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On the ICC's schema of decomposition, the formation of blocs and the class struggle

Updated: Aug 5, 2022

Some thoughts on the ICC’s public meeting of 02/07/2022


by Lars Torvaldsson


[In response to a request for comments at its recent public meeting, this has also been sent to the ICC. It was written just before the ICC's decision to 'close' its online forum (in fact it has deleted it entirely - hopefully it will at least re-instate it as an archive of decades of discussions in the proletarian milieu ).


Despite all the ICC forum's shortcomings, it was still one of the very few places for those interested in the positions of the Communist Left to discuss. Practically, its closure also means there is no longer a way of linking longer texts published here to more focused discussions on the forum. We will continue to post contributions here while we consider other ways of promoting debate. Comments are of course always welcome. - MH]


The ICC's schema of decomposition


Only an activity based on the most recent developments, on foundations that are constantly being enriched, is really revolutionary. In contrast, activity based on yesterday’s truths that have already lost their currency is sterile, harmful and reactionary. One might try to feed the members [of the organisation] with absolute certainties and truths, but only relative truths which contain an antithesis of doubt can give rise to a revolutionary synthesis (Marc Chirik, 1948, in IR33)


Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. (Marx, German Ideology, my emphasis).


I have included these two quotations as an epigraph to the following brief considerations, since I think they can usefully serve as a mental compass in a world situation which is undoubtedly extremely complex and constantly shifting.


They are also a cautionary answer to what is, to my mind, one of the principal defects of the ICC’s reasoning today: the tendency to schemas, which remain static and are therefore deceptive. Schemas are necessary ‘abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men’, but the ICC falls (increasingly it seems to me) into the mistake of imagining that these abstractions are things in themselves.


The principal of these is the schema of ‘decomposition’ (along with its avatars such as ‘every man for himself’).


To restate (schematically!) the essential idea of decomposition when it was first adopted in the early 1990s: it was founded on the idea of a stalemate between the two major classes, the proletariat on the one hand being unable, despite its struggles against the effects of economic crisis, to put forward a perspective for another society, the bourgeoisie on the other being unable – because of that resistance – to move towards imperialist war. The tendencies towards a general breakup of society, including the disintegration of all imperialist blocs, were posited on this situation of stalemate.


It should be said here that, at the time, the ICC considered that the tendency towards the formation of blocs was an inherent feature of capitalism in decadence, but that the only potential candidate for the position of ‘bloc leader’ against the US was Germany, a political and military pygmy.


In chess, a situation of stalemate brings the game to an end. That doesn’t happen in history. A stalemate is inherently unstable; indeed, as the ‘Theses on Decomposition’ say, ‘Still less for capitalism than for preceding social forms, is a “freeze” or a “stagnation” of social life possible’. So we need to ask: how have things changed since the 1990s?


Imperialist conflicts since the 1990s


I’ll return later to the class struggle, but in terms of imperialist conflict, there are two major differences which should be blindingly obvious to anybody.


The first of these is the situation in Russia. Whereas during the 1990s Russia (not just the USSR) was in a state of liquefaction, with the mass of the population reduced to desperate straits just to survive, and quasi-famine conditions in some places, the last 20 years have seen the Russian state undertake a large-scale program of rearmament, re-establish itself as a major player in its own ‘near abroad’, and return to areas of historic influence such as the Middle East, from which it had been pretty much excluded by the USA (Egypt’s change of bloc allegiance notably); this has even seen a rapprochement with Turkey, which is of course a NATO member.


The second major difference is, obviously, the rise of China, which in the 1990s had very little presence on the world stage. China is today the world’s second (by some measures its first) industrial power, and has been increasing its military spending consistently for the last 20 years. Under Xi Jinping, it has clearly announced its intention to dominate the oceans around China, to have ‘blue waters’ capability in the Pacific, and to dominate the Eurasian landmass (Belt & Road).


A common interest (opposition to the US-dominated ‘world order’) unites China and Russia. Their own interests, moreover, are complementary in the long run, up to a point: China sees in Russia a source of raw materials, for Russia China is a source of components and high-tech which it will less and less be able to source from the USA or Europe. Moreover it is obvious that the war in Ukraine, and the economic sanctions imposed on Russia, will push it more and more into China’s arms (According to one ICC intervention, the war in Ukraine is a proxy war, an American effort to bring Russia to its knees, and to make Russia turn to help from China; this is supposed to be an indirect attack on China. I confess that I fail to understand how pushing Russia into China’s arms will weaken the latter).


The splitting up of NATO?


As for NATO, several interventions made much of the internal divisions within the NATO alliance:


An ICC sympathiser spoke of ‘the breakdown of the blocs of the cold war – the longest existing, most successful blocs in history’, but seemed to have forgotten that not only did NATO survive the end of the Cold War, its Article 5 was invoked for the only time, after the 9/11 attacks on the USA. The same sympathiser also referred to an ICC text (apparently a recent one though I have been unable to identify it on the ICC web site), according to which ‘in decomposition, we said the only pole capable of facing up to the US is Germany; and even if the growth of China must be taken into account, the re-arming of Germany has to be taken into account’; does anyone seriously believe that German rearmament is even remotely likely to be used against the USA?


We then had two ICC interventions insisting on the divisions between the US and the Europeans. The US, we were told, wants war, whereas in Europe there is far more desire to negotiate. This was supposed to demonstrate the historic trend of the last 30 years towards fragmentation, the splitting up of NATO, and increasing tension between US and European states. Macron and other European bourgeois leaders, said the ICC, do not have full confidence in the US, especially given that Trump could very well be re-elected, in which case it is hard to imagine Biden’s present policy being continued: the unpredictability of the USA’s internal politics has an impact on Europe. This ‘impact on Europe’ is supposedly confirmed by the doubling of German defence expenditure, which ‘will later be used at America’s expense’.


But then we had another ICC intervention insisting that the purpose of the war in Ukraine was not just to trap Russian imperialism but also to intimidate Western Europe and weaken America’s main rivals in Europe, in other words Germany and France.


Nobody seems to have noticed the contradiction between the two: for the first, Germany is doubling defence expenditure which will be used against the US, while for the second, America is intimidating France and Germany which leads presumably to… a doubling of German defence expenditure.


I fail to see the logic here. I also find it bizarre, to say the least, to hear that NATO is ‘splitting up’, just as it accepts the candidature of two new states, brings Turkey back into line (more or less, and perhaps temporarily), and increases its front line troop deployment from 40,000 to 300,000. Then again one ICC member said that ‘There is no denying strengthening of NATO so far’, so what are we to believe? Both ICC members mentioned the nervousness of the Europeans at the possibility of Trump’s return, and they are quite right. But if the Europeans are frightened that America might carry out Trump’s threat of withdrawing from Europe (I think this is true), then how does that square with the idea that this war is provoked by America to intimidate its European rivals?


It is worth, perhaps, just parenthetically recalling that the ‘historic trend of 30 years towards fragmentation’ has witnessed the creation of the NAFTA accords (in 1994), of the European Union (Maastricht Treaty of 1993), of the euro currency (2002), the World Trade Organisation (1995)… The history of ‘fragmentation’ would seem to be a little bit more complicated than the ICC allows for.


To my mind, the whole question of ‘blocs or not blocs’ is anyway a schematic rabbit-hole down which I do not propose to go. ‘As revolutionaries the ICC has a duty to try to understand the dynamic of history’, said one ICC member, and I quite agree. However, taking ‘decomposition’ as an unchanging ‘historical abstraction’ (Marx) and then cherry-picking events to fit into your schema (sometimes rather in the way that a square peg fits into a round hole) is not the way to go about it.


Back when the ICC first formulated the notion of ‘decomposition’, it said – I think rightly – that the two main factors in the cohesion of the US bloc were the overwhelming power of the USA, and fear of a common enemy, the USSR. In the 1990s, the former remained essentially intact (just look at the figures for world defence spending), the latter had disappeared. Today, fear of Russia has returned with a vengeance, with fear of China as an added bonus (although most EU members are less concerned about China, which is a long way away, than they are about Russia, which is next door, it is worth noting that the last NATO summit was also attended by Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand amongst others).


The Western bloc during the Cold War by no means saw the disappearance of tensions between the various powers (think of Suez 1956, the French withdrawal from NATO’s military command and development of its own nuclear deterrent, the conflict between NATO allies Greece and Turkey over Cyprus: these are just three examples which spring immediately to mind). What held the whole thing together was fear of Russia. The current dissensions over how exactly to deal with Russia should be put in that context, as should – it goes without saying – the integration of Sweden and Finland into NATO, and the enormous increase in German defence spending (which is directed at Russia, not the USA).


The continuity of US policy


The ICC made much of the unpredictability of Trump, but if one takes a longer, historical view, the perspective looks rather different, to my mind. It is true that Trump’s ungentlemanly behaviour shocked and unnerved the Europeans, not to mention the Japanese; it is also true that the supine isolationism which dominates the Republican Party today poses a problem for US imperialism in general. However, there is clearly a continuity in US policy which Trump did nothing to overturn, quite the contrary:


- The ‘strategic shift’ towards Asia, and towards opposition to China, began under Obama, continued under Trump (launching the current tendency towards ‘deglobalisation’ though more verbally than in reality I think), and continues in spades under Biden.


- The exit from Afghanistan was negotiated under Trump and executed (incompetently) under Biden.


- Trump blustered and blackmailed the Europeans to increase their defence spending. With the war in Ukraine, under Biden that goal is achieved.


Given the perspective of Trump’s possible return to power, we should also keep in mind that the President is only one man, and is only there for four years. The state includes the biggest single part of the US economy: the Pentagon, which will undoubtedly resist tooth and nail any serious attempt to reduce the overall US footprint abroad.


The presentation talked of ‘circumstantial’ alliances. I confess that the meaning of the term is opaque to me. NATO (founded in 1949) is surely not a ‘circumstantial’ alliance, nor is the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, putting an end to decades of neutrality (including during the Cold War). As for Russia and China, is their alliance any more ‘circumstantial’ than that between Germany and Japan – or for that matter between Germany and Italy – in 1939? Indeed, if we consider the three wars of the 20th century, we can observe that whereas WWI and WWII both began before the alliances that fought them out were stabilised, the Cold War between two fully constituted blocs actually ended without a hot war breaking out (this is not to argue that this is cause and effect).


The rise of China


Lip-service was done to the importance of China, but it seems to me that one really cannot understand the situation today without completely integrating the key differences between the situation now and that of 1945-1990. I’ll name a few (taken almost at random and without claiming to be systematic):


- The ‘rise of China’ is much bigger than the expression implies. In fact, the whole weight of the world economy has shifted to the Far East: not just China but Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia are all important economic and potentially military players in their own right. India is also a major player here.


- The world economy (despite re-shoring) is globally integrated in a way inconceivable in the 20th century.


- Russia is now a major exporter of raw materials, including grain. In the 1980s, Russian (including Ukrainian) agriculture was unable to feed its own population.


- Electronics, the design and production of computer chips, concentrated in SE Asia (Taiwan and Korea) is now an element of critical importance both militarily and economically.

One small point to conclude here, raised by a friend of Internationalist Voice: the effect of new technology on military operations. I think (as I said) that this is an important point which deserves more attention. However, there is a danger of making the same mistake that Donald Rumsfeld made before the war in Iraq, of thinking that electronic war can replace ‘boots on the ground’; the war in Ukraine (like the American experience in Iraq) suggests the contrary.


So much for the ‘imperialist tensions’ side of things. I am well aware that I have by no means answered every question, nor have I even put forward a ‘framework’. To do so would demand far more in-depth analysis, and indeed greater discussion (and a much longer text). The general tendency seems to me clear enough however: Ukraine is a step towards generalised warfare between NATO-AUKUS-Quad and the China-Russia alliance. Only time will tell whether that will be the final outcome.


In 2014, the ICC published an article on the outbreak of WWI. One of the final paragraphs read as follows:


Let [the workers] remember that World War I was caused not by historical happenstance, but by the inexorable workings of capitalism and imperialism, that the world war opened a new period in history, an “epoch of wars and revolutions” as the Communist International called it. This period is still with us today, and the same forces that drove the world to war in 1914 are responsible today for the endless massacres in the Middle East and Africa, for the ever more dangerous tensions between China and its neighbours in the South China Sea.


I wrote that article and I still stand by it. More than ever, in fact.


The political defeat of the working class


What about the class struggle? As one of the few critical voices in the meeting said, and I entirely agree with him here, ‘the presentation talks specifically about the defeat of workers in Ukraine and mentions Russia, but the global and historical level of balance should be the starting point, taking into consideration the length and breath of the defeat of workers at the end of the 1980s’. I myself spoke of a ‘profound political defeat’ of the working class. The ‘Theses on Decomposition’ actually envisaged just such a situation: ‘the decomposition of society, which can only get worse, may in the years to come cut down the best forces of the proletariat and definitively compromise the perspective of communism. This is because, as capitalism rots, the resulting poison infects all the elements of society, including the proletariat’.


Because the ‘Theses’ have declared ‘Decomposition’ as ‘the final phase of capitalism’ (which is unprovable), they are unable to envisage such a political defeat as something that can be overcome. However, unlike an army, the working class cannot be definitively defeated: as long as capitalism exists, the working class exists, and remains potentially the revolutionary class and the bearer of communism.


The defeat or otherwise of the working class at any given point in time does, however, determine the ‘historic course’ – which is nothing more than the extrapolation into the foreseeable future of the present balance of class forces. And defeat is above all – as Bilan understood – political defeat. This is how WWII could be preceded, in France, by an enormous upsurge of economic class struggle (with some real gains, like two weeks paid holiday which remains iconic for many workers to this day), which led to profound political defeat behind the Popular Front government. It is also how (incidentally) strike days lost in Britain during WWII far exceeded those lost during WWI, despite the fact that during WWII they were illegal, without this leading to any movement against the war itself.


If you want to know what ‘political defeat’ looks like, then consider two aspects:


- In France, the area of Longwy and Denain (which in 1979, for the ICC, ‘showed the way forward’), that is, the northern French rust belt, is one of the main strongholds of Marine Le Pen’s far-right populist ‘Rassemblement National’ (indeed, large parts of the Stalinist CGT and PCF moved to the RN lock, stock, and barrel). And the same phenomenon is to be found all across the industrialised world (USA, Britain, the east of Germany, etc).


- The fragmentation, disarray, and – regrettably – general atmosphere of suspicion and ‘resentment’ (to use one speaker’s eloquent expression), that characterises the Communist Left and the internationalist milieu more generally, and which offers a striking contrast with the move towards regroupment during the 1970s.


Roughly speaking, the ICC schema seems to be (as it was in the 1970s), that the crisis will force workers to struggle, that this struggle will bring them up against the unions and the state, and that this will open the way to a break through in consciousness.


With fifty years behind us, we need to match the schema against reality. There was class struggle during the 1970s and 80s, bitter class struggle in many cases. Did it lead to the development of a perspective? It did not. One reason for this could be that the crisis did not affect the working class evenly: at the same time as the old industries were in decline, new ones were expanding and developing – IT, electronics, telecommunications, aerospace, etc, etc.


More, the high point of those struggles (as we can see with hindsight), was obviously Poland in 1980 when the working class more or less ran the country for months. Where did it end up? Bowing the knee to the Catholic Church, and – in 1989 – with Lech Walesa as president. One can argue about the whys and wherefores but the end result is undeniable.


The ICC during the meeting made much of the economic struggles during WWI leading to revolution in Russia and Germany. And it is true, in all likelihood, that economic self-defence will be a vital part of any revolutionary struggle. But what was left unsaid, is that the working class of Russia and Germany (and Europe generally) had been leavened for decades by social-democratic propaganda: above all, by the sense that a socialist perspective could exist as something more than just a dream. It is that sense of perspective that no longer exists, and without it there is no reason to suppose that economic struggle will lead to revolution. It could just as well lead to ‘chaos’. According to the ‘Theses’, ‘no mode of production can live, develop, maintain itself on a viable basis and ensure social cohesion, if it is unable to present a perspective for the whole of the society which it dominates’. I think that there is much truth in this, but the same holds true for the revolutionary class: if it cannot ‘present a perspective’, no amount of economic struggle will compensate for that absence.


Climate change and the question of 'class identity'


Finally, there is the question of ‘ecology’, or to be more specific, climate change. The question of how the working class can and should react to this is relatively new and far from straightforward.


According to the conclusion to the meeting, ‘The Theses on Decomposition said that the economic crisis remains fundamental because it directly affects workers, in contrast to ecological questions. This is the key to the recovery of class identity’. Or, to quote the ‘Theses’: ‘while the effects of decomposition (eg pollution, drugs, insecurity) hit the different strata of society in much the same way and form a fertile ground for aclassist campaigns and mystifications (ecology, anti-nuclear movements, anti-racist mobilisations, etc), the economic attacks (falling real wages, layoffs, increasing productivity, etc) resulting directly from the crisis hit the proletariat (ie the class that produces surplus value and confronts capitalism on this terrain) directly and specifically’.


One could take issue with quite a number of points here: ‘pollution’ (including climate change) is not a feature of decomposition but of capitalism since its beginnings; far from ‘the effects of decomposition hitting the different strata of society in much the same way’, they all hit the poorest sections of society (and so the working class) first and hardest; the crisis (as I mentioned above) by no means affects the whole working class in the same way or to the same extent. And so on.


All that aside, and leaving aside the question of what class identity actually is (or might be in the future), between now and 2100 – in other words, during the lifetime of workers in their 20s today – the working class is going to be directly confronted with the ‘ecological question’ in at least two different ways.


First, they will be confronted by government attempts to deal with climate change, such as the closure of coal mines (these efforts will be inadequate but they will happen) and maybe even oil or gas fields. What have communists to say about that? What, for example, should we say to coal miners in Poland (or elsewhere) faced today with the closure of their mines? Knowing as we do, that every month burning more coal reduces still further humanity’s chances of survival, can we really tell them ‘Fight to save your jobs’?


Second, at best, global warming is expected to lead to sea-level rises of between 1 and 2 metres on average. It has been calculated that some 3.5 million people in the UK alone will be confronted with annual flooding, that 2 million people in London will have to be rehoused, and that 80% of Cardiff will be under water (Bangladeshis, of whom 4.5 million have been forced from their homes today by flooding, might find this trivial, as indeed might the inhabitants of the suburbs around Sydney). The working class, including in the most developed countries, is about to be affected by ‘the ecological question’, in the most direct way possible.


I don’t think that it will really be an adequate response from communists to say ‘defend your wages and we’ll sort out the mess afterwards’. This is not by any means an easy question and I don’t pretend to have any easy answers, but it is not something that can be brushed aside.

At the end of the meeting, another ICC sympathiser asked ‘if the working class is defeated and the Third World War brewing, what does this imply for revolutionaries?’ An excellent question.


The importance of theoretical development and 'merciless self-criticism'


It has always been a basic principle of the ICC that revolutionary organisations may be larger or smaller depending on the state of the class struggle, their intervention will be determined by the state of the class struggle, but there is one facet of their activity that remains a constant responsibility: the development of the proletariat’s theoretical armament. Today, that means (as Bilan said) discussion and research ‘without taboos’, and as the ICC’s 21st Congress said, ‘merciless self-criticism’.


The ICC has since abandoned the critical orientation of its 21st Congress (as can be seen from the account of the 23rd). This is why my personal choice has been to work on theoretical clarification on an individual basis, and it has been my good fortune to have met a small group of fellow communists in which discussion is possible despite (or even thanks to) the many differences between us. This is, to my mind, the best way that I can contribute to a revolutionary future that I will not live to see.


The presidium called for attendees to ‘take position’, and invoked the importance of ‘clarity’. But the clarity needed to take position cannot be achieved without discussion. Moreover, it seems to me abundantly clear that the ICC itself is not very clear (as I have tried to show), and very much in need of discussion.


One final point on this question. The presentation concluded by saying that ‘The only possible answer is the world proletarian revolution which must be prepared by creating the conditions for the formation of a World Class Party’ (I presume this doesn’t mean ‘unlimited cakes and ale’).


As it stands, this statement is so vague as to be meaningless, and big general statements which hide all the fundamental questions are typical of centrism. One thing one can say, however, is that of all the ‘conditions for the formation of the Party’, the most fundamental is to understand the reasons for past defeats and to prepare the theoretical groundwork for the next upsurge of class struggle, if it should ever come to pass. This the ICC is ill-equipped to do since it cannot even recognise the reality of the present state of defeat.


Perhaps I am reading too much into an unfortunate turn of phrase, but this vague declaration sounds to me like an upending of the ICC’s original understanding of the relationship between Party and Class. Who is to ‘create the conditions’? It is the class struggle, not revolutionaries and their will, that ‘creates the conditions for the formation of a World Class Party’. The ICC in the 1970s used to be very clear about this, as we can see from this ICC intervention at the 2nd International Conference:


Today in all the discussions concerning a presence in the class, factory groups etc, we also recognise the problem of decadence and the counter-revolution which separated revolutionaries from the class. It is necessary to remember that this is a historic problem: there is no organisational solution to a historical problem. It is in the real practise of the class that this will be resolved (the emphasis is mine).


Lars Torvaldsson, 16/07/2022


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