Fraction of the International Communist Left has published its bulletin #9 of August 15, 2012 We publish the article below with which we are totally in agreement.
Internationalist Communists – Klasbatalo
Warning : the
translations into English we do, are made by comrades whose knowledge of this
language is very relative.
Thus, besides the lack of easiness for the
reading, our English texts may present some mistakes and confusions which
aren't political but "technical". One can refer to the French version.
The Historical Perspective of « Communism »
is the Key of the Proletariat's Present Struggles
Forced to mention the workers mobilization
around the struggle of the Spanish miners – they could not ignore them unless
risking to discredit themselves – , the bourgeois media hasten to silence again
on this event after the miners' demonstration in Madrid (July 11th) taking
advantage the holidays summer period and the Olympic Games. The censorship that
the international media exert over the workers reactions to the crisis is an
illustration of the threat that the dynamic of international workers struggles
represents for the capitalist order and which particularly runs through Europe.
After Greece, it is thus the turn of the Iberian Peninsula, in Spain, in
Portugal, where the proletariat is obliged to attempt to react in front of the
conditions of living which are now imposed on it. And the silence exerted by
the ruling class, doesn't change anything to the reality of the various workers
responses of this summer.
After Greece, the workers mobilization around
the Asturian miners' struggle tended to focus the attention of the
international proletariat and has embodied a centre of agitation in Spain for
all workers. The massive participation of the workers population of Madrid to
the “Marcha negra” [the “Black March”] of the miners as well as the warm
reception they received in the whole country, reveal the fact that all Spanish
workers tended to identify with this fight and were conscious of the need for a
united response of all sectors and all regions to face the State. The use of a
class violence to defend itself in front of the bourgeois repression, the
attempts to paralyse the functioning of the State and the capitalist economy
through the blockage of transportations and the occupation of the cities of the
mine region, has shown to all the path to follow and it is precisely in this
that the whole Spanish proletariat recognizes itself. Also, this mobilization
of an “historical” sector of the working class, with a “tradition” of decades
of struggles whether under the Spanish Republic in the years 1930 as well as under
Franco's dictatorship in the following years, has definitively shown the
“limits” of the famous movement of the “indignados” [“indignous”, the Spanish
version, and first one, of the “Occupy Wall Street” movements] and, actually,
the example-trap that it represented for the proletariat's struggle. The miners
of the Asturias recalled to everybody that the fight against the capitalist
attacks due to the crisis is not a fight of “citizens” for a better democracy,
but well and truly a fight of an exploited class against another ruling and
exploiter class whether it is “democratic” or no.
For this, the miners' struggle and the
mobilization it has led to in the whole country, is an example to follow, a
path to take back in all countries.
Nevertheless, we must also note that this
mobilization – up to today, the miners have globally stop their strike without
having get something and the austerity measures carry on falling on the Spanish
working class – has not emerged on a raising of the class fight against the bourgeoisie
and its State up to shake the latter and oblige it, at least momentarily, to
withdraw its economical attacks.
Why the workers anger which is real,
generalized, why the willingness for fighting, the feeling we must struggle
altogether, have not succeeded to modify significantly the relation of forces
between the classes ? The workers demonstration in Madrid, despite its
success and the reinforcements of the workers population of the Spanish
capital, has finished into an impasse and a kind of an end – at least for the
moment. Why ? Is this due to the fact the unions have kept the control
over the workers mobilization, over the organization of the March to Madrid,
over the slogans and the demands – often regionalist and corporatist ? Due
to the fact they have also partly succeeded in turning back against the workers
the use of self-defence in front of repression by making it a myth and a goal
in itself, thus limiting at the maximum any risk of real extension and
generalization of the movement ? Indeed, the unions and the Left political
forces have played a role and made all they could to enclose the workers into
their specificities of “miners” and in the “save our region” - and
unfortunately no communist group could, or didn't want(Note 1), intervene and oppose
besides the workers to the unions dead-ends and sabotages ; none could
advance alternative slogans and alternative perspectives of action. But this is
not enough to explain the limits of the present workers struggles – since the
limits of the mobilization in Spain are more or less the same as the ones the
international proletariat faces almost everywhere.
Why the role of the bourgeoisie's agents in
the workers ranks as the unions, the Left parties and the leftists, and their
action are not enough to explain that the working class doesn't succeed up to
now to rise its struggle at the level which is required by the situation
(gravity of the capitalist crisis and the attacks) ? While never in
capitalism history – we do weigh our words – the objective conditions have so
much favoured the evolution of the relation of forces between the classes in
favour of the proletariat. Never in capitalism history, the bourgeoisie had to
attack the proletariat with such a strength– we only are at its beginnings – and
with such a frontal manner, in all countries and in all sectors, at the same
time, while the whole working class – though suffering the ceaseless false
plugging of bourgeois ideology – remains far from supporting the great
nationalist, democratic, anti-terrorist, anti-fascist or other themes of this
ideology.
These frontal and massive attacks aren't but
beginning and are even going to increase, not only because the economical
crisis is insolvable from the capitalist oint of view but also precisely
because the bourgeoisie has no other choice than to press that the whole
society mobilizes and compromises in a new generalized imperialist war. This
other “historical perspective”, the one “offered” by the bourgeoisie, implies
even before its starting new and terrible sacrifices. But, up to today, and
contrary to 1914 and 1939, the working class is not ready to accept and to
adhere to this march towards generalized war. Thus, while the objective
historical conditions (the more and more obvious bankruptcy of capitalism, the
historical weakening of the ruling class...) have never been so favourable, we
repeat it, why the proletariat is it still unable to take advantage of this
situation in order to turn the situation in its own favour ? Why, whereas
its illusions about capitalism and bourgeois democracy are falling down under
the strikes of the attacks by the bourgeois States ? What is it
missing ? What does it suffer of ?
The essential weakness of the international
proletariat – the workers struggles in Greece and now in Spain demonstrate it –
lies at the level of its class consciousness, at the level of the extent and
the deepness of this one in its ranks. At the very moment it regains, in its
masses, the consciousness that it is a single and same class, it carries on
suffering the huge and deep impact of the anti-communism campaigns which have
above all followed the collapse of stalinism and which rely on the false
assimilation of genuine communism to the stalinist dictatorship and to the
USSR. Since, with its campaigns ceaseless dealt out, the bourgeoisie does all
it can to make us believe that “communism is dead” and above all that there is
no alternative to capitalism.
One fact is significant and goes beyond a
simple detail : the images of the massive demonstration in Madrid show a
flowering of regionalist or unionist banners but no red flags – what ever is
their utilization by the leftists. This a particular illustration of the fact
that consciousness, as diffuse and confuse it can be in the workers ranks, that
another society is possible and that capitalism has to be destroyed, is
particularly reduced and in great part lacking in the workers mobilization.
Inevitably, this has a negative impact for the development (in extension, in
unity and in deepness) of the workers fights of today. Without this historical
perspective whether it be more or less clear and present in the class, the
proletariat's struggle can't rise up to what the situation requires. Without
historical perspective, it is deeply weakened up to the very level of its
immediate and daily struggles which have no chance to make the bourgeoisie
withdraws – in particular today when the capitalist system is bankrupted. Since
the need for paralysing the bourgeoisie and its State power, it means to
confront it politically and to dispute it its power, loses its foundation
without the consciousness that the proletariat is a class whose future is to
overthrow capitalism, make disappear the classes and set up communism through
the exercise of its own class power.
It is all the difficulty of the class fights
of today as well as their limit. This weakness also expresses itself at the
level of the proletariat's political vanguard in particular through the absence
of influence of the living communist minorities. Of course, the groups and
organizations which claim communism, define themselves according to this
perspective. Nevertheless they have also suffered from the post-1989
anti-communist campaigns. In particular, political opportunism have exerted
ravages in their ranks as illustrates it the example of the catastrophic
political drift of the ICC(Note 2) which openly manifested since 2001. Besides this,
sectarianism carries on hitting the existing groups and weaken their difficulty
to assume the tasks of political confrontations and debates in order to favour
the indispensable regroupment of forces.
In that sense, the fact that various
individuals and circles, often stemming from... the ICC, take over the
anti-communist campaigns of the bourgeoisie adding their contribution and their
“supposed” authority on the subject for having been militant in the ranks of
the Communist Left during decades, comes also to weaken directly the communist
camp and its organizations.
“There are not two different class
struggles of the working class, an economic and a political one, but only one
class struggle, which aims at one and the same time at the limitation of
capitalist exploitation within bourgeois society, and at the abolition of
exploitation together with bourgeois society itself “ (Rosa Luxemburg, The
Mass Strike, 1906).
August 2012.
1. The intervention of the ICC has been
conspicuous by its absence in a first time, and then, after much delay, by its
content worthy of the “indignados” and anarchist ideology according to which “one
must change himself” ! See our following text in this issue.
2. We refer the reader to the summaries of our
bulletins and the ones of the ex-Internal Fraction of the ICC for the study of
this catastrophic opportunist drift of this organization which once was our
organization (www.fractioncommuniste.org).
