



Comrade Livio has Passed Away

On the morning of 4th March 2005, at his home in Naples, Livio passed away. He was 84 years of age.

Over the past few months his illness had seriously weakened him, but to us he still seemed to be the same exuberant, brimming full of life Livio as ever. His energy and rare intelligence, his joyous sense of humour will be missed by all.

Son of a faithful comrade of 1921 vintage (and of a German mother who he would lose very early on), it was impossible not to feel great fondness towards a man who showed just as much enthusiasm at recent meetings as the young man who joined the party just after the 2nd World war: "Why don’t we just do it, eh, what does it take..?".

When he was with young people, who he used to keep amused during the meals and the breaks at the party meetings, it was almost as though he was animated by some internal force. Drawing on his lucid memory, it was obvious he wanted to pass on to future generations as many of his experiences and teachings, derived from a long life of hard study, as possible.

As he got older, after long years of militant activity, he become justifiably concerned that nothing should dispel the memory, both oral and written, of the communist way of life which had sustained him over long decades, and for part of which, due to generally adverse conditions, he had remained the unique depositary. He treasured every carefully ordered document, and had even transcribed single sentences and well-chosen expressions of old comrades (on one occasion he read us his copy of a wonderful, personal, letter from Ludovico Tarsia to another old comrade, we think from Torre Annunziata, offering condolences on the death of his wife) and he used to wonder whether it would be possible to get them published somehow, or in any case make sure comrades could access them.

Throughout the high and low points of the second half of the 20th Century, he worked tirelessly for the party, doing what needed to be done, fortified by his encyclopaedic reading and huge thirst for knowledge (indeed his study was like a well-equipped and efficient laboratory). Livio was a person who threw himself enthusiastically into every task, who explored every subject, and would examine difficult and controversial topics only to then explain them to us with an air of serene confidence.

The degree to which his depth and enthusiasm overflowed into his conversation, in which he would entrance his listeners with two, three, or four lessons drawn from his personal and party life, and all recounted in such a way as to weave together and highlight the main points, all in the same current of discourse, was matched only by the degree to which he was measured, precise, rigorous and meticulous in his party work. And he did a tremendous amount of work for the party, all in his clear handwriting ’in pencil point’, just so everything was absolutely clear. Beyond him and after him.

Yes, truly an indispensable comrade.

Our fondest condolences to his wife, his daughter, and our Neapolitan comrades.



















New Orleans

Ignorance - Impotence - Rapacity

Even before colonisation the tracks of man and beast ran along the banks of the Great River, or Missi-sipi as it was known in the language of the Algonquin Indians.

And it is into the Mississippi-Missouri river, with its great tributaries the Arkansas and Red Rivers feeding in from the right and the Ohio-Tennessee from the left, that most of the continental precipitations within the coastal mountain chains flow. The hydrographic basin of the Great Lakes doesn’t flow into it but an artificial canal connects it to Chicago. Along the river’s principal arm water takes three months to complete its course from source to delta.

At Baton Rouge, upstream from the delta and 100 kilometres from New Orleans, the average flow of the river is 12,800 cubic metres per second with a maximum of two and half times that. But the final course of the river, which follows a millenary cycle and is also linked to variations in sea level, hasn’t always been as it is today. Erosion of its banks has caused the river to widen, resulting in meanders, which later became cut off and left to find their shortest route to the sea.

The amount of solid matter carried along by the ’Brown River’ is calculated at 0.2 kilograms per cubic meter, adding up to 2.5 tons per second. Alluvial floodings of extremely fertile land make up a quarter of modern Louisiana. These sediments have shaped the delta and coastline into an intricate and continually changing landscape of shallows, bayous, swamps, lagoons and meadows. The principal branch of the river, the one which crosses New Orleans, then flows along a peninsula, composed of old silts, and finds an outlet on a spur 160 kilometres out in the Gulf of Mexico.

As in all fluvial deltas, the weight of new deposits exerts pressure through compaction and subsidence – that is, through lateral slippage – on the older layers of clay and mud, and causes a slow, but steady, lowering of the ground level. The erosion caused by hurricanes, tides, the rise in sea level and human activity are other significant factors though of lesser impact. At the present geological moment, taking deposition of material and subtracting lowering of the ground level and erosion, we arrive at a negative figure; between 1974 and 1980 the land above sea-level retreated at an average rate of 430 hectares per annum, corresponding to 1.7% of the delta.

This picture, already very unstable and dynamic, has latterly been complicated by human colonisation.

In 1927 there was a flood which submerged 70,000 square kilometres of the middle course of the Mississippi under up to 10 meters of water. Following the 1929 crisis a New Deal project for a series of hydraulic works got underway whose main object wasn’t regulating the flood waters but rather improving the rivers’ navigability. The problem is the level of the river at low water: to increase the draft, canals were constructed to avoid the rapids, and 27 dams built in the higher course upstream from the confluence with the Ohio.

These works, which continued down to the middle of the last century, caused an increase in the velocity of the water and resulted in a temporary increase in erosion and in the transport of solid matter (by seven times according to some estimates) and in various States resulted in the draining of the vast floodplain and low lying areas for agricultural and building purposes. Rather than diminishing the risk of the river bursting its banks, these works have increased it. In 1973 there was a serious flood, but the worst in recent American history was the ’Great Midwest Flood’ of 1993, during which the river overflowed its banks along a 10,000 kilometers stretch and caused 19 billion dollars worth of damage.

And of course New Orleans has to suffer the consequences of any bad management of the river happening further upstream.

Although the climate and setting are clearly hostile, the city was founded by the French, in that strategic situation, in 1718. It was at a time when building still took place according to what we might call a town plan, that is, an organic relationship between man and territory, and one which would later be recognised as beautiful and good. The choice then was to build on the highest ground, directly onto the outer bank of one of the bends of the great river. Up to the early 1900s, the inhabited area grew in a large semicircle, and building was carefully avoided any lower down; towards the lagoon, Lake Pontchartrain, and the port, which lay 7 kilometers away. Today it is the ’French Quarter’ which has been saved from the water.

Despite the insalubrious climate (in 1853 a yellow fever epidemic killed 10,000 people) the city population increased through an influx of immigrants – freemen and slaves, of all languages and races. In 1830 the city numbered 100,000 inhabitants.

But its urban conformation at that time wasn’t sufficient for the burgeoning forces of rising capitalism. In the last century New Orleans became one of the biggest ports in the world. Today it is 4th in terms of traffic and one of the most concentrated industrial centres in North America. Soon the extraction and refining of oil would get underway as well.

Only the laws of profit and revenue can explain why the great factories and the workers quarters had to be situated in the middle of swamps. The population today (or rather was) 480,000.

In the second decade of the 1900s, with a view to building in the swamps, there began a concerted project to drain the shallow swampland in the low lying depression between the banks of the lagoon and river. A whole network of artificial levees would be built along the lake and, running laterally from the lake to the banks of the river, a network of drainage channels would be excavated. An innovatory pumping system would be set in place which would operate around the clock and keep the basin, as far as possible, dry. A large number of other types of embankments, of great height and extension, also had to be erected along the various canals, which, linking the river to the lagoon, would be used by river traffic and be of service to industry and convenient for warehousing.

That mechanical drainage has only been partially effective is illustrated by the fact that cemetery burials take place not in the ground, which consists of only a very thin stratum overlying the water, but in specially raised aedicules.

The more the water is removed, the more it filters under the riverbanks and under the levees; and the more the resulting subsidence occurs, the more water there is to pump away. At present, the entire city, excepting that built on the banks of the Mississippi, is lower than the annual average level of the river by about 6 meters. Moreover, for the most part, it is also lower than the average level of the sea and the lagoon, with a maximum depression of 2.5 metres, whilst at high tide the whole of the city is at a maximum of 6, and average of 3, meters below sea level.

In Streetcar Named Desire, as she leaves a house in the workers’ quarter of New Orleans supported on the arm of the doctor taking her off to mental hospital, poor Blanche confesses, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers". A presentiment of the catastrophe forever looming over the American bourgeoisie, and over its less bad literature.

But the coasts of Louisiana are threatened not only by river and sea but are threatened from above by tropical hurricanes.

Hurricanes of the force of Katrina, the one which hit New Orleans on August 29, are not uncommon. The statistical information on hurricanes shows they seem to be distributed over a thirty year cycle, and there is no evidence to suggest they are on the increase, either in frequency or force. Currently the opposite is held to be true, and their cause is sought in a supposed climatic change, and talk of this celestial phenomenon is on the lips of ignorant people everywhere. About evolutions of this sort, of such delicacy, slowness, complexity and duration, we – we who live under capitalism – are totally ignorant, with its specialists the most ignorant of all. Not that we Marxists rule out that capitalism will eventually poison the earth and troposphere so badly that the climate will be affected. In fact, we are certain of it. We are however just as certain that it will not be able to measure nor, much less, be able to voluntarily intervene to modify the planetary consequences of its means of production.

Reproaching the ’Bush Government’ with not having signed up to the Kyoto Agreement on the reduction of Carbon Dioxide emissions is therefore just a ’green’ version of the same old anti-Americanism which is so often wheeled out on such occasions, and which is totally rejected by Marxism. As capitalism ages it gets worse, and worst of all in every sense is the capitalism we find in Europe.

The problem, as ever, is on earth and not in the sky. What is clearly on the increase, with respect to hurricanes, is social vulnerability. "What you search for lies within you", responded the oracle to an Oedipus who didn’t want to see, true reversal and assertion of modern man’s consciousness.

If we restrict ourselves to the United States – although this can be generalised to every type of what are aptly described as "unnatural" catastrophes – we observe that over the past 25 years the population in the coastal areas, which are affected by three or four hurricanes a year on average, has expanded by 25 million. The type of building construction, especially in the areas inhabited by the poor classes, is the least adapted to withstanding cyclones, and consists of small flimsy houses with wooden frameworks and outer coverings and panels which easily detach in strong winds.

In the delta, the canalisation of the Mississippi has reduced the lateral dispersion of the floods, which feed precious nutrients and silt into the wetlands, and over the last 75 years vast swathes of marshland vegetation and coastal mangrove swamps have disappeared. Irregular coastlines, along with their protective cloak of vegetation, absorb energy and soften the impact of hurricanes, thereby constituting a natural buffer which is a lot more effective that reinforced concrete. Even for the latter it is calculated – now that the coastline has moved back 8 kilometres – that the sea wall would have to be double the height to attain equivalent resistance.

Moreover, the total lack of planning and the neglect typical of capitalism has resulted in trees being cut down, in particular the lines of cypresses which used to function as windbreaks.

From the time of the Civil War, the difficult, onerous and strategic maintenance of the banks of the Mississippi has been the responsibility of the army corps of engineers; later the job of looking after the levees along Lake Pontchartrain, and the canals and pumping stations, was then transferred partly to the city government and partly to the State of Louisiana.

But the entire system of barriers is only designed to resist an ’average’ storm of ’category 3’, a rise in sea level of 3.5 meters and waves of around a meter in size. The pumps are designed to drain off 25 millimetres of rainwater an hour, and are therefore already not up to dealing with really heavy rains.

Everything that has happened – a real "unnatural disaster" in the strict sense of the word – had therefore already been predicted, and described in minute detail, decades ago in hosts of texts and denunciations. The last of these warnings was issued in a bulletin by the national meteorological service in the days immediately preceding the hurricane. It predicted the consequences for the city of New Orleans in a scenario which exactly corresponded, even in terms of scale, to what then actually happened.

First there was the hurricane. If the little houses in the poor areas could do little to resist it, modern works fared even worse: practically all the bridges and monumental viaducts on the motorways sustained irreparable damage. This shows that they either weren’t designed to withstand ’predicted wind strength’, or they were badly constructed. Present-day mythology and illegal reliance on automatic calculation of structures, using computers, in order ’to save time’, even for straightforward pieces of work like bridge abutments, piles and beams, shows its practical impotence and "reveals the charlatan". Capitalism even fails at what it is supposed to be best at, adding things up, and even statistics and mathematics revolt against it. We have seen images of modern hotels being torn apart by the wind, their windows ripped out and hurled into the maelstrom, followed by the furniture. Even the roof of the stadium was partially blown off.

Then the hurricane turned inland and the levees collapsed. Because the eye of the storm passed to the left of the city, the latter would then be hit by strong southerly winds, which raised the level of the lake by 120 cms. Not enough, therefore, to overflow the levees. Nevertheless three of them gave way, over a length of two or three blocks. Not those facing the lake, potentially susceptible to wave motion, but the ones along the internal canals, communicating with the lake. Not the old levees made of earth but the barriers of reinforced concrete built in the 60s. According to those responsible for maintaining them, the collapse of the entire system of levees was only narrowly avoided.

Soon the sea invaded 80% of the built up areas, covering them in up to six meters of water. All just as had been predicted.

As for the hydraulic technicians, first they had to plug the gaps, then pump out the water, both of which operations were difficult and laborious. Having discarded the idea of blocking the breeches in the damaged levees because they were simply too wide, it was decided to block sea access to the two canals. But due to the fact that mobile or floating bulkheads weren’t initially available, although an obvious precautionary measure, they had to make do with materials delivered by means of helicopter drops and pontoons. And if all that wasn’t enough, a barge had sunk at the entrance of the canal as well, which also hampered operations. The work would take several days.

By September 6, only three of the city’s 148 pumps were working. Since they were old, and no provision had been made for spare parts, it appeared they would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

To see how ’rational’ capital is, we need only refer to the project for reinforcing the levees put forward by the army’s corps of engineers. As the estimated cost for this project was 14 billion dollars, Congress decided it could ’make a saving’ by giving it the thumbs down. However, in the past few days it has already had to allocate 10.5 billions for emergency aid alone, and it is estimated that hundreds of billions more will be needed for reconstruction work.

Where is the logic in all this? It is to be found in the fact that ’reconstruction’ entails not only profits, but revenue from rent. It is worth letting destruction takes its course so that then rebuilding can take place. And this explains the ’inefficient’ management of the aid with regard to the poorest section of the population, composed of proletarians and the vast industrial reserve army. The poor people are sent away and there is a rise in the price of the devastated areas where they used to live.

For several decades now the city of New Orleans, along with every other industrial area in the West, has been hit by an industrial crisis and many factories have closed down; still going strong is the pestilential oil industry and the so-called ’service sector’, in particular the docks and that form of mass alienation known as ’mass tourism’.

The industrial crisis has made the perennial insecurity of the working class a lot worse. Of the population, two thirds of whom are Afro-Americans, a quarter are categorised as poor. But amongst those 18 year and below, poverty rises to 40%. The rate of illiteracy is around 40% as well.

Even after the inevitable catastrophe threatening the city had been known about for several days, nothing was prepared and it was left to the local police force to tell the townspeople that it would be best to get out. But at least 57,000 families were without a car, that is a quarter of the inhabitants. All these have been left to fend for themselves because it was simply impossible for them to escape. There are no buses, no trains, nobody knows where to go. Only 10,000 of these people who left behind have taken refuge in the stadium. And they are told ’to bring their own provisions from home’.

Although the covered stadium is in a less low-lying area of the city and not far from the banks of the Mississippi, which have remained dry, the refugees have been held here for several days and nights in infernal conditions without food, without water, without toilets, without lighting, and weighed down by the torrid summer heat.

The State has intervened, yes, by sending in the national Guard, "with loaded weapons and orders to shoot on sight". For capitalism this makes sense, since every emergency is a social emergency, and there isn’t a suspension of hostilities in the war between classes just because there is a disaster. We see armed soldiers patrolling this scene of desperation and destruction, in the middle of this emergency, whose main concern seems to be hunting down ’looters’. The Baghdadization of New Orleans.

After three days it was announced that, "the National Guard has taken control of the city". The bourgeoisie heaves a huge sigh of relief. The relief operation has still not got underway. It starts with the transferral of hotel guests, the rest are held back by the threat of being shot.

A week goes by, and the authorities decide on forced deportation of the unfortunate occupiers of the Huston stadium to somewhere 500 kilometres away. Those who have survived that is. Meanwhile, armed soldiers go on house to house searches to monitor the dead and evict the living.

We don’t have special sources, but it seems pretty apparent that behind all this there is some nice ’reconstruction’ plan for the city. The poor refugees won’t be going back, and in the areas around the lake they will construct a nice wall of skyscrapers, like in all the Naples’ and Honolulus of this world. And then it will be left to geology to avenge the poor, sucking these lousy buildings, floor by floor, down into the mire.

Is this, therefore, some kind of ’long-term plan’ coming to fruition? We repeat: the dominant classes neither can, nor do they wish to, predict and deal with emergencies. But one thing is for sure, they certainly aren’t concerned about helping proletarians deal with the consequences. This senile impotence which capitalism is exhibiting, vile and indecent, has done nothing to diminish its insatiable rapaciousness. Not ’the Bush government’, not the ’American bourgeoisie’ but the international class of slaveholders.

Even if we don’t deny capitalism’s particularly odious legacy in the many ’deep Souths’ of this world, capitalism, as mode of production based on class oppression, won’t be able to free itself from slavism, anywhere.

Everywhere, objectively, poverty is increasing. For the bourgeoisie it is getting ever more difficult to keep its wage slaves alive, who, after all, are its one and only source of sustenance.

But it won’t be either a natural, nor a social, disaster which will threaten the domination of the bourgeois class. For that it will need to undergo a political disaster, the conscious revolutionary intervention of the working class.

























Terrorism - Anti-Proletarian in Two Senses

The Iraqi working class and the various guises of its bourgeois enemy



Sixteen months ago, the United States, aided by Great Britain, invaded Iraq. Then they were joined by lesser bourgeoisies, including Italy, who though of the second, third and fourth order proved to be no less criminal, cynical and bloodthirsty. Indeed if anything their hypocrisy was even more disgusting.

The reasons given for the war were entirely spurious: the Iraqi regime was portrayed as a danger to the entire ’International community’ because of its arsenal of ’weapons of mass destruction’, which were later shown not to exist, and its links with, and the fact it was supposedly harbouring – again, never proved – the increasingly mysterious Al Qaeda ’terrorist’ organisation.

The real reasons for the invasion lay elsewhere, in the competition between the imperialist powers: of much more importance was to occupy an area which was both of strategic importance and one of the foremost producers of oil, so that the economies of the biggest global blocs – China, Japan, India and Europe – could be put under pressure. The present oscillations in the price of crude oil show the operation to have been successful.

The entire country was occupied within the space of a few weeks, both due to the superiority of the forces deployed by the Anglo-American alliance, and – and possibly this is the main reason – because the Iraqi army, much larger though it was, deserted en masse. Quite rightly these proletarians in uniform didn’t see why they should make even a minimum sacrifice in the interests of their bourgeoisie and their national State, let alone get killed: they knew then, and they know now, that they have nothing to gain from any ’victory’ by their country.

For the occupiers, the trouble started after the ignominious collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime. Holding on to the territory has proved to be an extremely costly exercise for the troops of the Western coalition. Even with a presence of around 200,000 men it hasn’t managed to carry out its work of ’pacification’. Soon the number of Western soldiers killed by a well-equipped guerrilla force, due partly to the large quantity of easily arms left lying around after the war, would far exceed the number of military personnel killed during the invasion.

The parties of the ’left’ (not just Rifondazione in Italy but everywhere, including groups which claim to be part of the communist tradition) consider the action of the armed bands sacrosanct and exalt the gesture of ’resistance’ against the occupation; they incite the global proletariat to sympathise with the proletariat in Iraq and support it, in the name of Iraqi national independence, Democracy, Liberty...

Genuine communism cannot but oppose this tragically mistaken perspective.

The Iraqi proletariat – which boasts a long tradition of trade-unionism and social struggle – is certainly capable of seeing through those who talk of ’Liberty’ whilst simultaneously dropping ’smart-bombs’ on the civilian population.

Their worst fears about the intentions of the ’liberators’ have been confirmed by the first few months of occupation. The disruption caused by the war has further damaged the economy of the country, and it is the unemployed, now hugely increased in number, who are going to have to pay the cost. The dissolution of the army, and the sacking of the enormous bureaucracy linked to the old regime, has caused tens of thousands of additional families, suddenly without income, to face the prospect of poverty and starvation. The targeted devastation and looting, hitting a country impoverished by more than ten years of sanctions and by the preceding wars, is causing serious discomfort to the general population, deprived of electric power and finding it difficult to obtain water, and even petrol. On the other hand, the administration of the occupiers has spent virtually nothing on getting the basic infrastructures up and running again, still serviceable and efficient but which it means to ’reconstruct’.

As well as the armed battles between the forces of the coalition and their puppet government on the one side, and the guerrilla bands on the other, both sides are using the strategy of terrorism against the general population. As well as being subjected to searches and indiscriminate arrests it is the civilian population, the proletariat and the urban masses, which is most affected by the heavy reprisals which are the inevitable consequence of this strategy.

The denunciation of the sad effects of the military occupation on the Iraqi proletariat is naturally more than justified. The Iraqi government, a direct expression of the occupiers, headed by Allawi, the ex-CIA agent, has shown the workers that it is no better than Saddam Hussein’s. And the Iraqi proletariat knows that very little will change even when the government of the country issues from a parliament which has been elected after formal, multi-party, democratic political elections.

The fact of the matter is that in Iraq a war is being fought between the various imperialist powers to divide up the loot, from theft of the petrol revenue to the ’awarding’ of lucrative ’reconstruction’ contracts. The cowardly and impotent Iraqi bourgeoisie gets along by supporting one imperialism here, another imperialism there, and, if possible, more than one at the same time. It is Baathist and it is anti-Baathist, it is lay and it is Islamic, it is democratic and it is fundamentalist.

What is really at issue is the ’right’ to exploit the Iraqi proletariat. Therefore, for the Iraqi proletariat, the struggle against the military occupation is in itself an objective of no significance: it is a blind alley down which they want to push the proletariat to distract it from its immediate economic interests, in order to subject it, terrorise it and use it as cannon fodder in their dirty, reactionary bourgeois games.

The Iraqi State – totally bourgeois despite being an American puppet – is condemned by the oil locked within its subsoil to remain firmly in the sights of the major global capitalist powers. After the departure of British troops from the country in 1956 its independence has been merely formal, apart maybe from the brief few years in which a young nationalist bourgeoisie attempted to attain a relative autonomy by taking advantage of the divergences between the blocs in the ’Cold War’ period.

The Islamic clerics are not an alternative to the bourgeois regime but rather serve as cover for it; their fiery invective serves merely to hide their collusion with the dominant economic forces and the secret chanceries of the imperialist countries.

If the proletariat in the West had been less corrupted by decades of opportunism, it would be putting the struggle against militarism, against war, and against the occupation of other countries at the top of its list of priorities and it would be denouncing the imperialist lies of its own bourgeoisie. It would be denouncing the fact that even in the aggressor, interventionist countries it is the class of workers who end up paying the material costs of the war.

Equally, the Iraqi proletariat would be steering clear of collaborating with bourgeois movements, which we won’t even dignify with the name of ’nationalist’ – whose anti-proletarian ferocity has been demonstrated again and again precisely in Iraq.

War between bourgeois States destroys solidarity amongst proletarians, sent to the fronts to slit each others throats, but not solidarity between the opposing bourgeoisies who will always place their common class interests, and the preservation of their domination over the working class, over the national interest.

An example of such bourgeois solidarity occurred in Iraq in 1991. Following their defeat in the war against Kuwait, thousands of Iraqi soldiers in the South and the North turned their weapons against the hated regime which had for so long been sending them off to be massacred, and they would find support for their revolt amongst the proletariat. The American battalions who were going up against Baghdad would stop their offensive, cease their bombardment of divisions of the Republican Guard, loyal to Saddam, and support the repression of the revolt. The bloodthirsty Saddam Hussein saved his position, and his skin, precisely because he was held to be indispensable to ensure both social peace in Iraq, and the interests of the western powers.

The war currently in progress is another act in this same drama with the same actors. It is why the Iraqi workers must denounce the present war as well, from both sides. The war may be happening in Iraq, but more and more it is taking on the characteristics of a preparation for a generalised third world war, that is: an imperialist, anti-proletarian conflict.

The Iraqi ’resistance’ represents one of the fronts on which a part of the bourgeoisie is lined up, supported more or less explicitly by a coalition of States opposed to United States hegemony. Communists and the Iraqi and international working class shouldn’t align with either one of them, but rather oppose them both.

In any case, given the instability of the current political and social situation, which is skilfully manipulated from both inside and outside the country, a sudden withdrawal of the occupying troops from Iraq wouldn’t improve the situation of the impoverished masses one bit. The Americans leaving would be of no advantage to the Iraqi working class since they would find themselves being squeezed in an even worse way by an openly Islamic regime, as in Iran, or in a totally arbitrary way, as in Somalia. Behind the apparent chaos they would still both have the national bourgeoisie, in whatever guise, on their backs, and remain in the clutches of the imperialist robbers.

The outlook for the proletariat in Iraq today, same as in all other countries, has be something other than that. The Iraqi working class must defend its own interests and organise itself separately in strong trade unions, and indeed it is already fighting an extremely courageous battle to do precisely that.

On the political level it is necessary for the proletariat to reconstitute its international party on the basis of the original, unabridged Marxist communist programme. A party which will have drawn all the lessons of the Stalinist counter-revolution and its terrible effect on our movement both in the industrialised countries and in those areas which reached the stage of modern capitalism later. Only when equipped with such a party, and solidly linked to it, will it be possible for the working class to emerge victorious.

The task of the International Communist Party today, whilst remaining in a state of almost total isolation, is to firmly uphold these cardinal points of communism.















The terrorist attack in Madrid

In this issue we are publishing a short note concerning the bloody and murderous terrorist attack on March 11 against a train in Madrid.

Reaching us today comes news from Ossetia about yet another analogous terrorist act, described by the loudhailers of the opposing bourgeois regimes as one more episode in the struggle, as inexplicable as it is ’inevitable’, between different ’civilizations’, religions, and races. Meanwhile, many of the more authoritative amongst them reiterate, with ill-concealed satisfaction, that ’it signals the start of the Third World War’, due to an ’aggressive act’ which ’everybody’ will be ’forced’ to ’defend themselves’ against.

Ossetia obliges us once again to point out that the victims of ’terrorism’ are proletarians and proletarians alone. As always, the instigators of such actions have carefully avoided attacking the symbols, personnel, and apparatus of those States which have declared themselves to be, in words, their ’enemies’.

On the other hand, ’our side’, the military forces of ’those who have been attacked’, don’t think twice about helping the ’fanatical Islamists’ to crush any proletarians unfortunate enough to be caught, literally, between the two competing sets of homicidal maniacs. In Ossetia so it is in Iraq and in Palestine: the ’terrorism’ which never declares itself behind any political programme or social group is always useful as propaganda for capitalist militarism; useful to the Putins and the bearded Chechins, to the Bush-Bin Laden gang, to the old accomplices, complementing and collaborating with one another, Sharon-Arafat.

It’s true: it is a war. It is their war. A general war against the global working class to draw them way from their own struggles and their own organisation; against that same working class which, where-ever it may be found, in the North and the South, Europe and the Middle East, in the USA, Russia and Asia, is objectively the only really important, powerful and irresistible enemy of this putrefying and murderous society.





The number of civilian casualties caused by large-scale capitalist armed conflicts has gradually risen as capital extends its mercantile laws throughout the planet, constantly perfecting its means of production, and destruction. This is shown by comparing the number of civilian casualties in the Franco-Prussian War (the first imperialist conflict in Europe between fully capitalist states) with those in the First and Second World Wars. And the effect on the population of the so-called ’minor conflicts’, which have raged uninterrupted since the surrender of the Axis troops in 1945, also needs to be taken into consideration.

Since for Capital the proletariat is simply a commodity, to be suppressed whenever necessary, it is highly probable that future inter-imperialist conflicts will find the mass of the civilian population, that is the proletariat, defenceless and incapable of responding. Such has been the case in the recent Balkan Wars, in Africa and, by means of terrorism, as we know only too well, in Spain,.

The terrorist attacks of March last year in Madrid must be considered as a machination by those who are used by the various bourgeois States to attain their ends by clandestine means; and those organisations which make of terrorism their modus operandi lend themselves very well to this type of activity due to their secretive character. There is practically no organisation of this type, anywhere, which doesn’t maintain, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, some kind of link with one state apparatus or another.

Low cost, high impact Terrorist attacks are the ideal as far as this criminally capitalist logic is concerned. Thus it is that the trains on the outskirts of Madrid, which were packed with workers during the rush hour, were the perfect target. The explosives, which were obtained through a criminal/police informer, were placed in the trains in rucksacks with the sleeping victims totally oblivious of their deadly contents. The bombs were packed with grapeshot to cause the maximum number of casualties and exploded with the outcome we all know.

That it was an attack against our class there can be no doubt. It wasn’t an attack against Spaniards, since many of the victims, both dead and wounded, were of other nationalities, and nor was it an attack against Christianity as that meddling priest Rouco Varela has implied. The only factor common to all the victims was their shared condition of being workers; wage slaves who have to procure their sustenance by travelling often hundreds of miles a day in order to work long hours for little pay.

In those moments, Madrid returned to being the martyred city it was in the far off days of the Civil War, when fascist bombardments would accompany the daily activities of its working inhabitants. Even back in those days it was the working class districts which were the hardest hit, by the Francoist artillery and air bombardments. And, as happened then and as so often happens amongst humble folk in moments of adversity, a spirit of solidarity emerged: that characteristic of the human species which has stayed with us from the time of tribal communism through to the horrible class society of today. In a totally spontaneous way, everything that could be done, was done. Some gave First Aid to the wounded in the zone of the tragedy, others, in their thousands, gave blood to staunch this enormous haemorrhage suffered by the working class of Madrid and the world. Fleeting gestures these, certainly, but significant insofar as they serve to remind us that the spirit of communism hasn’t been entirely extinguished, after thousands of years of class society founded on inequality and exploitation of man by man. These are instincts which help to reinforce our faith in the revolution, and as a consequence of the historical dialectic, a society without classes.

Later, after the emotion, came reflection. Who was responsible for this terrorist attack? What motivated them to do it?

Given that we can only move in the realm of conjecture and in light of the outcome, we may hypothesise that the aim was to re-orientate Spanish foreign policy, this time utilising so-called Islamic terrorism.

Occurring a few days before the general elections, the terrorist attacks were bound to have a decisive effect on their outcome, a fact borne firmly in mind by the bourgeois PP government from the very beginning. Hence the pathetic efforts to blame ETA, and thus allay suspicion that it was in fact an Islamic reprisal for the support given by Spain to the United States in the invasion of Iraq. We are left with the impression that the PSOE achieved an election victory which was unexpected, and in a certain sense, not really wished for, given the PSOE’s prudent silence before the attack and its previous lack of criticism of the government’s lies.

And it would be these same lies and the shameless manipulation of the facts before the elections which would propel thousands of people, on the night before the elections, onto the streets. That the aim of most of these people was nothing other than bringing about the fall of the PP government would be confirmed by the victory of the PSOE, which in fact had tried to stop any demonstrations. However, this was no ’mass action’ of major importance as some would cheerfully maintain. In reality what occurred, entirely compatible with democratic norms, was simply a transfer of the reins of the Spanish State from one bourgeois party to another. As a consequence, since there is nothing strange in the PSOE profiting from an opportunity offered to it on a plate, we are now witnessing rhetorical embellishments which Aznar’s ’further to the right’ government would have been incapable of pronouncing: that is, greater links with European rather than with United States imperialism, liberalisation of the laws governing abortion, but not immediately, the making of the teaching of religion in schools optional rather than obligatory; and it might end up with equal rights for homosexual couples, but that will be that. As regards what is really important, the laws on work and political economy, everything will stay the same; or rather that will depend on the level of combativity of the working class, which has currently reached an all time low in Spain as elsewhere.

To sum up: yet again proletarian blood has been spilled in the name of aims which are not its own, but those of its class enemies. We honour our fallen, and we continue our fight against this abominable society.

















Terrorist Attacks in London

In the early hours of July 7, three bomb explosions on the London Underground and one on a double-decker bus announced the latest round of terrorist attacks.

By Saturday the number of confirmed deaths had reached 49, with further victims still trapped in the wreckage. For the most part the victims were workers, tragically cut down as they fought their way through the rush hour, but the entirely random nature of these bomb attacks meant that members of all classes, and all races, fell victim to these attacks.

The self-sacrifice and heroism which ‘ordinary people’ exhibited in the aftermath of these events was, as is usual on such occasions, startling and impressive; but it was not long before such community spirit would be harnessed to a sense of national, rather than class identity – soon we were informed the bombs had been planted by... foreign terrorists; and it would not be long before reports were coming in of attacks on Muslims, and even on groups such as Sikhs not remotely connected with the prime suspects, al-qu’ida.

What is truly disgusting is that the English establishment is now parading the broken bodies, and the grieving relatives, in order to redound to its own credit. It postures as the protector of the community, the guardian of so-called Western virtues against all those backward, barbarous foreigners who know nothing of freedom and democracy and who need to be ‘taught’ such values.

And indeed just such a lesson did the British establishment, in its capacity as junior partner to American Imperialism, recently impart to the Iraqi proletariat. Here, the latter were supposed to learn that 100,000 lost lives were a small price to pay if a dictatorship were to be overthrown; even if it was a dictatorship installed by their liberators in the first place!

But if the recent terrorist attacks were in some way meant to avenge the imperialist invasion, then clearly they were not a class response, but rather one pandering to one or another of the national interests in the Middle East; exactly whose, it is still not clear, and probably it never will be.

All wars that aren’t class wars are wars against the working class. Both the terrorist attacks of isolated groups, who by circuitous routes are generally linked to some state interest or other in any case, and the officially sanctioned State terrorist attacks, like the invasion of Iraq, leave proletarians dead and dying on the battlefield.

Capitalism is in its period of senile decay. It is a system which is unable to resolve any of the problems it has given rise to, and can only perpetuate itself by an unceasing succession of large and small wars whose main aim is destruction: only through destruction can the different capitalist factions make room for themselves and their commodities in the increasingly congested global market place.

In peace and in war, and when the two phases become increasingly indistinguishable as during the London bombings, the proletariat must seek to retain its identity as a class for itself; an international class with a world yet to win.

If we now condemn the terrorist attacks in London which have so cruelly destroyed so many lives, including those of Muslims, and taken them in such a pointless way; if we feel for the countless grieving friends and relatives, we condemn equally the capitalist state which steps forth as the defender of ‘order’ in the face of these attacks; a state whose collusion with terrorist organisations in Northern Ireland (another area where the difference between peace and war is difficult to discern) is not seriously in doubt, and whose participation in countless acts of officially sanctioned State Terror, the latest of which in Iraq, has ruined countless more proletarian lives.

















Bourgeois Terrorism against the International Proletariat

The fable of an international terror network, with distinct political objectives and activity of its own, is used to distract the proletariat from its own class problems. The aim today, by intimidating the proletariat with war psychology, is to get it to accept the current war undertakings of various States. Tomorrow, by brandishing the banners of nation, race and religion, the aim will be to get it to accept the future imperialist world war.

Contrary to what they would have us believe, terrorist organisations are pawns in the hands of bourgeois States, which, as well as attacking the working class, will use any and all means to fight its wars: the protagonists might be groups of fanatics, but the people giving the orders are to be found throughout the world in the chancelleries of the various State powers.

The "religious fanaticism" of the Islamic extremists is one more beguiling delusion to fool proletarians; in the West and in the Muslim countries. Everyone knows that these organisations depend on powerful oligarchies of finance capital. Yesterday, in Afghanistan, they allied with the USA against a supposedly communist Russia; today they are certainly in the pay of all the imperialist powers, manoeuvring in a changing game of alliances within a permanent war. In the Arab countries the "Islamic revolution" is a grim ideology which is simply a cover for reaction: there, too, the ultimate aims are the classic anti-working class ones of every bourgeoisie.

If today war takes on a terrorist guise, it is mainly because of Washington’s clear military supremacy over every other imperialism. That isn’t to say that the USA won’t have recourse to the methods of its enemies, but the future transition to open warfare between the imperialist powers, after an adequate rearmament, is nevertheless a certainty. All bourgeois States are warmongers and in favour of using massacres to destabilise their enemies.

The slogan "War on Terrorism" is therefore totally meaningless. It is impossible to wage war on something which is just a particular way of fighting wars. The only way Capitalism can survive, can tackle its economic crises, is through perpetual war. Today it happens to take the form of terrorism. The only real "War on Terrorism" is the one against capitalism: the communist revolution. If you accept capitalism, you have to accept its wars, and its terrorism.

But surely a capitalist State should stop ordinary workers being massacred? History proves otherwise: here in Italy as well it was organs of the State which implemented the "Strategy of Tension". Each terrorist attack is used by government to reinforce the anti-terrorist laws, all the while maintaining a democratic façade, which are then used against striking workers and communists. As in time of war, proletarians are lulled into accepting the strengthening of their State in the illusion that it will protect them from further atrocities, but instead they are ensuring better health to their own executioner.

The bourgeois world tries to persuade us wars are caused by madmen. Yesterday it was the Nazis, today it is either Islamic fundamentalists or the warmongering clique gathered around the Bush family. The bourgeoisie won’t admit that the factors which determine wars aren’t cultural, but economic; factors arising from the capitalist mode of production. That admission will have to be forcibly wrung out of them by the proletariat. It will be down to the proletariat to organise itself on an international level, both politically and within the unions, and convert the wars fought between states – the bombardments of cities during the 2nd World war, both conventional and atomic, were terroristic as far as the workers were concerned – into an international class revolution.



























IRAQ

Against collaborationists and resistance fighters

In the Iraqi Referendum of October 15, 78% of those entitled to vote (9 million out of a population of 19 million) approved the draft constitution, officially elaborated by the Transitional National Assembly (an institution which emerged from last year’s elections on January 30th and which performs the function both of a parliament and a constituent assembly). The draft constitution would be deemed to have failed if it was rejected by 3 out of the 18 provinces, and by at least two thirds of the voters, even if the majority of votes cast in the rest of the country were in favour of it. As anticipated, the provinces with a Kurdish majority in the North and those with a Shiite majority in the South voted in favour, whilst the three provinces with a Sunni majority, Salahuddin, al-Anbar and Niniveh, voted against, although in Niniveh only with 55% of the vote.

The way has thus been paved for the next electoral contest on December 15, which will supposedly lead to the formation of a stable parliament and government.

All this of course is entirely hypothetical since the actual situation in the country is light years away from the normality propagandised by the United States Occupying forces (and by their allies, whether indigenous or not).



"Errors", or a necessity?

In April 2003, the Anglo-American forces occupied Iraq, and were welcomed as ’liberators’. Within a few days of the advance of the Western Coalition’s hyper-armed troops, and after minimal engagements, the Iraqi army melted away into the background. Hierarchies great and small took flight, abandoning their positions. Thus a formal surrender of the State, as for example occurred in Germany in 1945, never actually happened.

After long years of privation imposed by the war and by the embargo, the Iraqi people, now suddenly released from a regime based on the police and on terror, were expecting ’liberty’ from the occupiers. They aspired to a life which was a little less wretched, they wanted the roads, schools, hospitals and aqueducts to be rebuilt. And this is why, in general, the occupying troops didn’t find the atmosphere that hostile.

Today, two years on, the majority of the population now see the Anglo/Italo /Americans as an army of occupation, which has not only not resolved any of the problems of daily life, but made them a good deal worse by imposing another regime based on terror; one no better than Saddam’s.

Over last few months the resistance movement has been growing and becoming ever more battle-hardened. Guerrilla actions and terrorist attacks targeted at roads and airports have imposed the necessity of diverting more troops to defend the oil fields and pipelines. The resistance movement has operational bases in many cities, towns and villages across the country.

This situation of infinite war – which has already resulted in 2,000 deaths (official figures) amongst the American troops alone, and tens of thousands amongst the Iraqi civilian population (100,000 at least) – is attributed, by many observers, to the United States making a series of inaccurate evaluations and out and out errors of a political and strategic nature.

Their worst error is supposedly that they insisted on declaring war in flagrant violation of "International Law", meaning, in essence, against the explicit disapproval of the other great powers – i.e., a good part of Europe, Russia, China – which perceived the operation as an abuse of power and as a clear threat to their interests.

To this we could add their naïve assumption that a region as socially complex as Iraq would be easy to control with a reduced number of soldiers by relying on the active support of the indigenous population, support which turned out not to be there. Finally, the decision to exclude those States opposed to the war from any share of the reconstruction contracts only exacerbated the coalition’s international isolation, and held up the execution of the major infra-structural works.

A series of errors which, according to many commentators, should be blamed on the nationalist egotism and superpower delirium whipped up by the present bunch of eggheads currently residing at the White House.

Despite the ’late empire’ atmosphere in which we live, with its wars of religion, god-anointed presidents and god-ordained hurricanes, we don’t believe it is anything to do with errors, but with necessity: the necessity of the largest of the capitalisms to defend its world domination, at any cost, at a time when its economic power, and therefore its political and military supremacy, is running out of steam. The productivity of capital invested in the West is less than in the East, whilst the enduring crisis of global over-production is exacerbating the clash between the imperialist powers. In the United States, it isn’t a case of the ’right-wing neo-conservatives’ having ’got it wrong’. The American bourgeoisie have been impelled, by a number of strategic motives of considerable importance, into wanting war: namely, the need to reinforce its military presence in the region after the occupation of Afghanistan and to control Iraqi oil supplies.

But the war has highlighted certain structural weaknesses in their military apparatus, and in their economic structure too.



Towards the Destruction of the Unitary State

At the end of the 2nd World War, the Liberators from across the Atlantic occupied Europe and brought with them entire shipfuls of margarine, condensed milk, tinned meat and chocolate: if they weren’t going to conquer the hearts of the hungry defeated at least they would be able to fill their stomachs. After the armoured cars, there would come the Marshall Plan and big United States capital, paving the way to reconstruction. Soon the occupied countries, preventively flattened by the flying fortresses, would be obliged to re-embark on the cycle of accumulation, forcing the unemployed masses and poor peasant farmers into the factories and allowing our bourgeois capitalists to get back to enriching themselves. Finally, after a few decades had gone by, a few poisoned breadcrumbs (which today we are paying for) would filter down to the wage earners. Post-war imperialist colonisation by the United States occurred in a tormented Japan and Germany, and, a few years later, in South Korea. Steps were taken to prop up the State to ensure social peace and the submission of labour under the national democratic-republican or bureaucratic-Stalinist banners. With this end in view, either the old bureaucracy was recycled or it was perfectly substituted in a seamless way by one deriving from the anti-fascist parties. And this was the case for the army, police and judiciary as well.

We can’t therefore attribute the tragic Iraqi quagmire to the ’errors’ of a state entity which has more experience than any other at exporting "liberty" and "democracy". Despite the raised expectations produced by such slogans, after Baghdad was taken the victors left the city in the hands of criminal gangs for a good five months. This was after having previously bombarded the ministerial offices of the old regime (apart from the oil ministry) and allowed the national treasures to be plundered. Unexpectedly they sacked the vast bureaucracy on which the State was based, and by reducing to poverty many thousands of families, they broke up and embittered the only structures capable of maintaining order. First of all the Iraqi army. There is no doubt the army was a major symbol of national unity. It was, "multi-ethnic and multi-faith, custodian of ’Arab nationalism’, and capable of opposing the break up of the country into ’ethnic fatherlands’," (as the Italian newspaper Manifesto would put it). And this indeed is precisely why the Viceroy, Paul Bremer, dissolved it.

After these events, we hypothesised that the United States was planning to attack the symbols of Arabic Iraq in order to destroy state unity, thereby opening the way to its dismemberment into various smaller States founded on the basis of ethnic or religious considerations. This plan, drawn up in Washington, has indeed been endorsed in the draft constitution approved by the parliament which was elected in the farcical elections of last January. The project, despite its generic nature, seems to open the way to the division of the State into three regions endowed with considerable autonomy, including having their own parliaments, armies, and, above all, control of the oil resources (’open’, of course, to exploitation by the multinationals). This would mean that the Kurdish region would control the oil wells of Mossul and Kirkuk and the Shiite region the oil wells in the Gulf, whilst all that would remain to the Sunnis, in the centre of the country and including the capital Baghdad, would be some old wells which are running dry.

This would mark the end of the unitary State and be a repetition of that Divide and Rule strategy previously applied in this tormented region following the 1st World War, when the imperialist powers divided up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire.

With such a strategy the United States hopes to win the definitive support of the reactionary irredentist Kurdish parties and their armed militias, control the turbulent Shiite proletariat through an alliance with the clerics, which of course would have a nice slice of the oil cake, and finally, ’normalise’ the predominantly Sunni areas which are the focus of guerrilla warfare by means of stringently repressive military action and economic impoverishment.



The Social Situation and the Task of the Proletariat

Two years after the war has officially ended life is still extremely hard in Iraq. There has been very little progress in the reconstruction of the basic infrastructure and the social situation is tragic: a quarter of the children are suffering from chronic malnutrition, and the probability of dying before 40 is greater than in any of the neighbouring countries; many children no longer attend school, three quarters of the inhabitants don’t have a stable electricity supply, and a third have great difficulty even accessing drinking water. The number of unemployed is enormous. Added to this there is the general insecurity, fear of terrorist attacks and bombings, indiscriminate killings, arbitrary arrests and generalised torture.

After two years of occupation, and despite the rise in the price per barrel, revenue from Iraqi oil (which was supposed, according to some, to cover the costs of reconstruction) has been considerably lower than anticipated and it hasn’t yet attained pre-war levels. Meanwhile, it seems the costs of the war have gone up, and it is costing the United States alone the staggering figure of 5 billion dollars per month.

In this extremely fraught situation, the Iraqi proletariat finds itself entirely alone in its daily struggle for survival. It is a situation which is neither new nor unexpected: in the present historical phase the proletariat has no allies, no defenders; it must find the power within its own class, and not expect help from outside it.

The Iraqi proletariat certainly cannot consider as their allies the United States and the parties bankrolled by it, who openly support the interests of the big multinational employers and use terror to maintain order. But neither can those parties and movements who are fighting against the occupation, whether by peaceful means or force of arms, be considered as allies. The Iraqi resistance is composed of a myriad of groups, parties and movements, ranging from Baathist supporters of the old regime, Arab nationalists, and various Islamic movements to groups which describe themselves as ’nationalist communist’. But these various components have a common plan: to drive out the occupying armies to constitute a State which is united and independent; a State where the classes they represent can get back to selling their petrol, having their land cultivated, and churning out their commodities in peace – and above all, without having to share the profits and revenue with the invaders. All this, of course, on the back of proletarians, who have to keep on toiling away and sweating blood for their bosses. In fact, as many commentators have correctly remarked, the resistance represents the real continuity of the independent Iraqi State; a State which – whether of the warmongering Baathist variety or not – is still one which massacres proletarians.

In order to restore the conditions which suit it best, the Iraqi bourgeoisie wants to mobilise the Iraqi proletariat to take part in the war against the occupying forces and the collaborationist government. To obtain this outcome, it has no hesitation about conducting a ferocious war against the proletarian vanguards, who have no intention of being taken in by this plan, and who continue to defend their independence and their class organisations.

The arrangement of the world into free and stable nations isn’t an intermediary stage between the present situation and socialism. Communism devotes itself to undermining the blood-soaked framework of the national States with a view to the installation of proletarian power on at least a regional scale. In this necessary strategic perspective there is no place for struggle against the regional occupier. The working class has to conduct its hard, daily struggle to survive and to defend a living wage, but even in pursuit of these limited and contingent objectives it finds the other classes in its own country ranged against it. On the organisational level, the condition for proletarian defence today, and for an assault on capitalism tomorrow, is maintaining the political independence of its communist party; on the tactical level, it must remain outside any front or military structure of inter-classist resistance. What needs to be done in Iraq, tortured by occupation and civil war, as much as anywhere else, is to weave together the weft of the Revolutionary Communist Party with the warp of class based trade-union organisations.

The proletariat cannot recover its unity and power on the basis of belonging to such and such a country, ethnic group or religion, but only by actively belonging to its own class: the class of the exploited.

Just as the Baath party, despite its "lay" origins, fomented religious and ethnic divisions in order to prevent the re-composition of the working class, so too does the United States today; and so too will the resistance if it manages to drive out the occupiers.

The dominant classes will do anything to divide the proletarian movement. The latter, which in Iraq is restricted by the need for clandestinity and has to endure living in the midst of a war zone, must cling to its classist and internationalist traditions. It must oppose the war fronts and commit itself, as it is already doing in fact, to the vigorous activity of reconstituting free trade-unions and associations which are capable of resisting the reactionary propaganda emanating both from the various churches and bourgeois parties, be they collaborationist, or on the side of the resistance.



























Theses on the Chinese Question

"Marseilles Theses"

1964













Introduction

The Theses on the Chinese Question was written in 1964 and became known as the Marseilles Theses, after the place in which they were presented. The purpose of these theses is self-explanatory, to counter the Maoist theory of "peasant socialism". Stalin’s Moscow never had a strategy for a Chinese revolution. In fact Moscow wanted what other capitalist countries wanted – a slice of China. Russia’s involvement in the war against Japan in 1945 was not the freeing of China, but to pillage Manchuria. The victory of Mao’s armies in 1949 was against the express orders and interests of Moscow. The ideological breach between Russia and China was, to put it concisely, a conflict between national interests, expressed through early border skirmishes through to vying for influence in the so-called Third World. The competing support for the "colonial revolutions" was little more than the marketing of weapons, sold at exorbitant prices. Conflict between Russia and China was not limited to an economic one, and was soon transferred to the political plane. Stalinist parties were soon wracked with splits, whether to support Moscow or Beijing. Soon there was a plethora of Maoist parties all competing for the support of Beijing, raising the banners of people’s struggles. Moscow wanted its official parties but Beijing distained from conferring its official recognition on any of the various competing Maoist parties. Today the Moscow International is dead, the Russian party having abandoned the false name of Communist. The various Maoist parties have largely disappeared, but the Chinese state party still falsely calls itself communist, and parades under a red flag. That is why these theses are still relevant. China has been converted from a backward country into a major player on the world stage. The conflict between China and the old capitalist countries is not against imperialism, but an imperialist one for trade, sources of raw materials and spheres of influence. The expansion of Chinese industry has been through the regimentation of the growing working class, often through the discipline of the "People’s Army". Chinese industry has been able to compete against the older capitalist countries by the ruthless exploitation of its own working class. The false use of name Communist by the Chinese capitalist state has the added use for capitalists throughout the world – it makes the term communism stink in the nostrils of many workers throughout the world. It has the same function as that of the cold war between Russian and the Western Allies – to denigrate communism, and deny a future for the emancipation of the working class. Although Maoism is mostly dead, it still has its influence of those who had been through the various Maoist parties. The choice is that between Maoism and Marxism – exploitation of the workers (in China and throughout the world) or its emancipation internationally.

Theses on the Chinese Question



After 1960, the year in which the 81 so-called Communist Parties (including Mao’s) demonstrated their unanimity on the programme of Kruschevite opportunism, a de facto break occurred between Beijing and Moscow. We have analysed various documents in which China outlines its own national variant of Stalinism, but unlike the other "national socialisms" of Arab, Cuban or Yugoslav stamp, Chinese "socialism" insists on calling bourgeois Russia to account, on setting itself up as defender of Marxism and reconstructing under its aegis the ranks of the world proletariat. It is this claim, more than the inevitable antagonisms between the Russian and Chinese states, which requires our response, since neither the social practice nor the official political ideology of the Beijing leaders is directed toward victory for the Communist programme.





The Revolutions of the East: Character and Perspectives



1. In China, as in the other backward countries of Africa and Asia, the two world wars brought to breaking point the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the old relations of production inherited from the patriarchal regime. Here, over a long period of time, national revolts and agrarian rebellions have followed each other in quick succession, validating the prognostications already formulated by Marxism at the start of the century. Thus, despite the repeated defeats of the proletariat in the European industrial metropolises, the upsurge of national movements in the East has demonstrated the revolutionary strength of the antagonisms accumulated within the capitalist system. But, as has been proved today by the increasing retardation of the backward countries in relation to the economic development of the old industrialized metropolises, these contradictions cannot be solved within a national framework or by means of bourgeois "progress": they are the product of world capitalism, of its uneven development, of the accumulation of all wealth by a handful of super-industrialized States. It was exactly in those terms that the Communist International raised the question of the colonies in its 1919 Manifesto:

"The last war, which was by and large a war for colonies, was at the same time a war conducted with the help of the colonies (...) At best, Wilson’s programme ("Freedom of the seas", "League of Nations", "internationalisation of the colonies") has as its task to effect a change of labels with regard to colonial slavery. The emancipation of the colonies is only possible in conjunction with the emancipation of the working class in the metropolises".

The proletariat had been defeated and then enslaved by bourgeois, pacifist ideology. But contrary to all the prophets of "social peace" and "peaceful coexistence", the certain lesson which the working class must derive from the revolutions of the East is this: that violence is always the sole midwife of history.



2. Whatever the oppression wrought by foreign imperialism in China, the nature of the economic and social contradictions created there were not such as to render China’s revolution an "anti-capitalist" revolution per se. Marxism has always denounced this illusion of petit-bourgeois "socialism", which was adopted also by the Russian populists and is today exploited by Mao’s "extremism". About the Russian populists Lenin had this to say:

"They all readily mouth ’socialist’ phrases, but it would be impermissible for a class-conscious worker to be deceived as to the real meaning of those phrases. Actually there is not a grain of socialism in the ’right to land’, ’equalised division of the land’ or ’socialization of the land’. This should be clear to anyone who knows that the abolition of private land-ownership, and a new, even the ’fairest’ possible, division of land, far from affecting commodity production and the power of the market, of money and capital, leads to their expansion" ("The Political Parties in Russia", 1912, Collected Works, Vol. 18, pp. 52-3).

The liberation of the peasant from the bonds of natural economy, the development of a "modern" industry, utilising the reserves of labour and capital supplied by a "modern" agriculture, the creation of a national market and, crowning it all, the glorification of "national unity", of "national culture", and of all the "modern" attributes of the State power: all this has always been, and always will be, the programme of capitalist accumulation.



3. And yet Marxism, far from restricting itself in a bourgeois revolutionary movement to issuing formal demands for a national State and political democracy, makes the most rigorous assessment of the role of the social classesin all revolutions. The appearance of an industrial proletariat in China, as in tsarist Russia or Europe in 1848, indicated to communists the necessity for a class organization which would utilise the crises of the pre-bourgeois regime for its own political purposes. This is the line of the Communist Manifesto and of the October Revolution; a line that Marx named "permanent revolution". In his Supplementary Theses on the colonial question presented at the 2nd Congress of the 3rd International, Roy stressed the importance of this perspective of independent and continuous struggle for the proletariat in the colonies:

"Foreign domination constantly obstructs the free development of social life; therefore the revolution’s first step must be the removal of this foreign domination. The struggle to overthrow foreign domination in the colonies does not therefore mean underwriting the national aims of the national bourgeoisie but much rather smoothing the path to liberation for the proletariat of the colonies (...) In the first period the revolution in the colonies will not be communist; if however from the very start the communist vanguard emerges at its head the revolutionary masses will be brought on to the correct path along which, through the gradual gathering of revolutionary experience, they will reach the hidden goal".

By imprisoning the Chinese proletariat, from the very start of the revolution, in "the bloc of four classes" – political formula of the present "people’s democracy" – Mao’s party has marked the break, by the whole of the backward East, from the tactics so gloriously expounded by Russian Bolshevism.



4. The permanence of the revolutionary process which was to bring the proletariat of the backward countries to power, would make sense, in terms of the final victory of Communism, only if the proletarian revolution succeeded in spreading to the metropolises of Capital. In the second foreword to the Russian edition of the Manifesto, Marx wrote that Russia could only escape the painful phase of capitalist accumulation: "if the Russian revolution becomes the signal to a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other".

Lenin’s International not only took up this perspective again for Soviet Russia, but extended it to the whole of Asia. We quote here from the theses of the Baku Congress in 1920:

"Only the complete triumph of the social revolution and the establishing of the Communist world economy can liberate the peasants of the East from ruin, poverty and exploitation. Therefore, no other course is open to their liberation than allying themselves to the revolutionary workers of the West, to their Soviet republics and simultaneously fighting the foreign capitalists as well as their own despots (the landowners and the bourgeoisie) until the complete victory over the world bourgeoisie and until the final establishment of the Communist regime".

It is well known how Stalinism turned this thesis on its head by making Russia’s economic and diplomatic success the universal criterion of Communism’s progress. Beijing goes even further in repudiating it: instead of seeing the victory of the Western proletariat as the only prospect for social liberation in the East, Beijing makes the cause of the international proletariat dependent on the outcome of the bourgeois national revolts in Africa and Asia.



5. In opposition to the Stalinist theory of "building socialism in the USSR", and the tactical extensions that the degenerated International gave to this theory in China, Trotsky has the historical merit of defending the unabridged view of the revolutionary process which was triggered by the first World War and the October Revolution. Thus, in his "Theses" of 1929 on the permanent revolution he declared:

"The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois society is the fact that the productive forces created by it can no longer be reconciled with the framework of the national State. From this follow, on the one hand, imperialist wars, on the other, the Utopia of a bourgeois United States of Europe. The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds in the international arena, and is completed on the world arena".

Thus the theory of the permanent revolution is applied to each isolated proletarian dictatorship, both those whose economic structures are ripe for certain socialist changes and those in which they are still very backward. No more than Hitler’s Germany, Stalinist Russia couldn’t arrogate to itself the national privilege of "building socialism" within its borders. But on the other hand, Trotsky insisted:

"The development of the world revolution eliminates the question of countries that are ’mature’ or ’immature’ for socialism, in the spirit of that pedantic, lifeless classification given by the present programme of the Comintern. Insofar as capitalism has created a world market, a world division of labour and world productive forces, it has also prepared world economy as a whole for socialist transformation".





Democracy and the Proletariat: The National Question



6. By installing the dictatorship of the proletariat in a petty-bourgeois country which had experienced neither parliamentary regimes nor developed capitalism, the Russian Bolsheviks dealt a death-blow to the reformism of the 2nd International which had made bourgeois democracy, and its "progress", an absolute condition for the "transition" to socialism.

Half a century later, not content with considering constitutional reforms and democratic methods as the royal road to socialism, the renegades define socialism itself with bourgeois terms like "people’s democracy" or "State of the entire people". Those who destroyed Lenin’s International have but one slogan and one creed: independence of the various "Communist" parties, non-intervention in the internal affairs of the "national" parties.

In explaining the collapse of the 2nd International, the 1919 Manifesto declared:

"But the centre of gravity of the workers’ movement during that period remained wholly on national soil, wholly within the framework of national States, upon the foundation of national industry, within the sphere of national parliamentarianism".

We deny that the way the 3rd International ended up was inevitable. World capitalism and the imperialist wars had just shifted this "centre of gravity" on to the international arena, not just for the advanced capitalist countries, but also for the oppressed countries where the national colonial question arose to its fullest extent.



7. The national question arises as a specific question for the proletarian movement only in the revolutionary phase of capitalism when the bourgeoisie storms the bastions of power in order to complete its social and economic transformation. During the mature phase of capitalism, on the other hand, if any workers’ party puts out a "national programme" demanding the perfecting of the representative or economic system of the bourgeois State, it constitutes a programme for class collaboration and for "defence of the homeland". That is why Marxism has always strictly defined with reference to geographical areas these two successive phases of capitalism.

"The epoch of bourgeois democratic revolutions in Western continental Europe embraces a fairly definite period: approximately between 1789 to 1871" wrote Lenin. "This was precisely the period of national movements and the creation of national States. When this period drew to a close, Western Europe had been transformed into a settled system of bourgeois States, which as a general rule, were nationally uniform states. Therefore to seek the right to self-determination in the programme of the West-Europe socialists at this time of day is to betray one’s ignorance of the ABC of Marxism. In Eastern Europe and Asia the epoch of the bourgeois democratic revolutions did not start until 1905. The revolutions in Russia, Persia, Turkey and China, the Balkan wars – such is the chain of world events of our period in our ’Orient’" (Lenin, "The Right of Nations to Self-determination", 1914, Coll. Works, Vo l. 20, pp. 405-6).

Today, this phase is also concluded as far as the entire Afro-Asian area is concerned. Everywhere more or less "independent", and more or less "popular", national States have arisen since the end of the Second World War which, in a more or less "radical" way, have promoted the accumulation of capital. For this reason alone, Chinese "extremism" can no longer be depicted as the theory of a national revolutionary movement. Instead it is the official ideology of an established bourgeois State, a programme for class collaboration with all that that implies in terms of "socialist" phraseology.



8. Even during the period of bourgeois democratic revolutions, communists mustn’t make a fetish of the "national question", and should never place resolving it above the interests of the class and their own struggle. The revolutionary proletariat must never forget that its historic task is to destroy the bourgeois State and its relations of production in order to build a society where classes will disappear, along with distinctions between States and even between nations.

As capitalism develops it tears down national boundaries with its commodities and its armies. As destroyer of property relations, capitalism breaks down national entities and imposes its forms of world domination upon the most advanced countries as upon the oppressed peoples. Therefore communists should not expect capitalism to create a harmonious "society of nations" where relations between States are regulated in conformity with "human rights". They were however entitled to hope that the overthrow of world capitalism might mean that the East would be able to escape the phase of capitalist accumulation and constitution of bourgeois national States.

Lenin also said: "We cannot say whether Asia will have had time to develop into a system of independent national States, like Europe, before the collapse of capitalism, but it remains an undisputed fact, that capitalism, having awakened Asia, has called forth national movements everywhere in that continent, too; that the tendency of these movements is towards the creation of national States in Asia; that it is such states that ensure the best conditions for the development of capitalism" (ibid., p.399).



9. The Third International had foreseen the different ways in which the world revolution might develop:

- Simultaneous victory of the proletariat in the West and the East

- Victory of the proletariat in the industrial centres and independence for the colonies under the national bourgeoisie

- Victory of the proletariat in the colonies and delay of the communist revolution in Europe.

But it never considered the victory of a block of classes to be a lasting revolutionary perspective to which the proletariat in the backward countries should link its destiny. The theses of the 2nd Congress, which Roy dedicated especially to China and India, in any case stressed how necessary it was for the proletariat to detach itself from the "national" bourgeoisie:

"Two movements can be discerned [in the oppressed countries] which are growing further and further apart with every day which passes. One of them is the bourgeois-democratic nationalist movement, which pursues the programme of political liberation with the conservation of the capitalist order; the other is the struggle of the propertyless peasants and workers for their liberation from every kind of exploitation. The first movement attempts, often with success, to control the second; the Communist International must however fight against any such control, and promote the development of the class consciousness of the working masses of the colonies".



10. The history of the Chinese workers’ movement and of the political tradition of the Communist Party of China is one of rejection of this demand made by the International. Already having entered the Guomindang in 1924, the young Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gave its support to the "three people’s principles", Asiatic variant of the formulas advocated by Lincoln ("Government of the people, for the people and by the people") and the bourgeois French revolution ("Liberty, Equality, Fraternity). As Trotsky pointed out, the fusion of the Communist Party of China with the nationalist party had nothing to do with the tactics of temporary alliances which Marx considered acceptable during a bourgeois democratic revolution and which had been used by the Bolsheviks in Russia. It was a case of a merger on principle, renewed by Mao Zedong at every "stage" of the Chinese revolution even after the defeat and destruction of the Guomindang. Indeed in 1945, in his report "On Coalition Government" he would declare:

"These views of ours are completely in accord with the revolutionary views of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen... struggle against foreign feudal oppression to deliver the Chinese people from their miserable colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal plight and establish a proletarian-led, new-democratic China, whose main task is the liberation of the peasantry, a China of the revolutionary Three People’s Principles of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, a China which is independent, free, democratic, united, prosperous and powerful. This is what we have actually been doing" (Sel. Works, Vol. III, pp. 230 and 232).





From the Russian Revolution to the Canton Commune: the Revenge of the Mensheviks



11. It is in the analysis of the events of 1905 that Bolshevism found its tactics confirmed and which separated it definitively from the Menshevist current. Lenin stated that in Russia "the bourgeois revolution is impossible as a revolution of the bourgeoisie". Thus the proletariat cannot be expected to wait until the bourgeoisie has carried out its political and social tasks (overthrowing tsarism and abolishing feudal property) before launching its own struggle. Leading the social movement without restricting it within bourgeois juridical forms (the constituent assembly) was the meaning of the slogan: "the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants" and "All power to the soviets!". The result of these tactics was not the establishment of a bourgeois democracy but of the open dictatorship of the proletariat.

In combatting the theory of the "stages" of bourgeois revolution which Stalin already supported at this time, Lenin recalled in March 1917 the essence of the conflict between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks:

"Ours is a bourgeois revolution, therefore, the workers must support the bourgeoisie, say the incompetent politicians in the camp of the liquidators. Ours is a bourgeois revolution, we Marxists say, therefore, the workers must open the eyes of the people to the deception practiced by the bourgeois politicians, teach them to put no faith in words, to depend entirely on their own strength, their own organisation, their own unity, and their own weapons" ("Letters From Afar", Coll. Works, Vol. 23, pp.297-308).



12. Stalinism has done its utmost to prevent the application to the colonial countries of the principles and lessons of the October Revolution, and to this end it has supported a typically Menshevik interpretation, according to which the imperialist yoke rendered the "national" bourgeoisie of the backward countries more revolutionary than the Russian anti-feudal bourgeoisie. In reply to this theory of Bukharin, Trotsky wrote:

"A policy that disregarded the powerful pressure of imperialism on the internal life of China would be radically false. But a policy that proceeded from an abstract conception of national oppression without its class refraction and reflection would be no less false (...) Imperialism is a highly powerful force in the internal relationships of China. The main source of this force is not the warships in the waters of the Yangzijiang, but the economic and political bond between foreign capital and the native bourgeoisie" (The Chinese Revolution and Stalin’s Theses, 1927).

Without an analysis of the class relations in China, or in the other colonial countries, it was impossible to understand either the essence of the agrarian question or the phenomenon of the comprador bourgeoisie, or finally the role of the "warlords" and the other nationalist generals such as Jiang Kai-shek and Wang Jing-wei, to whom the International looked for "allies" but found only hangmen.



13. "The Asiatic revolutions have again shown us the spinelessness and baseness of liberalism, the exceptional importance of the independence of the democratic masses, and the pronounced demarcation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of all kinds" (Lenin, "Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx", 1913, Coll. Works, Vol. 18, pp. 584-5).

Such are the lessons that Lenin drew after 1913 from the first wave of bourgeois national revolutions in the East: Russia (1905), Persia (1906), Turkey (1908), China (1911). And Trotsky, shortly before the ending of the second revolutionary wave with the massacre of the Guangzhou (Canton) proletariat in 1927, would sum up the bitter lessons of the International’s tactics as follows:

"From the theses of Stalin it follows that the proletariat can separate itself from the bourgeoisie only after the latter has tossed it aside, disarmed it, beheaded it and crushed it under foot. But this is precisely the way the abortive revolution of 1848 developed, where the proletariat had no banner of its own, but followed at the heels of the petty-bourgeois democracy, which in turn trotted behind the liberal bourgeoisie and led the workers under the sabre of Cavaignac. Great though the real peculiarities of the Chinese situation may be, the fundamentals that characterized the development of the 1848 revolution have been repeated in the Chinese revolution with such deadly precision as though neither the lessons of 1848, 1871, 1905 and 1917 nor those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Comintern had ever existed".

And during the great battles of the Chinese revolution between 1924 and 1927, it was not actually the future of an "independent, prosperous and powerful" China which was compromised for many years, but the future of the entire workers’ movement in the colonies, for an infinitely longer, and much more painful, historical period.



14. By joining the Guomindang, and dispatching its "ministers" to the nationalist government in Guangzhou, the CCP wasn’t making a smart tactical manoeuvre to increase its influence as the International in Moscow would have had it believe. It was renouncing its principles and subordinating its action to the national strategy of the bourgeoisie. Stalin took this position to its extreme consequences, and the "theses" he published in April 1927, more than a year after Jiang Kai-shek’s first blow against the Communists, took a "classical" form.

Indeed adhesion to "the people’s three principles" did not imply just the simple recognition of abstract principles, the "common belief of the workers and the bourgeoisie in the national movement". According to the doctrine of Sun Yat-Sen the "three principles" corresponded to "three stages" in the development of the bourgeois revolution:

- the first, "military", stage was to translate the principle of nationalism into practice through the unification of China;

- the second, "educative", stage was to prepare the people for political democracy;

- the third, and final, stage was to realise this democracy and introduce "the welfare of the people".

Stalin adopted these same "stages" in his "theses" renaming them anti-imperialist, agrarian and soviet, only for him the massacre of the Chinese proletariat signified the ending of the "first stage", during which Communists were neither to broach the agrarian question nor consider leaving the Guomindang. All the Stalinist parties would take up this policy again in the colonial countries. In China, where it was used for the first time, it revealed itself as open class betrayal, abandoning the insurgent proletarians in the main industrial centres to the blood-thirsty repression of Jiang Kai-shek.



15. Stalinism never wished to consider the defeat in 1927 as anything other than a "stage" of the bourgeois revolution in China and a "temporary" setback in the workers’ movement. We reject this interpretation. The class struggles of this period were anything but "partial", so much so that they were transformed into a struggle for power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and defeat was accompanied by the physical and long-lasting elimination of the entire Communist vanguard. By then, as Trotsky said, the "democratic revolution" in China had taken on the character not of bourgeois revolution, but of bourgeois counter-revolution. Finally, the failure in 1927 marked the complete rejection on the part of the Moscow International of the Bolshevik tradition in all countries in the East. The April Theses of 1917, in which Lenin announced the approaching victory of the Russian revolution, are contradicted word for word by the theses of April 1927 in which Stalin justifies Jiang Kai-shek’s coup d’etat by the theory of revolutionary "stages".

In opposition to bourgeois and national historiography, Marxism must re-establish its proletarian and international concept of the historical course of the bourgeois revolutionary movements:

1789 - 1871: bourgeois democratic movements in Western Europe (as well as in North America and Japan);

1905 - 1950 (roughly): national revolutionary movements in Eastern Europe and in the entire Afro-Asian area; just one proletarian victory: in Russia;

1917 - 1927: world strategy of the permanent revolution, with defeat in Europe (1918-1923) and in Asia (1924-1927) as the conditions for the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia and in the rest of the world.





Peasant "Socialism" and the "New" Democracy



16. Marxism has not only denounced the theory of the "democratic stage", it has also rejected, during the "agrarian stage", the use by Stalin of the slogan "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants" to cover up the governmental alliance with the left of the Guomindang. In its completed form this theory has become the theory of the "new" democracy, signalling the complete abandonment of those Marxist conceptions on the class nature of each and every State.

"Thus the numerous forms of State systems in the world can be reduced to these three basic types: 1) republics under bourgeois dictatorship; 2) republics under the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) republics under the joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes (...) During a specific historical period, the only applicable form of State organisation is the third, the one which we call the new-democratic republic" (Mao Zedong, On New Democracy, 1940).

Lenin’s International never called upon the proletarians of the colonies to establish such "intermediary" States between the dictatorship of the proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie, and we also deny that there exists, or ever has existed, a single example of such a State after over 40 years of "anti-imperialist fronts". The experience of duality of power during the Russian revolution showed that the "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants" is inevitably transformed, in a short period, into either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Trotsky extended this lesson to the Chinese revolution, and we can see its confirmation today in the bourgeois outcome of every anti-colonial movement.

"While the Russian Narodniks, together with the Mensheviks, lent to their short-lived ’dictatorship’ the form of an open dual power, the Chinese ’revolutionary democracy’ did not even attain that stage. And inasmuch as history in general does not work to order, there only remains for us to understand that there is not and will not be any other ’democratic dictatorship’ except the dictatorship exercised by the Guomindang since 1925" (Trotsky, The Communist International After Lenin).



17. After having long ignored the agrarian movement and the arming of the peasants, the Stalinists became so infatuated with it that they came to consider it the "defining trait of the Chinese revolution and the basis of the new democracy".

"In essence, the national question is a peasant question", Stalin declared. And Mao commented:

"This means that the Chinese revolution is essentially a peasant revolution, and that the resistance to Japan now going on is essentially peasant resistance. Essentially, the politics of New Democracy means giving power to peasants" (Mao Zedong, On New Democracy, 1940)

It is not in this, as far as we are concerned, that the originality of the bourgeois revolutions in the imperialist epoch lies. In the past, all of them have all used the peasants in different ways, including the armed organization, and they have all, to varying degrees, brought along profound changes in agriculture. Yet Marxism has always stressed the incapacity of the peasant class to define a policy of its own. It has shown that agrarian insurrections, which are an integral part of bourgeois revolutions, have only succeeded under the leadership of the cities and by ceding power to them. The Communist Manifesto already insisted back in 1848 on the dual character of the peasantry and why it cannot act as an independent class. The peasant is nothing but the social representative of bourgeois relations; he always leaves his political representation to others.

To all those champions of peasant "socialism" who, both in Russia and China, have reproached us for "underestimating" the peasantry, we answer that we have always stressed the lessons of Marxism and that the originality of the Eastern revolutions lies not in the armed intervention of the peasant masses, but in the prospect of a proletarian course towards not inevitably bourgeois goals.



18. The defeat of the Chinese proletariat explains why the revolution had to recede to the countryside. But it does not provide justification for communists to exchange their class conceptions for the theories of peasant "socialism". In 1848-9 the failure of the German revolution had left the proletariat in the same politically disorganised situation; it had put it in the same danger of being submerged by petit-bourgeois democracy. This was the danger confronted by Marx and Engels in their famous Address to the Communist League.

Against the petit-bourgeois radicals, who "seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail, while their particular interests are kept hidden", the Address stresses the necessity of an independent class party.

Against every type of petit-bourgeois democratic power, this is how the Address introduced the slogan of the proletarian revolution:

"Alongside the new official governments the workers must simultaneously establish