Editorial for Revolutionary Perspectives 24 (Series 4).

Since we began preparing this issue, Russian missiles have struck a paediatric hospital and Israeli bombs have flattened yet another UNRWA school, this time in Nuseirat, Gaza; the news reminds us that, in this year of electoral distraction, war continues to devastate lives in at least fifty countries across the world. These don’t get the prime time coverage of the Ukraine “meat-grinder” or the devastation in Gaza but they bring the same amount of misery to those in the firing line. In Sudan, for example, the war between the ruling factions, which began 15 months ago, rages on with the support of the local and not-so-local imperialist powers. No-one knows the real death toll (way over 15,000) but the cemeteries are now full. Here the particular humanitarian services targeted are health centres. According to the WHO, 60 attacks in a few months have disabled 70% of health services. Imperialist total warfare allows no “collateral damage”. They are cut-throat fights to the finish in which the annihilation of the “other” in terms of both variable and constant capital is the object of the exercise. As the Secretary General of the United Nations said in February, the world is now entering “an age of chaos” where war means “a dangerous and unpredictable free-for-all with total impunity”. He even went so far as to say that unlike during the Cold War, when “well-established mechanisms helped manage superpower relations”, those mechanisms are missing “in today’s multipolar world”. His observations are incontestable but his solution, of course, was simply to suggest making the UN more effective, ignoring the fact that far from being a body for peace it has always been just another forum for acting out inter-imperialist rivalry. To understand the current drift to a more generalised war we have to look elsewhere.

Namely, we need to go to the material basis of society and this means having an in-depth analysis of the economic situation. This means digging a little deeper than the UN Secretary-General. In the Cold War to which he refers, a “nuclear stand-off” was not the chief reason for preventing an all out world war. The fundamental point was that the two powers that emerged dominant from the Second World War were largely satisfied with the status quo. Moreover, the war had destroyed so much value that it was followed by the greatest boom in capitalist history. Both super-powers had more to lose than gain from all-out war. It was the end of that boom in the early 1970s, and the rise of working class resistance to the attempts by capitalist states everywhere to make us pay for the crisis, that gave birth to organisations like the CWO. Since our foundation almost fifty years ago, we have been attempting to understand the material basis of all the shifts and turns in capitalist development and the latest contribution to this is the fifth part of our series on capitalism’s economic foundations in this issue.

This not only explains why globalisation occurred but what it has done to the world working class in the process. The old massive plants of the Fordist era in the “advanced” capitalist world have been replaced by smaller units as even the monopolies farm out services to ancillary companies. This new class composition means greater challenges for revolutionaries. Some theories have been overtaken by events. The idea of syndicalists and council communists, that by simply taking over their production units workers can go on to destroy the capitalist state and its social order, has lost its force as we show in our review article on Anton Pannekoek. Pannekoek was right about one thing however – the key to the liberation of the working class lies in its consciousness. Capitalism won’t simply be superseded by super-militancy. The overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the foundations of a new communistic world can only come about through the conscious action of millions of workers across the world. More than ever that means we need a credible international political force to unify the class around a clear programme. Given the threats to human existence posed by capitalism’s continuing destruction of the environment and the prospect of a generalised imperialist war emerging from any one of the wars going on across the planet today, this is more urgent than ever. Pannekoek lived through the disasters of the Second and Third Internationals which had both ended up betraying the working class. In the counter-revolutionary period of the 1930s with the fossilisation of a state capitalist ‘Marxism’ by the Stalinist regime in the USSR he came to see “the party” as a brake on the developing revolutionary consciousness of the class and put his trust more and more in “spontaneity”. He was well aware that the elemental struggle of the working class had to involve the development of revolutionary ideas but did not explain how these could be retained through time. He also viewed the councils (soviets) in themselves as only arenas for the struggle between ideas, albeit often embodied by parties, but he did not see the party as a collective emanation of the consciousness of the workers themselves before the revolution. Today we can see that an organised international political body with a clear revolutionary programme based on the acquisitions of the working class’ own history of struggle are essential factors in the fight to overthrow the system. We are not talking here of a party which aspires to government (that is the task of the councils: the Russian workers’ historically discovered form of how to operate a mass society whilst guaranteeing the maximum of participation of all its members). We are talking here of an International capable of taking on not only the false friends of the workers who peddle the reactionary ideologies of Stalinism and social democracy (today embraced by many Trotskyists), but new political dangers which will emerge to sidetrack and undermine the independent struggle of the working class.

It is in this framework that we are ready to cooperate in building workers’ resistance to war by first of all rejecting nationalism and engaging with all those who recognise that the working class, which produces the wealth of nations everywhere, is the one global force that has the potential to halt the imperialist drive to world war. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine we knew that this would be no easy task. Identification with the nation has always been an easy option for the capitalists and in this sense preparations for a wider war are already well underway. Part of the preparation is ideological and this was reflected in the recent elections in the EU, the UK and France where the “choice” before electors was all about the best way to step up military preparations and stopping the immigration of the victims of war and economic crisis around the world from bringing in their “alien values”. The role of identity politics was more obvious than ever in these elections. In France the rise of the Rassemblement National gave a green light for racist attacks against French citizens with origins in North Africa or France’s other former colonies. Today the party of Le Pen, which once was so anti-semitic that it dismissed the Holocaust as “a detail of history”, now lines up with Israel as fellow fighters against Islamism. In the UK in seats like Batley and Dewsbury, supporters of the Palestinian national cause were elected by Muslim voters whilst thousands of white workers turned to the racist Reform Party. Such polarisation is a product of the decades old capitalist crisis which today finds almost half of UK adults, 20.3 million people, living hand to mouth on credit just to survive. In the sixth richest capitalist nation on the planet almost 3 million use food banks regularly. Throughout the richer OECD countries real wages have fallen since 2021 and this comes on top of the long decline of wages as a share of GDP since 1979. In these circumstances it is not immediately apparent to workers that their wretched quality of life is caused by some abstraction like “the capitalist system”. How easy and cheap to blame migrants or Muslims or Jews or anyone else who can be made a scapegoat.

But that is not our only problem in building a class movement. There are also the divisions in the revolutionary movement that 100 years of counter-revolution have produced, as our article on Pannekoek shows. This not only produces fake or part-time internationalists like the Stalinists who will use “revolutionary defeatism” as cover for support for Russia in Ukraine but it also has left a legacy of suspicion amongst revolutionaries who see all attempts at political organisation as “rackets” (à la Camatte). Others simply do not see the seriousness of the current situation even when taking correct internationalist stances. At the Arezzo meeting every other delegation argued that our concerns over generalised war were exaggerated or that “the working class is holding back war”. In Prague the main difference was between those (primarily anarchists it has to be said) who argued that exemplary actions (“propaganda by the deed” in the nineteenth century) were the ways to fight militarism and those (like us) who argued that it was only the wider working class beyond the revolutionary minorities who could stop war by stopping capitalism. Our work has to be to spread propaganda about exactly where capitalism is taking us and this means building a widespread enough movement to reach the rest of the working class. It is in this spirit and with this motive that we have joined with others in the No War but the Class War committees to provide a concrete step towards a wider class resistance. It was in this spirit that we also attended the international gathering in Prague reported in this issue, as well as the smaller gathering in Arezzo.

And as a salutary warning of what playing political games instead of working in the wider class brings, we have translated an article by Onorato Damen on the murder of Giacomo Matteotti on its hundredth anniversary – a murder which led to a political crisis and the Fascist takeover of Italy. The Communist Party of Italy, with Gramsci by then installed at its head by the Comintern, neglected a seething class movement throughout the peninsula, and played parliamentary games with social democrats and liberals in the farcical so-called Aventine Secession. This allowed Mussolini to survive months of crisis and eventually declare the dictatorship in January 1925.

Finally, and sadly, this issue of Revolutionary Perspectives is slightly late as we only received news of the death of our comrade Olivier in the course of its preparation. Olivier, despite suffering from prostate cancer for two years or so, and knowing he may not survive, devoted his last energies to the establishment of the Groupe Révolutionnaire Internationaliste (GRI), the French affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency. His dedication, determination and courage and dignity throughout his political life were unequalled, and our condolences go to his comrades in the GRI and his partner Françoise, and their family.

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Image: UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0), flickr.com