressed of the world who yearn to complete the world revolution that began in1917, to unite with us in our call for a New Zimmerwald. Together we can build an AIUF to smash the imperialist ruling classes and their client states and create a new World Party of Socialism to organise workers, poor farmers and all oppressed peoples internationally, for the fight to make a new world to save the world!

International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency – ILTT, 18 August 2023

The original commune was the birth of humanity. It created an egalitarian society in which social relations were reciprocal and in harmony with nature. Without it, homo sapiens would not exist today. The rise of class society began with the overthrow of the commune and the domestic slavery of women by the patriarchy, followed by the wider exploitation of slaves, peasants and wage workers since. But humanity survived in the historic class struggles of the exploited and oppressed for the revolutionary overthrow of class society culminating in decaying capitalism.

We must rescue humanity from the deathly destruction of patriarchal capitalism in terminal crisis and create the conditions for its rebirth with the abolition of class in a future communist society returned to nature. To build support for socialist revolution we need to harness the power of the international proletariat in the uniting all workers of all ethnicities, creeds, nations, sexes and sexual orientations. The socialist revolution will build on the lessons of class struggle through the ages, founding a world party of socialism with a revolutionary transitional program that guides workers in the struggle for world revolution and a communist world yet to be born.

The Birth of Humanity

The birth of Humanity was the result of the original social revolution that created human society in which women organised the social relations between the two sexes as reciprocal and equal. To be human began when women over-rode natural selection to socially select male partners who would defer their sexual gratification for part of the monthly menstrual cycle. 

Women went on sex strike during menstruation synchronized with waxing moon to force men to hunt to provide meat for the children’s hungry brains. The men were then rewarded during the waning moon with sex when women were most fertile.  

This is not biological ‘essentialism’ or determinism, but rather the social determination of the reproduction of human life. Beyond natural selection, which is random resulting from genetic variation, this is social selection where women collectively organised the lineage social relations between men and women as equal sexes. The result was the original classless commune which lasted for 200,000 years before women’s resistance gradually succumbed to the patriarchy 40,000 years ago. The evidence of this timeline and the distribution of red oche used in the menstrual rituals in Mesolithic Africa shows the rise and fall of the original human commune.

Moreover, in many parts of the world there are communal societies surviving more or less intact to the present day. Therefore, the evidence for an historical commune at one with nature is unquestionable. Human society was egalitarian rather than a hierarchy ruled by men. Rosa Luxemburg wrote from jail that the ‘overthrow’ of the original ‘primitive communism’ more than 10,000 years ago was a “brief passing phase” within the total history of humanity. She venerated ‘primitive communism’ as a damning critique of capitalism and inspiration of its return in the future communism.

Marx, Engels and Luxemburg while marking ‘primitive communism’ as a major transition in human history, did not recognise it as a mode of production. But each for different reasons came close. Luxemburg saw communal property as the basis for allocating labour to meet social needs.   She read history forward from the ancient commune to recreate it a higher level. Marx and Engels, discovered the residue of the commune as a survivor within 19^th century capitalism and reasoned backwards that its fate was to make way for the development of the forces of production necessary for socialism.

 In the 1960’s the path-breaking Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock took on Luxemburg’s intuition that the egalitarian ‘primitive communism’ was more than a descriptive label. She used Marxist analysis to reveal the ‘communal mode of production’ (CMP), complete with social relations of production where matrilineal control of communal land was the material base for an egalitarian society that allowed unlimited personal freedom of expression.

The Overthrow of Humanity?

The existence of a CMP makes sense of the transition from ‘primitive communism’ to the ‘patriarchy’, as distinct Modes of Production.  It explains why women put up a continuous class struggle over 100,000s of years for the future of humanity, defending the CMP against men seeking to exploit their labour as propertyless slaves. 

For many millennia in all parts of the world the communal society could expand hunting and gathering into pastoralism and agriculture on the basis of its principle of equality and personal freedom. It could coexist in complex relationships with patriarchal bands that augmented hunting with pastoralism and were moving away from communal property ownership towards private property, and the hierarchy of social class or caste.

So historically significant was the ‘overthrow of mother right’ that Marx and Engels viewed the new social relations between men and women as like that of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’. Had they followed through their observation that women became ‘domestic slaves’ of men to provide surplus labour, they might have concluded that a patriarchal class society based on the exploitation of women’s labour was the forerunner of the Ancient Slave mode of production (SMP).

De Ste Croix in his magnificent book The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, examined the Ancient Slave mode of production and concluded that women were largely propertyless. He questions why Marx and Engels didn’t draw the conclusion that in the ancient world women where an exploited economic class dependent on men:

“… [For anyone who believes that] Marx was right in seeing in the whole system of production (necessarily including reproduction) as the principal factor in deciding class position, the question immediately arises: must we not allow a special class role to that half of the human race which, as a result of the earliest and most fundamental of all divisions of labour, specialises in reproduction, the greater part of which is biologically its monopoly? Marx and Engels, it seems to me fail to draw the full necessary conclusion. Engels, in the Preface of the original edition of the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, acknowledged specifically that ‘the production of and reproduction of immediate life’ is ‘according to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history’…’The first division of labour is that between man and woman for the production of children’, and he added ‘the first class antagonism which appears on history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male’… ‘The nucleus, the first form, of property lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first form of property, but even at this stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour power of others’… Yet Marx and Engels seem hardly to have realised what far-reaching consequences ought to have been drawn from this particular specialisation of role, within their own system of ideas above all.

Meanwhile, this is the position I propose. In many societies, either women in general, or married women (who may be regarded as monopolising the reproduction function), have rights, including above all, property rights, markedly inferior to those of men; and they have these inferior rights as a direct result of their reproductive function, which gives then a special role in the reproductive process and makes men desire to dominate and possess them and their offspring. In such societies it is surely necessary, on the premises I have accepted, to see the women, or the wives (as the case may be), as a distinct economic class, in the technical Marxist sense. The are ‘exploited’, by being kept in a position of legal and economic inferiority, so dependent upon men (on their husbands in the first place, with their kin, so to speak, in reserve) that they have no choice but to perform the tasks allotted to them. Aristotle… could speak of the propertyless man, who could not afford to buy slaves, as using his wife and children in their place.” (p 100)

The Patriarchal Mode of Production

Following the logic of De Ste Croix, Marx and Engels should have recognised the first class in history as the ‘sex-class’ of women, exploited on the basis of their social reproductive labour. It is women’s sex that determines their lack of property and enslavement by men. This gives the radical feminist definition of women as a ‘sex-class’ a material basis open to the Marxist analysis of class relations. These class relations define the Mode of Production where men exploit women as a class to extract and accumulate labour time from their labour as reproducers and producers.  

If the original commune is essentially the same as ‘primitive communism’ (CMP) recognised by Marx and Engels as a classless, egalitarian society, then the overthrow of mother right was a revolution. It created a Patriarchal Mode of Production (PMP) which exploited women’s labour and accumulated their surplus labour in patriarchal families.

Similarly, the SMP revolutionises the limits of the PMP by extending the domestic slavery of women to the whole of society, allowing the harnessing of slave labour by slaveowners. The new ruling class could increase the labour productivity of slaves to develop the forces of production in pastoralism and agriculture beyond the limits of the PMP, until the SMP itself imposes a barrier to the further development of those forces. 

If this is correct, the concept of Patriarchy used by radical feminists today to signify the universal power that men hold over women, is given an historically specific material basis in the social relations of production of the PMP. It then becomes the original class mode of production and the precursor to the Slave Mode of Production (SMP).

Looking back from the standpoint of 19^th century European capitalism, Marx and Engels accepted that the end of the commune had allowed a succession of class modes (Slave mode, Feudal mode, Asiatic Mode) each of which overcame temporarily the limits set by the social relations of existing modes which had to be overthrown in order to develop the forces of production.  

For Marx and Engels, the object of human social development was in the reduction of necessary labour time – the labour time necessary to reproduce the material basis of life. Human freedom became possible with the development of the forces of production reducing necessary labour time and increasing the productivity of labour as the material basis of freedom.

In its essence then, the end of the original commune was a casualty of the first exploiting class, men who introduced slave social relations, reducing necessary labour time. Women as domestic slaves had their labour time expropriated to create surplus labour consumed by the patriarchs. The giant leap in freedom made possible by the original commune and the creation of universal human society, was now subjected to class rule and class struggle over the distribution of labour time.  

The exploitation of the labour of women, slaves, peasants and wage workers, was always contested by the resistance of the oppressed and exploited. Their fight for freedom from private property and the family was never abandoned. It was the class struggle, the motor of history, defending nature and revolutionising class society to further develop the forces of production. It created the conditions for the final social revolution to end class society and to create the new Commune where human society can return to a state of harmony with nature.

The Struggle for Humanity

Was Marx and Engels view of history as a succession of class struggles necessary to create the conditions for a new commune a grand narrative? Hardly, they saw the survival of previous modes in vestigial form within modern capitalism as evidence that a number of social revolutions had contributed to the development of the forces of production sufficient to realise human freedom in a future communism. Towards the end of his life, Marx argued in his draft letter to Vera Zazulich, that in Tsarist Russia there was the theoretical possibility of the survival of the rural commune “replacing capitalist production with cooperative production, and capitalist property with a higher form of the archaic type of property, that is, communist property.”

In the interests of historical accuracy, the possibility of the new commune was conceived in embryo in the Soviet Union until it was aborted by the counter-revolution of Stalinism and global capitalist reaction which halted and drove back the revolution.

So, for Marx the realisation of socialism and communism had to be the work of future class struggles, that unleashed revolutionary consciousness, opening the road to socialism. We agree with Marx and Engels that a future communism is no utopia. Humanity is capable of choosing communism against extinction. It can make the material conditions for the realisation of universal values of humanity, of equality and freedom from oppression and exploitation.

But there are many who reject Marxism as reeking of historic inevitability, of the suppression of human agency, and of the pre-determination of the future of humanity. Clearly, the onus is on those who argue for an alternative past and alternative future of human agency to put their theories to the test. What other mechanism for human progress can be conceived other than the powerful motor of collective class struggles by women, slaves, serfs and wage workers, whose accumulated revolutionary past unites them for the final struggle to end class society and reunite humans with nature?

In the end the only theory that can work is one which makes humans capable of understanding that though they may be driven by forces seemingly beyond their control, they have the capacity to break free from those forces to create their freedom. A recent challenge to ‘historically determinist’ theories that ostensibly suppress humans’ capacity to rise above historic inevitability is the empiricist theory expounded by David Graeber and David Wengrow in the recent book: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Inhumanity against Humanity

Bearing in mind that Rosa Luxemburg saw primitive communism as representing humanity against the inhumanity of capitalism, let’s consider the passive-aggressive critique of historical determinism byGraeber and Wengrow.

“One notable recent competing theory is that of David Graeber and David Wengrow, who in their recent book,The Dawn of Everythingargue against any original commune. Their method is a radical bourgeois empiricist rejection of any pre-determined historical evolutionary dogma which fails to cope with the diversity and complexity of human society. The absence of Marxism in their work is pointedly obvious. Yet the material presented in their book fits neatly with Marx’s non-dogmatic theory of evolution from the Grundrisse to Ethnological Notebooks. Rather than face this challenge to meet Marxism head on, the authors end up replacing the grand old narratives of pre-determined stages of development with the grand new narrative of a 21^st century anarchist version of the ahistorical radical bourgeois individual.

Their postulated ubiquitous blossoming of an anarchic ‘free will’ is substituted for the historical contradiction of kinship with kingship, of competing modes of production, where the original commune rules for millennia, is overturned and women enslaved. They struggle to resist kingship, are again suppressed, once more rebel, and are never fully subordinated. Far from being a schematic social evolution through the rear-view mirror of bourgeois ‘civilisation’, this resistance is the ongoing class struggle of the residual commune that survived the overthrow of women, their historic exploitation as slaves, serfs and wage labourers and which today represents the potential for the revival of the commune in modern form.”

The Dawn of Everything rejects class and class struggle as the motor of history because it rejects the material premises of human evolution, the biological determination of life and the mode of production and reproduction that determines class relations. Class struggle as the motor of history is erased. The mechanism for social development that replaces social class is individual agency and radical democracy as the ultimate driver of history. Humanity as the result of class-conscious agency, dissolves into the fragmented isolated agency of post-modern alienated actors magically choosing to defend an abstract democratic, egalitarian society, while the class conquests of the very real bourgeois warlords necessarily turn it into an actual authoritarian, hierarchical society.

Post-modernism is the ideology of late capitalism facing terminal crisis. It represents the degeneration of capitalism destroying the forces of production reflected at the level of ideas, and bankrupt of a revolutionary program.  This ideology is no challenge to Marxism since such radical individuals are not the motor of history. They are buyers and sellers of individual ‘wants’ and ‘desires’ in the market to feed their alienated identity in which they are separated from the process of production. Ironically, they are blind to the real material forces driving social development, and become cyphers in the laws of motion of capitalism. That is why this postmodern radical/liberal ‘woke’ ideology is being sanctioned by the state to destroy the unity of the only class that can put an end to the certainty of human extinction.

As bourgeois ideology, trans ideology turns the reality of biological reproduction into its opposite, the fetishising of biological sex as gender oppression. Men appropriate women’s biology by synthesising prosthetics and erasing women’s control of their bodies. They celebrate gender to oppress women, substituting men for women in subordinate roles where surrogates are not ‘mothered’ but ‘othered’. Men become ‘women’. They cease to be brothers of mothers. Women become ‘men’. Material production and reproduction in nature becomes transformed into its opposite, the consumption of ‘people’ as commodities bought and sold on the capitalist market. Trans ideology can only be understood as the end game of capitalism to destroy mothers as part of nature for profit.

Against this ruling class ideology of othering mothers, Marxism fights to return mothers to their brothers. Against bourgeois empiricism, which alienates humans from nature, it practises dialectics. It arms the proletariat to act subjectively as a class for itself against the objective reality of decaying capitalism to create the conditions for the final revolutionary leap forward.  

Down with the trans Patriarchy!

As argued above, trans ideology is all about weakening women’s sex-class struggle against the surviving PMP within the ruling Capitalist mode to divide the working class. Its method is to justify the state-backed attack on women. The state uses transactivists to attack women in general, specifically terrorising young Lesbians ‘born into the wrong body’ to trans into boys, and Sex Self ID-ing AGP men to legally become transwomen to attack Lesbians. In arming these attacks on women, it is both misogynist and homophobic towards the same-sex attraction of women. The ultimate in post-modern gay conversion “transes the gay away”.

Why is this attack on women on behalf of capitalism legally sanctioned in the 21^st century? Precisely because the failure of neo-liberalism to restore post war profit rates at the end of the 20^th century has now become an existential crisis for Late Capitalism. Crisis can only be resolved in two ways, either Capital destroys the working class as the only class capable of overthrowing it, or, the working class rises up and overthrows Capital. To survive this time capital resorts to the same means it used in the major crises in the 20^th century – fascism. Only this time fascism takes the form not only of national chauvinism, racism and homophobia, to smash the working class, but is now an attack on the original minority in history – women as domestic slaves!

In 2021 we wrote about why trans activism (TRA) could be turning into a fascist movement here:

“Capitalism in terminal crisis is throwing up all the old crap of ages in preparation for fascism that divides and destroys the working class as the revolutionary class. It draws on the slavery and serfdom of all prior modes of production as wage labour ceases to deliver the profits. Most important it casualizes wage labour to break down the solidarity of social labour and replaces it with disorganized internal class warfare.

As if to rub our noses in this historic decomposition of social labour, capitalism dredges the underworld to make a new iteration of the patriarchy in the form of the trans cult seeking to destroy women whose historic resistance is an unbroken link back to the overthrow of the commune and introduced the original class society, the patriarchy.

Since then, all attempts by the patriarchy have failed to defeat women’s historic liberation struggle. So today with late-stage capitalism in terminal crisis, the bourgeois state now recognises men as legal women attacking the historic solidarity between men and women in the working class, uniting to defeat fascism and overthrow patriarchal capitalism.”

The resistance to trans ideology has been met with violent attacks on women’s rights to free speech, to assembly, and to women’s spaces separate from men.

“Women’s resistance to the threat posed by trans ideology has been countered by the trans cult with increasingly violent arguments directed at them as transphobes, even fascists, justifying open violence by the ‘left’ to shut them up. Judith Butler, a US academic influential in developing the argument that gender trumps sex, recently stated that those who criticise trans gender people are motivated by the alt-right and are fascists. Gender critical women are therefore fascists.

But Butler gets it all wrong. Fascists defend the patriarchy. So does gender ideology which insists that transwomen with penises are women. Therefore, for both alt-right and alt-left versions of the patriarchy, the common enemy is women who lead the resistance to patriarchal capitalism. The real left takes the side of women, especially lesbians, against the threat of the trans cult, against fascism and rotten capitalism.

Butler is wrong because she is essentially a liberal intellectual. She glosses over end-stage Capitalism and argues for human rights despite capitalism’s inability to deliver them to all but the ruling class and their agents. She rejects the determining influence of capitalist social relations. She takes the post-modern line that individuals can self-determine their identity as a matter of free choice.

This is an idealist erasure of production relations by exchange relations. The market rules, and freedom translates into freedom of choice. Into the vacuum left by the missing production relations Butler validates the alienated exchange relations of bourgeois individuals.

The theory of ‘gender’ demonstrates this perfectly. Production relations under capitalism are class relations. Gender identity denies the production relations of labour and sex and the necessity of class struggle to revolutionise these relations. Instead, the alienated subjectivity of exchange relations defines self-identity as the buying and selling of commodities to meet socially contrived needs, that is, the ‘performance’ of self-determination.

The performance of gender miraculously erases the historical oppression of gender grounded in the exploitation of women’s reproductive power. By privileging gender over sex, men re-define women as determined by their gender, that is, subordinated to their oppression. They attack women’s human agency as a revolutionary force that can overthrow the patriarchy as part of the socialist revolution.

That is why it will be women, and lesbians in particular, that lead the struggle against trans ideology, as part of the socialist revolution that ends capitalism and builds socialism.”

Forward to Communism

The first commune was made by the collective agency of the human revolution. It created the conditions for homo sapiens to emerge and then survive other branches of hominids. The sex-strike theory is best in explaining how women during the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, used their collective power to socially ‘select’ men creating a social division of labour in reproducing hunter-gatherer societies. This egalitarian society was dominant until its gradual overthrow by men which began from around 40,000 years ago in Africa, but later elsewhere, usurping common lineage property as private property. This patriarchal private property then became the model for the ruling classes in successive class modes of production to the present day.

Marx, Engels and Luxemburg recognised the overthrow of ‘primitive communism’ (CMP) as a class revolution, but failed to realise that it comprised a new PMP in which gender ideology now justified new social relations between the patriarchal ruling class and women as domestic chattel slaves.  If we are correct then the PMP was the model for the SMP.

Why is the analysis of modes of production so important?  Marx’s method was to abstract from the surface features of capitalist society to penetrate below the level of appearances to discover the defining elements of the mode of production.  We have argued that the CMP, or Leacock’s PCMP, is a non-class egalitarian society which long pre-existed, co-existed with, and was in Africa, and parts of Eurasia and America, overthrown by the PMP, or successive modes, surviving as a subordinate mode. The PMP privatised land and slave labour to turn pastoralism and subsistence agriculture into a new source of wealth that was accumulated by the patriarchal ruling class.

Similarly, the SMP generalises the social relations of the PMP to create a class of chattel slaves. When slave rebellions and territorial wars weakened the ancient city states of Greece and Rome this led to their breakup into smaller-scale Feudal or Tributary modes extracting ‘rent’ or ‘tribute’ from workers and peasants. The bourgeoisie, the new ‘middle-class’ of the market and the bazaar, was born in the Eurasian city states to expand trade and accumulate wealth. Their new wealth challenged the existing tributary modes based on rent and tribute that were holding back the development of the forces of production.

Capitalism arrived when the bourgeoisie plundered the existing modes to create private ownership of the means of production, exploited the labour value of slave and wage labour as a commodity to increase labour productivity and develop the means of production. It became the revolutionary class by removing or subordinating the existing modes of production, colonising their forms of labour appropriation to augment capitalist wage labour.

This is not an evolutionary sequence of ‘stages’ in which ‘progress’ necessarily follows with each social revolution. One could justifiably argue that the PMP was inherently a counter-revolutionary mode subordinating women as domestic slaves to men who valued their labour not in the survival of children but as so many cattle. Yet the overthrow of women as a sex-class was met by never ending resistance by women. We need the Marxist concept of Mode of production to reject historic inevitability and show how human agency has been kept alive in the ongoing class struggle between ruling and exploited classes throughout history.

It is this historic class struggle that determines revolutionary change, harnessing the subjective force of revolutionary ideas and actions, creating the class consciousness necessary to overthrow the CMP, and to create the pre-conditions for the future commune. We learn the lessons of the actual history of revolutions that overturned existing Modes, subordinating them to the new dominant mode. At the same time, we recognise that each revolution is the result of the class struggle that is devoted to defending the interests of the oppressed classes advancing the conditions necessary for the future commune.

We learn from Marx on India. He condemns the brutality of the colonisation of India by British imperialism, but at the same time says that the development of capitalism that resulted produced in the working class and its relation to nature, the seeds of the future commune.

“These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

The class-conscious struggle to defend the original commune against inhumanity’s ‘unconscious tools’ never ended and will not end until it has created the conditions for the new commune. To win that objective we have to defeat the assembled reactionary fascist forces of patriarchal capitalism and all of its agents of inhumanity, and revive the revolutionary class agency of women and men united in the working class to bring about socialism and ultimately, communism, to rescue humanity from extinction.

Introduction

The following are two more sections of the counter-resolution of the Communist Tendency (CT) in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Historical Roots of the Degeneration of the Fourth International and the Centrism of the SWP—For a Return to the Proletarian Road of Trotskyism.

These sections concern themselves with the obligations of a vanguard party of the proletariat in the struggle against war. They do not represent the first salvos against the SWP’s class-collaborationist and essentially pacifist politics in the antiwar movement, its main area of activity since 1965. Cde. Fender, the CT delegate at the SWP convention, August 9, 1971 [see Vol.4, No.1, of Vanguard Newsletter In Defense of Trotskyism, pages 12-24, for Cde. Fender’s speeches] had, at the two previous conventions of the SWP In 1967 and 1969, carried on the polemic against the SWP’s reformist approach in the struggle against war.

Except for a few added details, Cde. Fender’s documents were the basis for the CT’s positions outlined below. However, one of the added details deserves some comment and correction. The first section below maintains that the SWP used the “single-issue” question as “a cordon sanitaire to exclude alien class Influence” of the bourgeoisie, but that the gimmick failed and the “single-issue” business was finally dropped. Actually, the opposite is true. The “single-issue” approach is only the other side of the same coin of non-exclusion under which the SWP Justifies the inclusion in the antiwar movement of a section of the liberal imperialist bourgeoisie and their representatives. While the SWP’s non-exclusion is designed to allure and protect the petty-bourgeois pacifists and liberals, “single-issuism” is designed to repel and muzzle any tendency who might raise political issues that would drive these same pacifists and liberals away. The SWP had no trouble conveniently forgetting about “single-issuism” when the liberals or the pacifists raised issues such as anti-draft campaigns, when during the lulls—and the liberals were not around—the SWP needed an extracurricular activity to tide them over to the next peace parade, or when, in response to a current vogue, it was more opportune to do so as with women’s liberation.

Not only does “single-issuism” provide a cover under which the SWP leadership can avoid any political struggle that might frighten its bourgeois allies, but It also provides a convenient excuse to hide the SWP’s s own lack of political struggle.

The SWP’s chase after this will-o-the-wisp of respectability is nothing new. To Ingratiate themselves with those influenced by the Cuban revolution as well as with Castro and Co., the SWP leaders have continually apologized for the petty-bourgeois Cuban leadership and kept any political criticism they might have had, strictly to themselves for fear of scaring off all the spontaneously developing “unconscious Trotskyists” such as Fidel himself. The telegram of condolences to Mrs. Kennedy was only one more of many similar steppingstones touched by the SWP on its way to today’s outright blatant opportunistic moves to gain favorable acceptance in the petty-bourgeois and even bourgeois milieus, such as the women’s “liberation” movement, where even the fight for free abortion on demand was considered too risky and, therefore, dropped In favor of a campaign against abortion laws—much more palatable in bourgeois circles.

The SWP like the CP of yesterday and today thinks that people can be fooled or tricked into playing a “progressive” or even “revolutionary” role and that the capitalists can be maneuvered into involuntarily forfeiting their “rights” to the “people,” or more correctly, to “the vanguard mass movements.” This objectivist approach permeates the whole of the political activity of the SWP and is tied in methodology to the guerrilla war and terrorist approach so prevalent today. All think that due to the “new” reality, the methods of class struggle and the building of a vanguard party, modeled after the Bolshevik party, can be discarded without compunction. While the guerrilla advocates substitute for the party a small group which is supposed to arouse the masses to revolutionary activity with their daring exploits and super-revolutionary calls to action, the SWP substitutes action and action alone by the greatest number possible and, therefore, organized strictly on the lowest, i.e., on a purely reformist, basis. The SWP sees its role as a mere coordinator of all the “mass vanguard movements” and as a centralized information clearing house for these movements. Both approaches are united in methodology in that they see their role as merely a technical one. The revolution is left to the spontaneity of the masses or perhaps to some divine inspiration. In reality, the revolution is abandoned.

In the antiwar movement—as well as in every other movement—the SWP maintains that it is not necessary to struggle for a conscious appreciation of capitalism or imperialism on the part of the masses. The antiwar movement is objectively anti-imperialist, as the women’s liberation movement is objectively anti-capitalist, merely because it is. The Stalinist NLP and the Stalinist regime in Hanoi are no longer considered to be Stalinist, but objectively as revolutionary merely because they actively defend themselves against imperialist aggression. And those like Hartke, who identify with the antiwar movement, are unconsciously betraying their own class and objectively helping to advance the world revolution. From the early days of Fidel and the Cuban revolution, the “unconscious Trotskyists” have multiplied in geometric progression.

In sacrificing the conscious element, i.e., the Bolshevik party, in the revolutionary process, the SWP has turned its back on the last half-century of history, from the defeat of the 1925-27 Chinese revolution through the rise of Hitler and the smashing of the Spanish proletariat to today, with the massacre of the Indonesian masses and the sell-out of the French revolution of May-June 1968. In so doing, the SWP as well as all its political bed-fellows have sacrificed their own capability of leading a revolution. They satisfy themselves instead with the shabbiest organizational maneuvering, the old political shell games and pretentious diplomatic wheeling and dealing. But for this, all that is required is money, technocrats, cannon fodder and, above all, respectability.7

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The Struggle Against Imperialist War

The struggle against imperialist war has always been the great test of a revolutionary party, and some of the most Important writings of the great Marxists have outlined the correct strategy for this task.

The SWP, despite its smug feeling of self-congratulation, has failed the test. From the beginning the party’s position was inadequate. Despite this, due to the totally wrong character of all other alternatives, the leadership has been able to convince its members and the best of the radical youth that the party has been wholly right. The party has been advancing the idea of immediate withdrawal—correct in itself, but not enough—as the basis for the “objectively anti-imperialist” character of its “single-issue united-front-type coalition.” These propositions deserve a little investigation. The “single-issue” character of the coalition has been the backbone of the leadership’s argument that the movement was not an evasion of revolutionary duty. If the program of the bloc was limited to the demand of immediate withdrawal, then everything was perfectly legitimate —no reformist demands were being smuggled in. What the “single-issue” business really was, only became gradually clear as the other “mass movements” began to develop. It was an artificial barrier which a centrist party erected to keep it from falling into the swamp of open reformism. Due to its total inability to project and carry out a revolutionary program, the SWP needed a cordon sanitaire to exclude alien class influence. With the influx of petty-bourgeois elements into the party, the gimmick was bound to fail. Soon the antiwar movement took positions on everything from the draft to the Black movement and union struggles. But instead of taking these positions on a class basis, the party merely went along with a totally reformist outlook, and objectively, by abandoning the program of Marxism, subordinated this movement to that “soft” wing of the exploiters, which wanted out of the Vietnam misadventure.

Several other points are connected with this evaluation of the nature of our participation in this movement. The movement obviously is not a “type” of united front, by definition, since this involves only the participation of working-class organizations, but neither is it formally a “Popular Front” as it is often called. This phrase poses the question too narrowly and too specifically. The most exact description of the essence of this formation is best given in Trotsky’s words:

“The matter at issue in all cases concerns the political subordination of the proletariat to the left wing of the exploiters, regardless of whether this practice bears the name of coalition or left bloc (as in France) or “People’s Front” in the language of the Comintern.” (Our emphasis— China and the Russian Revolution.)

Closely connected with this is the question of non-exclusion. Originally this policy was used, correctly, to fight against red-baiting against us and as a justification for blocking with anyone who would agree on a common action. It has gone far beyond this now and is used as a principle to demand the inclusion of liberal bourgeois speakers and representatives, at all times, as spokesmen for peace. This only legitimizes the deceit of the ruling class and furthers the illusions they perpetrate. Non-exclusion has become the means by which the leadership has cemented an alliance with the liberal imperialists. As a consequence, the party is unable to correctly handle the union bureaucrats who have followed their capitalist masters into the antiwar movement. Instead of utilizing the opportunity to reach workers and destroy the fakers, as in a real united front, the tactic has been to build them up and actually strengthen their hand. Just as all the so-called “radical” programs to end the war are in reality based on students, etc., and thus are just so much hogwash, so must a real program for revolutionaries look to the proletariat.

The Transitional Program shows the way. The party, rooting itself in the proletariat, in the factories and the armed forces, must struggle to win the proletariat to a “subjectively” anti-imperialist consciousness. Only revolution can end war for good, and if this war is ended on the terms desired by the liberals, then the next war is already near. A program for struggle would include, in addition to immediate withdrawal: workers’ control of war industries, confiscation of war profits and the expropriation of war profiteers, public works to employ war workers, open diplomacy and other appropriate slogans. Factory antiwar committees would be the organizing base for such a program, as well as for the political mobilization of the class in opposition to the capitalist class and its war. Such must be our perspective, and not the futile pacifist actions we are now engaging in—like the April 24th “Youth Festival -cum-Rites of Spring.”

The Proletarian Military Policy

Along with the abandonment of the rest of our program on the struggle against the war has gone the Proletarian Military Policy (PMP), which was a concrete expression, under American conditions, of the Leninist policy on military training and conscription. This policy was counterposed to the pacifist program of ending the war by ending the draft, and to the control of conscription by the imperialist government by demanding that the government finance training in the military arts in camps which would be under the control of the trade unions. The idea was to try to make a bridge between the level of the masses who saw the need, for learning how to wage war in an epoch of violent upheaval, and the future possibility of turning the army against the imperialist government. It was designed, as well, to ensure that no repetition of the disastrous policy of draft resistance, which isolated the radicals of WWI, would occur, and had the additional benefit of increasing the prestige and strength of the trade unions as organizations of the working class.

The present party leadership, which would very much like to forget that there ever was such a policy, has concocted several stories to justify its rejection of proletarian methods for pacifist ones. These stories can be summarized as follows: 1) WWII was basically an “inter-imperialist war,” and consequently that tactics of Marxists in the period of counterrevolutionary colonial wars must be different; 2) the party made an adaptation to the backwardness of the workers; 3) there was no movement against conscription, so we simply adjusted our tactics—today things are different. There is a certain division of labor on points 2 and 3. The slicker advocates of the present line combine them in a sort of “times-have changed” routine, while the more vulgar peace-nik elements simply claim that the stupid workers led us astray.

All these arguments and all their variants are false to the core. The first is simply the grossest kind of petty-bourgeois moralistic breast-beating. Even when we exclude the question of Russia in WWII, we are faced with the interesting case of it being alright for American workers to fight German and Japanese workers and peasants, and not alright to fight Vietnamese workers and peasants. Maybe we fought WWII to “defend Democracy?” The reality of the situation, of course, is that the party’s abstentionist policy of having comrades at Columbia [university] rather than Khe Sanh, has left the spontaneous GI revolts largely leaderless, and has hindered the defeat of US Imperialism.

What was the reality of the situation on conscription in 1940? The party did not in its propaganda oppose the introduction of conscription before its adoption, despite significant opposition to a peacetime draft from the “America-Firsters,” the radical movement in general, John L. Lewis and his section of the bureaucracy and many plain citizens. The draft law of 1940 passed by one vote. The OHIO (over the hill In October) movement, which encouraged mass desertions, spread rapidly at first. The party, however, stood firm against all those who wanted to go along with the crowd, despite the ravings of the Shachtmanites who called our policy “social-patriotic.” The party based Its stand on the clear and Irreconcilable position of Trotsky, who was largely responsible for the inspiration of our position. Trotsky said: “We can’t oppose compulsory military training by the bourgeois state just as we can’t oppose compulsory education by the bourgeois state.” This is not an Isolated quotation but is a good example of his thoughts on the question during his last year. (cf. Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939-40). The party leadership, of course, not being formalists, are not at all troubled by their departures from Trotsky.

The Proletarian Military Policy, nonetheless, was not just dreamed up by Trotsky in 1940. It was the continuation of the line laid down by Lenin in his polemics against the centrists and reformists of the Zimmerwald movement. Prior to WWI the Social-Democracy had proposed the establishment of a people’s militia as a means whereby militarism and war could be prevented. This fantasy of peaceful substitutionism was destroyed by the shock of the war. During the discussions among the Zimmerwaldists, an alternative was proposed to this now discredited theory. This alternative was, “disarmament!” Lenin reacted violently to this form of pacifist hogwash, and in two articles—”On the ‘Disarmament’ Slogan“ and “The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution“—demolished these idealistic conceptions of the nature of war and society. He pointed out that imperialism, not weapons, was the cause of war, and that the only way to end war was to end the system that produced it. Consequently, proletarian militarism had to be opposed to bourgeois militarism. As concrete steps to this end he proposed the drafting of women, the election of officers, and, especially, the setting up of military training under the control of workers’ organizations, as well as full civil and economic rights for soldiers. He fiercely fought against draft-dodging, whether individual or “mass.” This Is the root of the 1940 adoption of the PMP.

There is no great gap between 1915 and 1940. This outlook was continued in the theses on War and the Fourth International in 1934. It was clearly stated as a transitional demand in the Transitional Program of 1938, which says nothing about “abolishing the draft,” “capitalist” or otherwise. What the Transitional Program does say is crystal clear:

 “… we must tear from the hands of the greedy and merciless imperialist clique… the disposition of the people’s fate. In accordance with this we demand: …military training and arming of workers and farmers under the direct control of workers’ and farmers’ committees.”

In 1940, in the Manifesto on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian Revolution, this position was further enunciated. Nor was the PMP abandoned after the war, to which it was supposedly a subjective reaction. In a 1946 polemic against the Workers Party (International Informational Bulletin, Vol. VIII, No.10, August 1946) it was described as a major difference between the SWP and the Shachtmanites. Even in 1948 when conscription was reintroduced, we advocated the PMP although in a rather abstract way. It was not until 1953 that we abandoned this policy, but we would not vote on this question until 1969. (It seems that this puts an interesting light on the question of “adaptationism.” When was the working class more social-patriotic—in 1940 when we adopted the PMP, or in 1953 when we abandoned it? When was the party more susceptible to petty-bourgeois pressure—on the eve of WWII, or in the period of “McCarthyite-Fascism?”)

The question of a correct policy on conscription is no longer a question of great urgency for our movement. The bourgeoisie literally hungers and thirsts for a voluntary army. They must demobilize the present army which every day threatens them more and more. The Gates Commission has shown the ruling class that it can be done. When they say they want “no more Vietnams” they are not lying. They do not; they want more Santo Domingos! And with a relatively small, cheap, elite, cadre-type army they can have them. This Is the significance of the experimental TRICAP (triple capability) divisions which combine armor, airmobile infantry and helicopters into juggernauts which are not designed for use against students. The ruling class says “volunteer army.” We say “abolish the draft.” The juxtaposition makes it clear that our present policy objectively supports the bourgeoisie in its desires. The situation now, as well as all our traditional analysis, demands the adoption and implementation of the Proletarian Military Policy.

All the party’s documents state that members will enter the armed forces if drafted. What actually happens is something else. A comrade about to be drafted sends a letter to his draft board informing it of his political beliefs and affiliations, supposedly to provide future legal cover. If this does not have the desired effect, then it is followed by a press conference, and then by a demonstration. After all this, if a comrade is inducted, he enters the army as a marked man. Everything Is done, short of any illegality, for SWP’ers and YSA’ers to avoid their revolutionary duty. Trotsky once said, “If the leaders seek to preserve themselves, that is what they become—dried preserves.” This practice of the SWP shows its total unwillingness to leave behind a comfortable milieu and to penetrate into an arena where the proletariat is to be found. The hard and difficult work is avoided, just as with the unions. It is another manifestation, more hypocritical and despicable, of the party’s wish to turn its back on the working class.

*From Vanguard Newsletter, Vol 4. No 3*, pps 39-44. April, 1972. Editors: Harry Turner, David Fender and Ed di Tullio. This issue was numbered incorrectly as No.2 and its contents are missing from ITOL

On August 4, 1914, the First World War broke out. The Second International had an official policy of opposing the war. But this collapsed under the pressure of wartime hysteria and with a few brave exceptions, broke up with each section voting for workers to go to war to kill other workers. The remaining revolutionary forces regrouped at Zimmerwald in Switzerland in 1915 to take a stand against the war, calling for workers to turn their guns on their own ruling classes. The ‘left’ at Zimmerwald were to be the core of the revolutionaries who went on to make the Russian revolution and build the 3rd Communist International. In a series of articles we argue that we are living through a similar period were the left is not prepared to fight the drive to war. We call for the rallying of left forces in a new Zimmerwald to build a revolutionary opposition to new imperialist wars. Part one deals with the years before the First Zimmerwald in 1915.

Many communist and revolutionary socialist forces around the world recognise that with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the victory of imperialism in the late 1980’s the workers of the world experienced an historic defeat. Yet, this defeat was not one that smashed all the past gains of workers won over the previous centuries.

Nor could this victory postpone for long the onset of a more serious world recession that would once more see the workers and poor peasants mobilised in defence of their hard-won gains, and imperialism embark on a drive to war to revive its falling profits.

The onset of the current world recession and the drive to war that began with the Gulf War in 1990 has vindicated this perspective. We are now facing a period of worsening crisis and polarisation of classes world wide, that pits workers revolution against imperialist counter-revolution.

The time has arrived once more for the surviving communist forces to rise up again against imperialist war to overthrow capitalism and build of a socialist world.

Zimmerwald

The situation resembles the crisis facing humanity with the onset of the first imperialist war in 1914. Workers in every country are being rallied by their bosses behind the national flag to go to war against ‘evil’ in whatever guise the ruling class says. We need to mobilise our forces in the same way that the communist fighters did against the first war at Zimmerwald in 1915 and Kienthal in 1916. Here they broke with the rotten International of Social Democracy and raised the cry for workers to shoot their bosses and not each other. In taking this stand they rallied around them the forces that would make the Russian Revolution and become the new Communist International, the 3rd International.

Zimmerwald, a town in Switzerland gave its name to a conference held in Sept 1915 to rally all the anti-war forces, pacifists, defencists, and the Bolsheviks. The majority refused to break with the 2nd International, while the Zimmerwald ‘Left’ called for “civil war not civil peace” and the overthrow of capitalism. The ‘Left’ position was rejected at Zimmerwald. By the end of 1916 the Left split from the majority so it could rally those sections of workers who were beginning to resist the war to its revolutionary program.

The broad Zimmerwald movement was anti-war, but not anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist. It was still heavily influenced by chauvinism and pacifism. Why then did the Bolsheviks remain in it for more than a year? Did they, while they were inside, and while they were outside, adopt the best tactics to win workers over to the revolutionary position? These questions are important because a New Zimmerwald movement must avoid making the mistakes of the First.

Before addressing these questions, what took the anti-war movement more than a year to unite at Zimmerwald? What were they doing in the years immediately before the outbreak of war and the year following?

Pre-Zimmerwald:Stuttgart 1907

The 2nd International didn’t suddenly jump on the nationalist bandwagon in August 1914. It had been moving in that direction for years. At the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 a sizable minority argued for a ‘socialist’ colonisation policy; i.e that colonisation was necessary to advance human civilisation provided the method of colonisation was not exploitative! Bernstein (the famous German socialist) said “The colonies are there; we must come to terms with that. Socialists too should acknowledge the need for civilised peoples to act somewhat like guardians of the uncivilised”. (LSRI: 10).

That made the imperialist countries out to be ‘civilised’! If they were bad imperialists and mistreated the colonies or immigrants, they could be made into ‘good’ imperialists, or even cease to be imperialist, with the correct ‘socialist’ colonial policy! Even thought his ‘social imperialist’ tendency was outvoted, it showed that the rot was setting in. What was the material cause of this rot? Lenin was onto it.

Lenin commented:
“This vote on the colonial question is of very great importance. First, it strikingly showed up socialist opportunism, which succumbs to bourgeois blandishments. Secondly, it revealed a negative feature in the European labour movement, one that can do no little harm to the proletarian cause, and for that reason should receive serious attention. Marx frequently quoted a very significant saying by Sismondi. The proletarians of the ancient world, this saying runs, lived at the expense of society; while modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians…However, as the result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletariat partly finds itself in a position when it is not its own labour, but the labour of the practically enslaved natives in the colonies, that maintains the whole society. In certain countries this provides the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism.” (LSRI:39).

On the question of war the Stuttgart Congress debated four resolutions, two of which called for workers actions against war to include strikes and insurrections (one as the last resort); while two called vaguely for “appropriate measures” or “intervention”.

Two extreme tendencies opposed each other. One tendency [Bebel] saw imperialist war as ‘militarism’ that could be resisted by socialists, first by voting against it, but if necessary going to war against ‘militarism’ to defend the ‘workers father land’. That meant that workers in every country would be dragooned to fight in ‘defensive’ wars to defend ‘their’ fatherland.

The other tendency talked of stopping wars by uniting workers across national frontiers to refuse to fight imperialist wars. “Our class -that is our fatherland” [Herve] (LSRI: 27). Herve said of the German Social Democratic Party (and its ‘workers’ fatherland’): “…you have now become an electoral and accounting machine, a party of cash registers and parliamentary seats. You want to conquer the world with ballots. But I ask you: When the German soldiers are sent off to reestablish the throne of the Russian Tsar [this was two years after the 1905 revolution] when Prussia and France attack the proletarians, what will you do?…the whole of German Social Democracy has now become Bourgeois. Today Bebel went over to the revisionists when he told us: “Proletarians of all countries, murder each other”. (28)

Lenin commented on the anti-militarism debates criticising Herve as a ‘semi-anarchist’ who did not see that war was necessary to capitalism and stopping wars could only be achieved by ‘replacing capitalism with socialism’. “However, underlying all these semi-anarchistic absurdities of Herveism there was one sound and practical purpose: to spur the socialist movement so that it will not be restricted to parliamentary methods of struggle alone, so that the masses will realise the need for revolutionary action in connection with the crises which war inevitably involves, so that, lastly, a more lively understanding of international labour solidarity and the falsity of bourgeois patriotism will be spread among the masses.” (41)

In the middle of these two extremes but leaning towards Bebel, was Jaures who argued that socialism could reform the imperialists and prevent war by means of an international arbitration court, but if push came to shove, strikes and insurrection would be necessary. He saw war as an extension of the class war which up to then had been managed successfully by the big socialist parties. In reality, Jaures believed that negotiations would suffice and make militant actions unnecessary.

Also in the middle but leaning away from Bebel was Rosa Luxemburg who spoke of the recent Russian Revolution and the need for workers to use the general strike against war not only to end war, but to “hasten the overthrow of class rule in general”. She moved an amendment along these lines which she drafted(along with Lenin and Martov of the Russian Social Democrats ) which was incorporated into the final draft.

The Resolution was a compromise. On the one hand ‘militarism’ was bad policy, on the other, militarism was vital to the survival of capitalism. These were clearly two very different views of imperialist militarism! But Lenin regarded the result as good. The left got in its view of militarism as necessary for capitalism to survive and for the struggle against war to be also a struggle against capitalism. He was pleased that the resolution spelled out the methods that social democracy would use, and could not be misinterpreted by the reformist Vollmar or by the semi-anarchist Herve. (42)

However, despite the amendments from the revolutionary left which strengthened the Stuttgart resolution on War and Militarism, it was clear that a growing element in of the international viewed capitalism, imperialism and militarism as reformable by social democracy. Herve characterised the German element around Bebel as “bourgeois”, “satisfied” and “well fed”.

Lenin’s view was that the material benefits of colonialism created an “aristocracy of labour” in the imperialist countries. Thus the move away from proletarian internationalism towards the socialist fatherland was the result of the success of the movement in legislating for reforms. But these reforms were paid for by the imperialist super-profits extracted from the colonies, and the ‘socialist’ adaptation to super-profits took the form of ‘social imperialism” or :”social chauvinism” -i.e. the civilising socialism of the ballot.

Lenin summed up rather optimistically that despite the sharp contrast between the “opportunist and revolutionary wings” …the work done at Stuttgart will greatly promote the unity of tactics and unity of revolutionary struggle of the proletarians of all countries”.

Nine years later, when the Second International has collapsed in the face of the war, Zinoviev commented that at Stuttgart the coming war was clearly seen on the horizon and it was understood that it would be the life and death test of the International. Yet the opportunists had already “won the upper hand”. “Bebel, Jaures, Branting, Vendervelde, Vollmar, and Vaillant all spoke about “the nation” and “the fatherland” in terms which the social patriots of all countries now find it easy to justify their “new” tactics…Only one speech delivered at Stuttgart differed….in principle -Rosa Luxemburg’s. This speech provided, although not yet in a fully finished form, the basis of the revolutionary Marxist position”(44).

Zinoviev tries to explain how a resolution that embodied such contradictory positions could be agreed to. The opportunist majority stood for “defence of the fatherland” yet they agreed to the revolutionary amendments. On the one hand they could not openly take a position in defence of the ‘revolutionary father land’ when everyone knew the war would be between bloody imperialist ‘fatherlands’. Second, the revolutionary amendments on strikes and insurrections was “watered-down” by lawyers to avoid the German SD being prosecuted (47).

The result was less than Lenin wrote at the time, a congress in the “spirit of revolutionary Marxism”, but more a compromise congress in which the revolutionary left was indulged by an opportunist majority who did not need to proclaim their revisionism openly because they had the material means (voting and bookkeeping) to decide the issue in reality. So the scene was set for further retreats in the years between 1907 and 1914.

The years 1907-1914

The next international Congress was at Copenhagen in 1910. The international became more divided on how to respond to the coming war. Commenting on the German Party Congress at Magdeburg in September 1910 Lenin put his finger on the reason for the failure to take a strong internationalist stand on the war. He recognises that the socialists in Germany have been sucked into a legal apparatus and were unsure how to break with bourgeois legality (parliamentarism).

“The chief feature of this peculiar pre-revolutionary situation consists in the fact that the coming revolution must inevitably be incomparably more profound, more radical, drawing far broader masses into a more difficult, stubborn and prolonged struggle than all previous revolutions. Yet at the same time this pre-revolutionary situation is marked by the greater (in comparison with anything hitherto) domination of legality, which has become an obstacle to those who introduced it…The era of utilising the legality created by the bourgeoisie is giving way to an era of tremendous revolutionary battles, and these battles, in effect, will be the destruction of all bourgeois legality, the whole bourgeois system…” (67)

The Copenhagen resolution against militarism echoed the Stuttgart resolution. It called on workers to use all measures available to stop war, but it stopped well short of the internationalist position that workers should turn imperialist war into a civil war. During the Copenhagen Congress Lenin tried to rally the left wing without success. Rosa Luxemburg wrote a critique of the ‘Peace Utopias’ evident in the resolution.

She ridiculed the utopia that imperialists could make peace as flying in the face of imperialist economic expansion and rivalry. “Arms limitation and curbing militarism are not part of international capitalism’s further development. In fact they could result only from the stagnation of capitalist development…Only those who think that class antagonisms can be softened and be blunted, and that capitalist economic anarchy can be contained, can think it possible that these international conflicts can subside, ease, or dissolve. For the international antagonisms of the capitalist states are only the complement of class antagonisms, and world political anarchy is but the reverse side of the anarchic system of capitalist production. Only together can they grow and only together can they be overcome. “A little peace and order” is, therefore, impossible, a petty-bourgeois utopia, as much so in the capitalist world market as in world politics, in the limitation of crises as in the limitation of armaments.” (71)

A confrontation between German and French troops in Morocco in July 1911 showed Rosa Luxemburg to be correct. Hermann Molkenbuhr of the SPD executive claimed that the German government had provoked the crisis to “divert attention from the domestic situation and create a mood favourable to them in the Reichstag elections”. He argued that this ruse would fail as ‘pro-French’ industrial capitalists would stop the war as it was against their interests to go to war.

Luxemburg responded attacking the concept that different national imperialist rivalries that surfaced in Morocco could be stopped by a common interest among German and French firms to ‘share’ colonial booty.

She summed up Molkenbuhr’s argument:
“Leave it to the grandees of the steel monopolies to order a halt to the German action in Morocco at the appropriate moment. As for us, we will pay as little attention as possible to the entire affair, since we have other business to attend to, namely the Reichstag elections…It is best not to rely on the commitment to peace of any particular capitalist clique, but on the resistance of the enlightened masses as a force for peace…Above all we must carry out socialist education in the Reichstag elections. This cannot be accomplished, however, if we aim our criticism exclusively at Germany’s internal political conditions, and fail to portray the overall international context – capital’s deepening domination over all parts of the world, the obvious anarchy everywhere you look, and the prominent role of colonialism and world power politics in this process. We must not fashion our electoral agitation as some simplistic political primer cut down to a couple of catchy slogans, but as the Socialist world view in its all-encompassing totality and diversity.” (77).

At this time there broke out in the German party a debate on the nature of imperialism. Was it doomed to go to war by its very nature, or was war a sort of aberration, even an accident, that could be corrected by socialist peace policies? On the left was Pannekoek, Radek and others, on the Right was Kautsky, Hasse, Bernstein and others. The left was defending the existing position while the right was looking

g for a parliamentary road to socialism by arguing that modern imperialism had investments in every country so could not afford to go to war. Kautsky’s theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’ expressed this clearly.

Pannekoek neatly summed up the revisionists views: “We often hear talk of imperialism as a sort of mental derangement of the bourgeoisie…Bernstein speaks of a spiritual epidemic. But we should not conceive of it in such an un-Marxist manner, as if it were an accident.”.

Lensch also had some ripe words:
“Comrades! How did the international arms buildup which we have witnessed these last ten years come about? Is it really just a case of international misunderstanding? That would mean that world history had made mistake, as it were: that a capitalism without resort to force, without colonies and fleets is also feasible. No doubt that is true, but only in a vacuum! Perhaps in your imagination or on paper, you can conceive of a capitalism without violence. But we deal with the real capitalism here on earth. Our task cannot be to correct World History’s homework, and say, “Dear World History, here is your work back! Its swarming with mistakes. I marked them all in red. In the future I expect better work from you.” (80).

In October 1912 the International was put to the test by the outbreak of war in the Balkans. Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria attacked Turkey which was defeated and forced to withdraw from its European possessions. Then Serbia, Greece and Romania turned against Bulgaria. What was the role of international socialists in this war? All the various socialist parties took a stand against the war. In Bulgaria the a Socialist parliamentarian was assaulted when he spoke out against the war. Yet in each country this opposition got more popular as the death and destruction affected the people. The international correctly saw the Balkan wars as a forerunner of imperialist war. Both sides in the war were pawns of imperialism so the war had to be opposed and stopped by revolutionary means.

An emergency congress was held at Basel November 24-25 1912. The Basel Manifesto began by quoting the earlier Stuttgart and Copenhagen resolutions against war including ‘civil war’, but again refrained from calling on workers to use the methods of ‘strikes and insurrections’ to stop the war.

While the war in the Balkans did not see any wavering from the official line, in the German party the centre and right began to grow in influence as it was put under pressure to vote for money to expand the military. In March 1913 the SDP deputies (MP’s) voted for a huge increase in military spending. The measure needed the SPD support to pass, so the government tried to win its support by introducing an income tax rather than a flat tax that would hit the poor hard. After a sharp debate the majority abandoned the principle ‘not one man, not one penny for war’ and voted for the Bill. At the Party’s Jena conference of 1913 the leftist position calling for a mass strike in the event of war was outvoted 142 to 333 in favour of the rightist position against the general strike.

Again Rosa Luxemburg sounded the warning that this capitulation to social chauvinism would lead to disaster with the outbreak of war.

“What will happen if war breaks out and we can do nothing more to avert it? The question will then arise whether the costs should be covered by indirect or direct taxes, and you will then logically support the approval of war credits…the position will lead us onto a slippery slope where there is no way to stop. Let our resolution therefore put an end to such cheating on principles by proclaiming, “So far and no further!” (94)

Jena was the last Congress of the united SDP. The SDP was now split into three fractions, Left, Right, and Centre.

August 4, 1914. The collapse of the International

The outbreak of war saw the rotten centre of the International expose in a massive betrayal. Despite many dire warnings, this event was still a huge shock for the ‘left’.

Rosa Luxemburg co-founder of the new revolutionary journal Die Internationale wrote in the leading article in the first issue “The Reconstruction of the International”:

“On August 4, 1914 German Social Democracy abdicated politically; at the same time the Socialist International collapsed. Every attempt to deny these facts or go gloss them over, regardless of its motive, in reality serves only to perpetuate the disastrous self-deception of the Socialist parties and the internal sickness that led to their collapse”. (183)

“A body of four million strong allowed a handful of parliamentarians to turn it around in twenty-four hours and harness it to a wagon going in a direction opposite to its aim in life…Marx, Engels, and Lassalle; Liebknecht, Bebel and Singer trained the German proletariat so that Hindenburg could lead it” (186)

Brave exceptions on the Left.

Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin all drew the conclusion that this betrayal did not call into question either Marxism or the revolution. It was the result of alien class forces and the ‘internal sickness’ of the party. They all called for a the reconstruction of a new International to replace the collapsed Second.

However, almost immediately differences emerged on how to fight the war. Trotsky said that workers had to stop the war to preserve their power and so use their arms to fight for the United States of Europe. But how? Mobilise for peace? “Neither victory or defeat” was his slogan.[155]

Lenin said that workers must oppose the war by calling for the defeat of their own country. It was necessary to turn imperialist war into civil war by turning their weapons on their own bourgeoisie. [156]

Their differences.

Trotsky criticises the Bolsheviks for their defeatism in Russia as unrealistic. It is “an uncalled for and absolutely unjustified concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation – highly arbitrary in the present conditions – towards the lesser evil”. Trotsky wants to avoid defeats as they “disorganise the whole of social life, and above all else the working class”. [165]

Lenin responds that this is typical of Trotsky’s “high-flown” phrases with which he “justifies opportunism”. He criticises Trotsky for calling for peace without any means of linking this to revolution i.e. defeatism. “ ‘A revolutionary struggle against the war’ is merely an empty and meaningless exclamation, something at which the heroes of the Second International excel, unless it means revolutionary action against one’s own government even in wartime.” [166].

Lenin accuses Trotsky of ‘opportunism’

because Trotsky assumes that the call for the defeat of Russia must mean the victory of Germany. The ‘lesser evil’ means that Russian workers will see the victory of Germany as preferable to the victory of the Tsar. And Trotsky is not prepared to swim against this stream of social-patriotism

Yet, says Lenin, the 2^nd International position was clear: “In all the imperialist countries the proletariat now desire the defeat of it own government”. So in rejecting the call for workers in all countries to defeat their governments, and adopting the position that one nation must win, it is Trotsky that adapts to the “political methodology of social-patriotism” [167].

Trotsky moves toward Kautsky’s fatalist view that neither revolutions nor international solidarity between workers of different countries is possible in an imperialist war. That’s why the call for ‘peace’ is substituted for ‘defeatism’ because it does not challenge social-patriotism. It means in effect “neither victory nor defeat”.

This is a paraphrase of the “defence of the fatherland” slogan because it is a ‘class truce’. The working class is neither for nor against the war policy of its ruling class which also claims to be ‘against defeat’. [168] So the class struggle is suspended for the duration of the war. That is why the Italian government threatened its social democrats with ‘treason’ if it called a general strike. This explains why the Tsarist government charged Russia’s social-democrats with ‘high treason’.

For Lenin: “A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the ‘foreign country’, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his ‘own’ imperialist ‘Great Power’”[169].

Lenin concludes: “Those who stand for the “neither-victory-nor-defeat” slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of international revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian, the only socialist task. It is the proletariat in the most backward of the belligerent Great Powers which, through the medium of their party, have had to adopt – especially in the view of the shameful treachery of the German and French Social-Democrats – revolutionary tactics that are quite unfeasible unless they ‘contribute to the defeat’ of their own government, but which alone lead to a European revolution, to the permanent peace of socialism, to the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing.” [170]

In Germany it was some months before the revolutionary left was able to mobilise opposition to the leaderships betrayal. Small meetings in working class branches supported the minority opposition to war credits but also criticised the minority for upholding party discipline and voting with the majority in the Reichstag. In Stuttgart on September 21, a meeting of SPD elected leaders condemned the war credits stand by 81 to 3.

Liebknecht responded: “You are quite right for criticising me. Even if alone, I should have called out my “No!” in the Reichstag and so informed the whole world that the talk of unanimity of the Reichstag and the German people is a lie”. [173]

In November in the Berlin suburb of Niederbarnim local left wingers also took a stand against the war credits: “Had the Social Democratic faction done its duty on August 4, the external form of the organisation would probably have been destroyed, but the spirit would have remained…then the German working class would have carried out its historic mission.” Their conclusion was to build a new party and begin underground work.

“The Main Enemy is at Home”: Liebknecht and the Spartacists

In December on the second vote for war credits 20 deputies voted against at the party meeting. But once again all but Karl Liebknecht voted with the majority in the Reichstag.

On December 2, 1914 Karl Liebknecht took his historic stand and cast the sole vote against war appropriations. [174] In a declaration, “Explanation of War Credits Vote”, distributed as an illegal leaflet he explained his political stand. In the leaflet Liebknecht said he refused to vote for war credits because the war “is an imperialist war, fought for the capitalist domination of the world market and for the political domination of important territories for settlement of industrial and finance capital” [175]

Liebknecht was drafted into the army on 7 February 1915. Rosa Luxemburg was arrested and jailed on 18 February. Despite the repression, the left SDs formed an underground opposition to imperialist war in the factories and working class areas, known as the ‘Spartacists’ – the name of the leader of a slave rebellion against the Roman empire. Their main slogan became “The Main Enemy is at Home”!

But it was the Russian revolutionaries who spelled out what revolutionary defeatism meant.

“Who is it that threatens the Russian people? Who should we combat? They say it is the Germans…But it is the landlords, the factory owners, the big proprietors and merchants who steal from us; it is the police, the tsar, and his hangers-on who rob us. And when we have had enough of this robbery, and call a strike to protect our interests, then the police, the soldiers, and the Cossacks who are unleashed upon us…Now they try to mislead us and make us believe that our enemy is “the Germans” whom we have never seen… But will we Russian workers be so stupid as to take these lying phrases seriously?…No! If we must sacrifice our lives, we will do it for our own cause. They put guns in our hands. Good. We will use these guns to fight for better living conditions for the Russian working class.” [178]

Revolutionary defeatism got a practical endorsement during Xmas 1914 when British, French and German soldiers fraternised at the front. The British and German troops even organised their own 48-hour truce! Lenin wrote that this proved workers could unite against their own bosses. The military high commands worried that it might spread rapidly ordered that fraternisation was high treason punishable by death.

Lenin wrote (in The Slogan of Civil War Illustrated) that if the opportunists had devoted their efforts to calling on workers to fraternise for peace instead of backing their bosses war efforts and accepting ministerial jobs, then the spontaneous fraternisation of Christmas 1914 might spread on into the new year and beyond. The real issue came down to what cause should workers die for.

“There is only one practical issue – victory or defeat for one’s country – Kautsky, lackey of the opportunists, has written…Indeed, if one were to forget socialism and the class struggle, that would be the truth. However, if one does not lose sight of socialism, that is untrue. Then there is another practical issue: should we perish as blind and helpless slaves, in a war between slaveholders, or should we fall in the “attempts at fraternisation” between slaves, with the aim of casting off slavery? Such, in reality, is the “practical” issue.” [179]

Kautsky and ‘ultra-imperialism’

Meanwhile, Kautsky was working overtime trying to invent new twists in Marxist theory that would justify workers not having to fight anybody in principle. His theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’ was revamped to claim that imperialist war was old fashioned and that the class interests of the bosses were now so enmeshed in each others stock markets that fighting imperialist wars was bad for business.

“Every far-sighted capitalist today [with the benefit of Kautsky’s lesson on where their class interests lay] must call on his fellows: capitalists of all countries unite!” [180] Kautsky is saying: imperialists wake up! Why are you fighting among yourselves when the real danger is posed by the colonial and semi-colonial

countries, and by your own socialist movements. You are ruining yourselves unnecessarily. Stop the war in your own interests. Peace brings prosperity!

This was the old opportunist line from the pre-war Congresses of appealing to the bosses self-interest but now revived to provide ‘official Marxist’ legitimacy to the opportunists.

Kautsky and Co got the savaging they deserved from the revolutionaries. In a new theoretical journal, Die International, launched on April 14 1915 to combat this falsification of Marxism and to advance the creation of a new revolutionary leadership, Rosa Luxemburg wrote the devastatingly brilliant ‘The Reconstruction of the International’:

“Kautsky, the representative of the so-called Marxist Centre – politically speaking, the theoretician of the ‘swamp’ – made a sincere contribution to the party’s present collapse. Many years ago he degraded theory to the role of obliging hand-maiden to the official practice of the party establishment. Already he has thought up an opportune new theory to justify and whitewash the collapse”.[184]

“…Official theory, whose organ is Die Neue Zeit, [The New Times!] misuses Marxism any way it pleases to serve the party officials’ current domestic requirements and to justify their day-to-day dealings…The world historic call of the Communist Manifesto has been substantially enriched and, as corrected by Kautsky, now reads: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite in peacetime and cut each other’s throats in wartime!”

”…According to historical materialism, as Marx laid it out, all of previously recorded history is the history of class struggle. According to Kautsky’s revision of materialism, that must be amended to read: ‘except in time of war’.” [187]

Luxemburg goes for Kautsky’s throat: “A moments reflection shows that Kautsky’s theory of historical materialism…does not leave a single stone of Marxist theory standing. According to Marx neither the class struggle nor war fall from the sky, but rather arise out of deep-seated social and economic causes. Thus neither of the two can periodically disappear unless their causes also vanish into thin air.”

“…Wars in the present historical period result from the competing interests of rival groups of capitalists and from capitalism’s need to expand. But these two driving forces do not operate only when the cannon’s roar, but also in peacetime, when they prepare and make inevitable the outbreak of new wars. War is indeed, as Kautsky is found of quoting from Clausewitz, only ‘continuation of politics by other means.’ And it is precisely the imperialist stage of capitalist domination whose arms race has made peace illusory, by declaring what is in essence the dictatorship of militarism and permanent war.” [188]

On the dangers of ‘official Marxism’ Luxemburg says this:

”All attempts to make Marxism conform to the present transitory decrepitude of Socialist practice, to prostitute it to the level of a mercenary apologist for social imperialism, are in themselves more dangerous than all the blatant and shrill excesses of the nationalist confusion in the ranks of the party. Such attempts tend not only to conceal the real causes of the International’s profound failure, but also to discard the lessons from this experience necessary for its future construction.” [192]

Writing for the Russian Bolshevik journal Kommunist, in September 1915, Lenin also takes Kautsky apart in “The Collapse of the Second International”.

First, Lenin refutes Kautsky’s complaint that the revolutionary situation that was expected at the Basle Congress did not occur with the outbreak of war because governments got stronger and workers weaker. Lenin shows that the war did create a revolutionary situation which he famously defined in this article. ,

A revolutionary situation exists ‘objectively’ when the ruling classes find it impossible to rule ‘in the old way’; when the ‘lower classes do not want to live in the old way’, and when workers are drawn into independent action. To which he adds the necessary ‘subjective’ changes to workers consciousness –the “ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government” [194].

Thus the prediction of the pre-war Basle Manifesto is “fully confirmed” says Lenin; even “…those who fear revolution – petty bourgeois Christian parsons, the General Staffs and millionaires’ newspapers – are compelled to admit that symptoms of a revolutionary situation exist in Europe…To deny this truth, directly or indirectly, or to ignore it, as Plekhanov, Kautsky and Co have done, means telling a big lie, deceiving the working class, and serving the bourgeoisie”. [196]

So rather than take advantage of a revolutionary situation to ‘hasten’ the downfall of capitalism as demanded in the Basle Resolution, Kautsky and Co take refuge in the ‘big lie’ that no such crisis exists. Hence Kautsky rejects the charge that the leadership of the SD betrayed the masses. He caricatures the left SD position as calling for a ‘revolution within 24 hours’ which was impossible.

Lenin counters that revolutions are not ‘made’ but develop within objective conditions and the betrayal of the leadership was a massive setback to that development.

Kautsky justifies his position by trying to make the crisis dissolve into thin air as a ‘mistaken’ policy option that can be turned into peace by appealing to ruling class interests

The conditions were not ripe for revolution because the ruling class had not come to an impasse where it could not ‘rule in the old way’ but could instead opt for peace rather than war.

Lenin responds: “The most subtle theory of social-chauvinism, one that has been most skillfully touched up to look scientific and international, is the theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’ advanced by Kautsky…This theory boils down, and can only boil down, to the following: Kautsky is exploiting the hope for a new peaceful era of capitalism so as to justify the adhesion of the opportunists and the official Social-Democratic parties to the bourgeoisie, and their rejection of revolutionary i.e. proletarian, tactics in the present stormy era…[198]

Further: “Let us recall what the passage from the previous and “peaceful” period of capitalism to the present and imperialist period has been based on: free competition has yielded to monopolist capitalist combines, and the world has been partitioned. Both of these facts (and factors) are obviously of world-wide significance: Free Trade and peaceful competition were possible and necessary as long as capital was in a position to enlarge its colonies without hindrance, and seize unoccupied land in Africa, etc., and as long as the concentration of capital was still weak and no monopolist concerns existed i.e. concerns of a magnitude permitting domination of an entire branch of industry. The appearance and growth of such monopolist concerns (has this process been stopped in Britain or America? Not even Kautsky will dare deny that the war has accelerated and intensified it) have rendered the free competition of former times impossible; they have cut the ground from under its feet, while the partition of the world compels the capitalists to go over form peaceful expansion to an armed struggle for the repartitioning of colonies and spheres of influence.” [199]

Both Luxemburg and Lenin proved that Kautsky’s ‘official Marxism’ rejected the laws of capitalist development and the operation of the market, leaving “no stone” of Marxist theory overturned. Rather imperialism by its nature was inevitably forced to war. That war created the objective factors necessary for a revolutionary situation but the old leadership had betrayed the Basle resolution and failed to lead a revolutionary opposition to the war. It needed to be replaced urgently by a new leadership that could exploit the revolutionary crisis and turn imperialist war into civil war. The time was overdue to regroup the left SD forces and begin the process of building a new Third International.

It was necessary to unite the left forces and prepare for a anti-war conference. The question arises why did the ‘left’ leave the initiative to the ‘centre’ to convene the first anti-war conference at Zimmerwald in September 1915, one year after the war had begun. Why did it take the ‘left’ so long to re-organise?

Towards Zimmerwald

The bourgeoisie understood that imperialist war created a revolutionary crisis and passed tough repressive measures against workers and the ‘left’ in general. The anti-war movement was driven underground and many of their leaders and cadres were imprisoned. To implement the Basle resolution and the call to turn imperialist war into civil war, the left needed to build a new international. Why didn’t the left initiate an antiwar conference?

Two pre-conferences were held during this period; an International conference of Women met in Bern, March 26-28, and an Internationalist Youth Conference during April 1915. But no call arose out of either of these for a full blown anti-war conference. In May 1915, the Italians try to get the ISB to hold an antiwar conference. This is rejected, so the Italians decide to convene a conference without the ISB. A Preliminary Conference met on July 11 in Bern. Invitations were sent to the official ISB national leaderships! Kautsky among others declined.

Zinoviev reported on the Preliminary Conference. He was obviously surprised to find that the organisers had invited only representatives of the official ISB parties “Where are the genuine lefts of the International?” he asked.

The Zimmerwald Left and the Lessons for Today

How and when did the split which formed the Zimmerwald Left in 1915 take place? Why was this the important step to building a new international? What are the lessons to be learned today as US imperialism steps up its war drive? With the end of the Soviet Bloc most of the Western left has reverted to a Menshevik position of putting faith in the completion of the bourgeois revolution. They have given up on any belief that the working class is the revolutionary class and substituted the petty bourgeois intelligentsia. Those who adapt to democratic imperialism, Stalinists, centrists, and social democrats avoid fighting their own ruling class! They turn their backs on revolutionary Marxism, Leninism, and Bolshevism. As the contradictions of imperialism intensify these Menshevik currents form a counter-revolutionary barrier to the leftward movement of workers and poor peasants. That is why we need a New Zimmerwald, a new Bolshevik left, and a new Communist International.

Zimmerwald at Last

During the first year of the war the pressure from the left for an international conference to unite those prepared to break with the social chauvinists and pacifists was sabotaged by the right and centre. The preliminary conference in Bern on July 11 1915 was dominated by the right and centre and rejected Zinoviev’s motions for revolutionary mass actions against the war. When the Zimmerwald Conference was finally held, September 5-8, 8 delegates including the Polish, Russian delegates met beforehand and formed the ‘Zimmerwald left’. They were Lenin and Zinoviev (Bolsheviks), Berzin (Latvian social democrats), Radek (Polish-Lithuanian opposition), Borchardt (for Lichenstrahlen in Germany), Hoglund and Nerman (Swedish and Norwegian left), Platten (Switzerland). Trotsky was among several others who attended this meeting but did not endorse the left’s position.

Liebknecht writing from prison greets the delegates and calls for a “settling of accounts with the deserters and turncoats of the International”. He urges the delegates to fight an international class war and to break with false appeals to national and party unity. He concludes:

“The new international will arise on the ruins of the old. It can only arise on these ruins, on new and firmer foundations. Friends – socialists from all countries – you must lay the foundation stone today for the future structure. Pass irreconcilable judgement upon the false socialists…Long live the future peace among peoples! Long live internationalist, people-liberating.”

The formation of the ‘Zimmerwald left’ was the decisive step in the break with the old international. Lenin and Radek had drafted resolutions to put to the conference. Radek’s was adopted but Lenin’s references to support for colonial wars and calling for ‘defeat of one’s own country’ were omitted. Yet Radek’s draft was still strong. The war is characterised as an imperialist war. The causes of war can only be overcome by socialist revolution in the leading countries. The majority of the socialist international has gone over to the social patriotism of their national bourgeoisies. The ‘centre’ current of pacifists such as Kautsky is more dangerous than the open patriots because it misleads and confuses the more advanced workers. The left must struggle against social patriotism with every method at its disposal – rejection of war credits, propaganda against the war, demonstrations, fraternisation in the trenches, strikes etc. Quoting Liebknecht’s letter, Radek concludes: “Civil war, not ‘civil peace’ is our slogan” (LSRI, 299).

The debates centred around the question of ‘civil peace’ versus ‘civil war’. Most delegates were for ‘peace’ because they said workers were demoralised, confused and needed further preparation before they could turn the war into a ‘civil war’. Those against ‘civil peace’ also included Trotsky who opposed to pacifism ‘class struggle and ‘social revolution’. Chernov the Russian socialist revolutionary said that the “struggle for peace exclusively” must be extended to the “struggle for social revolution”. Radek’s resolution that put the case for ‘civil war’ was voted down 19 to 12 and did not become part of the final manifesto. Trotsky and Roland-Holst, Chernov and Natanson voted with the Zimmerward 8.

Zimmerwald Manifesto

The Zimmerwald Manifesto addresses the Proletarians of Europe: “one thing is certain: the war that has produced this chaos is the product of imperialism…economically backward or politically weak nations are thereby subjugated by the great powers, who, in this war, are seeking to remake the world map with blood and iron in accord with their exploiting interests…In the course of the war, its driving forces are revealed in all their vileness…The capitalists of all countries who are coining the gold of war profits out of the blood shed by the people, assert that the war is for defence of the fatherland, for democracy and the liberation of oppressed nations…thus the war reveals the naked figure of modern capitalism which has become irreconcilable not only with the interests of the masses of workers, not only with the requirements of historical development, but also with the elementary conditions of human existence…this situation that faces us, threatening the entire future of Europe and humanity, cannot and must not be tolerated any longer without action…

So far so good, but what action? The Manifesto concludes: “Proletarians! Since the outbreak of the war you have placed your energy, your courage, your endurance at the service of the ruling classes. Now you must stand up for your own cause, for the sacred aims of socialism, for the emancipation of the oppressed nations as well as of the enslaved classes, by means of irreconcilable class struggle”.

“Class struggle”? What does this mean? Socialists in the countries at war are told to take up “this task”. What is this? “peace among the people”. Compared with real task of turning the imperialist war into civil war this is a pious platitude. (320)

Lenin, Zinoviev, Radek, Nerman, Hoglund and Winter of the Zimmerwald left produced a statement protesting the omission of any “characterisation of opportunism” as the main cause of the capitulation to war, and any clear presentation of “methods of struggle against the war”. But they said that they would still vote for the Manifesto as a “call to struggle, and because we want to march forward in this struggle arm in arm with the other sections of the International”.

Zimmerwald leads to inevitable split

The Zimmerwald left was aware of the need to use the left position to break with the right and centre to form a new international. Lenin and the others (excluding Trotsky) saw that a split was necessary. Radek calls the betrayal of the opportunists a de facto split. The failure to prepare for a new international quickly was to set the scene for later defeats. This is most obvious in Lenin’s critique of the Spartacists for not taking a firm independent line against the centrists in Germany.

The main lesson from Zimmerwald was that the left needed to strike out on an independent course (collaborating where possible at Zimmerwald etc) to win over the most advanced workers, with both a critique of opportunism and a revolutionary mobilisation against the ruling class.

Radek put this forcefully in his report on the conference: “It may be a long-time before the masses, bled white by the war recover and renew the struggle. We can shorten this time, however by explaining to the most conscious workers why the International collapsed, how they have to struggle, for what goals they must appeal to other workers, and how they must organise the struggle under conditions of military rule. The more difficult the situation the clearer must be the politics of socialism. It is never too early to tell the workers their true situation” (339).

Lenin’s critique of Luxemburg

Lenin critiqued Luxemburg and the German Spartacists for following the Zimmerwald Manifesto in toning down their critique of opportunism and failing to break from the centrists and create an independent party. He was responding to Luxemburg’s famous ‘Junius Pamphlet’.

“The chief defect in Junius pamphlet…is its silence about the connection between social chauvinism …and opportunism. This is wrong from the standpoint of theory, for it is impossible to account for the ‘betrayal’ [of the 2^nd international without linking it up with opportunism as a trend with a long history behind it, the history of the whole Second International. ..It is also a mistake from the practical political standpoint, for it is impossible either to understand the ‘crisis of social democracy’ or overcome it, without clarifying the meaning and the role of two trends, the openly opportunist trend…and the tacitly opportunist trend…A very great defect in revolutionary Marxism in Germany as a whole is its lack of a compact illegal organisation that would systematically pursue its own line and educate the masses in the spirit of the new tasks; such an organisation would have to take a definite stand on opportunism and Kautskyism (436).

Lenin also criticises Luxemburg for not understanding that a civil war against the bourgeoisie was necessary. “In saying that the class struggle is the best means of defence against invasion, Junius applies Marxist dialectics only half way…Marxist dialectics call for a concrete analysis of each specific historical situation…Class struggle…is too general and therefore inadequate in the present specific case. Civil war against the bourgeoisie is also a form of class struggle, and only this form of class struggle would have saved Europe…from invasion” (443)

Lenin explains these defects in Luxemburg’s position materially as due to the ‘environment’ of German social democracy and the fear of the leftists to follow “their revolutionary slogans to their logical conclusions”. As a result Luxemburg pulls back to “something like a Menshevik ‘theory of stages’ of first defending a republic and then to the next stage – socialist revolution”

“But this shortcoming is not Junius’ personal failing, but the result of the weakness of all the German leftists, who have become entangled in the vile net of Kautskyite hypocrisy, pedantry and “friendliness” for the opportunists.”

Trotsky the semi-Menshevik

Trotsky’s role in all this was ‘confusionist’. He had illusions in winning the ‘centre’. He talked of Kautsky moving left. He confused the necessary subjective task of winning the most advanced workers (Radek’s point) with the objective backward consciousness of workers. This misled him into trying to influence the party leaders of the centre like Kautsky who had “authority” with the masses. Hence his mechanical schematic view that workers had to stop fighting themselves before they would fight their own bourgeoisies. This was true but undialectical.

Trotsky was proved wrong. When the German soldiers and sailors mutinied in 1918 they fulfilled the first part of Trotsky’s schema. But instead of turning their guns against the bourgeoisie, they were talked into exchanging their guns for votes in a German Republic. In Russia, the first revolution in February against the Tsar did not succumb to the bourgeoisie. The armed workers retained their guns, defeated the counter-revolution and went on to make a socialist revolution.

What was the lesson from Zimmerwald? Lenin expressed it very well. Imperialist wars can be won by workers only by means of a socialist revolution. Wars open up revolutionary crises and the revolutionary leadership must clearly take the lead from the right and centre of the party. The right goes further to the right and drags the centre with it. Failure to break from the centre was the fate of the German Spartacists. The lack of a Bolshevik party in Germany was the vital factor that allowed the counter-revolution to succeed. The defeat of the German revolution was ultimately to bring the defeat of the Russian revolution in 1991.

We need a new Bolshevik International

Menshevism allows the possibility of a ‘peaceful’ evolutionary transition to socialism and so sees bourgeois democracy as a shell for workers democracy. But In times of war capitalism doesn’t want workers votes it want their blood. Revolutionaries have to counter that by building independent workers organs that do not rely on bourgeois democracy. Bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie counter-posed to the dictatorship of the proletariat. That’s why we were against bourgeois democracy in the former DWS’s. As Trotsky said, bourgeois democracy could only be counter-revolutionary in a DWS.

Today the remains of the 2^nd International are even more openly social imperialist. Socialism has virtually disappeared inside imperialism. The new imperialism promotes western values of democracy and human rights as the means of ‘civilising’ the colonial and semi-colonial world. The remains of the 3^rd international have become 2^nd internationalists in the imperialist world. In the ‘3^rd world’ they are for the patriotic popular front to complete the bourgeois revolution in the former workers states and in the semi-colonies. This means counter-posing the international civil society of Porto Alegre to the rogue institutions of globalisation such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO etc. Both of these currents endorse the right of imperialism to intervene in oppressed states to remove local dictators and facilitate ‘democratic’ regimes. They are against the armed struggle of colonial and semi-colonial peoples to do it themselves.

The degenerate Trotskyists are joining forces with these betrayers to revise the permanent revolution and promote the democratic stage as a necessary preparation for the socialist stage. But this is a grotesque deformation of the theory of permanent revolution that says that the democratic stage can be completed only by socialism. That is, the struggle right now is for socialism during which the incomplete democratic tasks will be completed.

Zimmerwald teaches us the importance of the fundamental distinction between the methods of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks explained by Lenin in What is to be Done, and then proven decisively in the massive betrayal in imperialist war. The Mensheviks wanted peace first, that is an end to military imperialism by peaceful imperialism. This was so because it was the institutions of bourgeois democracy, parliament, pressured by the masses that would enact peace. The Bolsheviks, dominating the Zimmerwald Left, saw the need to activate the working masses directly to stop the war by turning the imperialist war into a ‘civil war’.

Thus the Bolsheviks called for the struggle for socialism as the only way to stop the imperialist war. They knew that this struggle would transform workers from a backward, defensive consciousness, in awe of the bosses’ parliament, into a revolutionary force capable of socialist revolution.

Today, under conditions of growing crisis and drive to imperialist war on the part of US imperialism, revolutionaries have today, under conditions of growing crisis and drive to imperialist war on the part of US imperialism, revolutionaries have this same task. We need a New Zimmerwald. We have to reject the Menshevik program of counter-posing bourgeois democracy to US imperialism in the Porto Alegre, anti-globalising, sense. We have to break from the politics of the popular front and internationally from the Menshevik international. We have to rebuild a new Bolshevik International now!

All page references are to Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International. Documents: 1907-1916. The Preparatory Years. Edited by John Riddell. Monad Press, New York, 1984.

First Published in Class Struggle April-May 2002 and online at Communist Worker July. 2008