Against the European Union referendum !

The working class can only defend its conditions with class organisation and class struggle !

For months the working class in the UK has been subjected to an ideological onslaught on the future of “their” country. In an effort to keep his own party’s MPs and supporters in line, Prime Minister David Cameron promised to renegotiate membership in a reformed European Union and put the issue to the electorate. He got very little in the way of concessions from the EU, but decided to proceed with the referendum.

The slogging match that ensued has revealed deep divisions within the ruling class, making a mockery of the claim that the British economy has been out-performing the other 27 countries in the EU. Those in favour of leaving (Brexiters) claim that migrants moving from other EU countries into the UK are taking advantage of the country’s “generous” benefits system, while those in favour of remaining have agreed that benefit cuts are required “to solve the problem”. In general, there appears to be a consensus that “uncontrolled immigration” is putting strain on jobs, housing and services.

In reality the run-down of services goes back four decades to the economic crisis of the late seventies and the response of the then Labour government. Thatcherite free marketers carried on the project, using mass unemployment to discipline the working class and make people grateful for any work that was on offer, however bad the conditions. Large swathes of industrial production were moved abroad and the mini-booms of the Major and Blair era were largely based on non-productive sectors such as financial services, together with credit expansion and rising house prices. Public and private debt mounted and job creation focused on “flexible” labour, i.e. low wages, rotten conditions and no trade union protection. The latest manifestation of this has been “zero-hour contracts”.

The crisis of capitalism is world-wide

The economic crisis is not, as the Leave campaign would have us believe, the result of “Brussels bureaucrats” or “over-regulation” or even the weakness of the Euro. No, it is inseparable from the ongoing global crisis of capitalism. Every country in the world is affected, even those that have until recently enjoyed rapid growth, such as the so-called BRIC countries. Brazil is now a financial basket-case, Russia will suffer negative growth this year, and while official growth rates in India and China appear high, investment is falling rapidly – a clear sign that capitalists in those countries expect lower profits. The Brexiters’ claim that Britain would have great opportunities to trade with the rest of the world, if only it threw off the shackles of the EU, is therefore complete baloney.

Immigration

It is no exaggeration to say that the referendum has been turned from one about the European Union into one pitting British people against foreign immigrants. This has stirred emotions to the point that a Labour MP was murdered by a fascist who shouted “Britain first” before shooting and stabbing her.

Brexiters likewise claim that British capitalism’s problems can be resolved by cutting the number of workers arriving from abroad and putting “Britain first”. They say that EU immigrants (though in fact most immigrants come from outside the EU) are driving down wages, driving up unemployment and putting pressure on healthcare and education. However, the Remainers will not rebut this with the simple truth, which is that all capitalists of all countries always aim to drive wages down to the minimum by whatever means. Because that is the very nature of capitalism: to extract the maximum profit from waged labour and under-cut the competition to win market share. This will not change whether Britain is in or out of the EU. Instead, the Remainers piously claim that immigration is a “price worth paying” for being in the single market.

The only way workers can defend themselves is by uniting their struggles as a class. We have seen some powerful examples of this in other EU countries. In France there has been resolute resistance to attacks on workers living conditions in recent weeks. And our Party has reported on the determined struggles by workers in the Italian logistics sector against both the bosses and the state-enrolled trade unions. The essential lesson is that if you don’t fight against the bosses’ attacks as a class everybody suffers: capitalists do not care whether you are British, Polish, Irish or Romanian: all they see in you is an opportunity to make profit, to be tossed aside when profits fall.

The fragmentation of the working class can only be overcome by class-wide forms of organisation, uniting workers on the shop-floor, in offices and services, and not allowing their struggles to be diverted by the Labour Party / Trade Union officials. The working class can only protect its interests by means of its own class organisation and its own struggles – by opposing the attacks wherever they originate.

“Sovereignty”

A lot of the argument in the referendum has revolved around the bourgeois idea of “popular sovereignty” or “the sovereignty of parliament”. The main argument of the Brexiters is “we need to take back control”. The main argument of the Remainers is “we have greater control by being at the EU negotiating table”. But the reality is that there is no “we” – the idea of popular sovereignty is a fiction to masquerade the reality, that there are only opposing class interests. Which is why, whatever the outcome of the referendum, this so-called “exercise in popular sovereignty”, little will change and attacks on the working class will continue as capitalism’s debt crisis worsens.

The workers have no country of their own – they cannot lose what they have never had. Every capitalist State represents the interests of the ruling class against the working class. Workers can only exercise “sovereignty” as an international class, through the dictatorship of the proletariat.





The Tottering Framework of Global Capitalism

In 1960 the United Kingdom was involved in the development of a “free trade” alternative to the “centralising” Common Market, which led to the formation of the European Free Trade Association [EFTA]. EFTA was originally composed of seven countries: Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, to be followed later by Finland in 1961, Iceland in 1970 and Liechtenstein in 1991.

The attempts by the UK to enter the European Economic Community in 1961 and 1967 were vetoed by France, under the Presidency of De Gaulle. De Gaulle’s resignation in 1969 removed this particular obstacle.

The Edward Heath Government of 1970-4 soon turned into one of crisis and internal turmoil, having Inherited industrial strikes and wage claims from the previous Wilson Governments (1964-70). The unprecedented use of a State of Emergency on the docks and then in the mining industry had not been seen on this scale since the post-first world war period. The tri-partite wages and prices agreement (Government, Confederation of British Industries and the Trade Union Congress), then statutory freezes, were soon in tatters. The miners were determined to join the dockers in clawing their way up the “wages league”.

The consequences of the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East, with the oil producers in that part of the world limiting oil production and so forcing up oil prices, further compounded the industrial problems facing the Heath Government. It considered introducing petrol rationing (petrol ration books were issued) and industries were confined to operating a three-day week.

With London distancing itself from Washington, and North Sea oil about to come on-stream, Germany was keen to overcome French vetoes and open the way for the UK’s membership. In 1973, following negotiations, the United Kingdom decided it would join the now renamed European Community, along with Denmark and Ireland.

To set the seal on the economic processes that underpinned the historic decision to join the EC, and to resolve the clashes between the various English political currents, a popular referendum was held in June 1975. This was won by an overwhelming margin by those who wanted to remain in the EC, marginalizing the pro-exit camp, which, irony of ironies, was most intense in the Conservative Party. During the closing stages of the February 1974 General Election Enoch Powell, now a prominent opponent of the EC, called for a vote for Labour because of Wilson’s pledge to renegotiate membership terms and hold a referendum on remaining a member. The outcome of the 1974 election meant that Heath’s Government lost its majority, with the Liberals under Jeremy Thorpe holding the balance of power – the terms of the political “horse-trading” for a coalition with the Liberals was Heath accepting proportional representation for General Elections. It was Margaret Thatcher’s firm opposition to this voting system (on the basis that the Tories might never again gain a majority of MPs at General Elections) which led to the end of these talks, and the fall of the Heath Government.

But the United Kingdom’s membership within the ‘European System’ has been beset by a constant lack of agreement between, and within, the various UK parties on fundamental positions. All a ploy, one might say, in order to emerge from negotiations with more favourable conditions vis-à-vis the obligations which the treaties and regulations imposed. Certainly something the United Kingdom has been rather good at over the last 40 years.

The EU, with all its weaknesses and divisions, has formed a pole of political and military stability In Europe, an open market which, its bourgeois supporters hoped, was bound to guarantee, even if under the watchful eye of the strongest and best equipped, an almost unlimited catchment area for its own goods and a barrier to those from outside. To begin with it was even envisaged that there would be regulation of the capital market, though not in order to bring a minimum of rationality to it but to control the ferocious competition.

Naturally such a colossal task was in vain, beset by a hundred and one obstacles and stumbling blocks. Thus there came about, among the 24 members as there were then, an ensemble of rules and exceptions, inclusions and exclusions, and of partial acceptances of the agreements and treaties. This was particularly the case for the United Kingdom; a ‘member’ so important that the ‘exceptions to the rule’ it managed to negotiate were accepted without too much hair-splitting.

But from around 2000, up until the general crisis in the financial sector of the capitalist system in 2008, the emerging supranational European apparatus showed how intrinsically weak and illusory it was; incapable, and it could not be otherwise, of shaping a policy which all could unite around, or at least agree on. The objective fractures between the member states appeared irresolvable.

And the way things have proceeded since then, on a dispersed, or rather unilateral basis, has naturally operated in the interests of the strongest. Germany, rigorous and decisive towards other countries, and the custodian of the rules governing the other countries’ banking systems, has had no qualms about violating the financial ‘rules’ when it comes to its own banking institutions, and ‘amending’ them to suit its national interests.

The UK has kept its own national currency, maintaining the right to a looser economic policy than the one enforced in the Eurozone; but the need to devalue against other currencies was avoided. The EU contract is too strict for many of its member states, but represents a veritable straitjacket for the states whose capital-finance sector is more developed. Even with all the various concessions made, the cohabitation of Germany and the UK in the same organization became more and more untenable.

An instrument, a casus belli, had to be found to escape from the cage, or at least widen the gap between its bars. Maybe a referendum like the one in 1975, or the one in Denmark in 1992 which rejected the Maastricht Treaty might do; or the pretext could be the differences in foreign policy. Eventually, prompted by what on the face of it were internal matters for the party of government, the chance arose to break out in a ‘democratic way’, much to the jubilation of the anti-EU petty bourgeoisie, who managed to garner a mass of ‘protest votes’, against who knows what, but certainly not against ‘class rule’.

Speaking of which we should mention some vile literature which has been spread about which has the nerve to define itself as ‘left-wing’. This stuff shamelessly declares that the votes cast for Brexit in the poorest districts inhabited by the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat mark a ‘progressive’ event in class terms, since it is a protest by the lowest strata of the population against their desperate living conditions. Certainly such a protest is justified, but this vote can’t be seen as marking a resurgent class consciousness; in fact quite the contrary!

Also the referendum certainly wasn’t an ‘accident’ as some have claimed; the rulers didn’t make a ‘mistake’; and it certainly doesn’t mark some kind of re-awakening of those hit by the Thatcher era ‘reforms’, or by Blair’s ‘refinements’ of them. The vote could have gone the other way, but the historical arrow still points in the same direction: if ‘remain’ had been the verdict of the ballot boxes, the British state would have eventually found another pretext to get out.

It is easy, after the mass of rubbish and nauseating propaganda both before and after the referendum, to blame everything on the clearly oligarchic, closeted procedures of a non-elected executive ‘committee’ which is free from any democratic popular control and engulfed by a no-holds-barred laissez-faire ideology. It is true: the ‘thinking brain’ of the EU is financial and not political. Yet if the European parliament is composed of a despicable bunch of idlers, worse even than the national parliaments (which is saying something), a structure without any objective power, these national parliaments, and also national governments, have themselves all handed control of the State machine over to the financial system – that is, to an all-pervasive and anonymous command structure representing the last form to be generated in the historical trajectory of Capital.

Similarly, this same anonymous business committee, supranational in substance if not in form, uses measures that are ever more laborious and inefficient in its attempt to reduce the violent impact of the crises. This superstructure, which is politico-economic, voluntarist and ideological, is imposed on the workings of the states and the governments.

Equally anti-historical and impotent is the idea that the UK, having finally freed itself from the fetters of the EU, can now recover from the social crisis which followed Thatcher and Blair’s laissez-faire cure, using its new found freedom to realign sterling’s foreign exchange rates, and take back its political, economical, commercial and fiscal autonomy etc, etc. All these are self-serving falsehoods in that they wrongly blame all of the social disasters tormenting the lower classes on the economic policies imposed by the EU: now that they are free of the EU, lackey of the banks, high finance and German treachery they claim, the national future is full of possibilities for recovery and wealth generation.

With the destruction of a large part of the social body, society’s dynamic is evolving towards the destruction of any illusions about progress happening under social democracy. But this won’t be due to the fact that the European Union’s umbrella is no longer there to offer its protection: we have to constantly bear in mind that this Union is a bourgeois, capitalist and financial construction which is objectively and inevitably anti-proletarian.

The frightening negative reactions that have been predicted, the economic and financial tragedies threatened by a section of the pro-Europe bourgeoisie will certainly come about, but not because the cosy ‘community home’ – a veritable nest of vipers for big-capitalist lobbyists – has been abandoned, but because all these problems were already present in the asphyxiating and rotten economic-financial capitalist system, which is global, European and British.

Already there have been tremors in the property market on which part of fictitious capital rests. If on the one hand an unruly deregulation of the capital market could give the City an advantage over its continental equivalents, on the other hand, despite the ‘competitive devaluation’ in which English capital is desperately placing its hopes, the future of trade and industry are in difficulty in the face of ruthless competition.

The British economy is supported by financial instruments based on property and is founded on an enormous family indebtedness – private not public debt! – which characterizes a major systemic fragility affecting Great Britain. A potential crack in this crucial sector, coming on top of the extreme fragility of the entire banking system of Europe, could be fatal.

Everywhere financial capital predominates over productive capital. And if in relation to the worn-out EU the names of the ‘important players’, the financiers, fund managers, governors of the central banks, of the various boards, etc, hold no interest for us, equally in the case of the various states the particular parties, heads of governments, professional politicians we also consider irrelevant. To speak of a ‘People’s Europe’ counterpoised to a Europe of the financial and capitalist elite, which should react and win back a violated democracy, is a foolish and reactionary aim and expresses a petty-bourgeois position.

The current situation – which had been building up for some time before it was consummated in the democratic orgy of the ‘should we stay or should we go’ referendum, but which has not yet concluded in Britain’s formal departure – is a sign that the community’s entire structure is crumbling: in fact it is bound to become unsustainable in the face of the encroaching capitalist crisis, which as it progresses will disrupt all of the economic, commercial, political and military certainties which were established in the wake of the Second World War.













New Publication:

Paper of the International Communist Party N° 1 - May 2015

– Lessons from the five month miners’ strike in South Africa

– May Day 2015 - Workers have nothing to lose but their chains and a world to win - As capitalism prepares for a new world war it has nothing to offer the proletariat but poverty - The workers must defend their standard of living today so they can destroy the global power of capitalism tomorrow!

– For the Territorial reorganisation of the Working Class

– Report on Rank and File Movements in Italy N° 2 - October 2015

– Rome, June 8, 2015 - The Cgil attack picketing strikers

– First Congress of SI Cobas – Our Comrade’s Intervention

– For the international solidarity of the exploited of every race and country!

– Germany - GDL betrays train divers N° 3 - May 2016

– May Day 2016 - Under the capitalist regime there can be no peace between States - So let there be war between classes!

– Paris attacks: Bourgeois terrorism

– Uniting the struggle of the international working class

– Italy: The struggles of the SI Cobas - Against police and regime unions

– Airbus production moved to USA

– Democratic Tunisia can’t stop the revolt of the unemployed

– Proletarians against bourgeois in Palestine N° 4 - September 2016

– Demonstrations in France against the El Khomri law and the ambiguous attitude of the CGT

– Italy: Ikea workers divided in struggle - Still opposing the Base Unions - Class murder

– UK: Brexit was no “working class revolt”

– Questions from the Usa on the SI Cobas and the Trade Unions









Only by the workers defending their standard of living today can they prepare to destroy the global power of capitalism tomorrow!



Each May Day is the day on which workers throughout the world, overcoming the barriers of nation, race and religion, confirm that they are joined together as one class, are united by the same interests, and are fighting the same battle to free themselves from exploitation and poverty.

Each May Day finds proletarians everywhere in a situation which has been getting worse and worse for years due to the crisis of world capitalism.

Bourgeois propaganda is keen to exaggerate the small signs of recovery in industrial production emerging in the United States and has announced that the crisis is over, when in fact it is only just beginning; already it is spreading and deepening and now it is hitting China. All the financial measures carried out by the United States, Japan, China and Europe to ‘kick start’ production will only result in a new financial bubble that will burst in a few months’ time, and which will be much worse than the one in 2008, which made the comatose state of the capitalist economy abundantly clear in the middle of a major crisis of over-production.

This crisis, which has been forecast and expected by revolutionary Marxism as an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system of production, has already thrown tens of millions of proletarians out of work throughout the world, pushed down wages, and resulted in the dismantling of the so-called ‘Welfare State’. And competition between workers will keep on making the situation worse if the class proves unable to prevent it by mobilising against it, by means of reorganisation and class struggle.

The economic crisis is also intensifying the clashes between imperialist states, great and small, who are competing to: acquire new markets where they can sell off their surplus production; to control the areas rich in the raw materials needed to reproduce capital; and to position themselves strategically in anticipation of the third world war. The war to control the sources of oil, which the ’terrorists’ are fighting, financed by the opposing imperialist centres, has devastated the entire Middle East, and in particular, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and has forced tens of thousands of refugees to abandon their homes fearing for their lives. The contest between the old and the new imperialist powers is also spreading to Africa.

Europe has seen war return to its eastern borders. A few years ago national and religious divisions served as the pretext for the partition of Yugoslavia. Today, the fragility of the Ukrainian state has allowed the United States to interpose itself between Germany and Russia and provoke bloody clashes, which yet again seek to divide the proletariat and harness it to the interests of the various bourgeois States.

In the Far East the arms race embarked upon by bourgeois and capitalist China, which is committed to gaining control of an area commensurate with its economic power by shattering the equilibrium established at the end of the second imperialist war, is bringing it into conflict with the neighbouring states of Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam; and in open defiance of the United States, which dominates the surrounding seas with its atomic fleets.

The bourgeois myths of progressive disarmament and of peaceful coexistence between states, which have somehow survived two deadly world wars, are belied by the continual increase in armaments production, including atomic weapons, and by the increasingly violent clashes between the imperial juggernauts, even if for now they are being conducted as proxy wars between mercenary and irregular forces, such as the Islamic State militias.

The small States are the first to pay the price of this power politics; however, the proletariat in these countries, and internationally, mustn’t allow itself to get drawn into the defence of national interests, as for example the ‘left-wing’ government is attempting to do in Greece, by stoking up patriotism and resistance to the economic aggression of Germany, or as the Chavist government is attempting to do in Venezuela, against United States imperialism. And when a war is already taking place the proletariat shouldn’t feel it has to line up on one of the two opposing bourgeois fronts as is happening, for example, in Palestine, where the only revolutionary perspective is that of a single working-class State opposed to both the Israeli and the Arabic bourgeoisie, who have been using proletarians as cannon fodder for decades, although mainly Palestinian proletarians for sure.

Only with its own party, founded on a sound theory of its own, which encompasses a comprehensive vision of the world which we call Marxism, will the working class be able to repel these opportunist influences and the corrupting ideologies of the enemy classes; only then will it be a class that can fight for its own interests. This party is the revolutionary and internationalist Communist Party, which from the very outset rejected all the bourgeoisie’s false principles, above all democracy, in the knowledge that the engine of history is powered not by opinions, but by class struggle.

The bourgeoisie will never relinquish its miserable privileges unless forced to do so. It prefers war, so it is up to the global proletariat to take up the challenge: by engaging in an economic war to defend wages, organised in genuine class trade unions, against the economic war of the bourgeoisie to defend its profits; by engaging in the revolutionary class war against the wars between bourgeois national states, and organised and led by its own united and disciplined international communist party.

We don’t know how long the death throes of the capitalist beast will last, but what we do know, drawing largely on the lessons of the past century, is that the organs of the revolution, that is Party and trade union, must have prepared themselves well before the revolutionary crisis breaks out, in order to be recognised and utilised by the class. Working to form the political and defensive organs of the working class today, in the midst of the enduring counter-revolution is already communism, is already revolution.

This party already exists in embryonic form today, as the International Communist Party















The false alternative for the proletariat in Greece

The proletariat in Greece – against the manoeuvres of the bourgeois State, as well as the phony workers parties and trade unions, who want to divide it between those supporting and opposing the European Union and the Euro – should reject the populist and demagogic referendum and mobilise itself to reconstitute its own class organisations, in the united defence of its immediate and future interests.

Neither siding with the monsters of nationalism, nor with the international piracy of the ruling class, will help to relieve the Greek proletariat of its dramatic condition. Both the “Europe of the Peoples” and the alternative of a closed patriotic autarchy are fantastical illusions that cannot save it from this system of exploitation and misery.

All of the parliamentary parties spouting off about “democracy” and “the will of the people” are working with all of their power to impede the reorganisation of the proletariat as a class that struggles for its own exclusive interests, which are objectively opposed to those of other classes.

The Greek proletariat should reject any faith in the governing front of Syriza and all of its demagogic promises! Abstain from the vote!

The Greek proletariat must demand that the unions start a determined struggle, by all methods, for the defence of its own living and working conditions, for adequate wages and pensions that can provide for a dignified life, for the general reduction of working hours, for full wages for those laid off and unemployed, and for the defence of collective national work contracts. For the general strike against the starvation of the working class! Against the capitalist sharks both in Europe and in Greece! And against their servants in the political parties and trade unions!

The imperialist states and the European Union will not change their politics – they are incapable of changing their politics. They will continue to defend their profits and their revenues by all means at their disposal, bleeding dry the entire working class of all nations. There is only one way to change this state of affairs, and that is to overthrow the regime of Capital with the international communist revolution.

“Workers of the world, unite!”















“

Islamic State” creature of the imperialisms

Introduction

These two articles on the situation in Syria and the Middle East, which were originally published in our press in November-December 2014, need to be considered in the light of significant developments since then. Among these there are the aerial bombardments of Syria by Russia, which rather than pursuing the declared objectives of the American coalition – replacing Bashar al-Assad and destroying ISIS – has followed its own agenda: keeping Assad in power and bombarding not only ISIS strongholds but other anti-Assad rebel groups. Indeed, this sealing of the Russia-Assad alliance prompted a “surprise visit” by Assad to Moscow in October 2015.

And there has been the mass exodus of migrants into Europe, mainly fleeing the war in Syria.

The bombings and chemical warfare in this civil war, all conducted in the interests of the various local, national and imperialist interests operating in the area, have created a tragedy of epic proportions: the lack of an independent expression of working class interests at the political and trade union levels has surely never been so keenly felt as at the present time in Syria.

A leaflet we distributed on the migrant crisis appears in the 2 nd number of our new English publication, The Communist Party. This can be found on our website, along with other relevant material in other languages.





“Islamic State” creature of the imperialisms

In Iraq, there is a war going on between the Shi’a and Sunni communities, that is, between the two most important bourgeois clans. According to official estimates, 4,500 people died in 941 terrorist attacks in 2012 alone.

The political system installed by the United States in 2003 has rendered the country hostage to its ethnic and religious divisions. The government is directed by the authoritarian Shi’a Prime Minister Nuri al-maliki, a member of the Shi’a Islamic party, Dawaa, which is strongly influenced by Iran. The presence in the government of a Kurdish vice president allows this significant ethnic minority to maintain its autonomy in the region of Iraqi Kurdistan, obtained thanks to the American occupier. The regime is still under the control of Washington, whose double-dealing diplomacy continues as before.

The United States is the main supplier of arms to Iraq: the government’s attempt to turn to Russia in 2012 failed due to American pressure. The war in Syria has aggravated tensions inside the country because the Sunni minority has lined up with the rebel forces, thus not only against Assad but also against Iran and the Shi’a power in Iraq.

The disastrous political and economic situation in Iraq is a fundamental cause of the chaos in the Middle East. Iraq, bled dry and in debt, is in ruins. The roads, hospitals, the transport system, are all to be reconstructed with oil revenues. But the political tensions at the heart of the government, the hostility between the oil and finance ministries, means any decisions are delayed. Legislative action hasn’t managed to resolve anything, and the oil law, which was supposed to regulate relations between the central State and the autonomous Kurdish region, is still under discussion five years later. Baghdad gathers the oil revenues and distributes them to the provinces according to their population density; thus Kurdistan only gets 17%. The Prime Minister, by favouring the Shi’a part of the bourgeoisie, just serves to aggravate the discontent of the Sunni part, and of the disinherited in general.

On 24 February 2013 in Fallujah, protests by Sunni Muslims against the government were harshly repressed and some of the demonstrators were killed by the soldiers, who had opened fire on a stone-throwing crowd.

Autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan has established itself as the indispensable ally of the United States in Iraq and throughout the region. Its government represents the keystone of the new Iraqi political system. In fact the rivalry between Barzani and Talabani (the latter occupying the office of President of Iraq until last July, when he relinquished it to another Kurdish politician) serves the interests of American imperialism, allowing its diplomats to manoeuvre between Iraqi Shi’as and Sunnis. The political institutions of autonomous Kurdistan are firmly in the clutches of President Masoud Barzani, head of the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party) while the vice-presidency rests with the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan).

Furthermore Talibani, head of the PUK, and other Kurds have been given important posts in the administration, the secret services and in the Kurdish army. Barzani’s arrogance and demands for independence are increasing as he exploits the increasingly acute divisions between Shi’as and Sunnis, which the war in Syria has only accentuated.

The assault in Kirkuk serves as a reminder that the nationalist Kurds are still active. Kirkuk, with its multiethnic Arab, Kurdish and Turkish population, is outside the perimeter of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan but the Peshmerga are present there. The Iraqi president Al-Maliki is relying on Arab nationalism to counter Kurdish nationalism in the city, and in September 2012 he installed a military command which provoked clashes between Peshmerga and Iraqi soldiers.

In 2014, adding to the social and political chaos generated by the continuous clashes between various militias and by the daily bombings, bands of Islamic terrorists formed during the Syrian conflict arrived and sided with the “resistance” of the various religious and nationalist groups, such as the Ba’ath party supporters, who were already active in the region.

For years now Syria has been one of the focal points of the struggle between global and regional imperialist bourgeoisies; but rather than the major states intervening directly with their armies, they prefer to use mercenaries, who are armed materially and ideologically as the need arises.

The so-called Islamic State, which emerged from the desert and mountain wastelands of Syria, falls into this category. The group has a lot of money which it obtains by robbing large banks, selling oil, given that it controls a number of oil wells, and power plants, and from the ransoming of kidnap victims; but it also receives financial help from some of the Sunni states in the Persian Gulf and from Turkey. It is equipped with small arms and heavy weaponry, and with tanks and armoured cars taken from the Iraqi army, mainly after the capture of the great arsenal in Mossul in north Iraq.

These guerrilla fighters, who are also recruited in the West, have found support in Iraq from ex-soldiers of Saddam Hussein’s army and from militants in the Baath Party, as well as from amongst the Sunni bourgeoisie and from the many desperadoes and rejects who have multiplied in this country after the victorious invasion of “democracy”.

The decomposition of Iraq’s central state reached a point where the insurgents were able to cut through the territory like a hot knife through butter, seizing possession of most of the northern part of the country in just a few days, striking terror into the population in the process, and only halting at the gates of Baghdad, the doorway to the southern regions, in order to concentrate their attacks on the oil-rich Kurdish zone.

It’s a case of one gang of brigands fighting against another, one lot in the name of radical Islam, the other lot in the name of the anti-terrorist crusade to defend the civil population. In actual fact this no holds barred struggle is a contest to see who can get their hands on “the black gold”.

After dismissing the legitimate, although contested, head of government, Al-Maliki, from office last August, once he started to prove obstructive, the United States and Iran, in an unprecedented joint action, replaced him with another Shi’a, Haïdan al-Abadi, who is also a member of the Al-Dawaa party, but one who has studied in Great Britain and seems to offer greater guarantees of overcoming the country’s political crisis.

Will this al-Abadi manage to hold the Iraqi state together by yielding to some compromise or other between the various religious and political factions? Or will he move towards partitioning the country into three regions, Sunni, Kurdish, and Shi’a, the solution the United States prefers apparently, and probably Iran as well, although it is strongly opposed by Turkey?

On 11 August Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent that the real reason for the intervention of the USA in Iraqi Kurdistan, allegedly to save the indigenous population from the invasion of the Islamic State Guerrillas, was actually to protect the interests of the multinational oil companies who are operating in the area. He stated that of the 143 billion barrels of crude oil reserves in Iraq, at least 43.5 billion of them are to be found in Kurdistan, not to mention the natural gas reserves. Mobil, Exxon, Chevron and Total, all of them multinational oil companies with a major presence in Kurdistan, pocket 20% of the total profits. The journalist remarks that the income from oil extraction in this case is particularly high because the cost of extraction is amongst the lowest in the world: 4 dollars a barrel, whereas for the last four years it has been sold at 110 dollars a barrel! Indeed, the oil that is the most costly to extract tends to dictate the market price.

The Kurdistan government, the journalist continues, sells the oil to Turkey which in its turn, without the agreement of the central government in Baghdad, then sells it on. A Turkish company has constructed a pipeline which skirts the Syrian border and links the refinery at Tak Tak, near Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, also the outlet for the pipeline running from Baku in Aserbajan, and from here onto the international market.

For the arms industries in the United States, Russia, France, Germany, England and Italy, the conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Gaza are veritable manna from heaven.

But in this chaotic situation what has become of the Iraqi workers? It seems that years and years of repression and bloody terror have got the better of their trade union organisations, and today most of them will need to start from scratch in a country which is still ravaged by war.

The Iraqi workers can expect neither the imperialist countries, nor its own bourgeoisie, which is murderous and corrupt, to bring peace to the country. Only the revival of international proletarian struggle, established on a sound class basis, can resolve this tragic situation, which exists not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. Once again the protagonists of this revival, along with the proletarians in those regions, will have to be their brothers in the western countries, in Europe, the Balkans, and in Israel.











Kobane



The Kurds in the quagmire of the Middle East

The dramatic battles to gain control of Kobane – a city in the north of Syria adjoining the Turkish border mainly inhabited by Kurds and other ethnic minorities – are between the Syrian Kurds and the jihadists of Islamic State. They have placed on the agenda the national aspirations of the Kurds and their demand for ethnic recognition, and they are represented by a multitude of parties, the most important of which are: in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), still considered a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union. Their branch in Syria is the Democratic Union Party (PYD). In Iraq there is Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP) and Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) (Talabani was president until July 2014). All of them are in competition with one another.

Kurdish demands for independence emerged during the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, when the victorious powers, in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920, promised an independent Kurdish State. The promises were not kept, and the territory was divided between the new states of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Persia. These four countries, in perpetual conflict with one another, have utilised the national and ethnic ambitions of the Kurdish parties within their territories to subsidise an enervating guerrilla war on each others’ soil (Iran-Iraq, Iraq-Turkey, Syria-Turkey) or, during times of reconciliation, have all allied against them.

The Kurds are not a united, homogeneous people. Out of the 35 million or so Kurds around half of them are to be found in Turkey, and many others in Germany, France and Great Britain. In Syria there are between 1 and 2 million, making up around 10% of the population. Around 4-6 million Kurds have established themselves in the north of Iraq, and around 7 million live in Iran.

They speak different dialects and have different religions. Most of the Kurds are Sunni, but some are Sufi, Shi’a (in Iran) or Yazidi. They are divided also by their geographical origin and their history is marked by numerous tribal conflicts; in fact they have never managed to unite in a centralised political sense. The Kurdish princes under the Ottomans fought seperately against the Sultan. Since then the differences between the various sheikhs and the different Kurdish parties have continually been exploited by the States within whose borders they live: some tribes participated in the massacre of the Armenians contrived by the Young Turks in 1915, others fought the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria on behalf of Hafez al Assad.

Kurdish revolts, repressions and betrayals, internal struggles and reconciliation, continued over the decades and are re-emerging today against the tragic background of a Middle East where the great imperialist powers (the USA, Russia and China) and the regional powers (Turkey, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, the Iraqi State being currently in total disarray) are all at each others throats.

Today it is the Kurds in Syria who are in a critical situation, with those in Iraqi Kurdistan receiving the protection of the United States, and also of Turkey. In Syria the Kurds live mainly in the north and north-east of the country. At the beginning of the seventies the Syrian government thought they could Arabize the territories along its border with Iran and Iraq, inhabited mainly by Kurdish and Christian minorities. This region, which is highly fertile and rich in oil, had known independence movements during the French mandate as well. But when Hafez al Assad assumed power in 1971 he put an end to the forced arabization and sought an alliance with the Kurds against the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Kurds accepted to the extent that in 1982 they took part in the bloody repression of the revolts organised by the latter. Hafez’s bodyguard was often composed of Kurds, and of Christians, towards whom he extended the same policy of protection. The Kurds of Syria didn’t enjoy any political or cultural rights but they weren’t officially persecuted, at least as long as they refrained from advancing any political demands.

The PKK, founded in 1974, got rid of any internal opposition (an armed repression that led to massacres that included women and children) before commencing its guerrilla war against the Turkish State. Its funding was obtained by drugs trafficking, arms dealing, bank robberies, and extorting money from Kurds both at home and abroad, and it also received material and financial support from Syria. This party was therefore tolerated there and its troops were allowed to train in Syria and in Lebanon, sometimes alongside the Palestinians of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The head of the PKK, Öcalan, with the Turkish army after him, was able to take refuge in Syria from 1979 and 1988. The PKK also collaborated with the Alaouite regime in order to contain the influence of the other Kurdish parties. Between 1980 and 1990 numerous Syrian Kurds went off to fight in Iraqi Kurdistan after it was attacked by the Turkish army. But in 1998, during a period of rapprochement between Turkey and Syria, Damascus began to persecute the PKK militants and expelled Öcalan, who took refuge in Italy, and then in Kenya where he was arrested and then handed over to Turkey in 1999.

The formation of an autonomous Kurdish region within Iraqi territory in 2003, supported by the United States, provoked clashes between Arabs and Kurds in Syria.

In October 2011 the Kurdish parties in Syria, with the exception of the PYD-PKK, founded the Syrian Kurdish National Council, which aligned itself with the part of the Arab population opposed to Bashar al-Assad. Meanwhile the militants of the PYD-PKK didn’t participate in the demonstrations against Syrian government and in certain cases tried to prevent them.

In March 2011 Bashar al-Assad, seeking reconciliation with the Kurds, published a decree which granted identity cards to 300,000 stateless Kurds, freed some Kurdish political prisoners, agreed to a possible return of exiles and withdrew from the country’s Kurdish regions. Thus three unconnected Kurdish enclaves were formed along the Turkish frontier: the region of Afrin to the north-east of Aleppo, some small territories which spread into Turkish Kurdistan parallel with the Turkish city of Urfa and in which Kobane is also to be found, and finally the region of Djezireh, caught between the Iraqi and Turkish borders. In actual fact Assad’s tactic was to divide the regime’s opponents, and to cock a snook at Turkey by leaving some of the border provinces under Kurdish control.

In July 2012, at Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani of the KDP reconciled and reunited the various Syrian Kurdish parties, including the PYD-PKK. The latter agreed to participate in the joint management of the cities and of the population of the Syrian Kurdish areas, but refused to merge their military wing with the Syrian Kurdish Peshmerga, who wanted to join forces with the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Within the FSA there is a Kurdish battalion whose members are opposed to the PYD who they accuse of supporting Assad. There are frequent armed clashes, followed by truces, between the militiamen of the Kurdish People’s Protection Force, the military wing of the PYD, and the FSA.

And yet the attacks by the Jihadists against the Kurds have fostered a mood of reconciliation amongst the Kurdish parties. A number of factors divide the Kurds from the Jihadists: the latter consider the Kurds as bad Muslims owing to the number of Kurdish Sufis and Yasidis (Kurdish Zoroastrians), and their liberated women who don’t wear the veil, and they are against Kurdish autonomy. Today the PYD-PKK, even if detested by many Syrian Kurds, is in the front line against the jihadists of Islamic State and the al Nusra Front, another jihadist group operating in Syria.

Islamic State intervened in the civil war in Syria and then invaded Iraq, gaining control of large swathes of territory and pushing forward to the gates of Baghdad and Mosul. It enjoys the support of the Sunni bourgeoisie: Sheikhs, Baathist notables and partisans and ex-officers of Saddam Hussein’s army, who after the dictator’s fall were driven to rebel against the vexatious and repressive measures of the Iraqi government led by a Shi’a prime minister.

The Peshmerga, of Iraqi Kurdistan, have refused to support the Iraqi army and profited from its rout by the troops of Islamic State in June 2013 by occupying the city of Kirkuk, which they had been laying claim to for some time. In August, Islamic State advanced on Iraqi Kurdistan, which then appealed for international assistance. The United States responded very quickly by forming a coalition of 22 countries. And thanks to the aerial attacks of the Americans and their allies the advance of Islamic State was halted.

The Islamic State army, well equipped and well organised by professional officers (Baathists, Chechens) but with no air force, is currently attacking one of the three Kurdish regions in Syria which adjoin the Turkish border. The current bastion is Kobane, part of which, despite the resistance of the Kurdish guerrillas, is already under the control of the jihadists.

To slow the advance of Islamic State, the countries of the coalition, brought together under the United States, are engaging in aerial bombing missions, launched from their bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq. But there will be “no boots on the ground’ since that could allegedly trigger a more serious conflict: the Syrian Kurdish militias with their small arms will have to be sufficient. The Turkish army is massed on the frontier but refuses to intervene, leaving the Kurdish combatants to defend the badly armed city of Kobane from the assault by the jihadists, who are armed with heavy weaponry, on their own.

It seems most of the city’s 40,000 inhabitants have now fled. By taking Kobane the jihadists would gain control of the 900 kilometre road which skirts the Turko-Syrian border. The Kurds in Iraq and Turkey can only get to Kobane by passing through Turkey because the road to Iraq is controlled by Islamic State and Sunni tribes who are hostile to Baghdad.

Many Kurdish PKK fighters set out from their base in the Quandil mountains, in the north of Kurdistan, and headed for Turkey. Here they were arrested by the Turkish army and imprisoned in a gymnasium close to the Syrian border, where over a hundred of them went on hunger strike. Turkey permitted the passage of supply convoys but not weapons or combatants.

And Iraqi Kurdistan doesn’t seem that interested in the Kobane tragedy either. This is due to its close business links with Turkey, which is investing heavily in construction and the oil “stolen” from the Iraqi state (or what’s left of it), thanks to the complicity of the KDP and the PUK, which are dividing up the government of Iraqi Kurdistan and its huge reserves of oil amongst themselves. The KDP and the PUK might not see the PKK being crushed as altogether a bad thing!

The inertia of the Turkish State, despite being a member of NATO and an ally of the United States, is to be explained by the fact that it wants the westerners to bring down the Assad regime but would rather have the black flag of ISIS flying over Kobane than the banner of the PYD-PKK.

Turkish President Erdoğan has stated that Turkey refuses to intervene because both the PKK and ISIS represent a danger to the country, with ISIS opposing not only the Assad regime but also the PYD, a section of the PKK which has been fighting the Turkish government since 1984. He has nevertheless offered political and material support to the Syrian opposition abroad and allowed some of the rebel groups to run arms and fighters through Turkish territory, whilst also turning a blind eye to the thousands of Jihadist recruits also passing through Turkey to get to Syria. In fact the greater part of the arms, equipment and supplies destined for Islamic State and the other Islamist groups fighting Assad has been routed across the Turkish border. In fact Islamic State would be geographically encircled were it not for Turkish Anatolia.

But Erdoğan and his Islamist party, the AKP, considered, like the Muslim Brotherhood, as apostates by Islamic State, have shown they can use the stick as well as the carrot: at the beginning of 2014 the Turkish air-force bombed a jihadist convoy heading towards a city held by the rebels, and in early Spring the Turkish government cut, and then stopped off the flow of water entirely, of the Euphrates in its descent toward Syria, causing the electric turbines in the Tichrin dam, in an area controlled by Islamic State, to shut down. Turkey maybe hopes that Islamic State, once it has disposed of the PKK, will also free it of Assad. Or maybe, once Kobane has fallen and the PKK-PYD have been disposed of, they can get rid of Assad by sending their troops into Syria.

It seems the United States have already renounced the possibility of an intervention by their troops in Syria as it would be vetoed by Russia and China. This, however, could just be a means of exerting pressure on Russia over the vexed question of Ukraine. And the United States are also in discussion with Iran, with whom they want closer ties; but Teheran is against an intervention by land troops because it could undermine its influence in the region which, through Hamas, extends from Syria through Lebanon to Palestine.

As to providing the PKK troops defending Kobane with more effective weapons, everyone (the entire bourgeoisie, that is) has agreed not to. All that remains is to sweeten the pill: on the one hand the media describe an unequal battle in which the Iraqi and Syrian population is terrorised and martyred, with the women reduced to slavery and violated by the Jihadists who are not afraid to exhibit their macabre excesses on the internet, and thus provide a justification and explanation for the “humanitarian” interventions of the western countries; on the other hand the various diplomats make cautious and querulous declarations about “not wanting to aggravate the conflict” by sending in heavy weaponry or intervening with troops on the ground! But we know well from studying the history of warfare that international diplomacy doesn’t have many scruples about abandoning badly armed soldiers to hold back armies while diplomatic negotiations run their course! We recall, for example, the battles fought, with no hope of success, by the young French recruits at Dien Bien Phu in 1954!

Thus the Kurds in Kobane have been abandoned by everybody. In Belgium, France and Germany Kurds have held protests under the black flags of the PKK. In Turkey demonstrations in numerous cities, some very violent, have been harshly repressed and the number of protestors killed there is already in double figures. Curfews have been imposed by the Erdoğan government in six of the country’s provinces where Kurds are in the majority. From prison Öcalan has called on his followers to prepare for war. The PKK has announced that if the Kurds in Kobane are massacred it would end the ceasefire declared in March 2013, after decades of guerrilla warfare, and resume the armed struggle. On 13 October, after three days of attacks by the PKK on the security forces in the south-east of Turkey, Turkish planes bombed their positions.

Once again the Kurdish people are being used as cannon fodder in a covert war between the regional and global bourgeoisies. The Kurdish proletariat has everything to lose from this war. It can expect nothing from the Kurdish governments and parties, bourgeois and collaborationist as they are, except terror, attacks on their living conditions, and a general lack of humanity in their methods. It should join instead with proletariats elsewhere, overcoming religious and ethnic differences in order to wage a common struggle against capitalism, against its wars of plunder and against the terrorist monsters they generate.

But to struggle for communist society means to struggle against all forms of oppression. With the abolition of classes there will disappear not only class oppression, but also the oppression of women by men, and the oppression of one people by another people and of minorities.

Communism is not “the night in which all cows are grey”. For a long time, alongside one or more common languages shared by the human species (languages that will evolve and change with a tendency to merge), all of the different peoples will continue to speak their own languages and, along with a propensity towards international brotherhood, there will continue to be a great diversity of cultures, costumes and sensibilities.

The Kurdish proletariat has nothing to expect from the Kurdish governments and parties, who are bourgeois and collaborationist; nothing but terror, attacks against their working conditions and a general lack of humanity in the methods they use. Only class struggle, only union organisation led but the International Communist Party will allow the workers of the world to see through the present chaos, and to act before police truncheons and the military force of the State are used against them.





THESES ON THE NATIONAL AND COLONIAL QUESTION ADOPTED BY THE SECOND COMINTERN CONGRESS

28 July 1920 Protokoll,ii, p. 224

1. An abstract or formal conception of equality in general, and national equality in particular, is characteristic of the very nature of bourgeois democracy. Under a show of the equality of the human personality in general, bourgeois democracy proclaims the formal equality in law of the property owners and the proletarian, of exploiters and exploited, thereby deeply deceiving the oppressed classes. The idea of equality, which is itself a reflection of the conditions of commodity production, is turned by the bourgeoisie, using the pretext of the alleged absolute equality of the human personality, into an instrument for combating the abolition of classes. The true meaning of the demand for equality resides solely in the demand for the abolition of classes.

2. As the conscious expression of the proletarian class struggle to shake off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, the communist party, in accordance with its chief task—which is to fight bourgeois democracy and expose its falseness and hypocrisy— should not advance abstract and formal principles on the national question, but should undertake first of all a precise analysis of the given environment, historical and above all economic; secondly, it should specifically distinguish the interests of the oppressed classes, of the workers and the exploited, from the general concept of so-called national interests, which signify in fact the interests of the ruling class; thirdly, it should as precisely distinguish the oppressed, dependent nations, unequal in rights, from the oppressing, exploiting nations with full rights, to offset the bourgeois-democratic lies which conceal the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s population by a small minority of the wealthiest and most advanced capitalist countries that is characteristic of the epoch of finance-capital and imperialism.

3. The imperialist war of 1914 demonstrated with the greatest clarity to all enslaved nations and oppressed classes of the entire world the falseness of bourgeois-democratic phraseology. Both sides used phrases about national liberation and the right of national self determination to make good their case, but the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest on one side, and the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germany on the other, showed that the victorious bourgeoisie quite ruthlessly determine ‘national’ frontiers in accordance with their economic interests. Even ‘national’ frontiers are objects of barter for the bourgeoisie. The so-called ‘League of Nations’ is nothing but the insurance contract by which the victors in the war mutually guarantee each other’s spoils. For the bourgeoisie, the desire to re-establish national unity, to ‘reunite with the ceded parts of the country’, is nothing but an attempt of the defeated to assemble forces for new wars. The reunification of nations artificially torn apart is also in accordance with the interests of the proletariat; but the proletariat can attain genuine national freedom and unity only by means of revolutionary struggle and after the downfall of the bourgeoisie. The League of Nations and the entire post-war policy of the imperialist states disclose this truth even more sharply and clearly, everywhere intensifying the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of the advanced countries and of the labouring classes in the colonies and dependent countries, accelerating the destruction of petty-bourgeois national illusions about the possibility of peaceful coexistence and the equality of nations under capitalism.

4. From these principles it follows that the entire policy of the Communist International on the national and colonial question must be based primarily on bringing together the proletariat and working classes of all nations and countries for the common revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the landlords and the bourgeoisie. For only such united action will ensure victory over capitalism, without which it is impossible to abolish national oppression and inequality of rights.

5. The world political situation has now placed the proletarian dictatorship on the order of the day, and all events in world politics are necessarily concentrated on one central point, the struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Russian Soviet Republic, which is rallying around itself both the soviet movements among the advanced workers in all countries, and all the national liberation movements in the colonies and among oppressed peoples, convinced by bitter experience that there is no salvation for them except in union with the revolutionary proletariat and in the victory of the Soviet power over world imperialism.

6. At the present time, therefore, we should not restrict ourselves to a mere recognition or declaration of the need to bring the working people of various countries closer together; our policy must be to bring into being a close alliance of all national and colonial liberation movements with Soviet Russia; the forms taken by this alliance will be determined by the stage of development reached by the communist movement among the proletariat of each country or by the revolutionary liberation movement in the undeveloped countries and among the backward nationalities.

7. Federation is a transitional form towards the complete unification of the working people of all nations. Experience has already shown the expediency of federation, both in the relations of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic with other Soviet Republics (the Hungarian, Finnish, and Latvian in the past, the Azerbaijan and Ukrainian at the present time), as also within the RSFSR itself in regard to the nationalities which had neither independent political existence nor self-government (for example the Bashkir and Tatar autonomous republics of the RSFSR, which were established in1919 and 1920).

8. On this question it is the task of the Communist International not only to promote further development in this direction, but also to study and examine the experiences of these federations which have arisen on the basis of the Soviet system and the Soviet movement. While recognising federation as a transitional form to complete union, efforts must be made to bring about an ever closer federal association, consideration being given to the following: first, it is impossible for the Soviet republics, surrounded by the imperialist states of the entire world, which are far stronger from the military point of view, to hold out unless they are closely allied with other Soviet republics; secondly, the necessity for a close economic association among the Soviet republics, without which it is impossible to restore the productive forces destroyed by imperialism or to ensure the welfare of the working people; thirdly, the movement towards the creation of a unified world economy on a common plan controlled by the proletariat of all nations. This tendency has already become clearly manifest under capitalism, and socialism will without any doubt carry forward and complete its development.

9. In regard to relations within States, the Communist International’s national policy cannot confine itself to the bare and formal recognition of the equality of nations, expressed in words only and involving no practical obligations, to which bourgeois democracies—even if they call themselves ‘socialist’— restrict themselves.

Offences against the equality of nations and violations of the guaranteed rights of nationalist minorities, repeatedly committed by all capitalist States despite their ‘democratic’ constitution, must be inflexibly exposed in all the propaganda and agitation carried on by the communist parties, both inside and outside parliament. But that is not enough. It is also necessary: first, to make clear all the time that only the Soviet system is able to ensure real equality for the nations because it unites first the proletarians, and then all the masses of the working people, in the struggle against the bourgeoisie; secondly, communist parties must give direct support to the revolutionary movements among the dependent nations and those without equal rights (e.g. in Ireland, and among the American Negroes), and in the colonies.

Without this last particularly important condition the struggle against the oppression of the dependent nations and colonies, and the recognition of their right to secede as separate States, remains a deceitful pretence, as it is in the parties of the Second International.

10. To acknowledge internationalism in words only, while in fact adulterating it in all propaganda, agitation, and practical work with petty-bourgeois nationalism and pacifism, is a common characteristic not only of the parties of the Second International, but also among those which have left the International. This phenomenon even occurs not infrequently among parties which now call themselves Communist. The fight against this evil, against deeply rooted petty-bourgeois national prejudices which make their appearance in every possible form, such as race hatred, stirring up national antagonisms, anti-semitism, must be brought into the foreground the more vigorously, the more urgent it becomes to transform the dictatorship of the proletariat from a national dictatorship (i.e. a dictatorship existing in one country alone, and incapable of conducting an independent world policy) into an international dictatorship (i.e. a dictatorship of the proletariat in at least a few advanced countries, which is capable of exercising decisive influence in the political affairs of the entire world). Petty-bourgeois nationalism calls the mere recognition of the equality of nations internationalism, and (disregarding the purely verbal nature of such recognition) considers national egoism inviolable. Proletarian internationalism on the other hand demands: 1) Subordination of the interests of the proletarian struggle in one country to the interests of the struggle on a world scale; 2) that the nation which achieves victory over the bourgeoisie shall display the readiness and the capacity to make the greatest national sacrifice in order to overthrow international capitalism.

That is why, in the States where capitalism is fully developed and which have workers’ parties which really are the vanguard of the proletariat, the struggle against the petty-bourgeois pacifist distortions of the idea and policy of internationalism is the primary and most important task.

11. In regard to the more backward States and nations, primarily feudal or patriarchal or patriarchal-peasant in character, the following considerations must be kept especially in mind:

a) All Communist Parties must support by action the revolutionary liberation movements in these countries. The form which this support shall take should be discussed with the communist party of the country in question, if there is one. This obligation refers in the first place to the active support of the workers in that country on which the backward country is financially, or as a colony, dependent.

b) It is essential to struggle against the reactionary and medieval influence of the clergy, the Christian missions, and similar elements.

c) It is necessary to struggle against the pan-Islamic and pan-Asiatic movements and similar tendencies, which are trying to combine the liberation struggle against European and American imperialism with the strengthening of the power of Turkish and Japanese imperialism and of the nobility, the large landlords, the clergy, etc.

d) It is particularly important to support the peasant movement in the backward countries against the landlords and all forms and survivals of feudalism. Above all, efforts must be made to give the peasant movement as revolutionary a character as possible, organizing the peasants and all the exploited wherever possible in soviets, and thus establish as close a tie as possible between the west European communist proletariat and the revolutionary peasant movement in the East, in the colonies and in the backward countries.

e) A resolute struggle must be waged against the attempt to clothe the revolutionary liberation movements in the backward countries that are not really communist in communist colours. The Communist International has the duty of supporting the revolutionary movement in the colonies and backward countries only with the object of rallying the constituent elements of the future proletarian parties—which will be truly communist and not only in name—in all the backward countries and educating them to a consciousness of their special task, namely, that of fighting against the bourgeois-democratic trend in their own nation. The Communist International should collaborate provisionally with the revolutionary movement of the colonies and backward countries, and even form an alliance with it, but it must not amalgamate with it; it must unconditionally maintain the independence of the proletarian movement, even if it is only in an embryonic stage.

f) It is essential constantly to expose and to explain to the widest masses of the working people everywhere, and particularly in the backward, countries, the deception practised by the imperialist powers with the help of the privileged classes in the oppressed countries in creating ostensibly politically independent states which are in reality completely dependent on them economically, financially and militarily. A glaring example of the deception practised on the working classes of an oppressed nation by the combined efforts of Entente imperialism and the bourgeoisie of that same nation is offered by the Zionists’ Palestine venture (and by Zionism as a whole, which, under the pretence of creating a Jewish state in Palestine in fact surrenders the Arab working people of Palestine, where the Jewish workers form only a small minority, to exploitation by England). In present international conditions there is no salvation for dependent and weak nations except as an alliance of Soviet Republics.

12. The centuries-old enslavement of the colonial and weak peoples by the great imperialist powers has left behind among the working masses of the enslaved countries not only feelings of bitterness but also feelings of distrust of the oppressing nations as a whole, including the proletariat of these nations. The despicable treachery to socialism committed by the majority of the official leaders of that proletariat in the years 1914- 1919, when the social-patriots concealed behind the slogan of ‘defence of the fatherland’ the defence of the ‘right’ of ‘their’ bourgeoisie to enslave the colonies and plunder the financially dependent countries—such treachery could only strengthen that quite natural distrust. Since this distrust and national prejudice can only be eradicated after the destruction of imperialism in the advanced countries and after the radical transformation of the entire foundations of economic life in the backward countries, the removal of these prejudices can proceed only very slowly. From this it follows that it is the duty of the class-conscious communist proletariat of all countries to be especially cautious and particularly attentive to the national feelings, in themselves out of date, in countries and peoples that have been long enslaved; it is also their duty to make concessions in order to remove this distrust and prejudice the more quickly. Unless the proletariat, and all the working masses of all countries and nations of the entire world, themselves strive towards alliance, and unite as one, the victory over capitalism cannot be pursued to a completely successful end.

Communism and the national question

"Prometeo" no.4, April 15, 1924

Presentation in “Comunismo” n.12, 1983

At the 5th Congress of the Communist International (June- July 1924) the national and colonial question was again placed on the agenda. The theses of the 2nd Congress and of Baku, despite their theoretical and practical clarity, had not proved adequate to prevent: 1/ the French and English Communist Parties from displaying serious resistance to promoting and adequately supporting the nationalist movements in India and Indonesia, 2/ the Egyptian and Turkish communist parties from lending their support in a way which was entirely subordinate to their bourgeoisies and governments, and 3/ above all in Germany, and with the total complicity of the International itself, they had not managed to prevent serious confusion arising between the struggle for communism and that of bourgeois nationalism struggle against the Versailles Treaty. What is more, other questions overlapped with the re-emergence of Greater Russian chauvinism and nationalism, in the guise of the incipient Stalinism, against which the dying Lenin led his last battle from the terribly isolated position in which the Left of the CPSU already found itself. The necessity of taking up all the main questions of principle again, and deriving from these in the clearest way possible rules of practical action in the various geo-historical areas within which the Communist International was called upon to act, was clearly posed. But by now the official chairman of the Executive of the C.I. was already resorting to that infamous method which would later become the distinguishing mark of Stalinism: instead of clarifying the norms of practical action in the light of principles a hunt began for someone to blame for incompetence and ineptitude. A representative of the Italian left took part in the discussions and emphasised the two key cornerstones of the national question which risked getting forgotten in the rush to allocate blame: first of all, the theoretical basis for the resolution of national problems is already contained in the Manifesto and it consists in the victory of communism on a global scale; and, in the second place, the national and colonial question must be posed from the very instant the metropolitan proletariat embarks on its struggle against imperialism, since it is not a case of problems which belong to two successive phases, but of problems which are strictly interdependent.

The text we are republishing here was written precisely in view of the debate about to take place at the 5th Congress, and it was originally published in our journal of the time (Prometeo, April 1924). What stands out is the clear contrast between the method subscribed to in the text and the one in vogue in the International at this time. To deal with practical questions from the point of view of principle was considered within the C.I. to be totally pointless, and, in the best of cases, supporters of this method were ridiculed or pointed out as representatives of a tendency which favoured “inactivity”, a tendency which loved theoretical dissertations since it was hostile to practical action. Here we see expressed the particularly persistent notion of the inherent opposition of theory to practical action.

It was precisely in order to prevent such bad practices, whose dire consequences the Left had already accurately predicted, that the text we are republishing here was written. It is an admirable example of that unique method, unbounded by time and space, which is an identifying feature of the Communist Party.

The article begins with a powerful theoretical introduction in which it is recalled how the Marxist method is opposed to every type of opportunism precisely because its tactical norms are directly linked via the dialectical method to its theoretical principles: only thus, a feature of our tradition alone, do theory and action not stand in contradiction with one another. Opportunism on the other hand has always signified absence of principles, and you only arrive at such an absence by devaluing ends (“the end is nothing, the movement is everything”). Since opportunism is able to do without principles it ends up by theorising that the rules of practical action can be concocted on an ad hoc basis; which, with communist principles repudiated, is as good as theorising that one can only act on the basis of the ideological principles of the bourgeoisie in all their myriad manifestations. In response to the old and by now very predictable criticism that we oppose this method with a set of dogmas, and thus relapse into metaphysics and the condoning of a method which is anti-scientific, we respond today, as the article did back then, that we do not deny that the examination of the general historical situation is in continual development and that our conclusions can always be elaborated better, but we also say that we wouldn’t be able to exist as a Party (with no Party everything would be ruled out: no party, no Communism) if the historical experience incarnated in its Party which the proletariat already possesses didn’t allow us to construct a programme and a set of rules of practical conduct, which cannot be done without precise and pre-arranged schemes. To the inevitable accusations of schematism we reply that we are happy to leave the eclecticism, ‘manoeuvrism’, the oscillations to right and left and the political in-fighting to all the other so-called communist movements and parties. We have no hesitation in replying that it is precisely our schematic method which not only allows us to exist as a single, compact and unitary party, but allows the proletariat itself to exist as a historical class. The proof of this is the way in which this method was comprehensively applied in a historical situation which had got notably worse from the point of view of the class’s potentiality, that is, from the time of the meeting of the 5th Congress of the C.I. in Moscow already heading toward definitive degeneration. And when applied to the present class struggles in Palestine, it has allowed us not only to correctly interpret the historical evolution of this area, but also to represent the only truly revolutionary course open to the martyred proletariat of those countries, one which is opposed to all the nationalist pipe-dreams, all the more pernicious insofar as they claim to be revolutionary or even in the line of our own tradition of the Communist Left.

COMMUNISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

Debates about the proletarian, communist and revolutionary method often revolve around the issue of ‘principles’ and of a so-called dualism between these principles and action, between theory and practice. It isn’t often that we manage to reach a clear understanding on this matter; and yet until we do, every critical and polemical development will turn into pointless confusion.

Opportunism, old and new, likes to shift the emphasis of the Marxist thesis which denies that innate eternal ideas underpin human conduct, and often talks about actions to be taken without considering the limiting factors which might hamper them, of policies without fixed principles. Bernstein’s classic revisionism, which cleverly superimposed itself onto the proletarian movement by claiming to have left Marx’s revolutionary doctrine intact, proclaimed “the end is nothing, the movement is everything”. To declare that the end is nothing, as we will soon see, implies you can do without principles because for Marxist communism principles are the ends, that is, points of arrival towards which action is directed… And the opposition of the two terms shouldn’t seem paradoxical.

After setting aside the vision of a great final objective and consigning the movement’s doctrine to the attic, opportunist reformism only talks about existing problems which can be resolved empirically one at a time, in the immediate future.

However, regarding the new variations of this falsification, which certainly hasn’t stopped reinventing itself and reappearing under new guises, we were entitled to enquire, and are still entitled to enquire, what indicator should we then use, having done way with all standing rules and guidance, to guide our choice between the various forms of action? Who is the ‘subject’ in whose interest the action is to be taken? And opportunism (embodiment and exponent of simple ‘labourism’ as replacement for the doctrine and general praxis of proletarian revolution) replied that its day to day tasks were inspired by workers’ interests, meaning by that the interests, taken one by one, of particular groups and professional categories, considering the satisfaction of these easier, closer to hand and quicker.

The solutions to the questions of what action to take are thus no longer inspired by the proletarian movement and its historical journey, but are concocted one at a time and restricted to small sections of the working class, on very small sections of its journey. By acting this way revisionism frees itself from any link to principles, but, in its more or less extreme forms, still boasts nevertheless of operating in the true spirit of Marxism, which according to them equates with a movement which is extremely open-minded and eclectic.

The struggle against these deviations will continue to be a very important aspect of the proletarian movement as it continues to acquire further important experiences. There have been frequent warnings and criticisms of this revisionist way of presenting and resolving problems, and yet it will find new and more devious ways to try and influence proletarian action. We will not make a general rebuttal of it here, but just in regard to a particular problem, which will render our position more intelligible.

Several times we on the Marxist Left have unmasked the vulgar trickery of opportunism. Its alleged aversion to principles, stupidly referred to as dogmas, was simply reduced to a blind, obstinate observance of principles typical of the counter-revolutionary ideology of the bourgeoisie. The positive, practical, open-minded people within the proletarian movement revealed themselves at the supreme moment as the most enthusiastic supporters of bourgeois ideas, to which they tried to subordinate the proletarian movement, and the workers’ economic interests.

The theoretical critique which highlights this characteristic fact is one which proceeds side by side with the political unmasking of socialist opportunism as a form of bourgeois action, and of its leaders as agents of capitalism within the proletarian ranks.

At the start of the world war, the spectacular bankruptcy of the opportunist International defended itself theoretically with arguments which, in the realm of theory as well as in socialist propaganda, appeared as surprises, as unexpected revelations, as sensational “discoveries”. Those who had stated that socialism had no doctrinal or programmatic principles suddenly asserted that socialism no longer even retained that distinction, of being the movement without principles, but had to be subordinated to the unconditional acceptance of certain theses, up to then never explicitly stated, indeed always viewed as extraneous to socialist thought and which at the polemical level had been demolished by it once and for all. Socialism was reduced to being a ‘sub-school’ of the bourgeois left movement, affiliated to the ideology of so-called democracy, which was presented all of a sudden not as Marxism considered it in its most elementary statements, that is, as the political doctrine appropriate to the interests of the bourgeois class, but as something advanced and progressive with respect to the dominant capitalist polity. The traitors in the International then tried to trip us up by “discovering” some principles, by which they claimed proletarian action was inevitably determined and doomed to follow; to which they said all immediate interests, including those of the individual groups so dear to their hearts, had to be inexorably sacrificed. Three of these principles in particular were especially touted: the principles of democratic liberty, the defensive war, and nationality.

Up to this time the opportunists had deliberately feigned a theoretical orthodoxy and were always talking to the masses about class struggle, socialisation of the means of production and abolition of the exploitation of labour: which is why the sudden discovery of the new principles was bound to take the proletariat by surprise and undermine its class consciousness and revolutionary ideology, sabotaging the possibility of mobilising it ideologically in a classist direction, just as, in a corresponding way, the passing of the leading officials of the great workers’ organisations into an alliance with the bourgeoisie was bound to result in the sudden removal of any platform of reorganisation of the world working class on the basis of socialist action.

Then we learnt (and only very few militant socialists knew how to articulate their indignation and protest, and less still were able to) that the socialist proletariat had to do without principles if they were principles derived from the classist doctrine, but bow to them, as though holy writ, if they were the principles of bourgeois ideology, namely, those fundamental ideas of religion into which the ruling classes tends to transform their prevailing interests. The betrayal of the substance of the Marxist critique could hardly have been more blatant.

To give a small idea of how far this brazen superimposition of irrelevant and antithetical elements onto the socialist doctrine’s most obvious formulations went, we will cite just one example. For our part we naturally invoked the well-known passage from the Communist Manifesto, according to which the proletariat has no country, and can only consider itself to have formed a nation, in a very different sense to that of the bourgeoisie, when it has seized political power. so, one of the socialist party’s best-known propagandists, the old party’s “technician” of propaganda himself, Paoloni, came back with this response: that conquering political power consisted in conquering … democratic suffrage; and wherever the proletariat enjoyed the right to vote it had a country and national rights! This proposition, which we won’t dignify with a reply, shows how those who were entrusted with the job of making Marxist propaganda in the Second International were either incredibly stupid or incredibly shameless.

In the pages of this journal we have expressed the Marxist critique of the bourgeois “principles” of democracy and liberty and will continue to try and express even better. We do not take bourgeois liberal philosophy and its equality under the law seriously. Its theoretical demolition needs to be accompanied, according to the communist conception, by a proletarian political programme which liquidates any illusion that it is possible to apply liberal and libertarian methods to achieve the revolutionary aim: the suppression of society’s division into classes. The allegedly equal rights of all citizens under the bourgeois state is nothing but a translation of the economic principle of “free competition”, and the parity, in the market- place, of the buyers and sellers of commodities: a levelling which merely signifies the consolidation of the best conditions under which capitalist exploitation and oppression can be installed and maintained.

Directly related to this critique, an essential of socialist thinking, is the demonstration that in time of war it is wrong to invoke, as a guide to proletarian and socialist policy, the greater or lesser degrees of “democratic freedom” achieved by the countries in conflict as this would mean relying purely on bourgeois and anti-proletarian criteria. We will therefore dwell no further on the first of the aforementioned three principles.

The other two principles derive from the same theoretical distortion: all the talk of just and unjust wars, according to whether they are defensive or aggressive, or have the objective of giving a country’s inhabitants the government the majority allegedly wants, presupposes the belief that a principle of democracy has been established in relations between states, like those between individuals.

Such principles are the ones the bourgeoisie proclaims with the precise aim of creating among the masses an ideology favourable to its rule, since it can’t confess to the ruthless egotism which really lies behind it. Whereas in the internal life of the capitalist state elective democracy is in fact equivalent to a legal ratification or a constitutional ruling, although not constituting, from our point of view, any effective guarantee to the proletariat that in the decisive moments of the class struggle it won’t find itself up against the armed State machine; in international relations there are no sanctions or conventions which correspond with a formal application of the principles deriving from democratic theory.

For the capitalist regime the establishment of democracy at a State level was a necessity intrinsic to its development: but the same cannot be said of any of the formulas deduced from democratic for international relations, and banned by ideologists who support universal peace based on arbitration, on the settling of borders based on nationality and so on. The latter is an argument which seems to fit in with the game of the opportunists, who depict the capitalist classes as opposed to these political demands which they, after borrowing them from purely bourgeois theoreticians, wish to have accredited by the proletariat. But the argument is constantly blowing up in their faces.

Indeed it is absurd to think that a bourgeois State would modify its international policy just because the socialist proletariat, after having lain down its arms in the name of the ‘Holy Alliance’ and abandoned its own struggle and independence, had left it an even freer hand to act in the interests of self-preservation. In the second place the criminal game of the social traitors is proving to be even more blatant: they have countered the so-called “utopianism” of the revolutionary programmes with the need to set immediate and tangible aims, of sticking to what is actually possible; all of a sudden they are coming up with objectives, with a view to subordinating the proletarian movement’s policy to them, which are not only not classist or socialist, but are proving to be entirely unrealistic and illusory; they lend credence to ideas which the bourgeoisie themselves would never apply but which it is in their interests to have the proletariat believe. The policy of the opportunists does not therefore aim to drive situations forward in their real practical development, albeit in small steps, but reveals itself as nothing less than the ideological mobilisation of the masses in the interests of the bourgeoisie and the counter-revolution.

As regards the nationality principle, it isn’t difficult to show that it has never been other than a slogan to agitate the masses, and, in the best hypothesis, an illusion cherished by some petty bourgeois intellectual strata. If for capitalism to develop the formation large State units was necessary, none however were formed through the observance of the famous national principle, which besides is very difficult to define in practice. A writer called Vilfredo Pareto, who was certainly no revolutionary, wrote an article in 1918 in which he criticised the “so-called principle of nationality” and showed how impossible it is to find a satisfactory definition, and how of the many criteria which it appears can be used to specify it (Ethnic, linguistic, religious, historical, etc.) not one of them is exhaustive, and in fact all of them lead to conclusions which contradict one another. Pareto also makes the obvious observation, which we frequently made during our war-time polemics as well, that plebiscites are certainly no sure-fire way of resolving national problems, since one would have to establish beforehand the boundaries of the territory to which a majority vote would apply, and the nature of the powers which would organise and control it; thus ending up in a vicious circle…

There is no need to go back over all of the polemics of nine years ago here. Easy it was then for us internationalists to show how the famous principles invoked by the social-warmongers lent themselves to being applied in an entirely contradictory way. Every State at war can find some way of contriving a situation that is defensive: maybe the aggressor is the one whose territory ends up being “trampled underfoot by the foreign invader”; in any case a revolutionary attitude on the part of the socialist movement would lead to analogous consequences in the case of both offensive and defensive military action, since the one can simply be converted into the other. As to the nationalist questions and those of irredentism, they are so complex and there are so many of them that they could be used to justify the formation of alliances very different to the ones during the world war.

The famous list of principles when applied then contradicted each other. We asked the social patriots whether they recognised the right of a more democratic people to attack and subjugate a less democratic one; whether in order to liberate ‘unredeemed’ regions they would countenance military aggression, and so on.

And these logical contradictions would translate into the possibility, once those fallacious theses were accepted, of justifying socialist support for any war, as indeed would happen, with the same arguments used to support the tactics of socialist betrayal in all countries, which were in the most desperate circumstances, with the workers on both sides dragged off to confront each other on the war front.

It was just as easy to predict that the victorious bourgeois governments, whichever of them happened to win, wouldn’t dream for one minute of applying, in peacetime, those policies which, according to the social nationalists, had not only provided a reason for the proletariat to support the war, but the guarantee that the war would lead to those outcomes, which the workers had been duped into believing by their unworthy leaders.

The critique and rebuttal of social-nationalist deviations is therefore nothing new: less obvious is the issue, which appeared particularly pressing at the time of the founding of the Third International, of the positive resolution of the national question from the communist point of view. It is a problem which cannot be said to have been entirely resolved by the theses of the 2nd Congress (1920) to the extent that the imminent 5th Congress will have to concern itself with it as well.

Obviously the Communist International is not about to borrow theories and slogans from the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie to help it resolve its own political and tactical problems. The Communist International has reinstated the revolutionary values of the Marxist doctrine and Marxist method and drawn inspiration from its programme and tactics.

How then do we arrive, on such a basis, at a solution to such problems as, for example, the national question? We would like to recall the latter’s most basic features here. The revisionists used to talk about examining contingent situations on a case by case basis, with no regard for principles or general aims. They therefore reached purely bourgeois conclusions, no longer sticking to Marxist criteria, which highlight the play of social-economic factors and conflicting class interests, in their evaluation of situations. It could be said that the correct communist line is to ensure that when analysing a situation one remains strictly faithful to the Marxist method of critique of the facts, arriving at conclusions naturally from there, without any need for preconceived ideas. But in our opinion such a response still harbours opportunist dangers, because of its indeterminacy. On the other hand it could be said instead that we, in order to conduct a more Marxist and classist examination of the contingent facts, should add the observance of principles and general formulas arrived at by an almost mechanical overturning of bourgeois formulas: we willingly admit that this would be to err on the side of oversimplification and a misjudged radicalism. Certain simple formulas are indispensable for the agitation and propaganda of our party, and they are, in any case, less dangerous than excessive elasticity and unscrupulousness. But these formulas are points of arrival, outcomes, not the points of departure from which to examine those questions which arise from time to time and have to be tackled by the party’s supreme critical and deliberative organs, in order that their conclusions can be placed at the disposal of the mass of militants in clear and explicit terms. Thus it could be said, for example, of the slogan “against all wars”, that during an important historical phase it served as a excellent way of distinguishing genuine revolutionaries from the opportunists quibbling over the differences between one war and another which lead to the justification of each bourgeoisie’s policy; but as a statement of doctrine the slogan is clearly inadequate, and this is because, for all its formal radicalism, which brusquely overturns the opportunist position, it could lend itself to being conflated with another bourgeois ideological position: that of Tolstoyan pacifism. And thus we would end up contradicting our fundamental postulate on the use of armed violence.

The Marxistically exact way of answering such questions is neither of the two responses we briefly mentioned. It would be worth the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifying this more precisely, even if brilliant examples already exist, such as the admirable edifice of the Marxist-Leninist critique of the bourgeoisie’s democratic doctrines, and the definition of our programme with respect to the question of the State.

To give a brief idea of what we consider the best solution to be, we can say that we absolutely reject the following thesis: that Marxist politics should be content to simply examine one situation after another (using a very specific method, of course) without the need for other elements. Whenever we have studied the economic factors and growth of class conflicts as they appear in relation to any given problem, we have done something that is indispensable but we still haven’t taken everything into account. There are certain other criteria that need to be considered which may be referred to as revolutionary ‘principles’; although it needs to be made clear that such ideas do not consist of immanent or a priori ideas, ‘discovered’ deeply inscribed on some stone tablet somewhere. We could if we wanted to dispense with the word ‘principles’ and refer instead to programmatic postulates: it is always possible to put things better, and in fact we should also bear in mind the linguistic requirements of an international movement, our terminology.

To these criteria we add an additional consideration which sums up the revolutionary power of Marxism. We cannot, nor should we feel compelled to, resolve the question of, say, the English dockers or the workers 