Debate on the course of history

The following text by an ex-ICC member in defence of the concept of the historic course criticises some of my own views on this topic and offers an alternative vision of the key issues in the current period.

Comments on MH’s critique of the notion of the historic course

The essay that follows is an attempt to respond to MH’s critique of the ICC theory of the “historic course”, and to defend the validity of the general concept by placing it into the context of its time and restating it in the context of the present.

In doing so, I intend to adopt a somewhat different approach to MH, who takes as his starting-point the resolutions of the most recent ICC congress, returning then to the empirical evidence of the 1970s and 1980s when the ICC defended the position of the “historic course” unambiguously, before actually looking at the document itself and its genesis in the International Conferences of the Communist Left at the end of the 1970s. I propose, rather, to start with the document published in International Review n°18 (July 1979), to examine it in its historical context in order to separate out what is general and remains valid from what is specific to a previous historical period, and finally to examine its implications for the present.

Before beginning though, I would like to look at one very general critique that MH makes, that of schematism. The idea of the “historic course” is in part directed against the empiricist approach which only believes in “facts” and refuses to make any attempt to draw out an overall structure, or a general dynamic, from a historical period. Personally, I am convinced that it is impossible to understand any historic period, and a fortiori to make judgments about the possible future course of events, without making such an attempt. However, to do so inevitably exposes one to the danger of adopting a schematic approach, which can only be avoided if three conditions are met:

1. A detailed knowledge of the empirical situation.

2. A firm grasp of the methodological approach adopted.

3. An ability to adapt the overall approach to the inevitably complex and contradictory evolution of events.

To bring these three conditions together, on a permanent basis to boot, is no easy task. As the IR18 text says, “it’s much more comfortable not to study and not to ask questions!”. So that while MH is right, I think, to highlight the danger of schematism, I would by no means agree that this invalidates the whole attempt to define the “historic course” at a given moment. Apparently the ICC is now making a distinction between the “balance of class forces” and the “historic course”, but such a distinction is completely absent from the original text. On the contrary, the historic course flows from, is directly determined by, the balance of class forces: “The nature of the present course — whether it’s towards imperialist war or class war — is thus an expression of the evolution of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat” (IR 18).

All this being said, let us look now at the IR 18 text itself.

At its most general, the question the text poses is this: “Can revolutionaries make predictions?”, or “more precisely: in the context of middle-term predictions, can and should we foresee the evolution of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat?”. What is proposed here is nothing less than the application of a scientific methodology to social reality: “Only by transforming hypotheses based on an initial series of experiences into predictions, and by confronting these predictions with new experiences, can the researcher verify (or invalidate) these hypotheses and advance his understanding (…) in contrast with researchers, revolutionaries cannot create the conditions for new experiments in laboratories. Only social practice can confirm or refute the perspectives they put forward, verify or invalidate their theory”. And as the text goes on to emphasise, an appreciation of the balance of class forces and the perspective for their evolution is critical in determining the way in which revolutionaries organise and intervene in the proletariat.

It seems to me that we have to keep sight of this basic idea. In short, the principle that it is possible to evaluate the balance of class forces and their evolution remains valid no matter what period we are talking about, whereas the terms in which that principle applies will vary depending on historical conditions. For example, posing the question in terms of “war or revolution” (in the sense of generalised imperialist war) is clearly dependent on the concrete historical situation of the 1970s when the world situation’s dynamic was dominated by two major configurations: first, the social situation in all the developed countries was shaped by repeated waves of class struggle against the first effects of the crisis that marked the end of the post-WWII reconstruction; second, the geopolitical situation was determined by the world’s division into two major imperialist blocs with little or no room for manoeuvre outside them (though there were exceptions, notably China to which I will return). The threat of global war seemed very present, and some countries were deeply scarred by disastrous colonial wars, which contributed to a general feeling of disgust with the ruling order and rebelliousness among the workers. This was especially true in France where the attempt to hold on to “French Algeria” had led to widespread resistance in France itself, in Portugal where the colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique led in the end to the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship, and of course in the United States, which had to abandon the war in Vietnam in large part because of the disintegration of the American army there (something that the ICC did not really recognise at the time). It is no accident that all these countries relied on conscript troops, in other words an army drawn essentially from the working class (in Vietnam, it was notorious that the career military reserved for themselves the safest positions in the rear, and relied on conscripts for front-line combat). In Britain, which relied on a professional army to fight its wars of decolonisation (notably in Malaysia and Kenya), the effect was much less marked. Germany of course was a special case. The young generations of the late 1960s were marked by a profound disgust for the heritage of Nazism, and in consequence a deep distrust of the generations that had, in their eyes, been responsible for WWII and for the failure to denazify German society during the 1950s and 1960s.

We should bear in mind here, that the general feeling of disaffection with the established order, born in part from the trauma of war, was something very different from the situation of 1914, when a very large part of the proletariat was regrouped in political and trade-union organisations that it recognised as its own and from which it expected a lead in the struggle against war. When that lead did not come, and when, on the contrary, the national leaderships of the Socialist International and the trades unions gave their support to the war effort, the mass of the workers found themselves completely disarmed. MH asks “Even if the SPD had voted against war credits are we seriously to believe that WW1 would not have broken out - in 1915 or 16 if not in 1914 – especially given the extent of the rot in Social Democracy?”, but is this really the right way to pose the question? An SPD that voted against war credits would have been a very different organisation, ready, perhaps, to run the risk of clandestinity in organising resistance to war. The vote for war credits was thus not the beginning but the end of a long process which had transformed the SPD, a process which the German ruling class had followed with attention (Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers is eloquent in this respect), and encouraged; as for the French ruling faction, they took no chances — there is little doubt in my mind that the assassination of Jean Jaurès was arranged precisely to avoid the risk that this great popular tribune would throw the force of his rhetoric and his immense moral authority into the balance against war.

In MH’s view the “mechanistic vision of the balance of class forces [ie, that “the responses of two historically antagonistic classes, imperialist war and revolution mutually exclude each other” (IR 18)] loses sight of the fact that the tendency towards war exists independently of the action of the proletariat and continually pushes the system towards war because it is rooted in the dynamics of capitalism itself”. But on the contrary, in IR 18 we read that “Left to its own dynamic, capitalism can’t escape imperialist wars (...) periods of peace are simply moments during which capital is reconstituting its forces for even more destructive and barbaric confrontations”. And I can’t help regretting that MH himself does not really offer us his own estimation of the danger of war today.

Now it is true that capitalism (and not just decadent capitalism) contains within itself an inherent tendency towards war, independently of any action or inaction of the proletariat. However, this does not imply that the resistance of the proletariat is the only factor preventing the outbreak of generalised war. That was the mistake made by the GCF in 1952: the GCF foresaw the immediate outbreak of WWIII as a consequence of the war in Korea, because the proletariat was too prostrated physically and politically to resist it. This should serve as a reminder as to just how difficult and groundbreaking the work of Bilan and the GCF really was. They did not just pull “correct” positions out of their collective hats, they had to fight for them. And they made mistakes: hence with the outbreak of war in 1939, Bilan transformed itself into Octobre in the belief that revolution would inevitably arise out of war (this was a generally held view amongst Left Communists in 1939, according to an interview with Marc Chirik which was posted on YouTube but seems since to have disappeared).

It is important to make the distinction here between the tendency towards war of any kind, and the tendency towards the specific situation of generalised imperialist conflict. Wars have continued unabated throughout decadence and notably since WWII: Korea, Vietnam, endless wars of “national liberation”, Afghanistan, Iran-Iraq, Iraq and the Middle East generally, ex-Yugoslavia, Crimea and the Ukraine, and so on. But none of these have metastasised into a world-wide conflict between imperialist blocs.

Clearly, the terms in which the IR 18 text posed the historic course, of revolution or world war between two blocs, no longer applied when one of those blocs disappeared and the other lost a large part of its reason for existence. War did not come to an end, as the history of the 1990s makes abundantly clear, but none of those wars ran the risk of escalating into a world war between two blocs. Russia, for example, was completely unable to take advantage of the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia (despite its attempts to intervene in Serbia’s favour), or in the Middle East.

What about the class struggle as a brake on imperialist war? Here I think that it is important to emphasise the distinction made in the IR 18 text between a physical defeat of the class and a political defeat. Class struggle in and of itself is not determinant if the proletariat has been defeated politically. It was Bilan’s great merit to see this with regard to France and Spain in the 1930s. For the vast majority of revolutionaries (backed by the immense prestige of Trotsky), the enormous struggles that led to the creation of the Popular Front government in France (and to some life-changing concessions to the workers, still treasured to this day: two weeks paid holidays) seemed comparable to February 1917 in Russia. The attempted armed seizure of power in Barcelona by the workers only served to confirm this impression. We should not underestimate the very considerable moral courage involved not just in opposing the dominant anti-fascism of the day, but in basing this on a recognition that the proletariat in both Germany and the USSR was crushed and that the Soviet Union had become an imperialist, anti-proletarian force.

The most important issue is not so much the physical level of class struggle (after all, there were very significant strikes in the USA during the late 1940s, and Britain was notorious for its conflictual labour relations throughout the 1950s and 1960s), as the overall political and social context in which the struggle takes place.

MH has a point in criticising the idea that for example “imperialist war and revolution mutually exclude each other not only for the future of society, but also in the day-to-day manner that these two alternatives being prepared” (IR 18). This does indeed seem over-schematic. For MH “the tendencies toward war and revolution must develop in parallel and simultaneously in capitalist society but in a dialectical manner, through clashes and contradictions, continually impacting on each other in complex ways”. The problem, is that MH does not give us much idea as to what these “clashes and contradictions” might look like in reality.

In fact, I think it is fair to say that the ICC in the 1970s did not see the balance of forces as something purely linear, leading inevitably to one or another conclusion; on the contrary it was a process marked by “clashes and contradictions”. Let’s consider briefly the Russian invasion of Afghanistan as an example. When the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, the ICC saw it as a dangerous step towards war: it was the first time that the USSR had stepped militarily outside the territory of the Warsaw Pact. Moreover, Afghanistan has been a strategically vital area ever since the British and Russian empires played out the “Great Game” during the 19th century, opening the way for Russia to the warm seas of the Indian Ocean. At the time, the ICC considered that if the working class did not respond, then this would be a serious setback for the class struggle, and a reinforcement of the dynamic towards war. Poland 1980 was that response, not in an immediate, conscious sense of course (the workers of Gdansk went on strike for their own reasons, not against the war in Afghanistan), but in the sense that it demonstrated concretely that the proletariat as a whole, in the Eastern Bloc especially, was not ready to be dragged off into the imperialist adventures of the Russian ruling class. And Russia experienced this in the growing reluctance of its conscript army to fight in Afghanistan. The intervention in Afghanistan foundered not so much militarily as socially. This was surely a critical element in the unprecedented decision of the Gorbachev regime, essentially to abandon the struggle against the US bloc without going to war. The collapse of the USSR is so far behind us now that we tend to forget just what an extraordinary event it was: an entire imperialist bloc, just keeling over and collapsing without a fight.

Fundamentally, the situation was the same in the US bloc. The USA was deeply affected by the “Vietnam syndrome” (see above), so that massive military intervention abroad became unthinkable for a generation.

On the issue of military budgets, one would have to check the figures but I believe it is right to say that the US military budget was a good deal lower as a percentage of GDP at the end of the 1970s than it had been during the Vietnam war, while in France and Britain (the USA’s main military allies in Europe), the defence share of the budget declined during the 1970s and 1980s to be overtaken by social spending which expanded enormously during the 1980s especially, for fear of the social disorder which might spring from the crisis. Reagan’s most serious foreign military adventure was the invasion of Grenada in 1983. Russia’s defeat was achieved not through military action but by upping the stakes in the technological race through the Star Wars programme, which the USSR was technically and financially unable to follow.

On the whole then, it seems to me that MH underestimates the degree to which the development of the class struggle in the 1970s especially, pushed back the preparations for war on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

What is the situation today? Is the general tendency of capitalism towards war likely to explode into a generalised imperialist conflict? I don’t propose to go into detail here but one can make a few general points.

The IR 18 text posits the need for an ideological component to the formation of blocs and generalised war (along the lines of fascism/anti-fascism for example). Until relatively recently, such an ideological divide did not exist. It is clear, however, that China today is trying to put itself forward as an alternative “model” to “Western democracy” in order to attract support from other regimes and set up a sort of “anti-democratic axis”. One of the ideological components in this is plain old nationalism based on resentment and a sense of historical grievance. According to IR 18, “chauvinism, under the mask of national independence, can only find a real refuge in the most backward countries”; today, the rise of populism in all the developed countries — not to mention the sense of nationalist grievance in both Russia and China, consciously maintained by their governments — shows that the ICC has seriously underestimated the continued weight of nationalism, including within the working class.

China is particularly concerned to assert its authority and control over the South China Sea, and this is probably the world’s most dangerous flashpoint today.

There is an increasing tendency for both China and Russia to challenge the USA on the international scene. We need only mention the Russian invasion of Crimea and the Ukraine, Russia intervention in Syria, the expansion of Chinese naval power into the Indian Ocean. There is also a certain rapprochement between Russia and China at both the economic and military levels. Although it is always perilous to argue on the basis of historical analogy, the relationship between China and Russia is not dissimilar in some respects to that between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the 1930s, with Russia and Italy very much the junior partners.

One could imagine a not wholly unrealistic scenario in which a military clash between China and the USA (or Japan or Korea) in the South China Sea were to escalate into a full-blown regional conflict drawing in the USA, India, and other lesser powers. An opportunist Russia might then seize the occasion of the US being fully engaged in Asia to invade the Ukraine and the Baltic states, in the hopes of splitting NATO apart completely and dominating Europe. If the USA and European states reacted with a determined defence, then we would be on the way to a world war without having to have gone first through the formation of clear imperialist blocs.

To be honest, I don’t feel that such a scenario is on the cards today, at least not in the immediate (to argue the case here would take far too long). Amongst other things, the ruling classes are aware, up to a point, of the dangers of all-out war, including nuclear war, in a way that they were not in 1914, or even in 1939. This does not mean that we can rely on them to “see reason”, simply that we should avoid any tendency to draw over-simple analogies, or to imagine that the outbreak of war is equally imminent at all times; we need to bear in mind that working-class resistance is not the only factor in the historic course.

Capitalism has a permanent tendency towards war, to be sure. But a tendency is not always necessarily played out to its logical conclusion. We need to ask whether, concretely, in the present situation, that outcome is on the cards in the short or medium term, independently of any intervention by the proletariat.

Inevitably, any consideration of the danger of war in the present brings us to the question of China. After 40 years of first ignoring, then dismissing, then being embarrassed by the rise of China, the ICC’s latest Resolution on the international situation at last attempts to address the question: “the position of the communist left affirming the “impossibility of any emergence of new industrialised nations” in the period of decadence and the condemnation of states “which failed to succeed in their ‘industrial take-off’ before the First World War to stagnate in underdevelopment, or to preserve a chronic backwardness compared to the countries that hold the upper hand” was valid in the period from 1914 to 1989. It was the straitjacket of the organisation of the world into two opposing imperialist blocs (permanent between 1945 and 1989) in preparation for the world war that prevented any major disruption of the hierarchy between powers”. This contains several statements which are either untrue or inaccurate. It would take far too long to argue this in detail, so I will just sketch out the most problematic aspects.

To start with, it is untrue that the impossibility of new industrialised nations was a “position of the communist left”. The Bordigists in particular always justified their support for national liberation movements on the grounds that this would permit the emergence of new national capitals, new national bourgeoisies, and therefore open the way to an extension of the proletariat thus bringing closer the conditions for revolution. No, the “impossibility of new industrialised nations” was always a position specific to the ICC.

It is also untrue that the ICC’s position on the impossibility of new major industrialised powers had anything to do with the system of imperialist blocs. On the contrary, it was integral to the analysis of decadence, which assumes that capitalism has reached the limits of its ability to develop the productive forces, in particular the proletariat itself. Moreover, if “any emergence of new industrialised nations” was impossible from 1914-1985 but has now, since 1989, become possible again, where does this leave the whole analysis of the decadence of capitalism since 1914? Did the decadence of capitalism come to an end in 1989?

It is inaccurate to talk of the bloc system post-1945 as a “straitjacket”, certainly as far as China is concerned (but also India). Unlike the countries of Eastern Europe, China was never militarily occupied by the USSR. And although China could be said to be part of the Soviet bloc during the Korean War, when it depended on Russian military support (notably in the air) and on the protection of the Russian “nuclear umbrella”, it broke decisively with the USSR in the 1960s (Khrushchev’s withdrawal of Russian technical and industrial support, military clashes on the Sino-Soviet border). This did not, however, mean its incorporation into the US bloc; US troops have never been allowed into China (compare this with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines), and it was China that forced the US to retreat (in 1979) over the recognition of Taiwan, not the reverse. The economic opening of China began during the 1980s with the creation of the first special economic zones but — as we have seen since — this certainly did not lead to a domination of China by US capital. Etc, etc, etc…

The rise of China to the position of the world’s second (and by some measures already the first) industrial power, and the incorporation of hundreds of millions of peasants into the working class as a result, thus poses a serious problem for the whole idea of capitalist decadence, which is the bedrock of all the ICC’s basic positions on the unions, parliament, national liberation, and indeed the very possibility of revolution. To resolve this problem demands a critical return to Marx and Luxemburg, and some serious study of empirical reality. But then, as the IR 18 text so rightly says, “it’s much more comfortable not to study and not to ask questions!”.

After this brief overview of the situation in which the ICC first put forward the idea of the “historic course”, and in which the “historic course” was played out, let us now turn to the present, and to the documents voted at the ICC’s 2019 International Congress, in particular the “Resolution on the balance of class forces”.

Before we do so, however, a couple of preliminary remarks are in order.

Firstly, when we read the aforementioned Resolution, it is clear that the “cruel, implacable criticism” that we were promised four years and three congresses ago, has sunk without trace, lost with all hands. A good two-thirds of the Resolution are devoted merely to repeating the positions adopted since the 1970s, with nary a hint that there may, perhaps, conceivably, be something, anything, if not to criticise then at least to re-evaluate. The Resolution, in fact, is reminiscent of those humorous “House rules” one sometimes sees posted in offices: “Rule 1: the boss is always right. Rule 2: in the rare cases when the boss is wrong, Rule 1 applies”.

Secondly, the fact that the ICC has now officially abandoned the idea of the “historic course”, at the same time as it proposes a Resolution on the balance of class forces, shows once again how far it has lost sight of its own theoretical history, since “The nature of the present course (...) is an expression of the evolution of the balance of forces” (IR18); you cannot have one without the other.

In considering this Resolution, we need to keep in mind the theoretical foundation of the IR 18 text which in my view remains entirely valid. We can summarise it in a few points:

1. As IR 18 says, “In general history doesn’t repeat itself, and although we must know about it in order to understand the present, the study of this present with all its specificities is even more necessary”.

2. It is only possible to evaluate the balance of class forces with a global approach, based on an overall appreciation of the major industrialised countries. As IR 18 puts it: “Any evaluation of the course must include an examination of the class struggle in [Europe] but it wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t take into account the situation in Russia, the US, and China”. Such an insistence is still more valid today. On this basis, it is necessary to draw out a general dynamic, something which cannot be done simply by cherry-picking the odd struggle here and there.

3. Hypotheses must be verified by reality: “Only social practice can confirm or refute the perspectives [that revolutionaries] put forward, can verify or invalidate their theory”.

4. The IR 18 text, on the whole rightly in my view, considered that “The preparation of [a generalised] imperialist war means that capitalism has to develop a war economy and it’s the proletariat which has to bear most of its weight”, and that “Capitalism still has to mobilise tens of millions of workers if it’s going to wage imperialist war”. For generalised imperialist war to be possible, it is not enough that workers passively acquiesce, they must “adhere enthusiastically” to the ruling class’ war ideology. But contrary to the situation in the 1970s, today the danger facing the proletariat and humanity generally (as the ICC recognised at the beginning of the 1990s) is “death by a thousand cuts”, inflicted by climate change, social upheavals such as the migrant crisis, and localised war. In this situation, passive acquiescence is the road to disaster.

5. The balance of class forces today will determine the perspectives we envisage in the medium term. At the same time, it is necessary constantly to update the evaluation of this balance in the light of events.

6. The balance of class forces in turn determines the field where revolutionaries can act: in a reflux, “their task is to (...) dedicate most of their weak forces to the theoretical work of drawing up a balance-sheet of past experience, notably the causes of the defeat”.

We are more than justified in asking how far the ICC’s “hypotheses” have been “verified by social reality”, all the more so inasmuch as the Resolution devotes so much space to repeating them. So let us begin with the massive strikes that shook Poland in 1980. Here is what the Resolution has to say about this: “This gigantic struggle of the working class in Poland revealed that it is in the massive struggle against economic attacks that the proletariat can become conscious of its own strength, affirm its class identity which is antagonistic to capital, and develop its self-confidence”.

With hindsight, can we really affirm any such thing? The strikes in Poland were undoubtedly the most significant class movement “on its own terrain” in the post-1968 period, an enormous, nation-wide movement, astonishingly well organised in the best traditions of spontaneous working-class creativity. But did the proletariat in Poland, as a consequence, become “conscious of its own strength”? Did it “affirm its class identity” during the 1980s? Did it “develop its self-confidence”? Quite the contrary is true of course. The proletariat in Poland followed Solidarnosc and the Catholic Church into the struggle, not on “its own” terrain, but on the terrain of bourgeois democracy and Polish nationalism.

The classic ICC response to such objections is that the proletariat in Poland was “derailed” by the “mystifications” of democracy and religion. All well and good, but this is really no explanation at all, since it fails to explain why the proletariat, after such a movement, fell such easy prey to such “mystifications”, just as, incidentally, the Bordigist or crypto-Bordigist explanation that it was due to the “absence of the Party” fails to explain why there was (and is) no such Party.

In fact, far from representing a new departure as the ICC thought at the time, it seems clear today that Poland 1980 was the high water mark of the post-68 struggles, the most flagrant example of the proletariat’s failure to go beyond the economic struggle to an understanding of its political implications.

Moreover — again with hindsight — we can see this failure directly reflected in the evolution of the communist left. The failure of the International Conferences of the Communist Left was the result, not just of the ambient sectarianism of the left communist groups (of which the ICC was itself guilty, as we can see from the arrogant digs at other groups scattered through the IR 18 text), but of the fading away of the pressure that the class struggle had put on revolutionaries during the 1970s, which was responsible for the partial victory over sectarianism represented by the opening of the cycle of Conferences in the first place.

There is also, it must be said, a deep ambiguity in this notion of “class identity which is antagonistic to capital”. Is it supposed to mean a consciousness within the working class of itself as a distinct part of society with its own interests to defend, interests which are antagonistic to those of capital? Or does it mean the proletariat’s consciousness of itself as a revolutionary class opposed to capitalism as such, and capable of putting forward a perspective for society as a whole? The former of course was very widespread in the old industrialised countries (and would have been recognised by Lenin as “trade union consciousness”); the latter, however, has signally failed to materialise from the class struggle since 1968. Nor can we deny that the former is not only far from revolutionary, historically it has aspects which are downright reactionary inasmuch as they comprise a “way of life” which is dominated by the ideology of class society.

Up to a point, the ICC realised towards the end of the 1980s that something was wrong with its confident predictions. The “Theses on decomposition” mark the recognition of this fact, inasmuch as they identify a situation of “stalemate” in the class struggle as a result — on the working-class side — of an inability to put forward a perspective: a political failure, in short. This political failure was reflected in the stagnation or retreat of the communist left during the 1980s. In the 2019 Resolution we now read that “When Stalinism collapsed, it did one last service to the bourgeoisie. It allowed the ruling class to put an end to the dynamic of class struggle which, with advances and setbacks, had developed over two decades”. But the argument here is completely circular: on the one hand, the failure of the “dynamic of class struggle” led to stagnation, stalemate, the collapse of the USSR, and the “phase” of Decomposition; on the other, it was the collapse of the USSR which “allowed” the bourgeoisie to “put an end to the dynamic”.

We would also be justified in asking what it means to talk about “the dynamic of class struggle which, with advances and setbacks, had developed over two decades”. In fact, this sentence as it stands is meaningless: to say that a phenomenon “develops” over time is simply a tautology, the question is, in what direction does this “development” take place? What is the outcome of the “advances and setbacks”? What were the “advances”, and did they outweigh the “setbacks”. On this, the Resolution remains silent.

We can see the same kind of circular reasoning in the Resolution’s treatment of the French “Yellow Jackets” movement. During the movement, the ICC’s section in France made itself look silly by sonorously announcing that “Only the proletariat can push back the bourgeoisie”, only days before the Macron government withdrew its fuel tax hike and announced a multi-billion euro package to appease the movement. Now we are told that in fact, this was done... to stave off the development of the class struggle: “By releasing a package of 10 billion euros to deal with the chaos accompanying the Yellow Vests demonstrations, the French bourgeoisie and its media were able to insidiously instil the idea that only inter-classist citizens’ movements and petty bourgeois methods of struggle can push the government back”. So what the government is really frightened of is not the “petty-bourgeois” Yellow Jacket movement but... the invisible class struggle (as Marx said, history sometimes repeats itself once as tragedy, a second time as farce: in 1939, Bilan thought that WWII was a bourgeois response to class struggle; 80 years on, the ICC uses the same reasoning to explain the Macron government’s response to the Yellow Jackets). But if the perspective of proletarian struggle is really such a threat, how are we to explain that the French ruling class, which has some experience in the matter after all, allowed Macron to all but exterminate the Socialist Party in the last elections? Has the ICC not always insisted that the “left of capital” (a generic term grouping Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, et al) is the bourgeoisie’s prime rampart against class struggle? If that is the case, how do we explain the annihilation of the French left, the disappearance of the Communists in Italy, the decline of the German SPD and the rise of the Greens, and the decline of left parties in general? Could it perhaps be that these phenomena are indicative of a general political defeat of the working class, or at the very least of a “retreat” to quote the Resolution?

This is not to mention, of course, one of today’s most glaring political phenomena: the rise of populism. According to the Resolution, “The rise of far-right parties in several European countries, as well as the rise to power of Trump in the United States, elected with many votes from workers in the "rust belt", reveals that some fringes of the proletariat (particularly those affected by unemployment) can be poisoned by populism, xenophobia, nationalism and all the reactionary and obscurantist ideologies that emanate from the foul putrefaction of capitalism”. “Some fringes of the proletariat”: this is, to say the least, a startling understatement! How delicately the ICC tiptoes round the fact that, for example, Marine Le Pen’s far right National Front (now re-baptised “Rassemblement National”) is the majority electoral party amongst working-class voters in the northern French rust belt! As for “several European countries”, an expression which serves to minimise the reality of the situation, how many European countries can the ICC identify which have not seen a rise in “far-right parties”? Luxembourg and Lichtenstein perhaps?

In the past, the ICC always insisted that to understand the situation and the development of class consciousness, one had to take account of what is happening in bourgeois politics, as a sort of mirror held up to the class struggle. If we do so, it is clear that the class struggle is a secondary concern for the ruling class today, whose political scene is dominated by Trump or anti-Trump in the USA, by the Brexit chaos in Britain, by the struggle over Catalan independence or Spanish national integrity in Spain, and so on. As MH quite rightly points out, a situation of social stalemate (which is the basis for the idea of decomposition) cannot be static, it must tend in one direction or another. The direction it is tending today is clear enough: towards a continued weakening of the proletariat both physically and above all politically.

When it comes to the overall balance of class forces, let us just remark in passing that the Resolution on the subject forgets the global method set out in IR 18, and completely ignores the class struggle (or lack of it) in China, which is today the largest single fraction of the world proletariat (not to mention Russia, the USA, Brazil…).

Up to a point, the ICC is aware of reality: the Resolution speaks of “three decades of retreat of the class struggle” and “a situation of retreat of the class consciousness of the proletariat and the move away from any revolutionary perspective”. And so the ICC consoles itself as best it can: “the bourgeoisie has so far failed to inflict a decisive defeat on the working class, as it did in the 1920s and 1930s”. But to suffer a “decisive defeat” you must first give battle, which the proletariat has clearly failed so far to do. Moreover, the Resolution (generally so fond of citing past analyses) forgets here the distinction that the IR 18 text made between a physical defeat and a political one. The British and French workers who went to war in 1939 had not suffered a physical defeat like the Germans, the Italians, or the Russians. But they had been politically defeated. This did not in fact mean that they “adhered enthusiastically” to the bourgeoisie’s war aims, rather that they saw no other way out, they were completely incapable of putting forward their own perspective.

History never repeats itself identically, and today is not 1939. Humanity faces disaster not from generalised imperialist war but from the effects of climate change and social disintegration. And for these to dominate, it is enough that the proletariat should be politically defeated to the point where it is incapable of recognising itself as a revolutionary force and putting forward a revolutionary alternative.

The social perspective is determined by the balance between the development of proletarian struggle towards consciousness, and the degeneration of capitalism towards global disaster. From this standpoint, there is an issue which will become critical in the short to medium term, but which the ICC has never really grappled with: the question of climate change. It would require much more study to work out more clearly the perspectives in the medium-term (let us say, in the next generation: a period of 25 years), however we can put forward a few tentative hypotheses (on the basis of current IPCC projections which are always on the conservative side) which, if correct, will clearly have a major impact on the balance of class forces and the perspective in general:

1. Many low-lying and equatorial areas of the planet are likely to become simply uninhabitable, either because of rising sea levels or because of rising temperatures. Rising sea-levels are already a major concern in several countries including developed ones: Britain, Holland, Denmark… Rising temperatures will effect areas already under severe pressure such as the Sahel and the Middle East. Estimates of the potential numbers of climate refugees range from a conservative 200 million, to a highly pessimistic 1-2 billion. The effect will clearly be migration towards more habitable regions, on a scale which will make the present migrant crisis look like chicken feed.

2. There may be a serious crisis in agriculture, with collapsing yields in major food crops (think of the droughts in the US Middle West). China in particular is in imminent danger of a food crisis brought on by pollution and overuse of the available agricultural land. Access to clean water may also become an increasingly contentious problem.

All these possibilities inherent in the situation will of course increase the military tensions between the imperialist powers, but they will also pose very real questions for the shape of class struggle. In IR 18, we read that “Imperialist war is the most significant expression of the historic bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production”; in the medium-term, climate change, which is inevitable and which cannot be answered without a planetary mobilisation and a revolutionary change in the organisation of human society, is likely to be a much more “significant expression”.

The Resolution cites the “Theses on Decomposition”: “Moreover, and this is the element which in the final analysis will determine the outcome of the world situation, the inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis constitutes the essential stimulant for the class’ struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot”. The “Theses” were written at the beginning of the 1990s; when we look at the situation of proletarian consciousness today, can we really say that “the inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis” has proven itself “the essential stimulant for the (…) development of consciousness”?

The IR 18 text tells us that “Outbreaks of [revolutionary] struggle take place when capitalist society is in crisis”. In the past, such crises have always been the result of war (1871, 1905, 1917), and communists after 1917 not unreasonably concluded that only an existential crisis such as war could provide the necessary impetus to provoke a revolutionary upheaval. The ICC considered (rightly in my view) that war put practically insurmountable barriers in the way of revolution, by dividing workers internationally. It harked back, rather, to Marx, who envisaged the revolution emerging from economic crisis.

In the 1970s, this was a hypothesis. Can we say that social reality has verified it? On the contrary, it seems to me. Whole communities across the industrialised world have been devastated (the decline of Detroit is a striking example), either by crisis or simply by the reorganisation of the productive apparatus, yet far from leading to a “development of consciousness” this has produced, if anything, the reverse; it is precisely those areas which have been most affected by the crisis, which are today the most affected by populism.

Moreover, as IR 18 says, “crisis is not a sufficient precondition” and nor is workers’ combativeness. The revolutionary nature of 1905 and 1917 was the result, not just of the crisis, but of a long and stubborn, often invisible, effort at political education undertaken by revolutionaries of all tendencies. This is what revolutionaries are for, but they can only fulfil their function if they are capable, in a period of reflux such as today, of “dedicating most of their weak forces to the theoretical work of drawing up a balance sheet of past experience, notably the causes of the defeat” (IR18).

Fifty years of economic crises and upheavals have not had the effect of encouraging the development of either class struggle or class consciousness. Today (if the scientists of the IPCC are to be believed), humanity stands at the brink of a truly existential crisis brought on by the playing out of the most fundamental contradiction of the capitalist economy: the imperative of production purely for the sake of expanded reproduction. This is something that the left communists never foresaw, indeed largely ignored; even today, the Resolution has nothing to say on the matter, other than to mutter darkly about the dangers of “inter-classism” and “ecological reform”. An enormous effort of political reflection and will, will be demanded if the proletariat is to put forward an alternative. Will the ICC be capable of contributing to this effort? Sadly, tragically even, the documents of the 2019 ICC Congress leave us no reason to hope that this will be the case. As the ICC said in 1978,“it’s much more comfortable not to study and not to ask questions!”.

MJ, 8th September 2019