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The Historical Perspective of « Communism » is the Key of the Proletariat's Present Struggles

Forced to mention the workers mobilization around the struggle of the Spanish miners – they could not ignore them unless risking to discredit themselves – , the bourgeois media hasten to silence again on this event after the miners' demonstration in Madrid (July 11^th) taking advantage the holidays summer period and the Olympic Games. The censorship that the international media exert over the workers reactions to the crisis is an illustration of the threat that the dynamic of international workers struggles represents for the capitalist order and which particularly runs through Europe. After Greece, it is thus the turn of the Iberian Peninsula, in Spain, in Portugal, where the proletariat is obliged to attempt to react in front of the conditions of living which are now imposed on it. And the silence exerted by the ruling class, doesn't change anything to the reality of the various workers responses of this summer.

After Greece, the workers mobilization around the Asturian miners' struggle tended to focus the attention of the international proletariat and has embodied a centre of agitation in Spain for all workers. The massive participation of the workers population of Madrid to the “Marcha negra” [the “Black March”] of the miners as well as the warm reception they received in the whole country, reveal the fact that all Spanish workers tended to identify with this fight and were conscious of the need for a united response of all sectors and all regions to face the State. The use of a class violence to defend itself in front of the bourgeois repression, the attempts to paralyse the functioning of the State and the capitalist economy through the blockage of transportations and the occupation of the cities of the mine region, has shown to all the path to follow and it is precisely in this that the whole Spanish proletariat recognizes itself. Also, this mobilization of an “historical” sector of the working class, with a “tradition” of decades of struggles whether under the Spanish Republic in the years 1930 as well as under Franco's dictatorship in the following years, has definitively shown the “limits” of the famous movement of the “indignados” [“indignous”, the Spanish version, and first one, of the “Occupy Wall Street” movements] and, actually, the example-trap that it represented for the proletariat's struggle. The miners of the Asturias recalled to everybody that the fight against the capitalist attacks due to the crisis is not a fight of “citizens” for a better democracy, but well and truly a fight of an exploited class against another ruling and exploiter class whether it is “democratic” or no.

For this, the miners' struggle and the mobilization it has led to in the whole country, is an example to follow, a path to take back in all countries.

Nevertheless, we must also note that this mobilization – up to today, the miners have globally stop their strike without having get something and the austerity measures carry on falling on the Spanish working class – has not emerged on a raising of the class fight against the bourgeoisie and its State up to shake the latter and oblige it, at least momentarily, to withdraw its economical attacks.

Why the workers anger which is real, generalized, why the willingness for fighting, the feeling we must struggle altogether, have not succeeded to modify significantly the relation of forces between the classes ? The workers demonstration in Madrid, despite its success and the reinforcements of the workers population of the Spanish capital, has finished into an impasse and a kind of an end – at least for the moment. Why ? Is this due to the fact the unions have kept the control over the workers mobilization, over the organization of the March to Madrid, over the slogans and the demands – often regionalist and corporatist ? Due to the fact they have also partly succeeded in turning back against the workers the use of self-defence in front of repression by making it a myth and a goal in itself, thus limiting at the maximum any risk of real extension and generalization of the movement ? Indeed, the unions and the Left political forces have played a role and made all they could to enclose the workers into their specificities of “miners” and in the “save our region” - and unfortunately no communist group could, or didn't want¹, intervene and oppose besides the workers to the unions dead-ends and sabotages ; none could advance alternative slogans and alternative perspectives of action. But this is not enough to explain the limits of the present workers struggles – since the limits of the mobilization in Spain are more or less the same as the ones the international proletariat faces almost everywhere.

Why the role of the bourgeoisie's agents in the workers ranks as the unions, the Left parties and the leftists, and their action are not enough to explain that the working class doesn't succeed up to now to rise its struggle at the level which is required by the situation (gravity of the capitalist crisis and the attacks) ? While never in capitalism history – we do weigh our words – the objective conditions have so much favoured the evolution of the relation of forces between the classes in favour of the proletariat. Never in capitalism history, the bourgeoisie had to attack the proletariat with such a strength– we only are at its beginnings – and with such a frontal manner, in all countries and in all sectors, at the same time, while the whole working class – though suffering the ceaseless false plugging of bourgeois ideology – remains far from supporting the great nationalist, democratic, anti-terrorist, anti-fascist or other themes of this ideology.

These frontal and massive attacks aren't but beginning and are even going to increase, not only because the economical crisis is insolvable from the capitalist oint of view but also precisely because the bourgeoisie has no other choice than to press that the whole society mobilizes and compromises in a new generalized imperialist war. This other “historical perspective”, the one “offered” by the bourgeoisie, implies even before its starting new and terrible sacrifices. But, up to today, and contrary to 1914 and 1939, the working class is not ready to accept and to adhere to this march towards generalized war. Thus, while the objective historical conditions (the more and more obvious bankruptcy of capitalism, the historical weakening of the ruling class...) have never been so favourable, we repeat it, why the proletariat is it still unable to take advantage of this situation in order to turn the situation in its own favour ? Why, whereas its illusions about capitalism and bourgeois democracy are falling down under the strikes of the attacks by the bourgeois States ? What is it missing ? What does it suffer of ?

The essential weakness of the international proletariat – the workers struggles in Greece and now in Spain demonstrate it – lies at the level of its class consciousness, at the level of the extent and the deepness of this one in its ranks. At the very moment it regains, in its masses, the consciousness that it is a single and same class, it carries on suffering the huge and deep impact of the anti-communism campaigns which have above all followed the collapse of stalinism and which rely on the false assimilation of genuine communism to the stalinist dictatorship and to the USSR. Since, with its campaigns ceaseless dealt out, the bourgeoisie does all it can to make us believe that “communism is dead” and above all that there is no alternative to capitalism.

One fact is significant and goes beyond a simple detail : the images of the massive demonstration in Madrid show a flowering of regionalist or unionist banners but no red flags – what ever is their utilization by the leftists. This a particular illustration of the fact that consciousness, as diffuse and confuse it can be in the workers ranks, that another society is possible and that capitalism has to be destroyed, is particularly reduced and in great part lacking in the workers mobilization. Inevitably, this has a negative impact for the development (in extension, in unity and in deepness) of the workers fights of today. Without this historical perspective whether it be more or less clear and present in the class, the proletariat's struggle can't rise up to what the situation requires. Without historical perspective, it is deeply weakened up to the very level of its immediate and daily struggles which have no chance to make the bourgeoisie withdraws – in particular today when the capitalist system is bankrupted. Since the need for paralysing the bourgeoisie and its State power, it means to confront it politically and to dispute it its power, loses its foundation without the consciousness that the proletariat is a class whose future is to overthrow capitalism, make disappear the classes and set up communism through the exercise of its own class power.

It is all the difficulty of the class fights of today as well as their limit. This weakness also expresses itself at the level of the proletariat's political vanguard in particular through the absence of influence of the living communist minorities. Of course, the groups and organizations which claim communism, define themselves according to this perspective. Nevertheless they have also suffered from the post-1989 anti-communist campaigns. In particular, political opportunism have exerted ravages in their ranks as illustrates it the example of the catastrophic political drift of the ICC² which openly manifested since 2001. Besides this, sectarianism carries on hitting the existing groups and weaken their difficulty to assume the tasks of political confrontations and debates in order to favour the indispensable regroupment of forces.

In that sense, the fact that various individuals and circles, often stemming from... the ICC, take over the anti-communist campaigns of the bourgeoisie adding their contribution and their “supposed” authority on the subject for having been militant in the ranks of the Communist Left during decades, comes also to weaken directly the communist camp and its organizations.

All this implies that the great proletarian masses, with the determined support of their most conscious and most militant minorities which are the communist political groups, must regain the perspective of the proletarian revolution and of communism. This way passes through the return to the workers and communist generations of the past ; for the whole international proletariat, it passes through taking back the path of the workers fights free from the democratic lies and illusions ; for the organized communist minorities, besides their decided intervention in the workers struggles to which they can participate, it passes through the defence of the workers experiences of the past, and all specially the defence of the 1917 Russian Revolution, of the workers insurrection, of the exercise of the proletarian dictatorship ; the defence of the bolshevik party of Lenin that the bourgeoisie strives to soil. For the great workers masses, the return in the consciousnesses of the revolutionary perspective will arm and will make more efficient the immediate fights which, in return, will increasingly precise and strengthen this perspective. From possible, these fights will make it a material necessity. For the political vanguard, defending the “communist program” within the working class, it is putting forward the legacy of the past, it is to tie up again with the threads of the previous generations of revolutionaries. This will favour their confidence and determination for their leading and dynamic role of political vanguard and thus will go towards giving the influence upon the great workers masses that it belongs to them.

“There are not two different class struggles of the working class, an economic and a political one, but only one class struggle, which aims at one and the same time at the limitation of capitalist exploitation within bourgeois society, and at the abolition of exploitation together with bourgeois society itself “ (Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 1906).

August 2012.

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