I. The overall world situation
1) DURING THE last fifteen years, both the structural crisis of international capitalism and the crisis of leadership of the world working class have deepened.
The present phases of the capitalist crisis is characterised by a combination of factors, making it the most serious crisis of its history:
• the long period of economic depression and the long-term, far-reaching social crisis, made worse by an increasingly pronouned ecological crisis, which began towards the end of the 1960s;
• the deterioration in the international relationship of forces for capitalism, the imperialist defeat in Indochina in 1975 being the clearest expression of this;
• the accentuation of inter-capitalist contradictions and crises of bourgeois leadership, especially since the middle of the 1970s;
• the unprecedented organic strength of the working class, a product of the long period of post-war economic expansion;
• the growing force and extension of the movements for social and national liberation in the dominated countries.
2) This crisis deepened sharply in 1979 with the overthrow of the Shah's dictatorship in Iran, the revolutionary victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador.
The extension of the socialist revolution in Central America is a crucial challenge to imperialism. It is taking place in what was the preserve of American capitalism. It opens up revolutionary prespectives for the mass movements which are shaking up the ruling dictatorships in the Southern Cone. All this explains the violence of American imperialism's reaction and consequently the difficulty for the revolutionary movements to win a new victory.
More generally, the depth and brutality of the economic disaster and the structural crisis and of bourgeois rule in a series of semi-colonial countries will lead inevitably to large-scale social explosions. At the same time the big battalions of the working class in the imperialist countries are resisting step for step the capitalists' austerity and militarisation offensive.
The beginning of the political revolution in Poland also had a destabilising effect on international capitalism, especially in Europe. It confirmed the revolutionary potential of the working class and its capacity to bring an overall solution to the crisis of humanity. The resistance of the Polish workers, after December 1981, remains an important element of the international political conjuncture.
3) The structural deterioration of the international relationship of forces to the detriment of imperialism does not mean it is incapable of reacting.
American imperialism's quasi-political paralysis after its Indochinese defeat or when faced with the fall of the Shah and Somoza was only temporary and conjunctural. There were political reasons for this situation, mainly related to internal US politics.
From 1979 the imperialist counter-offensive became clearer and was stepped up a year later with the arrival in government of the Reagan administration.
The target of the counter-offensive is above all the colonial revolution in Central America and in the Middle East. In the imperialist countries it takes the form of an anti-working class austerity and rearmament policy. It is exerting increasing military and economic pressure on the Soviet Union without this amounting to a new period of the Cold War. For imperialism it is rather the case of constraining the bureaucracy, already in difficulty, to negotiate a new adjustment of the world relationship of forces from an unfavourable position.
4) In the short term the imperialist counter-offensive aims to block any new breakthrough of the revolution in the semi-colonial and semi-industrialised countries and is trying to roll back the revolution where it has marked up decisive victories, as in Nicaragua.
By reducing the masses' living standards, and through long-term unemployment which weakens the organised workers movement, it is seeking to create the conditions for large-scale attacks against the social gains and democratic rights of the working class in the imperialist countries (right to strike, trade union freedom, freedom to demonstrate etc).
This counter-offensive has already inflicted heavy defeats on the Turkish masses, with the establishment of the dictatorship in September 1980, and on the Palestinian and Lebanese masses as well as the PLO. The counter-revolutionary US intervention in Grenada is a defeat for the revolution on this island. It concretely shows US imperialism's intention to militarily attack the revolution in Central America. Certain sectors of the working class in the imperialist countries have suffered partial defeats.
But the imperialist counter-offensive has not been able to decisively defeat the working class of any of the imperialist countries, nor stabilise bourgeois rule in most of the semi-colonial and semi-industrialised countries. It has not been able to roll back the mass movement where it is on the advance, nor has it restored capitalism in any of the countries where it has been overturned.
It has therefore not succeeded in fundamentally changing the relationship of forces on a world scale.
A long-term capitalist solution to the crisis indeed presupposes something quite different to partial military or diplomatic successes and a gradual erosion of the forces of the workers movement. It requires a qualitative deterioration in the organisation of the working masses and sweeping defeats in a whole series of key countries.
The "safety-valves" which functioned in the last ten years are less and less able to absorb the shock waves of the crisis: export of capital to semi-industrialised countries of the "third world"; expansion of the market in these countries and the OPEC ones; growth in East-West trade; relocation of production centres internationally. Limited changes in the share-out of national income in the imperialist countries are far from sufficient for ensuring an adequate rise in the rate of profit. To do that it is necessary to impose a brutal cut in wages, a far-reaching dismantling of the social security systems and massive unemployment with much lower indemnity payments,
5) The dynamic of the present world situation is above all one of the interaction between the crisis of the international capitalist system, the crisis of the system of rule established in the bureaucratised workers states and the crisis of the organised mass movement.
a) The Soviet bureaucracy took advantage of the victory of the Indochinese revolution and imperialism's temporary paralysis to try and modify in its favour and without great cost the regional relationships of forces (Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia).
But from the beginning of the imperialist counter-offensive the Kremlin took a line of overall negotiations with imperialism, sacrificing if need be the mass movement of certain countries, as was confirmed at some cost in its attitude to the Palestinian movement at the time of the Zionist invasion in June 1982.
Within the framework of these overall negotiations the Soviet bureaucracy does continue to help certain national liberation movements while at the same time tries to limit the level of this aid in order to dispose of the maximum advantages in its relations with imperialism. The bureaucracy has to also take into account the existence of social and political forces partially outside its control. In a similar fashion neither does imperialism any longer control all the counter-revolutionary forces in play.
For its part the Chinese bureaucracy, through its "detente" with imperialism and the bourgeoisies of the ASEAN countries, has facilitated the bourgeois counter-offensive in South East Asia and has helped to limit the repercussions of the victory of the Indochinese revolution. In the framework of its overall reorientation" and of "de-Maoisation" it has however in the course of the last year once again taken its distance from imperialism.
Behind both the Soviet and the Chinese bureaucracies' basic attitudes to imperialism and the world revolution is their basic counter-revolutionary conservatism.
b) From the beginning of the austerity offensive the reformist bureaucracies have politically disarmed the working class by making a series of social agreements and pacts with the bourgeoisie and gradually capitulating to the economic and social objectives of big capital. They have thus contributed to the weakening of the organised workers movement in several important countries while at the same time the emergence of organised class struggle currents and, a fortiori, the building of an alternative revolutionary leadership have not developed to the extent of at least partially neutralising the negative effects of the bureaucratic betrayals. The crisis of leadership of the proletariat therefore remains the main obstacle preventing resolving the capitalist crisis by taking a socialist road.
We are therefore seeing a crisis of the workers movement as a whole: a crisis of strategy and of leadership which tends to determine and speed up a structural crisis of the representative organisations of the working class.
c) Finally the discredit of the "socialist alternative" disfigured by the bureaucratic regimes of the USSR, Eastern Europe or China holds back the workers movement of the imperialist countries and to a lesser extent of the semi-industrialised semi-colonial countries from taking the anti-capitalist road — despite the effects of the crisis and the deadly threat of the arms race.
The Cambodian tragedy, and the Chinese-Vietnamese wars have discredited socialism. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the occupation of the country and the type of war that the USSR army is carrying out, have facilitated the international imperialist counter-offensive and the campaigns aiming to discredit socialism. The political counter-revolution unleashed by the 13th December 1981 coup d'etat in Poland has further deepened this discredit.
This has less direct influence over the toiling masses of the semi-colonial countries particularly since the living and cultural standards of the USSR appear greatly superior to those of countries subject to imperialist pillage. Also the bureaucracy has given limited but real aid to certain revolutionary movements. However, new political space can be opened up between the Kremlin and various currents of these countries as a result of the experiences of the developing mass movement.
6) The process of capitalist industrialisation, with its technclogical choices and models of consumption, has been determined by short and medium-term profit motives calculated by each company separately on the basis of its particular interests. These choices and models have been copied by the ruling bureaucracies in the bureaucratised workers states. All these processes bring the world closer to an ecological disaster. The destruction of natural resources, along with actual catastrophes (e.g. Bhopal in India) is already at an advanced stage, especially in countries dominated by imperialism.
The cancerous effects of about 9 million synthetic chemical products are still largely unknown. Water and atmospheric pollution has already had disastrous effects on seas, rivers and forests. The "peaceful" use of atomic power as an energy source has already produced catastrophic accidents in both the imperialist and Eastern European countries. Each year about 3 per cent of the tropical forests are disappearing because of the demand for wood pulp in the imperialist countries and due to stock rearing — which leads to desertification, floods and the destruction of land suitable for cultivation.
7) The extent of the crisis of proletarian leadership on a world scale has meant that up to now in the main imperialist or dominated capitalist countries the mass movement has not come to directly pose the question of the revolutionary conquest of political power — the only means of tackling the economic crisis with a solution in the interests of the exploited masses.
So in the three sectors of the world revolution there will continue to be a long period of convulsive upheavals, struggles of great importance, pre-revolutionary crises followed by phases of conjunctural downturn, even new revolutionary explosions.
It is the outcome of these struggles which will decide the future of humanity. The crisis of capitalism can result in the long-term in the victory of the world socialist revolution or in humanity falling back into barbarism. Historically the solution of the crisis is impossible without the resolution of the crisis of the subjective factor, which is more than ever the main obstacle barring the road to socialism.
II. The crisis in the imperialist countries
8) In the imperialist countries the crisis is dominated by the effects of the long economic depression that began at the end of the 1960s and which has already been marked by a series of increasingly serious recessions (1970-71, 1974-75, 1980-82). Given the logic of the capitalist industrial cycle there can be short phases of recovery in production and national income like the one which began in 1983. But the tendency is still one of decline in the average long term rate of growth.
The main characteristics of the depression are the rise of long-term structural unemployment and the persistence of inflation. Taking just the imperialist countries, official unemployment has gone up from 10 million at the beginning of the 1970s to 20 million in 1975 and 30 million in 1982. It will probably reach 40 millions in the years to come without even taking into account all those — and especially women — "who voluntarily withdraw from the labour market" and are no longer registered in the unemployment figures.
While inflation has declined a little, particularly under the effects of credit restriction measures taken by nearly all the imperialist governments, it continues at levels without common measure with a "stable monetary system". Up to now inflation has prevented a fall in prices and incomes really corresponding to the decline in values expressed in stable monetary terms. Consequently the decline in production is still inferior to that of the 1929-32 period. The persistence of inflation however threatens the world system of credit and banking with collapse.
This threat presents the international bourgeoisie with a harrowing choice. If it chooses to limit inflation at all costs it will continue to accentuate credit restrictions which would threaten important sectors of world capitalist industry with collapse and cause a catastrophic reduction in world trade, and could result in a dislocation of the world market. If it lets inflation rage in order to absorb the crisis it runs the risk of a headlong lurch to a financial "crash."
This is why the safeguard measures prepared by organisations like the IMF and the International Settlements Bank tend to come up against a decisive obstacle: how to divide up the costs of the rescue operations between different central banks, i.e., between the different imperialist powers in the eventuality of a threatened collapse of a major bank.
Indeed it was above all the inflation of credit which fed the long period of post-war economic growth based on the expansion of credit to capitalist companies, to consumers and to imperialist and semicolonial governments.
To absorb the effects of the 1974-5 recession there was an explosive growth in credit to so-called "third world" countries and bureaucratised workers states. Today the total sum of public and private debts (in dollars) has reached the fantastic figure of $7,000 billion, including more than $800 billion just for the "third world" countries.
Within this mass of debt there is a very big amount owed by private capitalist firms — a good number of whom are on the edge of bankruptcy (including important multi-national companies) or by imperialist governments, (France, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Spain, Denmark). These debts are often concentrated in the hands of a few banks. So, the actual resources of these banks hardly permit them to withstand their debtors defaulting. The bankruptcy of a few big debtors from the "third world" could provoke a chain reaction leading to a massive withdrawal of deposits and then to the collapse of the banks themselves. The imperialist rulers are conscious of this and seek to ward off such a situation arising (cf. the agreement reached in Mexico). However efficient the measures they take, they cannot manage to eliminate the roots of this world credit crisis. The next episode will include the multiplication of serious tensions caused by the indebtedness of a large number of countries. At the same time there will be a stronger "policing" role played by international bodies (above all the IMF). The struggle against capitalist solutions to the debt problem is therefore a vital task.
The imperialist bourgeoisie have drawn the lessons of the 1929-32 "crash" by creating national systems controlling the banks with the latter being bailed out in case of crisis by the Central Bank. But on the international level there is no such "lender of the last resort". A real "central bank of central banks" on the international scale would require the existence of an international capitalist state, that is the disappearance of inter-imperialist competition. In a period of crisis this intensifies rather than declines.
Whatever measures prepared and inter-imperialist compromises made (after increasingly tough bargaining and sharp conflicts), the risk of a banking crash cannot be ruled out. While we should be wary of believing in the inevitability of a "black Thursday" on a world scale, it is right to take into consideration what this risk implies in a permanent way for the actions of the most advanced capitalist states and for the evolution of the relationship of forces in the world.
9) As inter-imperialist competition deepens it produces strong pressure in favour of protectionism which show the limits of free-trade during periods of depression. Each imperialist power seeks salvation through exports, ie., in plans to export unemployment since the total volume of exports is stagnant.
This aggravation of inter-imperialist competition is taking place when the supremacy of American imperialism has seriously weakened. The productivity advantages it enjoyed for several decades over its main Japanese or European competitors have been eroded (cars, steel, machine tools, electronic equipment, robots).
The American imperialists have been overtaken althogether by Japanese capital in important regions of Asia (exports, investments). Furthermore Japanese and European imperialists are trying to challenge the hegemony of American capital in certain parts of the Middle East and Latin America, and even on the American domestic market. The European imperialists have established bridgeheads on the markets of the European bureaucratised workers states which increases their economic and political contradictions with the United States. American imperialism reacts by trying to compensate for this weakening by a re-industrialisation effort particularly in high technology sectors, by monetary manipulations and by using its military superiority (which is still formidable). Compared to its European competitors it has the advantage of a unified and powerful state apparatus to help achieve these objectives. But it runs a major risk with this. If it goes too far in the abuse of its political and military superiorty to weaken or put the squeeze on its European allies/competitors it can push them to develop their own arms industry, even an independent army (including nuclear weapons). The European imperialists already have the means to do that.
More generally, the accentuation of inter-imperialist competition obliges American imperialism to adopt a policy where its own interests take the priority more and more over the overall interests of the imperialist system. The crisis of bourgeois political leadership which is shown first in each of the main imperialist countries thus tends to be transposed onto the world level. While since the Second World War and up to the beginning of the 1970s American imperialist hegemony was a factor of relative stabilisation of the system, Washington's policy has become today a factor de-stabilising capitalist order on the international scale. This de-stabilisation was produced by the crisis. It in turn deepens this crisis.
The European Economic Community (EEC) has undergone serious tensions seen in the failure to stabilise the European Monetary System, repeated changes in the inter-European exchange rate and the difficulty of setting up a dynamic and effective industrial policy. There are also problems with the deepening contradictions of the agricultural policy and the resistance from many quarters to the proposed membership of Spain and Portuagal. Nevertheless, on the commercial level and in the domains of military and space production, EEC integration has stood up well to the shockwaves of the depression. The return in force of protectionist tendencies operates more between the EEC, Japan and the USA than on an inter-European level. The toughest protectionist measures furthermore affect the industrial exports of the dominated semi-industrialised countries.
West German imperialism had been one of the "motors" of post-war economic expansion and of the "moderation" of the crisis during the 1970s. It owed this privileged situation to its positions won on the world market (machinery, electronic equipment, cars) due to the progress in productivity achieved, as well as its greater internal political and social stability. The latter was notably due to the reforms carried out during the social democratic years of power — in turn made possible by the long period of economic growth.
But already towards the end of Helmut Schmidt's term of office these advantages had disappeared. The indebtedness of the East European and semi-colonial semi-industrialised countries had already put a brake on the expansion of German exports. The slowdown in growth, then the 1980-82 recession, caused a deficit in public finances and social security which led the bourgeosie to impose an austerity policy, which has already been stepped up after the arrival in government of the CDU. The basis of social stability has thus been eroded, favouring a recovery of working class militancy and differentiations within the trade unions.
Japanese imperialism continued to improve its positions in inter-imperialist competition up to the end of the 1970s. Today the Japanese economic miracle is reaching its end. The worsening of the 1980-82 international recession marked the limits of Japanese commercial expansion. Certain branches of industry like steel, shipbuilding and the auto-industry are already affected by surplus capacity and lack of sales, exactly as in North America and Europe, although it occurred here some years later. The crisis of public spending looks as though it will be severe.
Among the other factors which weaken Japanese imperialism's position in inter-imperialist competition is its extreme dependence on imported raw materials and the obvious absence of the means to defend its positions by politico-military capacity comparable to that of the United States or even of the European imperialists. That is why, just like its competitors, Japan will not again have the high growth rates of previous decades.
10) The effects of the crisis on the social and political relationship of forces inside the imperialist countreis are uneven.
The bourgeoisie must impose austerity on the workers and break the resistance of the workers movement in order to overcome the crisis in its favour. It has launched a sweeping social and political offensive to achieve these ends:
• an offensive against jobs and living standards;
• calling into question the social security and social benefits systems;
• it aims to privatise nationalised sectors;
• attacks the public sector and public education;
• develops racist propaganda and implements anti-immigrant policies;
• targets the employment of working women;
• and develops an ideological offensive replete with the most reactionary ideas.
This programme has begun to be applied in a substantial way in countries where the right-wing parties are in power (USA, Japan, Great Britain, West Germany ...), but also, albeit more partially, in countries where the workers parties are in government (France, Spain, Greece ...). For the bourgeoisie it is not a "maximum" programme. It must imperatively impose its solution in order to resolve the crisis to its advantage.
This offensive has borne its first fruits: in the first place the considerable increase in the number of unemployed. It should be noted that unemployment began by affecting the most vulnerable sectors of the working class but is now hitting the industrial strongholds.
The bourgeois offensive has been greatly facilitated by the attitude of the traditional leaderships of the workers movement — complicit passivity when faced with the capitalists' plans; submission to the demands of the bourgeoisie when they are in government; divided when there are workers mobilisations, the social democrats and the CPs have spared no efforts in holding back, diverting mobilisations and preventing an overall fightback against the bourgeoisie's attacks.
So today we see Mitterrand, Gonzalez and Papendreou align themselves with capitalist plans and prepare the way for a return of the right wing, just as Callaghan and Schmidt paved the way for Thatcher and Kohl. The social democrat Craxi is a crutch for the Christian Democrats. In Belgium political and trade union divisions made possible the blocking of the public sector workers mobilisation and gave a reprieve to the government.
This policy of the traditional leaderships has allowed the bourgeoisie to strike serious blows against the working class. The working class has suffered significant partial defeats in a series of countries. Revolutionary marxists have to take this into account when working out their tactics.
The limited and uneven character of the initial fightback of the working class is explained by the very mechanisms of the crisis. Those first hit were the more vulnerable and less organised sectors of the proletariat: immigrant workers, women, youth, older sectors — all of whom were insufficiently defended by an overall class solidarity.
Reactionary forces have taken advantage of this situation and of the effects on the working class of all the reformist policies concerning immigrant workers. They have launched xenophobic campaigns that have found a certain audience among some popular layers. The big battalions of the workers movement only began to be hit hard later on: around 1979-80 the steel industry in Walloon Belgium, France, UK and West Germany; Fiat in Italy, British Leyland, AEG in Germany etc. As the crisis deepens and the social security system is attacked by austerity measures movements of mass resistance will begin to gather strength among these key sectors of the working class.
More generally the European workers movement found itself — to varying degrees — thrown onto the defensive from 1975-76 on, not just because of the economic crisis but also as a result of political factors. The main workers parties actively contributed to the victory of the "democratic counter-revolution" in Portugal. They favoured the establishment of a parliamentary-monarchist regime in Spain and the stabilisation of bourgeois regimes rocked by the first upheavals of the crisis.
Finally the forms of fightback used by the working class vanguard in the 1960-75 period of expansion have lost their effectiveness. Social pacts and austerity policies implemented by the reformists have increased the disarray of the working class. In many countries important sectors of the trade union bureaucracy (including those considered to be left-wing) support the protectionist campaign of certain sections of the bosses. All these elements have accentuated divisions inside the working class and are a factor in the fragmented and dispersed nature of the initial large-scale working class fightbacks in most imperialist countries.
The disarray of the workers movement faced with the crisis and the partial defeats suffered on the economic and political levels (Great Britain) have led in some countries — particularly in Spain and France — to an initial weakening of the trade union movement, especially trade union membership. But:
a) this tendency is far from universal. It practically does not affect the smaller northern European countries. It has only begun in West Germany;
b) in most countries it is without any common measure with the extent of unemployment — ie., qualitatively different from the weakening of the trade unions which accompanied the 1929-34 crisis;
c) it is very contradictory since the decline in trade union membership can be accompanied by a maintenance of voting levels in elections to workplace councils/committees (Spain) and working class militancy in the workplace, industrial sectors or towns.
On the other hand, reformist election victories in France, Greece and Spain and to a lesser extent in Sweden periodically express, in a deformed way, the basic social relationship of forces and the opposition of the toiling masses to the growth of unemployment and the continued erosion of their living standards. This sentiment of opposition, in the absence of any class struggle alternative, is channelled onto the electoral terrain. But the dynamic of these "reformist" victories is very limited, even in the most favourable of cases, due to the fact that they come after a period of setbacks and divisions of the workers movement and not as the result of powerful working class mobilisations demanding immediate anti-capitalist measures. In these conditions reformist governments are still acceptable alternatives — but not the preferred one — for the bourgeoisies.
11) The situation in the European imperialist countries is far from being stabilised.
a) The different types of bourgeois governments have been unable to overcome the bourgeoisies' crisis of leadership.
• The West German reactionary government is in the process of losing its credibility and its re-election in 1987 is threatened by the decline of its Liberal partner inside the coalition. If the bourgeois parties win only a minority of votes in the 1987 general election it would seriously sharpen the period of instability opened up in the heart of imperialist Europe.
• Independently of who is in government — bourgeois parties or the social democrats — in recent years we have seen a development of working class resistance. The first signs of a revival in more extensive working class struggles have already appeared in Portugal (1982), Belgium (1982-84), in Italy with the formidable fighback of the factory councils and the working class against the decree on the sliding scale (spring 1984), in West Germany (strike for the 35-hour working week in the engineering and print industry in 1984), as well as in Spain (resistance against factory closures).
• The highpoint of this resistance to bourgeois government's austerity plans is the nearly year-long strike of the British miners, which shows the potential of the present resistance.
b) Imperialism's re-militarisation offensive has triggered off a broad mass movement which generally functions outside the control of the traditional working class organisations. Millions of people have mobilised for the first time in Western Europe against one of the pillars of this imperialist counter-offensive. A majority of the population is questioning for the first time the international strategy of the West German, British and Italian bourgeoisies — their pro-Atlanticist positions and membership of Nato. By influencing the traditional working class organisations which share this general approach, this movement is also putting into question — particularly in West Germany — the "consensus on international policy" which was one of the foundations of social stability.
c) In the past, the reformist leaderships and apparatuses, whether social-democratic, Euro-communist or Stalinist, after having built up positions in bourgeois state institutions, bowed to the logic of profit and were thus constrained to follow a bourgeois socio-economic policy for the crisis. In these conditions, differentiations inside the traditional mass organisations, developed in a rather complex way, varying according to the country.
The only "classical recomposition" inside the European working class is today unfolding in Great Britain where a left wing has emerged within the Labour Party (and to a lesser extent in the trade unions). This does not mean that there will not be similar developments in other countries in the future.
Most parties of a Stalinist origin are affected by a deep crisis of political orientation and in part by a process of disintegration (Spain, Holland, Great Britain, Belgium) or of a qualitative weakening (France), without there being the emergence of authentic left currents. In the same way, this disenchantment with the traditional leaderships is only exceptionally expressed in the emergence of structured currents in the trade unions on specific questions (Italy, Belgium) which does not challenge the ability of the traditional parties to channel militancy onto the electoral level. In West Germany, as well as in Austria, social democracy's loss of attraction has had concrete consequences in the formation of new "alternative" or "green" parties which bite into social-democratic electoral support and to a large extent paralyses its internal differentiation.
All these developments require a specific response from the European sections of the Fourth International.
This process will follow a different course in each of the imperialist countries although it will be influenced by class struggles internationally (cf. the miners' strike in Great Britain today). Upheavals and regroupments inside the traditional workers organisations, produced by the social and political effects of the crisis cannot be ruled out. That creates a new margin of manoeuvre for revolutionaries and presents them with the task of deepening these differentiations, which also exist inside the apparatuses.
12) However neither the stagnation or temporary downturn of the strike movement, nor the apparent depoliticisation of young people, nor the ideological offensive of the right and extreme right, justify drawing impressionistic conclusions on the overall situation. What is on the agenda in capitalist Europe is not a capitalist solution to the crisis through the accumulation of gradual defeats and without any fight from the working class, or collapse of the revolutionary alternative. No, rather we will see mass reactions against the unbearable blows of the crisis and the beginning of a recomposition of the workers movement. At the same time we will see the negative effects of the reformist experiences on workers morale and militancy. One of these two processes will finally win out over the other. The deepening of the capitalist crisis, the crisis of bourgeois political leadership, the maintenance of potential working class militancy, and the beginning of recomposition of the workers movement mean that sharp turns in the situation remain on the agenda in a whole series of countries.
In the United States, the repeated sell-outs of the trade union bureaucracy to imperialism and the bosses, its thoroughgoing integration in the bourgeois state apparatus and the two-party system, the progressive shift of industry to the south and west where most workers are not trade unionised, have deeply weakened the trade union movement. The capitalist counter-offensive has thus made more gains than in Europe, Japan, Australia or Canada. But working-class resistance is beginning to emerge against the intolerable concessions that the bosses and state have wrested from the bureaucrats under Reagan. The initial fightback which involves sections of the working class and Black masses will continue to develop. Such struggles could go as far as raising the question of working class political independence and a break with the two-party system, particularly among the Black masses. The struggle for the emergence of a mass labour party and a Black party independent of the bourgeoisie is becoming more and more relevant.
13) The first urgent priority is to oppose any defeatism as well as any underestimation of the seriousness of the crisis, its length and its possible results (poverty, more repressive regimes, dictatorships, imperialist counter-revolutionary wars).
The decisive struggles are in front of us and not behind us.
The capacity for struggle of the workers and social movements remains immense. This is what underlies the possibility of building our organisations: we are not in a period of growing working class passivity, whatever the temporary setbacks. But possible victories depend more than ever on building a revolutionary leadership effectively able to carry out its tasks.
This will not be done automatically. Revolutionary Marxists face a challenge. Confonted with the numerous "detours" taken by the radicalisation and recomposition in capitalist Europe, all the revolutionary Marxist arsenal of tactics and strategy is necessary according to the particular conditions of each country: working as a fraction in other parties; privileged unity of action with other revolutionary organisations including fusion proposals; entrism etc.
But whatever the adopted tactic, the workers united front must be at the heart of our political line in the different countries of capitalist Europe. No tactic can go around the organised workers movement which is under the hold of reformism. No overall political line — addressed to the working masses — can be worked out without placing the workers united front approach at the centre of this line.
None of these tactics should be interpreted as being an alternative to a permanent effort to root our own forces in the working class in order to build class struggle currents in the trade unions or to the need for national political initiatives.
III. The crisis in the underdeveloped countries
14) The semi-colonial and semi-industrialised countries which account for a majority of the world population, entered the crisis suddenly in 1979-80, many of them some time after the imperialist countries. Their situation became even worse in 1981, 1982 and 1983.
They have experienced a drop in production, a decline in the volume and value of their exports, and a drastic cut in employment in a situation where they were already chronically plagued by unemployment and under-employment. Their per capita income is further reduced by demographic growth. Proletarian and semi-proletarian popular layers are hit hard and directly. The income of the urban and rural petty-bourgeoisie is falling rapidly. Social inequality increases relentlessly. The scanty infrastructure of public equipment and services is in process of being dismantled. The nutrition and health situation is deteriorating dramatically. Capitalist and imperialist super-exploitation have made a new leap forward.
Insofar as these countries underwent a more thorough-going integration into the world market over the last few decades, the first effects of the 1974-1975 recession were reflected in a growing balance of payments deficit. Their debts snowballed and reached unprecedented heights in 1982, giving imperialism the means to press for and impose extraordinarily brutal austerity policies, thereby aggravating the social and political crisis.
Moreover, the onset of the crisis further widened the spectrum of differentiation, among the countries of the so-called "Third World".
15) In the poorest countries, mainly in Africa, but also in South Asia and Latin America, the crisis has taken on the dimension of a catastrophe. The standard of living of the popular masses has fallen below the "minimum threshold" set by the thugs of the World Bank. Broader and broader layers are not getting the daily food intake specifically needed by inhabitants of these regions.
Famine has struck the bulk of the people of whole countries: the Sahel, Ethiopia, Uganda, Chad, Bangladesh, north-east Brazil, Zaire and Ghana. The scourge of famine has never struck so massively in recent decades, yet imperialist countries are implementing a policy of subsidies to reduce their grain-producing capacity and keep prices up.
Wherever market relations developed in the countryside, they have led either to the near-destruction of food production, or to considerable reduction of the share of that production consumed on the farm — the farmer must first produce for the market if he wants to be in a position to secure the goods needed to reproduce his labour power. Still smarting from the deep upheavals of their agrarian structure set in motion at least in part by agri-business, these countries have to import an ever-increasing share of their food. These imports weigh heavily on a balance of payments already skewed by the drop in the prices of some of their export goods and the increase of the prices of manufactured goods, energy and interest on their debt!
In this context, the International Monetary Fund's "stabilisation programmes" work to spread and deepen the recessionary tide. The subjection of these dependent economies to the relentless logic of the law of value pushes them backwards even further. The process of social decomposition gains momentum with a twofold result: hunger, massive unemployment, galloping under-employment and the unchecked drop of incomes on one side; unlimited corruption and "doomsday" policies of the ruling classes on the other.
These poorest countries, in addition to their most immediate particular features, display all the classical characteristics of semi-colonial countries: predominance of agriculture and agricultural production, key role of raw materials and agricultural goods in their exports, a puny industrial base almost entirely oriented to the final phase of production of consumers' goods, weak development of the industrial proletariat and decisive weight of the peasantry which is becoming increasingly socially differentiated, direct control of imperialism over the decisive sectors...
As a result, some of these countries are faced with the perspective of acute social explosions and political convulsions that can lead to pre-revolutionary or revolutionary crises.
16) In the course of the last decade semi-industrialised countries have emerged within the group of semi-colonial countries. These semi-industrial countries, although still dominated by imperialism through the mechanisms of technology, credit, commercial (insurance, transport, distribution) and institutional links (IMF, GATT, trade agreements), no long have all the specific characteristics of underdevelopment.
Even if dependence on imperialist loans is greater than ever there is an important difference between imperialist property and dependence on credit or loans.
Some have developed a permanent industrial base, even a heavy industry sector, and exports these products, with an even greater presence of imperialist companies but also of the "national" state: Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Argentina, Turkey, South Africa, Taiwan and Singapore. In a number of these countries the proletariat is already the majority of the working population and the bourgeoisie is qualitatively stronger than in the poorest countries.
Others have developed large capital reserves: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Persian Gulf emirates. Finally, some have an initial industrial base: Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Colombia, Venezuela, Iran.
In all these countries, the state plays an essential role in mobilising capital (through the banks and various financial institutions), in investments (in heavy industry, but also in other branches), and therefore, directly or indirectly, in the consolidation of a national bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie whose industrial and agricultural workforce is decisively managed by the state, is subject to the international division of labour caused by imperialist expansion but, at the same time, strives to improve its rank in this hierarchical system; hence its vacillations between subordination and attempts to loosen the grip. However, the crisis has considerably narrowed the margin of maneouvre of these bourgeoisies.
These countries are entering the crisis from a specific situation determined by a number of factors:
a) The end of the opportunities for sustained growth through broadening the domestic market, through a resumption and significant increase of imports, or through new autonomous industrialisation drives. This economic dead-end has considerably altered the social and political atmosphere, as compared to the previous period. As a result, these bourgeoisies are looking for closer alliances with multinational firms and banks, either to try and change the position of a given exportoriented industrial sector through technological input, or to partly substitute direct imperialist investment for the assumption of new debts that have now reached the limit of what is tolerable, or, finally, to mobilise capital.
b) Semi-industrialisation has considerably strengthened the social weight and even the political role of the industrial proletariat. The crisis and austerity policies make the super-exploitation even more severe (with direct attacks on wages, brutal speedups, a lengthening of the workday) at the same time as they elicit resistance movements from the workers.
Accelerated capitalist penetration into the countryside has led to the proletarianisation of a new layer of the peasantry and to the subjection of a growing number of small individual landowners, farmers, and sharecroppers to the needs of capitalist agriculture. This has caused a deep mutation of work relations in the countryside and a renewed explosiveness of the agrarian question. In turn, this agrarian crisis feeds a mass exodus towards the large urban centres, especially towards the giant slums that surround them. These peasants, impoverished or driven off, constitute a reserve pool of labour that capital can draw on, as it pleases, for the construction industry or the vast network of semi-industrial subcontracting outfits, just as the large landowners can, at harvest time. The "marginalisation" of these pauperised masses corresponds to the needs of capitalist accumulation. Super-exploitation takes the most violent forms: the growth of child labour; the maximum lengthening of the working week; the most extreme casualisation of employment; the lack of any form of contract and of the most elementary social benefits; severe accidents.
c) The fact that, over and above the unresolved tasks of the national-democratic revolution (the land question, independence from imperialism, the elimination of dictatorships, the conquest of fundamental democratic rights, the separation of church and state, the conquest of elementary democratic rights for women ...), the social demands of the wage earning and pauperised urban masses are now posed.
In these semi-industrialised countries, the consequences of the government's capitulation to the plans of the IMF are terrifying. Wages collapse under the impact of inflation, the freezes imposed by the state and the pressure of the industrial reserve army. The employment situation is decaying rapidly. Public expenditure, especially social expenditures, are contracting. A drop in investment ensues under the double blow of reduced real demand and the restriction of expenditures for public infrastructure.
This has called into question the very model of development these bourgeoisies implemented with the blessing of imperialism. It is most unlikely, unless the international capitalist system collapsed, that a new wave of import-substitution could emerge, this time in the field of equipment goods.
Of course, we cannot totally exclude that the ruling classes might demagogically play their nationalist card, or that factions might appear in their midst and momentarily try to arouse some popular support for a nationalist campaign against the effects of imperialist aggression. But such attempts to legitimate their rule by resorting to populist nationalism cannot succeed because of the extent of the bourgeoisie's dependence and because of the exploited masses' advances in organisation and consciousness. The example of the nationalisation of the banks by the Mexican government in 1982 is an indication of this: its political impact was quite narrow and short-lived since the government immediately rushed to make concessions to international capital.
By contrast, in a number of countries where society is less differentiated, where the pauperisation of the urban and rural masses is increasing but their social weight and organisation remain limited, nationalist and populist forces can come to the fore. They will draw their strength from the ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie and plebeian masses. This can be the pattern in some African and Asian countries (Iran, Ghana, Upper Volta (Burkina)).
17) In a growing number of dominated countries, increased urbanisation and the uneven strengthening of the proletariat has caused the emergence of trade union organisations (sometimes confined to a single sector) or the rapid "massification" of existing unions, and sometimes a more or less explicit breakaway of some trade union sectors from the control the state apparatus or its client parties exercised over them (Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Tunisia ...).
Even in the least developed countries of Africa and Asia, urbanisation has considerably modified the conditions in which the working class forms. An increasing proportion of the male and female workers, even when their job is temporary, now come from an urban milieu and have had some schooling. The expansion of the state industrial sector often provided a launching pad for the first stage of organisation of a wage-earning layer, even though the state's role as the employer enabled various state institutions to establish their grip over the trade unions.
Thus, in dominated capitalist countries as a whole, the tendency is for trade unions to be strengthened, extended or rebuilt. This is a starting point for the fight for the achievement of class independence.
In attempting to annihilate these forms of unionisation, the employers can resort to the massive "underworld" of the proletariat, the host of workers without contracts, of casual workers (cf. the bosses' answer to the 1982-1983 Bombay textile strike), or even to the harshest repression of trade union militants through official or unofficial channels.
Coming on the heels of a period in which the real wages of large layers of the population of the dominated countries most often stagnated or regressed, the harsh austerity moves are being desparately resisted by the workers. A series of key demands were brought out by the struggles of the Indian textile workers, the Brazilian and Mexican metalworkers, and the Bolivian miners: the demand for a unified minimum wage, a wage increase to catch up with inflation, stable employment, rehiring of fired trade union activists, and even workers control over production and management in the case of the Bolivian mines. Once they pass a certain threshold, these struggles raise the problem of how they should be generalised (civic work stoppage or general strike) and what overall political perspective they should be linked to.
18) The agrarian crisis has generated an explosion of peasant mobilisations and struggles, often in the form of land seizures, of the defence of reclaimed lands against a threatened takeover by large landowners, of struggles over the price at which crops will be sold (to multinational firms as well as to the state) or over the requirements to obtain credit... Along with this, a process of unionisation of the pauperised peasant masses has emerged (in Brazil, in Mexico, in Bolivia, in Peru, in the Philippines...). This process puts demands on the agenda that deal with the contracts issued by agribusiness firms and large landowners who determine access to land, to natural resources (water), and the working conditions and health and food standards on plantations.
These mobilisations are one of the main sources of strength of the armed struggle movements, as for example in the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, on which industrial and commercial crops take 50 per cent of the land. The peasant struggles often combine with national demands (language, traditional forms of co-operation), as seen in the Philippines, Guatemala or Bolivia.
The various and many links that exist between the slumdwelling masses, the pauperised peasants and the proletariat provide fertile ground for the convergence of their struggles. While this junction is not automatic, it is made feasible by the growing closeness of their concrete material interests, provided the combative sectors of the workers and union movement make a conscious effort to put forward overall responses to the needs of these masses that are the motor force of the socialist revolution.
19) There is a crying contradiction between the gigantic dimension of the social and economic crisis, the aggressiveness of imperialism, the extent to which the most deprived societies have decomposed, and the lack of revolutionary leadership on an international scale. Out of it flow the tragedies and convulsions of the dominated countries, such as the expulsion of millions of African workers from Nigeria, or the massacre of refugees from Bangladesh and Nepal in Assam (India).
In this epoch of the putrefaction of imperialism, partial victories won by national liberation movements (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau for example) or the advance of the mass movement (Brazil, Bolivia) can be rapidly undermined. The combined forces of imperialism and the exploiting bourgeoisies will not stop hurling new attacks against the masses, to throw them back. Their task will be so much the easier where the recognised leaderships of the workers and popular movement have helped to create the illusion that the revolution must pause at a bourgeois democratic stage, or that it should be content, when precarious democratic "openings" occur, to use the new opportunities without consciously preparing the unavoidable showdowns.
The March 1983 Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in New Delhi showed that the bourgeoisies of dominated countries have decided to concentrate their complaints around the question of their increasing debt, and consign to oblivion a series of demands that they had raised in the 1970s along with their call for a new economic order and increased participation in the sharing of surplus value. This backslide bears witness to the change in the relationship of forces brought about by the crisis and the imperialist counter-offensive.
While social explosiveness is high, while the crisis of bourgeois rule and political instability are obvious, while mass mobilisations follow in close succession, the advance of the colonial revolution is by no means following a straight line. Its course is uneven and halting.
20) India represents a case apart. The Indian bourgeoisie, among the bourgeoisies of the dependent semi-industrialised countries, is the most independent in relation to imperialism. After independence it succeeded in imposing a marked isolation of its domestic market from the world market in order to integrate the latter more effectively later. This has made it possible in particular to maintain an annual growth rate of 4.5 per cent since 1980 while at the same time the main imperialist countries, then the dependent semi-industrialised countries, were successively hit by recession.
At the present time the role of foreign capital and exports is increasing. But the growth of Indian capitalism continues to be mainly oriented to the domestic market. It is held back by: the persistence of mass poverty and growing unemployment that economic development has not overcome; bottlenecks in the infrastructure; and the imbalance between agriculture and industry.
This relative dynamism of Indian capitalism contrasts sharply with an endemic crisis of political instability. The Congress party, which traditionally has had the role of the bourgeoisie's political leadership, saw its hegemony eroded from the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. There are growing tensions inside the ruling class bloc (specifically between the industrial bourgeoisie and the rich peasants) and between the industrial and rural proletariat on one side and the exploiters on the other. These tensions result in temporary compromises which give less and less satisfaction to the forces involved and are more than ever shortlived. The very big victory of the Congress party in the December 1984 elections under the new leadership of Rajiv Gandhi did not overcome this instability and endemic crisis of bourgeois political leadership. The increasing recourse to Hindu nationalism as the dominant ideology can only deepen the political crisis in a multi-national and multi-linguistic country.
In the Indian sub-continent the workers movement has undergone more than a decade of continuous weakening — marked in pariticular by: serious defeats of the Indian working class (failure of the public sector strike in Bangalore in the 1970s and the long strike of the textile workers in 1983-84); the establishment of the military dictatorship in Pakistan, and the collapse of the mass influence of the traditional parties of the working class in Sri Lanka, where the bourgeoisie has succeeded in imposing on the masses a choice between two bourgeois forms of rule. This deterioration is basically due to the constant class collaborationist policy of the traditional leaderships of the workers movement and other oppressed layers. It has facilitated ethnic/religious divisions (communalism) which is manipulated to great effect by the bourgeois state in India and Sri Lanka, which in turn accentuates the weakening of the workers movement.
But there are signs that indicate that this tendency could be reversed in a not too distant future. It is necessary to look at the sub-continent as a whole and not as a simple addition of national tendencies in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. National-communalist tensions have plunged Pakistan and Sri Lanka into a sharp crisis. Fundamentally these are crises which are shaking up the whole subcontinent. It is the Indian bourgeoisie who in the last analysis must take responsibility for ensuring a relative stability of bourgeois order in the subcontinent as a whole, within the framework of a long-term plan for establishing its hegemony over the whole region.
21) In several Islamic countries, nationalist experiences, first the Nasserist, then the Ba'athist, came up against intractable problems as a result of the social consequences of their economic policies (only briefly concealed by the oil boom), of the corruption which spread like gangrene among the new ruling layers, of the increasing breadth of the process of private capital accumulation (of which the Egyptian Infitah is the most advanced expression), and of their growing adaptation to the requirements of imperialism.
Repression and a lasting drop in oil revenues have exacerbated these social contradictions. The cowardice these regimes displayed in their support for the Palestinian liberation movement dealt a harsh blow to their prestige in the eyes of broad layers of the masses. This created a fertile breeding ground for the Islamic fundamentalist current. The petty and narrow-minded outlook of the organisations identified with socialism and the workers movement, their acceptance of the role of auxiliaries of the ruling regimes, along with the discredit of the ruling bureaucracies helped that current to spread.
In the name of Islam, fundamentalism opposes both imperialist oppression and its domestic representatives. This enables it to gain a hearing among the popular layers whose pressure in turn imparts a populist hue to the fundamentalist current. Nevertheless, the determining social base of Islamic fundamentalism remains located in the traditional layers of the small and medium bourgeoisie who have run into problems as a result of the development of capitalism under the aegis of nationalist regimes or of dictatorships such as that of the shah of Iran. These are the sectors that have found a vehicle for their aspirations in fundamentalism.
Fundamentalist ideology is profoundly reactionary. It goes against the great bulk of the tasks and demands of the national democratic revolution. It violently opposes any independent organisation of the masses, especially of the working class.
22) In the Middle East, American imperialism and Zionism have scored some points. The Arab bourgeoisie made not a move while Lebanon was invaded and the Palestinians massacred. In fact, a convergence of interests had come about between the aims of the Zionist regime and the Arab bourgeoisies' desire to eliminate the potentially revolutionary hotbed of instability in Lebanon. This convergence arose out of the social, economic and political changes of the countries of that region. These changes are reflected in the continuation of the turn taken in Egypt after Nasser, in the Saudi monarchy's role as a pilot-fish for imperialism, and in the fierce attempts of the Syrian and Iraqi regimes to consolidate the class privileges which have come under attack from all quarters (national minorities, fundamentalist currents, popular masses).
The main purpose of the Soviet presence in Syria is to allow the Soviets to participate in the diplomatic settlement that might be applied to this key region for the international relationship of forces.
23) In Iran, the bourgeois nationalist leadership constituted by a sector of the Shi'ite clergy led by Khomeini, behind which are grouped important layers of the traditional Iranian bourgeoisie (Bazaar) and elements of the state bureaucracy, represent the main pillar for the maintenance of bourgeois order in the country since the fall of the Pahlavi regime.
This leadership has been an essential element for channelling, holding back, atomising and then repressing the mass movement of workers, poor peasants and oppressed nationalities.
The tragic evolution of the Iranian revolution and the course followed by the Khomeini leadership which was able to place itself at the head of the mass movement against the Shah dramatically verifies once again the fundamental tenets of the theory of permanent revolution. The Khomeini leadership was able to base itself on various objective factors to carry out its counter-revolutionary actions effectively and to stabilise the institutions of the Islamic Republic:
a) The existence of a not inconsiderable economic margin for manoeuvre — a product of the oil revenue and the maintenance of its links with a series of imperialist powers (Japan, West Germany, Great Britain).
b) Structural factors like the relative weakness of industrialisation under the Shah, and the significant numerical imbalance which resulted from that, between on the one hand a "young" working class without a tradition of organisation and struggle employed in assembly plants, and on the other hand the numerous plebeian masses, often unemployed and at themercy of state and clergy-run subsidies, who are a product of the rural exodus and who can be directly influenced by the Khomeini faction's mixture of anti-imperialist demagogy and messianic Islamic phraseology.
c) The material and person-power of the formidable military-police machine and of the new big state bureaucracy inherited from the Shah — where the purges were limited to a few leaders.
d) The very structuring of the Shi'ite religious caste with its centuries-old tradition of political struggle, its organisational and financial autonomy, its relative ideological coherence anchored in a backward-looking and reactionary world-view and in its militant anti-communism; its patronage networks which have gone through a qualitative development due to its role in the leadership of the mass movement fostered by its management of state funds.
But the decisive factor permitting the stabilisation of the regime is political. It was the inability of the Iranian left organisations to present an overall revolutionary alternative to the projects of the Khomeini leadership. This incapacity flowed on the one hand from the discredit affecting the Tudeh party and the Soviet/Chinese bureaucracies due to the latters' support for the Shah up to the eve of his overthrow by the mass insurrection. It also results from the often acritical support given by various organisations of the workers movement to a regime defined as anti-imperialist. At the same time they were sectarian in practice and refused to form independent and unitary organisations of the working class (shoras, trade unions). They refused to consistently defend all democratic rights. All this made the emergence of an overall revolutionary alternative impossible.
The various mass mobilisations which brought together the exploited and oppressed millions in the riots, the general strike, then the insurrection against the Shah's dictatorship, later during the occupation of the American embassy and even at the beginning of the Iraq-Iran war, did not therefore result, due to the absence of the subjective factor, in a qualitative deepening of the Iranian revolution, placing on the agenda the overthrow of the bourgeois state and private property. As the total control of the Khomeini faction grew over these mobilisations they were increasingly manipulated and divided — one sector of the masses being played off against another.
The Iran-Iraq war, where the Bagdad regime (backed by the region's reactionary Arab regimes) was directly responsible for the aggression, made it possible for Khomeini to reach a new stage in his institutional stabilisation and in the takeover and repression of the mass movement.
The present continuation of a war whose objective — openly stated by the Khomeini faction — is the overthrow of the Bagdad government and its replacement by an "Islamic Republic" based on the most reactionary elements of the Iraqi clergy, is not in the interests of the workers, poor peasants and oppressed nationalities of these two countries.
It objectively favours imperialist manoeuvres in the region and the Khomeini leadership's only motives are to keep any mass movement totally gagged, to justify all its bloody attacks on basic democratic rights and to block working class action, to maintain and consolidate a gigantic military police apparatus and to thereby try to put off the day when the explosive political and social problems come home to roost.
This is why revolutionary Marxists in the region are for an immediate end to the fighting. In the imperialist countries (especially in the USA and France), revolutionaries denounce the policy of their governments which are attempting to reorganise their domination in the Middle East.
In the present period Iranian revolutionaries are struggling for a revival of the Iranian revolution both against imperialist manoeuvres and against the Khomeini regime. They reject any separation between these two struggles, any subordination of the second to the first, any limits placed on defending all the interests of the exploited and oppressed masses in Iran.
Imperialist threats have not changed the laws of the class struggle in Iran. Any effective struggle against imperialism, for breaking Iran's relations of dependency, necessarily leads to exacerbating class contradictions. This struggle can only be effective it if is based on the satisfaction of the needs of workers, poor peasants, oppressed nationalities and on the extension of all their rights.
The very course of the Iranian revolution has shown how the demands of the national democratic revolution (land reform, national independence, democratic rights, self-determination for the oppressed nationalities) cannot all be met by the Islamic Republican regime.
Only progress towards the socialist revolution, only a deepening of the process of permanent revolution can bring about the realisation and consolidation of these demands. Once that reality is grasped revolutionary Marxists can indicate the way forward for the Iranian masses to overthrow the Khomeini regime.
24) In EastAsia, the contradictory aspects of the World International situation appear sharply. Imperialism experienced one of its worst defeats there, in 1975. The Sino-Soviet and Sino-Indochinese conflicts had their greatest impact there, notably in 1978-1979. The social and economic upheavals transforming the region are deep-going and brutal and caused the emergence of poles of industrialisation (South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan) as well as the rapid expansion of agri-business, generating a new agrarian crisis (Thailand, Philippines).
The old neo-colonial order was undermined by the defeat of American imperialism in Indochina. A variety of factors — Chinese diplomacy, the tragic degeneration of the Cambodian revolution under the leadership of Pol Pot, the outbreak of the military conflict between Vietnam and China after the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia — enabled imperialism to regain the political iniative.
At the present time, the Indochinese revolutions are being subjected to very harsh external pressures. The objective conditions in which they must move towards consolidation are extremely difficult. Their leadership's orientation has proved little suited to the solution of a series of major problems and, as a result, has contributed to make the social and economic contradictions worse. The Thai revolutionary forces that experienced a genuine growth between 1973 and 1977, are now going through a period of deep crisis; the Communist Party (TCP) will not easily recover from the failure of its traditional leadership.
In South Korea the weight of the bureaucratic policies of Moscow, Peking and Pyong-Yang, and the presence of American troops bolstering the ferocious dictatorship, bear down heavily on social struggles. Nevertheless, the imperialist counter-offensive has encountered several obstacles. The uprising of the city of Kwangju in South Korea shows how severe the social and political contradictions generated by this development model can become.
In Thailand, the TCP's failure and the regime's success in fighting the communist guerrillas neither mean that the masses have been crushed nor that a historical defeat of the mass movement comparable to Indonesia in 1965-1966 has occurred.
The Thai revolutionary left is scattered and must now face a very grave situation. However, it is undergoing a slow process of recomposition that could enable it to regain the initiative in the future.
Since the second half of the 1970s social and democratic struggles have become steadily more extensive in the Philippines. The communist movement and the guerrilla forces have made highly significant advances. The Marcos regime has not been able to find a lasting solution to the national resistance of the Moro people. Since the assassination of B. Aquino, the crisis of the Marcos regime has slowly worsened. The mass struggles have taken on a new scope. The revolutionary forces (above all those of the PCP, the CNPA and the NDF) have shown themselves capable of taking new initiatives. This country, whose strategic importance is emphasized by the presence of the gigantic American military bases, is going through a deep political and social crisis. It has been the arena of high level class struggles which shows the revolution is on the agenda in the region.
25) The crisis of bourgeois rule in Latin America has increased rapidly in recent years under the impact of the international capitalist crisis and the generalisation of class confrontation in Central America. The triumph of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua opened up a new situation on the continent. Due to this the revolutionary process has developed onto a regional scale — both through the progress of the FMLN in El Salvador and to a lesser extent of the URNG in Guatemala and through the imperialist counter-offensive which has brought Central American countries into its counter-revolutionary plans.
The crisis is unfolding in the context of substantial changes in the economies and societies of the various Latin American countries. Industrialisation, the occasionally explosive urbanisation in certain capitals and the reduction in the importance of the rural economies are changes which the process of reconstruction of the world economy has strengthened.
The insertion of some of these countries, especially the most industrialised, like Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, in a new international division of labour has changed their social composition and the forms of imperialist domination. They have become more affected by, and more vulnerable to, the capitalist crisis of the metropolitan centres.
In Brazil, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina the military dictatorships have caused real economic and social disasters which have speeded up their own political crisis. In various ways, according to their traditions and their specificities, the crisis of bourgeois domination in different countries has developed along with a prolonged economic crisis.
The recomposition of the workers movement and the mass movement is also at the heart of the crisis the bourgeois political regimes are going through in Latin America. The mass movement is confronted with austerity policies implemented by the governments and the bourgeoisies which "manage" the crisis under the auspices of the IMF. Latin American workers' movements and even significant forms of coordination and unity have been stimulated, in varying ways and degrees, by the construction and reorganisation of trade unions, socio-economic struggle and the development of mass democratic sentiment and struggles for trade union democracy. The existence of the CUT and the CON-CLAT in Brazil, the PIT in Uruguay, the reunification of the CGT in Argentina, the revitalisation of the CGTP in Peru, the process of trade union reunification in Colombia, etc, expresses this tendency towards trade union unity and reorganisation.
The interaction of the economic crisis and the crisis of bourgeois rule has made possible a convergence of socio-economic demands and struggles with democratic ones which politicise and radicalise the workers movement. Workers do not just defend their living and working conditions but they must struggle for democratic rights in order to do so. The living experience of these dictatorships or authoritarian bourgeois regimes, which drastically restricted these rights for decades, leads them to reject authoritarian and bureaucratic methods inside their own organisations. This obliges them also to struggle for democracy in their trade unions and in all their social organisations.
Transformations of the Latin American economies have led to an explosive growth in certain towns which has produced significant semi-proletarian layers who organise and mobilise for their own demands. Their own radicalisation and politicisation have made them into a fundamental sector, whose struggles concretely converge with those of the working class. Significant struggles have developed in Peru, Uruguay and Mexico, in the "new towns", "misery belts" or lower class areas. Even in Managua these layers played an important role at the time of the insurrection. Their demands and these struggles are interconnected with those of the workers movement.
In the same way in a whole series of Latin American countries for some years now there has been a process of unitary reorganisation and coordination of the peasants which is linked in different ways to the workers movement. The participation of the CSUTCB inside the COB in Bolivia, the CCP-organised peasants in the Peruvian trade unions, CONTAC inside the Brazilian CUT, the MCI in the Dominican Republic, the CNOC in Ecuador, the CNPA in Mexico are important examples of the process of recomposition and reorganisation of the workers and mass movements in the various countries. It reflects to varying degrees the deepgoing character of the tendencies for unity among working people.
This process has even taken on clearly political forms. This is particularly the case with the PT in Brazil, the Izquierda Unida (United Left) in Peru, the DRU (United Revolutionary Leadership) in Bolivia. The ANOCP in Mexico embryonically combines raising economic demands with demands linked to the political struggle for democratic rights. These unitary political bodies have been strengthened by the most advanced examples of unity shown in the course of the Central American revolution by the FSLN, FMLN and URNG.
The proletarian united front and the different forms of unity and alliance between independent class currents and revolutionaries have therefore become more than ever relevant and concrete. In Mexico the PRT envisages the possibility of building a party of revolutionaries — that is a party of the different anti-capitalist revolutionary currents.
Elections have also been a central opportunity for structuring unitary independent class fronts against bourgeois parties in crisis, on the basis of independent class policies against the projects of capitalist restabilisation of the economy and the recomposition of bourgeois domination. There have been relevant experiences rich in lessons in Peru, Brazil, Uruguay and Mexico.
In this context of long term crisis, characterised by the new rise of the workers movement and the mass movement, the bourgeois regimes are trying to restructure their class rule. We are seeing an attempt to install regimes either of "controlled" bourgeois democracy (Argentina) or of semi-constitutional regimes (Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia) where the army has kept intact its force as an "alternative bourgeois party". This policy of making "openings" or preparing the political and economic rearming of the local bourgeoisies, which, because of the intensifying class contradictions and continuing inter-bourgeois frictions has resulted in unstable political situations. In cases like Peru or Bolivia, because of the very sharp combination between the capitalist crisis, the rise of the mass movement and the existence of powerful mass organisations with anti-capitalist perspectives, revolutionary situations can arise.
The objective convergence of the oppressed with proletarian organisations of different tendencies, even if it is still in many cases limited and conjunctural, marks a substantial advance in the organisation of an independent class response to the plans of the bourgeoisie and imperialism.
Democracy is today a deeply held sentiment among the masses of the great majority of Latin American countries and the bourgeois regimes and its policies cannot satisfy this demand. This is why this struggle affects all working people and unites and powerfully strengthens the different demands.
All the transformations of Latin American societies in recent years have brought to the fore the central role of the proletariat, but have also stimulated the emergence of powerful allies: small and middle peasants or the semi-proletarian masses of the big towns, who potentially improve the relationship of forces against the bourgeoisie and imperialism. In the struggle for their overthrow, the force and originality of the revolution will perhaps develop through unpredictable combinations, as always in real class struggles, but it will undoubtedly reaffirm strongly the validity of permanent revolution.
26) In Southern Africa imperialism is striving with some success to recover its lost ground, to establish better conditions for its political and economic domination and for avoiding the danger of social explosions.
In Zimbabwe, the dynamic of the independence struggle was blocked by the Mugabe leadership. Neither the land question nor that of basic democratic rights were resolved. The masses' hopes were rapidly dashed by the transformation of former nationalist leaders into a privileged and repressive ruling social layer, which is establishing gowing relations of subordination with imperialism. The "socialist" demagogy used by the ruling party (ZANU) actually only serves to prepare the conditions for imposing a single party system.
In Angola, the 1974-1976 civil war considerably destroyed the economic capacities and social resources of the country. Imperialism was able to use this situation to put pressure on the MPLA. By using, and also directly helping, South Africa's and UNITA's military actions, imperialism sought to reduce the Angolan government's room for manoeuvre so as to speed up the return of this country into the Western camp and to reduce Angolan demands regarding Namibian independence.
But this policy was greatly facilitated by the MPLA's inability to mobilise the masses, to win the confidence of the peasantry and to commit themselves further in the anti-imperialist struggle. The course followed by the MPLA, against the background of corruption and privileges, resulted in the agreement with Pretoria. Social and political conditions were worse just after the liberation struggle. It was possible to stand up to imperialism but not by throttling the mass movement during the civil war nor by cutting back on the neighbourhood people's committees and threatening repression against any independent political trade union activity. In practice the leadership apparatus consciously decided to seek a compromise with imperialism whose consequences could only be worsening forms of dependence.
A similar phenomenon occurred in Mozambique. The extent of the drought over several years now has made the economic problems inherited from colonialism even worse. The RNM guerrilla forces — who are totally supported by South Africa — have considerably disorganised economically and socially a part of the country, obliging the state to give over a larger part of its revenue to military spending.
But the FRELIMO leadership showed that it had not decided to find a revolutionary solution to the present difficulties. The attitude of the regime to the masses, the development of corruption inside the state apparatus and the party, the frenzied bureaucratisation, the distrust of and authoritarian attitude to the urban workers, has demonstrated that FRELIMO sought above all to consolidate its state power, to strengthen its control over the masses and to get a compromise — and not just a tactical one — with imperialism.
The Nkomati non-aggression treaty and good-neighbour policy with the South African regime cannot be interpreted as a tactical agreement. The FRELIMO leadership was fully aware of its actions when it hailed this event — in its own terms — as being in the continuity of the "revolution". This agreement was interpreted by the South African masses as a stab in the back, and the ANC, whose political and military operations partly depended on its positions in Mozambique, was requested to reduce its presence to a few persons and to cease guerrilla activity.
So the MPLA and FRELIMO were shown to be incapable of transforming liberation struggles into revolutions. These leaderships were neither politically or socially ready to resist imperialism's economic and political pressure. It follows that there has been an important modification in the overall relationship of forces in Southern Africa.
The racist South African regime is little by little breaking out if its regional isolation. From now on Mozambique is open to South African investments, aid and tourism. Pretoria is seeking to push home even further its advantage by increasing the dependence of other countries of the region on South Africa. The Nkomati agreement is now being used as a pretext by a whole series of countries like Mauritius, the Seychelles, Zambia, to establish more important economic relations with South Africa.
This recomposition in the relations between the states in Southern Africa does not mean at all that the racist regime is in the process of resolving its difficulties and contradictions. Quite the reverse. The agreements signed with Angola and Mozambique were reached at a time when there is a radicalisation of the mass movement in South Africa.
The development of the consciousness and organisation of the black masses in South Africa is of the utmost importance. There has been a considerable strengthening of the capacity of struggle of the oppressed population with the community associations (neighbourhood, sports...) and especially with the trade unions. The question of the political leadership of this mass movement is now sharply posed within the perspective of future confrontations (see the resolution on South Africa).
In Ethiopia the revolutionary crisis resulted in the collapse of the monarchy. It combined the classical forms of an anti-feudal revolution with certain forms of a proletarian one. Due to the absence of a revolutionary leadership the urban and peasant mass movement was gradually placed under the control of the military junta, the DERG. The latter was thus able to gut the basic forms of self-organisation of their substance and divert them into supporting its political power. Not all the social forces were ready to combine in the same way the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. National and regional questions in Ethiopia are among the most fundamental ones, and in the first place the right of the Eritrean people to independence. The social and political interests defended by the DERG are in contradiction to a real internationalist approach to these questions. In a way it was a case of a "jacobin"-type centralist and authoritarian line of a socially petty-bourgeois military group which finally imposed itself, preventing any real solution to the ethnic and national questions and thereby blocking the general revolutionary process.
IV. The crisis of the bureaucratised workers states
27) Society in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the People's Republic of China has been experiencing a crisis of bureaucratic rule which has been reflected for over fifteen years, especially in the USSR, by a regular slowdown of the rate of economic growth. This crisis has been enhanced by the crisis of the imperialist system, but it is not a mere extension of the latter. It has its own specific causes and roots in the contradictions inherent in bureaucratic management of a planned economy.
Its main cause lies in the ever more acute contradiction between collective ownership of the fundamental means of production on the one hand, and the management of these means of production by the parasitic bureaucracy on the other. Under bureaucratic dictatorship, state ownership of the means of production does not lead to their gradual socialisation. Bureaucratic planning cannot lead to the development of productive relations based on the progressive co-operation and association of the producers. To achieve such relations, producers must determine by themselves, and democratically control, the priorities in the use of productive forces; they must have the ability to choose among a variety of economic and political solutions, in the framework of an authentic pluralistic socialist democracy, that is, to exercise power themselves.
The overthrow of capitalism had resolved the contradiction between the increasingly social character of production and the private character of appropriation. It made possible a substantial, and even, for a time, impetuous development of the productive forces. But now the increasing socialisation of production is not matched by that of appropriation: from a relative brake on the development of the forces of production, bureaucratic management is tending to be transformed into an absolute brake. The positive economic effects of the overthrow of capitalism are weakened by the bureaucratic regime. The transition to socialism is blocked.
28) On the one hand, the collective ownership of the means of production, the monopoly of foreign trade and central economic planning, since it is not based on genuine relations between associated producers, leads to a functioning of the economy through administrative and juridical relations and through bureaucratic plans that retain full powers to set the level of prices and wages and the physical volumes of production. Since bureaucrats have no material interests for keeping the system going other than increasing and stabilising their material privileges and their status which guarantees them, this system does not result in any overall economic rationality. It gets ever deeper stuck in the dead end of bureaucratic centralisation: a great deal of wastage, breaks in the continuity of the productive process, weak labour productivity, growing imbalance between different sectors of the economy, etc.
However, on the other hand, workers gain access to the consumption fund mainly through their wages, and the relations between firms are still formally of a market-type. Even if their impact on the economy as a whole is limited these formally market-type relations are not inserted in new relations of associated producers. In the absence of the latter type of production relations the bureaucracy can also use the survival of market relations to reinforce its domination over the working class. It thus borrows from capitalism its methods of work organisation such as piece work, the production line, etc.
But in a post-capitalist society where there exists neither a genuine "labour market" nor an industrial reserve army, these practices are not sufficient to guarantee a continuous and regular process of production in the nationalised firms. This is why the bureaucracy is obliged to limit the use of these market mechanisms. Consequently the system neither has the "rationality" of generalised market production nor the rationality of socialist planning.
Bureaucratic management of the economy is an obstacle to the reconversion of industry, and even more of agriculture, from an extensive-type development pattern to an intensive-type development pattern. To achieve such a reconversion, a new, rational and conscious organisation of work, calculations of the real compared productivity, as well as the actual completion of development projects on time, are indispensable.
Now, this reconversion is becoming ever more necessary and urgent, on the one hand because the natural reserves which had been lavishly expended are getting closer to exhaustion, and on the other because of the growing contradiction between the overall shortage of labour (in the USSR, in the GDR, in Czechoslovakia) and the substantial "surplus" of labour in individual firms. It is also imperative because of the demands of the consumers (not just the labouring masses, but also broad layers of the bureaucracy) and the pressure which technological and labour productivity advances in the most developed capitalist countries bring to bear on the economy of the bureaucratised workers states.
The transition to an intensive-type development of the economy is incompatible with bureaucratic rule and can only come about in one of two ways:
• Either by the extension of market relations that would free the bureaucrats at firm-level from the constraints imposed by bureaucratic planning and re-establish a labour market, a market of the means of production, and a capital market. The Yugoslav experience, which went furthest along this path, showed that this alternative generates strong contradictions and runs up against the survival of collective ownership and the resistance of the workers to the deterioration of their social conditions which inevitably arises in this kind of dynamic. The solution of these contradictions would then require a genuine social counter-revolution and the restoration of capitalism, which would merely substitute the economic and social crisis of international capitalism for the specific crisis of the bureaucratised workers states, and in addition subject these societies to a semi-colonial-type super-exploitation by large imperialist finance capital.
• Or by establishing democratic planning based on a coordinated system of self-management and the subordination of market relations which inevitably survive in the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism, to such a system. To achieve this the workers must, themselves, really and democratically exercise power in the state and economic management. Socialist democracy is not some abstract or moral norm. It is necessary for a planned economy to run smoothly, because the mass of the workers constitutes the only social force with a real material interest in a generally rational and conscious reorganisation and management of the economy. Only the workers are interested both in an overall increase in the quantity and quality of the consumers goods produced, and in reducing the effort needed to produce them. These two aspirations imply the transparency of the economy, of costs, and of productivity gains.
By contrast, for the bureaucracy, its efforts to defend and consolidate its material privileges overrides the overall rationality of production and the improvement of the masses' consumption, even when its "material interests" are expressed by attempts to fulfill the plan. Furthermore its material interests are fragmented between different layers and cliques and are not unified at the level of the caste as a whole.
There is a tendency for opposition to develop between the heavy central apparatus, which is afraid of losing its influence and privileges once the bureaucracy of groups of firms gain the upper hand, and pressure groups from different sectors and the regions, which hope to increase and consolidate their privileges at the expense of the central apparatus thanks to decentralisation. Such tensions can exist and even shake up the political apparatus of the state/party. But the fundamental attachment of the bureaucracy to the monopoly of power — the only solid base of its material privileges — means it has to react to these contradictions and to its fears of working class revolts by half-reforms and vacillations. Nevertheless it is not possible for the bureaucracy to rationalise the overall functioning of the system.
29) Participating in the arms race relaunched by imperialism makes the crisis of the bureaucratically planned economy in the USSR worse. In China, the burden of military expenditure corresponds to the twofold pressure of imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy.
The bureaucratised workers states' dependence on the advanced technology of the imperialist countries continues, with all its consequences on the commercial and financial levels.
In the 1960s and especially the 1970s, the bureaucracy tried to overcome the obstacles to a transition to intensive-type development, through an increase in the division of labour inside the COMECON and an expansion of trade with the imperialist countries. Expanded trade rapidly got the upper hand. The bureacracy hoped that the production increase that these imports would generate, would divert the people away from massive revolt by providing greater satisfaction to their need for quality consumer goods. It met with temporary success in Hungary, especially because of the modernisation and specialisation of agriculture that eliminated supply problems for a whole period.
But the contradictions of these projects burst out into the open in 1980 with the aggravation of the capitalist economic crisis. Its magnitude and length surprised and threw off the bureaucracy in the USSR and the Eastern European countries just as it had surprised the workers bureaucracies in the capitalist countries.
Outlets in the West for the goods produced in the bureaucratised workers states shrank. This led to a balance of payments deficit with the West and difficulties in the repayment of the debts imprudently accumulated in many of these countries during the 1970s. So they had to reduce both the imports of quality consumers goods and of production goods. The intrinsic slowdown of growth was thereby made worse.
The specific interests and chauvinism of each of the COMECON member country bureaucracies further contributed to the partial failure of the economic reorientation of the 1970s. Faced with the consequences of the capitalist economic crisis, the Soviet bureaucracy at first tried to increase the satellite countries' integration in COMECON, hoping that the lessons of Eastern Europe's grave debt situation and financial crisis would make the satellite bureaucracies more amenable. It will meet with some success although this will not prevent renewed resistance by these bureaucracies when they see the Kremlin will not keep to its promises.
30) Mass discontent is on the rise in the bureaucratised workers states, albeit unevenly, for a number of reasons: as a result of problems in the supply of quality consumer goods, sometimes (as in Poland and Rumania) aggravated by generalised scarcity phenomena; as a result of the growing expectations of the masses that were generated by the real economic, social and cultural advances of the previous decades and by the promises of the bureaucracy; as a result of the attraction of the capitalist model of consumerism which is better known today thanks to improved communications; as a result of social, or even moral, demands for greater equality, freedom and truth that are the product of the very nature of the post-capitalist societies smothered by cynicism, careerism and corruption; and as a result of the deep ideological crisis racking these societies, aggravated by the lack of upward social mobility which finds its most concentrated expression at the top of society in the ruling gerontocracy (USSR, China). It is also on the rise as a result of brutal instances of national oppression, especially in the USSR (Ukraine, Georgia, Baltic countries, nationalities of Soviet Asia, Jewish population) and in China (Tibet, Inner Mongolia) where many nationalities live under the yoke of Great Russian and Great Han chauvinism. The same observation applies, although to a different degree, to the oppression of the Hungarian minority in Bulgaria, and of the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia. Moreover, Stalinism shares with imperialism the historical responsibility of the division of the German nation into different states and of the counter-revolutionary division of the potentially most powerful proletariat of Europe.
However, the obstacles before a spontaneous revolutionary outburst of the masses are enormous. They derive, first of all, from the fact that the bureaucratic regime keeps the working class and all of society in a state of forced atomisation, and prevents independent organisation and the free circulation and centralisation of information. Under these circumstances the working class can only accumulate experience and develop class solidarity very painfully and slowly.
Moreover, the weight of the repressive apparatus in the system of bureaucratic rule is increasing, even though, contrary to the Stalinist era, it now operates more through selective repression of the first opposition nuclei and of any form of workers' rebellion, than through massive terror. The case of Poland, however, demostrates that the bureaucracy is capable of conjuncturally resolving its crises of regime by resorting to open military intevention, including, for a time, by the temporary institutionalisation of a military form of its dictatorship. But the latter does not rule out the distribution of social and cultural advantages to divide the working class — this has always been used by the bureaucracies in the workers states.
But the obstacles to the emergence of mass movements leading to the beginning of political revolution, can break down. The bureaucracy's inability to control effectively the working class in the process of production is reflected by the workers capacity to resist passively in the workplaces. In this context, active resistance can be sparked off in a number of ways. The absence of unemployment and the fact that the state is the single employer enhances the rapid development of class solidarity and unity in the struggle. This is why a significant social explosion, even though it be local, can lead to a vast social movement.
31) In Poland, it was a series of overwhelmingly spontaneous explosions and the assimilation of these experiences that led to the formation of activist nuclei (mainly the KOR) and a broader workers vanguard which in turn helped to overcome the obstacles decribed above, beginning with the strikes of the summer 1980. This explains how the explosion of mass self-organisation could come about between July 1980 and December 1981. This is why ten million workers could assemble in Solidarity and wrest a series of democratic freedoms. A situation of dual power began to appear.
It is the most profound experience of the beginning of a political revolution that Eastern Europe has experience to this day. Poland's acute national feelings and the historical role of the church as the embodiment of these feelings contributed to the process by maintaining an opposition centre that was partially tolerated thanks to the concessions of the bureaucracy to the Catholic hierarchy; the bureaucracy preferred concessions to the church to allowing the slightest legal or semi-legal activity of socialist, communist or workers' opposition centres.
Subsequent events confirmed the lessons drawn from the explosive struggles in East Germany in 1953, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the beginning of the Polish revolution in 1956, the Chinese cultural revolution and the "Prague Spring" in 1968. There is no substitute for a real anti-bureaucratic political revolution in the bureaucratised workers states. Any hope of a gradual and peaceful democratisation of these states through reforms, whether they be initiated at the top or come about as a result of a split in the bureaucracy and mass pressure, is illusory. The bureaucracy may concede on secondary questions; it will never bend on the key issue, namely its monopoly over the exercise of political power from which flow its material and social privileges. The political revolution is a genuine mass revolution that implies the destruction of a series of specific state apparatuses, including especially the repressive apparatus.
The feudal nobility and bourgeoisie had succeeded in safeguarding their rule while making real political concessions to their class enemies (e.g. communal autonomy under feudalism, universal suffrage in the bourgeois state). The bureaucracy's — apparently irrational — rigidity is an illustration of the fact that it is not a class, that its rule is infinitely more precarious and unstable than that of a ruling class, that it corresponds to no necessary economic function, that it is in permanent conflict with the efficiency and logic of the plan.
The Polish experience confirmed that the bureaucracy only makes concesssions on the field of democratic freedoms on a temporary basis, when pressured and coerced, and without giving these concessions the slightest final juridical or constitutional formalisation. It retreats only to advance later and take back what it gave. The counter-revolutionary move of General Jaruzelski was inevitable to the very extent that the rise of political revolution had not come to fruition in the seizure of political power by the workers.
Likewise, the rise of political revolution and then of bureaucratic counter-revolution in Poland have confirmed that even the mobilisation, at first spontaneous, and then increasingly well organised, of millions of workers cannot on its own succeed in overthrowing the dictatorship if there is no conscious and determined revolutionary leadership. More generally, they have confirmed the immediate relevance of the political revolution in the bureaucratised workers states, the hegemonic role of the proletariat in that revolution, and the workers spontaneous tendency to self-organisation and the institutionalisation of socialist democracy.
Proletarian hegemony in the revolutionary process, the workers' drive towards taking over the firms and running the economy themselves, constitute real guarantees against the danger that capitalist restorationist tendencies might gain the upper hand. However, in the longer term, there is no automatic guarantee that these tendencies will be defeated since they arise for both social reasons (the survival of market mechanisms, the pressure of the capitalist economy, the spontaneous tendencies of petty commodity production) and political reasons (the disastrous political and ideological consequences of decades of bureaucratic dictatorship). Only the emergence of a consistent revolutionary leadership sinking deep roots in the working class, the rebirth of the proletariat's class consciousness, and the international extension of the revolution can finally neutralise these tendencies.
The Polish proletariat suffered a real defeat on 13th December 1981. The bureaucracy was able to score some tactical victories but is far from having restabilised its dictatorship. The workers have kept some forms of organisation, albeit more limited and less effective than the legal ones they had between August 1980 and December 1981. They have preserved a substantial capacity to resist and fightback, especially where Solidarnosc was rebuilt in the workplaces and where inter-factory coordinations have emerged.
32) Without any doubt Yugoslavia is one of the bureaucratised workers states where the contradictions and centrifugal forces are the most explosive: the rise of the different nationalisms, the recent riots in Kosovo and the extreme disarticulation of an economy where neither the plan, nor the market, nor self-management, nor the League of Yugoslav Communists manage to impose a coherent regulation, are all elements of the most serious crisis of the system since the end of the war. New loans and rescheduling of a foreign debt of some $20 billion have just been obtained in the context of these deficiencies. The Western bankers and the IMF prefer to deal with a single, "responsible" partner rather than a multitude of Yugoslav firms that have all separately got into debt, so paradoxically they have encouraged a strengthening of state control over foreign trade and foreign exchange.
Thus a halt is going to be made to the increasingly confederal evolution of Yugoslavia. But this comes up against powerful resistance from the richer republics such as Slovenia and Croatia. At the same time the Yugoslav authorities are counting on the accentuation of market competition to restore a greater unity to the economy. This new "liberal" turn will doubtlessly go hand in hand with purges and will meet bitter working class resistance. Up to now workers have used their self-management rights to stop redundancies (which is not to say they have used such rights to hire the hundreds of thousands of youth, peasants and women who are looking for jobs). This turn will also come into contradiction with the oft-repeated objective to reduce regional inequalities for the development of the private sector — aimed at resolving the problems of unemployment and of the non-repatriation of some $12 billion placed in the Western banks by emigrant workers — will come into conflict with financial measures limiting private enrichment.
Intense public debate is presently taking place in Yugoslavia on the balance-sheet of its system, centred on the question of political pluralism. Revolutionary Marxists have a responsibility to participate in such debates but also to make them as known about as possible in the other bureaucratised workers states, since the present problems of the Yugoslav system are at the same time the richest in experiences permitting us to come to terms with the conditions of a democratically centralised system of socialist self-management.
33) Soviet society's failure to move forward had already appeared in many fields during the last years of the Brezhnev era. In addition to the decline of the growth rates of industrial production, there was: an increasing technological lag; the failure of the economy; the sclerosis of the apparatuses; the more and more acute ideological and moral crisis in the bureaucracy itself, and especially the worsening crisis of agriculture and consequent greater difficulty in supplying the population in products derived from livestock. At a time when a public polemic with imperialism is raging as a result of the war-drive launched by Carter and Reagan, Soviet society's dependence on massive imports of American grain is not merely a source of economic weakness but also of ideological and political disarray.
While avoiding any kind of understanding of the economic might of the USSR (which remains the second industrial power in the world today) and the real advances of the standard of living of the masses over the last thirty years, and while denying the slightest credence to the fantasies about an impending "collapse" of the Soviet economy, revolutionary Marxists must emphasise the tendency of a slowing down of development in all realms of society in the USSR. The beginning of Andropov's era is characterised rather by a desire for reform than by the actual ability to impose it against the stubborn resistance of given factions of the apparatus. This means that, under Andropov, the bureaucracy will have far less leeway in which to play the card of a "consumers' society" (consumerism) to cushion at least some of the elements of the social crisis ripening in the country, than it did under Khruschev or Brezhnev. This spells a worsening crisis.
34) After beating around the bush for a long time to avoid new explosive crises in its own ranks, the Chinese bureaucracy finally openly decided on a course of de-Maoisation which included the de facto dissolution of the rural "People's Communes", a stronger use of market mechanisms, a broader opening to the world market, and emphasis on modernisation, the abandonment of some theoretical precepts of Maoism, a break with the conception of two "superpowers" of which the USSR was the most aggressive, a return to the definition of the Eastern European bureaucratised workers states as "socialist countries", and the attempt to achieve a modus vivendi with the Kremlin at the level of state-to-state relations.
When the Deng Hsiao-Ping faction came to power it was confronted with the following contradictions and crises:
• A slowdown in economic development caused by bureaucratic management and a succession of errors in economic policy. The masses' living standards were low, discontent rising and passive resistance becoming generalised.
• Frequent and violent factional struggles inside the bureaucracy caused partially by real differences over policy and leadership methods and partially by power struggles.
• Growing scepticism at the base of the party and among the masses towards the leadership of the party and its leadership.
This was the context in which the young generation in China became politically reactivated and, linking up with the traditions of the anti-bureaucratic struggle of the first phase of the "cultural revolution", raised the banner of the struggle "against hunger, repression, for human rights and democracy". The "dazibao" (wall posters) movement of the "Peking Spring" spread: non-official publications appeared; organisations developed across the whole country. A new stage had opened for the "Democracy movement" in China. The main current of this movement declared itself as socialist, opposed to the restoration of capitalism, demanded the implementation of socialist democracy, proposed a multi-party system and opposed the system of the single-party dictatorship.
Furthermore, after having defeated the other factions of the party, the Deng faction was obliged to recognise some of the errors committed by the Mao-led CCP under pressure from the masses' opposition to the Maoist faction.
All this, in the course of recent years, has led to accelerated economic growth and a partial raising of the masses' living standards. But at the same time the Deng faction has begun to repress the "Democracy movement". Consequently certain components of this movement shed their illusions in the Deng faction. The Deng faction feared the Solidarnosc example would spark off similar actions by the Chinese working class. For this reason it abolished the right to strike that is in the Constitution so as to stop strikes breaking out and any dynamic towards the formation of independent trade unions.
At the same time the "new course" of the Chinese bureaucracy has been accompanied by significant concessions to small commodity producers and the primitive accumulation of capital, which has widened social inequality. The CCP is encouraging the establishment of "special economic zones" where foreign capital can operate. It is enlarging the space for private enterprise in commerce and small industry where there is greater use of wage labour. It is favouring the strong rise in the number of rich peasants and urban private capitalists (recently the communist press celebrated the first millionaire CCP member). At the same time a growing number of poor peasants are obliged to sell their labour power to capitalist entrepreneurs to escape their miserable living conditions. The entire course inevitably produces new tensions and new conflicts, including inside the bureaucracy.
In the field of foreign policy the CCP maintains its hostility to Vietnam and continues to support the "tripartite alliance" (Pol Pot, Sihanouk, right-wing capitalist forces) in Kampuchea. Although Peking is no longer proposing an anti-USSR united front with imperialism and has abandoned the definition of the bureaucratised workers states of the USSR and Eastern Europe as having restored capitalism, that does not mark the end of the vacillations of the bureaucracy between a Peking/Washington axis and a Peking/Moscow axis, despite an improvement in relations with the USSR and the East European CPs.
V. The imperialist war drive and the anti-war movement
35) The crisis of capitalism is accelerating capitalism's tendency to rearm and increasing the danger of war in the world. The new round of the arms race imperialism set in motion at the end of the 1970s corresponds to several immediate objectives:
• To set up a mobile and effective strike force against developing national liberation struggles and revolutions in the semi-colonial and dominated countries.
• To provide a greater "replacement market" that will allow for profit rates to increase (in the context of the crisis) without increasing the standard of living of the masses.
• To weigh down the Soviet economy with the particularly heavy burden of the arms race and sharpen its social contradictions so as to force the Kremlin bureaucracy to enter an overall negotiation in a more unfavourable relationship of forces and reduce its possibilities of answering requests for help from governments brought to power by national liberation struggles.
• To re-establish American hegemony inside the imperialist camp and block the centrifugal tendencies enhanced by the "détente" policy, by bringing its military supremacy into full play.
In the longer term, the arms race aims to prepare the reconquest of several workers states by imperialism, an objective realisable only through war. But the immediate threat is localised counter-revolutionary wars against liberation struggles or advances of the revolution in Central America and the Caribbean, in the Middle East and in Southern Africa where Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are in the firing line of the South African army supported by imperialism.
But the arms race is not confined to the escalation of nuclear weapons, far from it. It should be noted in particular that 10 per cent of the US military budget are allocated to these weapons, while 25 per cent go towards interventions in so-called third world countries, and the remainder to conventional weapons, chemical weapons and research. Nevertheless, the spectre of the nuclear holocaust is not the product of some great irrational fear. It corresponds to the qualitative transformation of the means of destruction since World War II. Their murderous potential has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the period stretching from the age of the sling to World War I.
The nuclear destruction capacity which already exists at the threshold of the 1980s represents more than one million Hiroshimas and the possibility of annihilating the entire population of the planet twenty times over. The French nuclear arsenal alone — although it may appear dwarfish — represents 4,000 potential Hiroshimas. A nuclear world war would signal humanity's collapse into barbarism and perhaps the destruction of all human life on the face of the earth.
As it is, the risks of accidents and the outbreak of localised nuclear conflicts are increasing for political as well as military reasons as a result of the development of a whole gamut of sophisticated weaponry, including chemical weapons, which is beginning to bridge the gap which had existed between conventional and nuclear weapons; as a result also of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and their possession by reactionary regimes like those of Israel or South Africa; and as a result of the continuing capitalist crisis and bourgeois leadership crisis in some of the main imperialist countries. This is the context in which some of the Pentagon strategists have come to seriously consider the possibility of a "limited nuclear war", at the peril of triggering the mechanisms of a generalised nuclear conflict.
Such a war would be qualitatively different from World War I and World War II. It would no longer pit armies against one another but aim to annihilate populations as shown in a sinister way by the neutron bomb and the chemical and biological weapons. Today, the very nature of the means of destruction makes the dilemma socialism or barbarism more urgent than ever.
Neither the world proletariat nor the workers states can "win" a nuclear world war. The latter would make the building of a socialist society, indeed the survival of humanity, impossible. Our opposition to such a war is therefore not all "moral" but materialist and in no way breaks with class criteria — to preserve life and the possibility of emancipating the workers of the world. So preventing nuclear world war is a central strategic objective of the proletariat.
36) The American bourgeoisie has alredy used the nuclear weapon twice against another imperialist power (Japan). It has threatened to use it against the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutons. At least one of the reasons it has not carried through this threat is the dissuasive impact of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. This arsenal will remain necessary as long as imperialism continues to maintain, increase and perfect atomic weapons. The fear of extremely serious political consequences or of protest demonstrations would not on their own prevent imperialism from repeating Hiroshima/Nagasaki-type operations against determined centres of revolution in the "third world". But neither can the Soviet nuclear deterrent prevent the outbreak of nuclear war in the long term. The survival of humanity cannot indefinitely depend on the unstable balance of nuclear terror.
The imperialist strategists are looking for their own way out in the direction of "limited nuclear war". All forces identified with the workers movement must take a clear stand in favour of the other way out: a total ban on nuclear weapons and the controlled destruction of all stocks of such weapons.
This is why the workers states should take spectacular initiatives to partially reduce their own nuclear, biological and chemical arsenals — this would constitute a political blow to imperialist plans and the most vigorous encouragement for mass mobilisations against the war drive.
This would be the best means of strengthening workers in the conviction that only the socialist revolution will be able to definitively end threats of humanity's annihilation.
However the bureaucracy is unable to adopt such a policy. It locks itself into a militarist logic. In this way the struggle against the militarism of the bureaucracy is an integral part of the programme of the political revolution.
Humanity will only be definitively freed from the threats of war by the combined overthrow of imperialism in its main citadels and the bureaucracy in the USSR.
37) While all consistent and resolute opponents of atomic weapons can and must come together in the broadest united action, the question then becomes: by what means can this disarmament be imposed?
We reject the demobilising and defeatist notion that the outbreak of nuclear war is already a fatality. We also reject the idea that world war can be prevented by permanent negotiations and a series of agreements between the "two big powers". Finally, we also reject the illusion that nuclear war can be avoided in the long run through a gradual weakening of imperialism as a result of its being defeated in a growing number of dominated countries, of the strengthening of the economic and military potential of the bureaucratised workers states, of the internal divisions of the imperialist camp and of the advances of the anti-war movement.
The war drive and the bomb are not some wart on an otherwise healthy face, nor are they the toy of delirious rulers who need only to be reasoned with. The arms race is rooted in class society. It is part and parcel of the needs of the imperialist system in crisis. Armed conflicts change their form but they do not escape the logic of the class struggle. This is why there can be no subordination of the struggle for socialism to some sacred union among the various social classes against the mysterious demon of the nuclear threat.
Only the extension and victory of the socialist revolution in the very strongholds of imperialism can disarm the warmongers and save humanity from the nuclear holocaust.
38) The imperialist states, with US imperialism coming first among them, are the principal warmongers and the main threat to peace. The new drive towards worldwide slaughter they have initiated is the third one of our century — the first unfolded during the first years of the century, the second in the 1930s. In the first two cases, the pretext of a "Soviet arms build-up" could not be used. It has been made up out of whole cloth to get the population of the imperialist centres to accept an astronomical increase of military expenditures.
In fact, the Trident, MX and Cruise programmes were conceived at the end of the sixties, long before there was any talk of the SS20s. The deployment of Pershing and Cruise missiles was prepared ever since the Vietnam war ended. The strategic modernisations put into effect by Reagan were already initiated in 1972. Military expenditures had already begun to skyrocket in 1977, under Carter's administration. The refusal to ratify the SALT II agreements and Nato's two-track decision in 1979 on the deployment of the Pershings came before the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, not to mention the Polish events.
The pretexts used to justify the imperialist escalation are not only given the lie by the chronology of the arms race, but also by the facts of the matter. US imperialism and its allies still retain a quantitative, qualitative and strategic superiority in both the fields of nuclear and conventional weapons. Their expenditures on armaments are far above those of the USSR and Warsaw Pact both per-capita and in absolute value. The land divisions alone of those European armies which are allied to the United States number 2,176,00 soldiers, as opposed to 2,617,000 in the land divisions of the Warsaw Pact including those of the USSR which has its other frontiers in Asia to cover. The deployed missiles are not the only installations in Europe targeting the USSR; such installations also include American bases and the system of Poseidon nuclear submarines soon to be replaced by the Tridents.
The deployment of the Pershing missiles in Europe under a direct American command introduces a new imbalance not from the point of view of their technical features, but from the point of view of their strategic function: it places the vital centres of the Soviet territory within a few minutes of the range of American weaponry.
This colossal arms build-up implies the stepped-up plunder of semi-colonial countries, harsher austerity drives against the workers of the capitalist countries themselves, attacks against democratic rights in the imperialist countries and the denial of the sovereignty of nations.
39) Workers states, even bureaucratically degenerated or deformed ones, must be defended against any attempt to restore capitalism. We recognise the right of these states to equip themselves with the necessary armament, including nuclear weapons, to deter imperialism. But nuclear weapons are only that — arms that deter, not arms that can be used to victoriously defend the USSR in a war.
The best defence of the USSR and the other workers states against the threat of a capitalist comeback lies in the mobilisation of the proletariat and the extension of the revolution. But the fact that a parasitical bureaucratic minority has usurped power in these countries transforms the state, including the military apparatus, into an instrument of rule against the working class. The repression of any autonomous activity of the masses and the irrational management of the economy undermine the workers states' ability to defend themselves.
The victory of the anti-bureaucratic revolution would make it possible to defend and develop the remains of the conquests of October and to launch a massive mobilisation of the international proletariat against the imperialist war drive. This is why the defence of the workers states cannot be separated from the overthrow of the bureaucratic dictatorship.
Therefore, stating that the bureaucratised workers states have the right to equip themselves with a deterrent nuclear armament should in no way imply support for the military choices of the Soviet bureaucracy or for placing those countries where its missiles are deployed under receivership. These choices are part of a defence policy which, like the bureaucracy itself, fulfills a dual role. On the one hand, it contributes to the defence of the workers state (as with Stalingrad, or with its military aid to North Vietnam during the war). On the other, it defends the bureaucracy's own interests either against the workers of the workers states (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland) or against the self-determination of peoples (Afghanistan). Thus, the needs of defence are inseparable from the means of coercion, from the costs of the armaments policy in terms of social welfare and democratic rights, and from the diplomatic and political utilisation of the nuclear weapon.
The fact is that this armament is in the hands of a bureaucratic caste which is totally uncontrolled, a factor which increases the chances of its being used. It serves at once as a means to intimidate the mass movement of the countries under the rule of the bureaucracy, as an instrument for negotiation and compromise with imperialism, and as a means of pressure on allied semi-colonial countries or in inter-bureaucratic conflicts (as between the USSR and China).
The ceaselessly growing burden of military expenditures in the bureaucratised workers states cannot be explained only by the pressure of imperialism; one must also take into account the reactionary nature of the bureaucracy's military policy and the irrationality of its economic management. The refusal to base the defence of the workers states on the self-defence of the masses and the general arming of the workers leads to relying on technical means rather than the mobilisation of the masses and unavoidably ends up developing an ever-larger and more advanced military power. At the same time, bureaucratic rule is inherently wasteful; the military domain, being no exception, contributes to maintaining a low standard of living for the masses.
While imperialism must bear the overwhelming responsibility of having renewed the arms race, the bureaucracy makes its task easier, by moving from a dissuasive policy to a military policy whose form parallels that of imperialism every more closely, by sending its troops into Afghanistan, and by its repression of the Polish workers. Thus, Andropov's threat to answer the deployment of the Pershings with the deployment of new missiles in Czechoslovakia and the GDR dealt a blow to the unilateral disarmament movements in Western Europe. This is why the struggle for the unilateral disarmament of imperialism is inseparable from the struggle for control by the masses in the workers states over the production and utilisation of these countries' military might, for the arming of the workers in the framework of a regime of socialist democracy, and for their sovereign right to define a foreign policy based on the world wide interests of the proletariat.
Imperialist propaganda justifies its own over-arming by the so-called threat that the Soviet nuclear arsenal is supposed to represent. That is how it seeks to undermine the masses' resistance to imperialist rearmament. The bureaucracy's political approach — its involvement in the arms race in the wake of imperialism — facilitates this operation.
On the other hand, we have never considered the conditional and parsimonious Soviet military aid to the Vietnamese or Cuban revolutions as dangerous "Soviet expansionism", rather we have often denounced the inadequacy of this aid and the conditions sometimes attached to it.
40) In the imperialist countries the peace movement expresses the broad masses' reaction against the imperialist rearmament offensive. It struggles by its actions, independently of the ideology of its leaders or a part of them, for the unilateral disarmament of imperialism, and consequently is one of the main obstacles to imperialist war preparations. The existence of this movement demonstrates the historic inability of the reformist organisations to take in hand the anti-war struggle. At the same time it expresses an extreme mass distrust of bourgeois government, of the warmongers. The logic of mass mobilisations leads it to bring into question the imperialist military alliance (Nato), European post-war "order", and the right of bourgeois state institutions to decide on questions of war and peace over and above the heads of the masses.
Insofar as these mobilisations oppose the build-up of imperialist arsenals, without posing any preconditions or demands for reciprocity, by actions that are independent of the diplomatic policy of any state, they play a highly progressive role. Mass pacifism, which should not be confused with pacifist ideologies, plays a positive role in capitalist Europe, in the United States and Japan insofar as it signals practical opposition to imperialism's policy, even without the understanding that the threat of war is inherent in the capitalist system itself.
We are fully committed to participate in these mobilisations, to organise and broaden them on the basis of the greatest possibly unity around such slogans as No Pershing! No Cruise! Nato bases out! Out of Nato! No neutron bomb! No to French and British nuclear weapons, integral parts of the imperialist war machine! Imperialist troops out of Central America, the Middle East, Grenada, Chad ...! For a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal!
By contrast, the slogan No Pershing, No SS20, under the guise of simplicity, actually introduces confusion if it aims to tie the rejection of the Pershing missiles to a withdrawal of the SS20s. For such a bias tends to transform the anti-war movement into a means of pressure on the negotiations. If it really wished to express a radical refusal of all nuclear weapons, it should encompass not only the Pershing and SS20s but also the American MX and the French and British warheads. Although we do not endorse this slogan, we do not make abandoning it a condition for united action by the anti-war movement.
On the other hand, the reformist leaderships seek to compensate for their "involuntary" involvement in the movement by trying to subordinate the disarmament of imperialism to that of the Soviet bureaucracy, by using bilateralist slogans, in the perspective of transforming the anti-war movement into a means of pressure on diplomatic negotiations between the two "big powers".
The mass anti-war mobilisations are rooted in a desire for survival by broad sectors of the population. They have nothing to do with any sort of "European nationalism".
Such a nationalism would be concretised in the acceptance of a defence of capitalist Europe with or without the help of nuclear weapons by bourgeois armies, integrated or otherwise, and would be profoundly reactionary. But such a political line — developed by certain reformist currents — remains very much a minority inside the mass peace movement in capitalist Europe.
Within this context, the question of the division of Germany is posed again and the theses of the last World Congress on this subject are more relevant than ever:
The division of Germany is a major factor in maintaining the status quo. It is a brake on the most powerful proletariat in Europe. But, on the other hand, any upsurge in mass mobilisations in one part of Germany will have an impact on the other, and more generally on Europe as a whole.
We link ending the division of the German nation with the socialist unification of Germany, based on the political revolution in the German Democratic Republic and on the social revolution in the German Federal Republic. We oppose any unification that involves dismantling the economic foundations of the workers state in the German Democratic Republic.
We support the demand for withdrawal of occupation troops from the German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic, respectively allied troops — first of all the American forces — and those of the USSR. In fact, this double military occupation is designed to assure stabilisation of the political and social situation on both sides of the line in this key area of confrontation between the imperialist camp and the bureaucratised workers states. In the long term, it is also aimed at blocking both the socialist revolution in the German Federal Republic and the political revolution in the German Democratic Republic.
The stationing of powerful armies equipped with gigantic nuclear arsenals in both parts of Germany poses a danger of nuclear war, with the catastrophic consequences that would flow from this for the future of humanity as a whole.
By linking the struggle against imperialist militarism as closely as possible to the struggles against military aggression against dominated countries and against capitalist austerity, we give the anti-war mobilisations a class content that is not only anti-imperialist but also anti-capitalist.
We seek to give the anti-war movement its full anti-imperialist dimension by showing how the dangers inherent in imperialist militarism are already concretised at this very moment in warring expeditions against the colonial revolution. The people's liberation struggles are no more the result of some plot or "Soviet expansionism", than the Polish workers upsurge is the product of some CIA or Vatican plot. Both are expressions of social contradications that no state apparatus can even aspire to control.
Likewise we link the struggle against militarisation to the struggle against austerity and military budgets around demands such as the rejection of military budgets, "Money for social services, not for war, down with the bomb!", for the planned reconversion of the arms industry, for the defence of soldiers' material demands and democratic rights. Thereby, we work to broaden the participation of the organised workers movement, of its parties and trade unions, in the anti-war movement.
In Europe, the strength of the movement against nuclear weapons and war is fostered by the experience of two world wars and the feeling that a new world conflagration would once again make Europe its theatre. Various ideologues and leaders can try to orient this sentiment towards some form of nationalism or alleged "armed neutrality" or "non-alignment" on behalf of a still capitalist Europe. But at the level of the mass movement, the rejection of nuclear armament and American and Soviet decisions taken behind the back of the peoples can be transformed into a new internationalist spirit that is both anti-imperialist and anti-bureaucratic and into the perspective of the Socialist United States of Europe.
41) We support the peace movements that are independent of the states or governments and have emerged in the GDR, Hungary or the USSR for example. We support their right to organise independently to struggle against war, as well as their resistance to the nuclear and military policy of the bureaucracy which has an objectively anti-bureaucratic dynamic.
The demand for the abolition of secret diplomacy and military secrecy about the use of resources, for making information widely available to the workers and for the right of the people to decide their own fate, represent a first step in a growing awareness of the danger of militarism.
We support the struggle against the militarisation of society, against militarist and chauvinist education, against the repression of the mass movements, against the deployment of Soviet nuclear arms in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. We have never considered the Warsaw Pact to be a self-defence between freely associated workers states. As opposed to the "Brezhnev Doctrine" of "limited sovereignty" we also stand for the right of East European countries to leave the Pact while at the same time we think the appropriateness of such a separation or of a renegotiation of the Pact's condition of membership is a tactical question that the working masses of each of the countries concerned must resolve in each concrete situation.
Decades of bureaucratic dictatorship and denial of the most elementary democratic rights could foster tendencies among the East European peace movements that believe bureaucratic rule represents the main threat to world peace. In some extreme cases this position can lead them to support imperialist rearmament in the name of defending "democracy" against "totalitarianism". We make no concessions in fighting such positions, and support the demand for a radical disarmament of imperialism and the bureaucracy put forward by the most conscious sections of the independent peace movement.
42) We unconditionally support the peoples of colonial and semi-colonial countries against any imperialist aggression. When an armed conflict breaks out, we unambiguously take sides for the military victory of the dominated country and for the defeat of the imperialist power (Malvinas). This unconditional suport in a confrontation does not imply in any way support for a truce or some kind of national union between the exploited masses and the ruling bourgeoisie. Only the recognition of democratic and trade union rights, the strengthening of the independent organisation of the toilers, the extension of such social measures as the agrarian reform and the confiscation of imperialist holdings, permit a full mobilisation of the masses and a strong and effective defence against imperialism.
During the British aggression against the Malvinas, revolutionary Marxists in the imperialist countries — and above all in Great Britain — correctly struggled against their imperialism's military expedition, for the unconditional withdrawal of these forces, for the recognition of Argentinian sovereignty over the Malvinas. They particularly opposed those who de facto supported the aggression by claiming it was a conflict between a "democracy" and a dictatorship.
In Argentina, while supporting the country's defence against imperialism, revolutionary Marxists had to continue to fight, shoulder to shoulder with the toiling masses, for the defence of workers' political and economic interests, for the conquest of democratic rights and for the fall of the military junta. They had to denounce the inability of the junta to carry out any sort of resolute fight against imperialism either on a military or economic level (refusal to nationalise British property), the adventurous and criminally irresponsible character of its operations and had to show how the junta's survival was a major obstacle to winning the just demands of the Argentinian nation.
The crisis racking the dominated capitalist countries is also reflected in an increase of military conflicts, among them in Africa, the Middle East (Iran-Iraq), Latin America (Peru-Ecuador). To a large extent, these conflicts are the direct product of the "Balkanisation" imposed by imperialism on entire regions of the world. They reflect imperialism's determination to maintain its yoke over the exploited and oppressed peoples.
They are a means whereby imperialism can exercise a variety of pressures that can lead to armed conflicts which it hopes to use to weaken the political forces that have escaped its control, to counter the Soviet bureaucracy's influence in a given region or, more openly, to attack an ongoing revolution. In the civil wars that arise in a particular country, such as Angola, imperialism supports the reactionary forces.
Therefore, in order to determine the tasks of revolutionaries in a military conflict, whether international in scope or localised inside one country, and in order to know how to combine the anti-imperialist tasks with the tasks of defence of the workers' class independence against their own bourgeoisie, it is necessary in every concrete case to define the reality and dynamic of the class struggle and imperialist policy.
Imperialism systematically tries to use the military conflicts between dominated countries to its advantage. It is no accident that many of the "hot spots" are located in regions that it considers economically or strategically important. But the fact remains that a series of these clashes are the product of policies decided by the bourgeoisies of these dependent capitalist countries on the basis of their own specific interests. These bourgeoisies have developed a relatively large military machine to counter the rising social explosiveness and consolidate their rule through repression, most often with the backing of imperialism. These ruling classes can be led to revive ancient territorial claims or launch nationalist campaigns in order to sidetrack the social and democratic aspirations of the masses.
In conflicts of this type, our basic guiding principle is the struggle for the political independence of the exploited classes and the priciples of proletarian internationalism. We point to the road of a struggle of the popular masses both against imperialism and their oppressors. We can even advocate the need for a political settlement of the disputes left behind by imperialist rule.
VI. Our tasks
43) In the long term only the world revolution can prevent a nuclear world war. This implies the overthrow of the imperialist bourgeoisies by the proletariat of these countries. It rules out the subordination of socialist objectives to the anti-war movement and any subordination of the socialist revolution in the capitalist countries or the political revolution in the bureaucratised workers states to the anti-imperialist struggle. Seeing such a hierarchy of tasks for the world revolution would also mean an under-estimation both of the objectively revolutionary movements that will continue to emerge in the imperialist countries and the bureaucratised workers states and the threats of the outbreak of a nuclear war as long as imperialism survives in its main strongholds.
The victory of the proletarian revolution in the imperialist centres, the victory of the anti-bureaucratic political revolution in the USSR or in China and the progress of the permanent revolution in the main dominated countries, today becomes a question of survival for humanity. Only the socialisation of the means of production under workers management and widescale public control and the withering away of sovereign national states in a world socialist federation will permit the elimination once and for all of any danger of war through the simultaneous destruction of nuclear arms stocks and the definitive banning of their production, under the control of all potential producers.
Establishing a hierarchy between the three sectors of the world revolution flows from a strategy which gives priority to the confrontation between "camps" — i.e. between the imperialist states and the bureaucratised workers states (beginning with the USSR) and not to the class struggle on a world scale.
True the very existence of the USSR, independently of the policies of the bureaucracy, or even in spite of that, facilitated the consolidation of the Yugoslav, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions against imperialism. But at each decisive stage of the rise of the world revolution (in 1935-37 in Europe, in 1943-47 and the 1960s in Latin America, the Arab countries and South Asia for example), imperialism was supported not only by the dependent bourgeoisies but also by the ruling bureaucracies and the bureaucratic apparatuses of the workers movement. The inevitable conflicts and contradictions should not lead us to minimise the importance, for the world revolution as a whole, of the rise of the political revolution in Poland and the counter-revolutionary intervention of the Soviet bureaucracy against it.
The deepening of class conflicts on an international scale highlights the dialectical unity of the three sectors of the world revolution. This unity reflects the actuality of the class struggle worldwide and cannot in any way be reduced to a confrontation between "blocs" of states, with imperialism on one side and the "socialist camp" along with progressive bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces on the other. Recent developments in Central America, Latin America, the Middle East and in Iran prove this point. The passivity of the Soviet bureaucracy, bogged down with its own economic difficulties and the policy of the Arab regimes at the time of the Zionist aggression in Lebanon illustrate this too.
In a strategic sense the emancipation of the workers means the overthrow of imperialist and capitalist forces and the ruling bureaucracies. Political and social crises are inevitable in the bureaucratised workers states. Any attempt to ignore or relativise these conflicts between the bureaucracy and the working masses of these countries will necessarily result in practice to making concessions or capitulating to the bureaucracy.
44) At the present stage, the tasks of revolutionary Marxists flow from the immediate problems facing the masses in the three sectors of the world revolution, from the masses' relations with the traditional organisations and from the emergence of new organisations with which the masses are beginning to identify.
Among the immediate tasks, the solidarity campaigns with revolutionary movements targeted by repression or counter-revolutionary attacks, are a priority on an international level: solidarity with the independent Polish workers' movement, solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, with the Southern African masses and with the revolutionary struggles in the Philippines.
These campaigns correspond to an urgent need. They are developing on the initiative of a variety of currents of the workers' and popular movements. It is important that they set themselves concrete and precise objectives which can impart a genuinely unitary dynamic to mobilisations.
Moreover, revolutionary Marxists must stand in the front ranks of the many initiatives on behalf of working class organisations and activists targeted for repression by reactionary regimes, as in Turkey, Argentina, Chile, and Iran. Such efforts correspond to the struggles waged inside these countries against "disappearances", tortures, assassinations, and are a key factor in rekindling the fight against these dictatorships.
45) In the imperialist countries, the priority tasks revolve around the struggle against the austerity offensive and military build-up of capital. Sections of the Fourth International will seek to stimulate and unify the workers' fightback against attacks on employment, wages and social security. They will carry out mass campaigns on issues that can generate united mobilisations of wage earners and broaden their struggle against austerity. Rejection of austerity policies in all forms is the core of their propaganda and agitation.
It is a question of starting from the real demands of working people and of formulating slogans expression the collective needs of the broad masses:
• For the defence of living standards, for the indexing of wages on prices, for the sliding scale of wages. It is necessary to fight to the end without giving an inch and by all means of proletarian struggle to defend workers purchasing power — in opposition to the reformist leaders, who are always ready to concede on this question.
• For the defence of jobs against all redundancies and for the 35 hour working week without reduction in wages.
• For democratic rights: at a time when the reactionary "neoliberals" argue in favour of the elite, for selection, competition and profit against the "welfare state", we must commit all our forces to the battle for democratic rights.
• For the defence of immigrants: their right of residence, their right to work, their civic rights (right to vote).
• For the defence of youth rights: their right to free, public and secular education, cultural and democratic rights, their rejection of militarism and war.
• For the defence of women's rights: civic rights, equal pay, equal job opportunity, for abortion and contraception rights.
• For the defence of secular schooling and the right to free education.
• And, above all, for the defence of the right to strike and trade union freedoms without any restrictions.
The big workers' struggles of recent years in Europe have shown that trade unions are still the priority framework for the organisation of the working class. Everywhere where there has been broad mobilisations workers have tried to really use their trade union organisations. We have seen this especially in Great Britain, Italy, West Germany, Belgium and Denmark. While it is correct to note an increase in the distrust of working class leaderships expressed in a tendency for trade union membership to decline mainly in countries where workers' parties are in power and the trade union leaderships clearly appear as complicit or even the direct agents of austerity policies, at the same time it needs to be emphasised that trade unions remain the main instrument of workers mobilisations, even when there is a development of self-organisation, for this does not go around the trade unions.
When such struggles do take place we see the beginning of the emergence of trade union oppositions which tend to contend with the traditional leaderships for the control of the trade unions in order to restore their real function — the intransigent defence of workers' demands.
The dividing line between the old leaderships and class struggle trade unionists is between those who are ready to fight for workers' demands and those who do not want to.
This is why intervening in the trade unions is a priority for sections of the International.
Moreover, the sections will strive to put forward an overall anti-capitalist alternative to bourgeois and reformist policies. This can be expressed in an action programme. Such a programme must help to bring together the various currents opposing the collaborationist policy of the bureaucracies and to convince ever broader layers of the need to break with the bourgeoisie, its logic of profit, its state, and its international system, and to orient towards the conquest of power by the workers. In periods of acute political crisis, it is imperative to combine such an action programme with agitation for a precise government formula which concretises in the eyes of the masses the necessary break with the bourgeoisie.
Sections will work to promote the broadest unity in action of all forces willing in practice to open breaches in the austerity policy. While such initiatives should not be subordinated to the policy of the bureaucracy, they must be part of a united front policy towards all the workers' organisations.
The defence of the most vulnerable layers of the proletariat of imperialist countries (immigrant workers, women, youth, recipients of social benefits) is part of this approach.
To defend women's rights we must initiate or support independent women's mobilisations against unemployment, for the right to abortion and against reactionary policies "in defence of the family". At the same time we fight for the workers' movement as a whole to take up the struggle for these demands. Particular attention must be paid to the triple exploitation of immigrant women.
The workers' movement must organise a response to the rise of racism and xenophobia on which the far-right and fascistic forces feed. Assaults and repression against the immigrant workers lay the ground for assaults that will be extended next to revolutionary organisations, trade union activists, and the whole of the workers' movement.
In addition to the struggle against nuclear weapons and the imperialist military pacts, the campaign against the military build-up requires a sustained struggle against the bourgeois army, for democratic rights for soldiers, including the right to form trade unions. The combined struggle against austerity and the military build-up revolves around such slogans as: "Social expenditures, not military expenditures", "Schools, hospitals, not missiles", "Jobs not bombs".
46) In all capitalist countries many ecological movements or parties have been formed. Usually they have been led to distance themselves from the workers' movement due to the fact that the traditional parties have not given a valid response to the environmental question. In the dependent countries the relations between a catastrophic ecological situation, economic dependence on imperialism and the oppression of indigenous peoples appear increasingly clear. In the bureaucratised workers states opposition movements discuss the ecological dangers implicit in bureaucratic models of growth.
In fact, the ecological question implies a dynamic going beyond the system in all three sectors of the world revolution. In the imperialist countries it leads to posing the question of control over the means of production. In the dependent countries it cannot be taken up outside of a consistent struggle against the hold of imperialism and for a radical transformation of socio-economic structures. In the bureaucratised workers states it leads to challenging the bureaucracy's power.
Given the extent of the ecological crisis — as well as the depth of the economic crisis on a world scale — this fundamental tenet needs to be reasserted: workers' power is the necessary precondition for guaranteeing for future generations the conservation of these natural resources without which the prosperity of human civilisation and its very survival are mortally threatened.
Consequently the Fourth International and its sections must take up the environmental question more and more systematically in their propaganda and general activity. They will strive to develop common actions with ecologist movements.
47) In the semi-colonial and semi-industrialised countries, the combined struggle for democratic, anti-imperialist and anti-dictatorial goals plays a central role.
The mobilisation of broad popular layers for their most elementary rights, in a context of rising poverty and crisis, profoundly undermines military dictatorships, and more generally, all ruling regimes. The link between democratic rights and the anti-imperialist struggle strengthens because of the still more blatant and aggressive intervention of imperialism in periods of crisis, through the IMF, the World Bank, the resort to the food weapon, and direct military interventions. Independently of the uncertainty of any actual repayment of the loans — it is improbable — the demand for the real annulment/repudiation of the foreign debt retains all its validity.
The anti-imperialist struggle also includes the denunciation of regional military pacts, particularly in South East Asia, the Pacific Ocean (ANZUS) and the Middle East, and of the supplementary role played by certain local armies in the framework of imperialist projects (Caribbean bourgeois armies in Grenada, Chad army etc.).
We also support the masses' struggle for a nuclear-free zone in the Indian sub-continent and ocean and in the Pacific Ocean.
The struggle for democratic and anti-imperialist demands includes the struggle for land reform. Wherever possible, sections will strive to draw up a concrete programme of land reform, that will take into account the great diversity of regional situations, put the emphasis on helping to mobilise and organise poor peasants and the agricultural semi-proletariat and proletariat, and seek to answer their aspirations in matters of land ownership, access to water, to fertilizers, to tools and agricultural machinery, to credit, to commercialisation networks, to social infrastructures and to jobs.
Wherever possible, we must promote the formation or help to enlarge mass peasants unions or peasant leagues, and encourage them to carry out effective land seizure actions. More generally, we must promote the constitution of mass fronts among the peasants, slumdwellers, the women, the youth, the unemployed, when possible on a united front basis with other revolutionary or combative socialist tendencies, in order to enhance the self activity and self-organisation of the most deprived layers, and encourage them to enter into united actions with the working class. The initiatives and leading role that revolutionary Marxists can play in these mass fronts will also represent important tools for party-building.
The particularly dramatic situation of the semi-proletarian, marginal population of the towns means the demand for urban reform has great importance. Such a reform should include the immediate satisfaction of the needs of the shantytown population in terms of services (running water, sewers, electricity), housing, public transport, education, health, decent commercial supply of basic necessities, etc.
As a result of the industrialisation and urbanisation of a certain number of semi-industrialised countries the specific demands of the working class become more and more intertwined with the democratic and anti-imperialist demands from the very beginning of the mass movement. This interconnection is further strengthened by the consequences of the crisis and the effects of austerity policies on living and working conditions. All this leads to the emergence of a series of demands against austerity policies and anti-working class legislation, but also to the appearance of transitional and anti-capitalist demands as is the case in Bolivia today. These demands mainly deal with the massive urban unemployment, famine and undernourishment, inflation and super-exploitation.
This overall orientation, rooted in the programme of permanent revolution, entails a systematic effort to mobilise and independently organise the proletariat and poor peasants, to struggle for the class independence of the proletariat, and to build the workers and peasants alliance in which the outcasts of the cities, the popular youth, and the labouring urban petty-bourgeoisie will take their place. The struggle for class political independence can be based on all or part of the existing trade union structures. It can also emerge out of a political radicalisation of militant trade unionists and workers, as was the case when the Workers Party of Brazil was formed. It can also come about through a broad united front of organisations of the workers' movement with substantial trade union influence, as could have been the case in Peru on the basis of ARI.
Clearly then, it can arise through a variety of paths, depending on the country. Revolutionary Marxists fight for class political independence must include initiatives towards populist or nationalist curents moving in an anti-capitalist direction who can be won over to the project of building a workers' party independent of the bosses and the state. Insofar as the anti-imperialists task intermingle with the battle for class political independence, revolutionary Marxists do not exclude the possibility of agreements with sectors of the bourgeoisie who are acting in practice, albeit only temporarily and around a limited range of issues, against the dictatorships and imperialism. These agreements or tactical alliances must be established on the basis of precise goals and accompanied by the systematic education of the masses to the fact that these bourgeois sectors will inevitably go over, sooner or later, to the camp of the counter-revolution.
Strict maintenance of the class, political and organisational independence of the proletariat and poor peasants; unrestricted freedom of the masses to mobilise and organise to promote their own class demands; march separately, strike together: these are the rules that must guide revolutionaries in such conjunctural agreements with fractions of the bourgeoisie. They must especially promote a mass self-defence policy based on the balance sheet of past experiences, of the recurrence of waves of repression, coups and counter-revolutionary foreign interventions. The workers and peasants must be prepared to fight back, using as a point of departure their military preparation inside their own mass organisations. Revolutionary Marxists emphasise the combination of the insurrectional tasks on the agenda during a revolutionary crisis, and the general political-military tasks.
When confronted with fascist or military dictatorships which violently and systematically repress the workers' and anti-imperialist movement, specific initiatives by revolutionary organisations can be justified, within the framework of a general approach of self-defence of the toiling masses and their organisations. A precondition for this is that this organisation has the forces and implantation permitting it to avoid any adventurism or putschism.
48) In the bureaucratised workers states the revolutionary tasks revolve around the preparation of the political revolution, i.e., the revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucracy. This is now the best way to defend the revolutionary gains that remain in these countries and to eliminate the obstacles which prevent new advances towards socialism. These tasks can be concretised in the light of the Polish experience. They range from the struggle for the basic interests and democratic rights of the workers, in order to begin to overcome their atomisation, to the struggle for the conquest of power and the establishment (or restoration) of socialist democracy.
The anti-bureaucratic political revolution requires a revolutionary party of the vanguard capable of concentrating the energy of the mass movement on the urgent tasks, of proposing tactics that can help achieve the strategic goals, of giving impetus to the self-organisation and centralisation of the mass movement. The nucleus of such a party could only play that kind of role if it intervened in close connection with the most advanced currents of the movement, and if it respected its rhythms of maturation and real dynamic.
Revolutionary Marxists undertake the building of such a nucleus as an urgent task of the day.
This approach implies a rejection of the positions propagated by some sectors of "the dissidents" who claim the passivity of Soviet workers reflects their acceptance of the bureaucratic regime, or even a preference for the faults of bureaucratic management because this state of affairs allows them to combine low productive efforts and a "system" based on individual resourcefulness.
It also rejects any sort of defeatist approach that would subordinate the development of political revolution in Eastern Europe to the emergence of a vast mass opposition movement in the USSR. The Polish events demonstrated quite the opposite: that the proletariat contains an immense potential for mobilisation, creativity, and organisation, and is capable of reorganising society on socialist foundations as soon as it represents a majority of the active population. In the future, other East European countries will experience similar explosions and bureaucratic rule will not remain stable in the USSR or in the People's Republic of China.
Defence of the workers states against imperialism remains a strategic task of the world proletariat. In this period direct military aggression against the USSR is not on the agenda. However, the defence of Cuba and Nicaragua, directly threatened by US aggression and of the Indochinese countries under the threats of revanchist imperialist policy, from the Chinese bureaucracy and from the consequences of inter-bureaucratic conflicts in Eastern Asia, is a task of particular importance today:
49) Everywhere we continue our relentless work of building mass revolutionary Marxist organisations and a mass revolutionary International.
Building a genuine world revolutionary organisation remains a priority task which corresponds to the growing internationalisation of class struggles which is the outgrowth of the growing internationalisation of productive forces, and to the crisis of revolutionary leadership on a world scale.
The bourgeois ideological and political offensive against communism, Marxism and socialism must be vigorously answered. Unlike the 1930s, socialist planning no longer appears to the masses as the natural answer to the grave crisis of capitalism because this planning is identified with bureaucratic planning and its contradictions in the USSR and Eastern Europe. This confusion is fostered at once, though for different reasons, by the imperialist bourgeoisie, by the Stalinist bureaucracy, and by the reformist bureaucracy in the West. Defending the real meaning of socialism, as revolutionary Marxism and the workers' movement have traditionally understood it, but integrating the new possibilities opened by the present level of development of the productive forces, is part and parcel of the defence of Marxism and socialism.
Hence the importance of a programme that combines the proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries, the permanent revolution process in the dominated countries, and anti-bureaucratic political revolution in the bureaucratised workers states, to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist democracy on a world scale.
By deepening their roots in the working class and youth, by demonstrating their ability to converge and fuse with currents moving towards revolutionary Marxist positions on the basis of the experience of the class struggle in their own country, sections of the Fourth International work to implement and enrich this programme.
The fact that they have endeavoured to do so makes them an irreplaceable instrument for the building of a mass revolutionary International.