50 Years Ago: Fascism and the State (1977)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

When we urge the supreme importance of the working class capturing Parliament, with the administrative departments and local councils which it controls, we are often met with the argument that the Fascists came to power in defiance of the then constitutionally elected Italian government.

★ ★ ★

But as we have pointed out before, the Fascist seizure of power took place not in defiance of, but with the approval and active assistance of, the democratically elected Italian government. But for that active assistance Mussolini and his followers would have been helpless. Then, as before and since, the possession of the State machinery proved to be the deciding factor. Our view has received interesting confirmation from three sources—the Italian Communist, Bordiga; Professor Salvemini, a Liberal; and Modigliani, of the Italian Socialist Party.

Bordiga says (Labour Magazine, February & March 1923):- ‘After the Nitti, Giolitti, and Bonomi governments, we had the Facta Cabinet. This government was intended to cover up the complete liberty of action of Fascism in its expansion over the whole country. During the strike in August 1922, several conflicts took place between the workers and the Fascisti, who were openly aided by the government.

★ ★ ★

Wherever Fascism had been beaten back by the workers, the power of the State intervened; workers who resisted were shot down; workers who were guilty of nothing but self-defence were arrested and sentenced; while the magistrates systematically acquitted the Fascisti, who were generally known to have committed innumerable crimes.

Thus the State was the main factor in the development of Fascism.

(From an editorial “Fascism and the State”, Socialist Standard, Dec. 1927.)

Misreading fascism (2018)

Book Review from the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Fighting Fascism’. By Clara Zetkin, (edited by Mike Taber and John Riddell. Haymarket, £10.99)

This booklet reproduces two main writings of Zetkin on fascism: her report and resolution presented at the Third Enlarged Plenum of the Communist International’s Executive Committee in June 1923, and her speech to the German Reichstag in 1932.

Clara Zetkin was an iconic left-wing German Marxist and close friend of Rosa Luxemburg who opted for the political line taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, becoming a champion of the Third International. She stayed on the side of the Third International although not without some regrets, even during the rise and ‘splendour’ of Stalinism.

In order to appreciate the historical and political relevance of Zetkin’s analysis, the reader should consider that this came less than one year after the report (Rapporto sul Fascismo) presented by the then leader of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) Amadeo Bordiga. His report at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International came a few days after Mussolini had come to power. The fascists’ Marcia su Roma had taken placed while the Italian delegates were away at that congress. This is not a negligible detail if we consider that eight days after Bordiga’s Report on Fascism the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party sent a letter to the Italian delegation, signed by Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin to impose the fusion between the PCd’I and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), from which the PCd’I had split only a little less than two years earlier. Bordiga was a tenacious opponent of the reunification imposed by the International in the name of the ‘united front’. This tactic and the interpretation and attitude toward fascism were very much interlinked. So in June 1923, while Bordiga was in jail, and the change of guard at the leadership of the Italian Party – its Bolshevisation – was coming about, an adjusted interpretation of fascism would strengthen and justify the new direction. This re-interpretation was in fact Zetkin’s report and resolution.

To be fair, Zetkin’s interpretation of fascism, and Italian fascism in particular, is in many respects truthful and in line with Bordiga’s report. However, her version is studded with assumptions and convictions that served the political plan of discrediting Bordiga’s ‘infantile’ position (e.g. of no compromises with social-democrats and Massimalists), and winning the new leadership under Antonio Gramsci over to the united front story. For Zetkin ‘Fascism arrives . . . as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution’ and that ‘Fascism [is] an expression of decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy . . . bourgeois state’s dissolution’. ‘The weaknesses of the Communist Party [of Italy] also played a role here . . . policy error in viewing fascism solely as a military phenomenon and overlooking its ideological and political side’.  According to Zetkin’s view, the violent struggle against fascism would allow the proletariat to ‘grow conscious, stronger, and more purposeful’. Thus, ‘To the masses! . . . but maintaining Communist Ideology . . .  Meet violence with violence’.

Fascism did not arrive as a punishment because the workers and their leaders shied away from revolution. As already pointed out by Bordiga in his report, fascism was adopted by the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie to violently physically repress the workers who occupied factories and fields in the turmoil following WWI. Looking a bit closer, one can see that fascism was in fact generated by the bourgeoisie itself. Money for Mussolini’s journal and the creation of his pseudo-anti-parliamentary-pro-worker patriotic movement (Fasci Italiani di Combattimento) came mainly from the Italian bourgeoisie.

Nor was fascism an expression of capitalist economic disintegration. Italy was thrown into the First World War completely unprepared, by a secret pact involving the king, Vittorio Emanuele III, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sidney Sonnino and Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, representing the interest of industrial bourgeoisie hoping for easy spoils. By 1922 the country had already covered 79 billion lira of war costs without borrowing anything from other countries. 

When reading Bordiga’s report it is also clear that the Italian Party did not see fascism as a mere military phenomenon.

1919 was in fact a bad year for fascism still stuck with patriotic demagogy. At the end of the war the liberals had some difficulty in keeping control over the army generals. This was evident when the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, from whom Mussolini later stole completely his style and propaganda, managed to get several generals on his side to occupy the Italian-speaking city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), which according to the secret negotiations between Sonnino and the Entente was to go to Yugoslavia.

The old fox Giovanni Giolitti also thought he could use Mussolini’s fascists to get rid of the D’Annunzio movement, which was destabilising the army’s hierarchy, and to reduce the spread of working class organisations in particular in rural areas. He was looking for a political entity to go into coalition with. At the end of 1920, with government backing, the fascist ‘punitive expeditions’ started to terrorise the rural north of Italy. At the election of 1921 the fascists finally entered into parliament. They were not enough to serve Giolitti’s plans, who now had PSI and Popolari (Catholics) against him.

Thus, Mussolini’s fascists gained strength when the agrarian bourgeoisie, mainly of Emilia, Lombardy and Tuscany first, and the industrial bourgeoisie of big industrial cities such as Turin and Milan, saw in the fascists’ aversion towards working class organisations a viable anti-working-class weapon, even more effective than the Guardia Regia that up to then had violently repressed any insurrection. The advantage of using para-military fascist squadrons was that they could physically eliminate the leaders of the working class institutions, like the Mafia was doing in Sicily. The demobilisation of the army helped the fascists to recruit veterans who no longer fitted into society. Nevertheless, as we just mentioned, the fascist violence in the country as well as in the urban areas had always been tolerated if not facilitated by the police forces.

When Mussolini took power in 1922, against Giolitti’s calculations, the king did not enforce the state of siege ordered by the then Prime Minister, and permitted this. Hardly a coup d’etat when the Head of State gives his blessing.

Contrary to Zetkin’s, Zinoviev’s and other Third Internationalists’ expectations, Italy was not ready to conduct a successful working class revolution, ‘like in Russia’. This was acknowledged in Bordiga’s report. Instead of being an ‘expression of decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy’ fascism was an authoritarian adaptation of the political representation of capital’s interests.

The risk in adopting Zetkin’s view is to accept the false notion that fighting exclusively against fascism would automatically result in an emancipation of the working class. The danger today is that the ‘fight against fascism’ becomes a fight only against Trumpism, just because his bombastic ego may resemble Mussolini’s. Or that the victory against ISIS (a typical paramilitary ideological movement) is seen as a liberation of the working class in the Middle East from capitalism. The fight against fascism must not become a ‘moral question’. It is a class struggle question just as much as a fight against any other form of representation of capital’s interest is a class struggle question.

Cesco

Socialism and the Fascisti (1923)

From the April 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party accepts the view that it is necessary for the workers before they can begin to introduce Socialism to conquer the powers of Government in order that they may control the Governmental machinery, and through it the armed forces. The fulfilment of our programme requires that a majority of the workers shall understand and want Socialism. Given such a majority and its reflex in a majority of Socialist delegates on local councils and in the House of Commons, the workers will be in a position to impose their will on the present ruling class; an appeal to armed force from whom will be met by the military, acting under the instructions of the Socialist delegates.

This attitude is subjected to many criticisms, one of which is that the capture of the political machinery will not give the power we assert. Those who make this criticism argue that while political power is necessary it can be obtained only by the workers building up a rival organisation and with it overthrowing the capitalist State. They deny that the power of the capitalists rests on their control of Parliament, and point to the Fascist movement in Italy as proof that revolutionary Parliamentary action by the workers is futile. The workers must, they argue, organise armed resistance to the ruling class. They do not explain how the workers are going to obtain possession of the arms and organise in such strength as to offer serious opposition to- the Crown forces, and it seems fairly obvious that the capitalists will easily be able to prevent such organisation within the present system. When pressed on this point the exponents of violence look knowing, and make obscure references to the disastrous Irish insurrection now being crushed by the capitalist Free State Government.

Their chief argument is, however, the rise of the Italian Fascisti, who, they say, robbed the workers by armed intimidation of their constitutional gains. If it were shown to be possible that in an advanced and stable capitalist democracy the ruling class were able to throw aside the recognised forms of government, to ignore the institutions which they had proclaimed to be the basis of society, to rule by brute force and to survive, a condition of things would be created requiring the application of methods other than those we advocate. As regards Italy, however, it just doesn't happen to be true.

What these critics have overlooked is that the Fascist movement existed only by permission of the Italian Government, by the permission, that is, of the people who did control the political machinery and the armed forces.

Nor is there evidence that the Italian workers as a whole had ever reached the stage of desiring Socialism. They had, for instance, not returned a majority of Socialists to the Italian Parliament, nor had they captured more than a minority of the town and other councils.

What is always advanced as proof of their being revolutionary is their seizure of the factories during 1920. But according to the correspondent in Italy of the New York "Nation" (March 8th, 1922) this will bear no such interpretation. The "Nation" article (quoted by the "Western Clarion," Vancouver, May 1st, 1922) gives the following account of the event. The war gave rise in Italy to a new and powerful group of metal industries with banking connections, known as Peronne Brothers, the allied bank being the Banca Italiana Disconto. It was the Peronne factories, the "Ansaldo Iron and Steel Co.," which were occupied in 1920.

This group and its banking allies came into conflict with the older concerns, and at the end of the war, with its consequent slackening of demand for iron and steel for war purposes, the position of Peronne Bros. became acute. Naturally the employers sought to resist the wage demands of their workers, and for this purpose entered into alliance with their rivals. It was their betrayal by their rivals, the Banca Commerciale, which caused their defeat and subsequent bankruptcy.

  "The proletarian seizure of the factories was, in its political and juridical episodes a counterattack of 'safe and sane ' industry upon 'political and new' industry. The Steel operators (Peronnes) were tricked into resisting the demands of the workers on promise of support from all the other manufacturers ; who at once pacified their labourers with reasonable concessions, knowing well that the Steel industries would not be able to follow suit."

It is a noteworthy fact that the government of the day did not at once use troops to eject the workers. The "Nation" suggests that this was because Giolitti, the Premier, was in close friendship with the Banca Commerciale and wanted the factories occupied. It certainly is true that the movement came to nothing. If the responsibility for failure is laid on the shoulders of the men's leaders, this is only another way of saying that the men had no clear idea of their object nor how to attain it : they were, in fact, in a state of unrest, but were not consciously revolutionary, and were therefore not ready to undertake the task of overthrowing capitalism. They decided themselves by ballot vote to evacuate the factories.

As for the Fascisti, a member of the Communist Party of Italy, A. Bordiga. writing in the "Labour Monthly" (Feb. and March, 1923), gives an interesting account of their origin. In brief, he states that the end of the war found the Italian Government faced, like other governments, with the difficult problems of transition to peace. First, there was demobilisation and the absorption of ex-Service men into industry, and then there was the task of disillusioning those who really thought that the workers were going to share in the fruits of victory. To meet the peculiar conditions which arose from having to deal with masses of men who had been under arms for years and had been overwhelmed with flattery and promises, the Government deliberately encouraged the Fascist movement.

That they were able to do so was the result of the unfortunate fact that the Italian Capitalist Government still had the support of the majority of the Italian workers and peasants.

   "After the Nitti, Giolitti, and Bonomi Governments, we had the Facta Cabinet. This type of Government was intended to cover up the complete liberty of action of Fascism in its expansion over the whole country. During the strike in August, 1922, several conflicts took place between the workers and the Fascisti, who were openly aided by the Government. One can quote the example of Bari. During a whole week of fighting, the Fascisti in full force were unable to defeat the Bari workers, who had retired to the working class quarters of the city, and defended themselves by armed force. The Fascisti were forced to retreat, leaving several of their number on the field. But what did the Facta Government do? During the night they surrounded the old town with thousands of soldiers and hundreds of carabineers of the Royal Guard. In the harbour a torpedo boat trained its guns on the workers. Armoured cars and guns were brought up. The workers were taken by surprise during their sleep, the Proletarian leaders were arrested, and the Labour headquarters were occupied. This was the same throughout the country. Wherever Fascism had been beaten back by the workers the power of the State intervened ; workers who resisted were shot down : workers who were guilty of nothing but self-defence were arrested and sentenced ; while the magistrates systematically acquitted the Fascisti, who were generally known to have committed innumerable crimes. Thus the State was the main factor in the development of Fascism."

Further, while it is correct that the Fascisti were not in a majority in the Italian Parliament, they were compelled because of this to accept into their Cabinet representatives of such other parties as would give a combined majority, and Bordiga considers that it is only a matter of months before Mussolini takes Trade Union officials as well into his government.

The critics who argue from the experience of Italy that an armed minority can ignore parliamentary control are also invited to consider Bordiga's statement that :

"Fascism, after having temporarily adopted republicanism, finally rallied to the strictest monarchist loyalism ; and after having loudly and constantly cried out against parliamentary corruption, it has now completely accepted parliamentary procedure."

Edgar Hardcastle

A criticism answered (2004)

From the August 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The March, April, May and July issues of World Revolution, paper of the British section of the “left communist” group known as the International Communist Current (ICC) carried a long four-part critical article on the Socialist Party to coincide with our hundred years of existence and which described us “a group caught between sectarianism and opportunism”. The articles criticised in particular our attitude towards war, trade unions, political democracy and the development of socialist consciousness.

Before these criticisms can be answered, something needs to be said about where the ICC is coming from politically. Its basic theoretical assumption is that by 1914 capitalism had become “decadent” as an economic system in the sense that it had become unable to develop the forces of production any further. This claim is based on Rosa Luxemburg’s mistaken view that there was a flaw in Marx’s Capital, in that he had failed to recognise that a lack of purchasing power was built-in to capitalism and that therefore it had to rely on external markets to expand; once these had been exhausted – as the ICC claim had happened by 1914 – then capitalism would enter a period of economic stagnation and breakdown. (For a detailed argument as to the ICC’s mistake here see the article in the August 1980 Socialist Standard “World Revolution: Another Confused Group”.)

From this mistaken assumption, the ICC draws a political conclusion: that, after 1914, capitalism could no longer offer any lasting concessions to the working class, whether in the form of social reforms or in the form of increases in real wages. This means, according to the ICC, that working class living standards can now only be defended by revolution and that in fact the socialist revolution will develop out of the struggle to defend living standards, a quite inadequate, economistic conception of how socialist consciousness will develop.

When this analysis, and this conclusion, was first put forward by “leftwing communists” in Germany in the aftermath of the First World War it had a certain plausibility: this was a time of mass unemployment and roaring inflation there. But when it was revived by the political ancestors of the ICC in the 1960s, it made no sense at all. By then, despite the theory, capitalism had further developed the forces of production (by the application of, for instance, plastics, electronics and atomic energy); more social reform measures, in particular the so-called “Welfare State” had been enacted; and the real living standards of workers, at least in the heartlands of capitalism, had increased. To deny this was to fly in the face of the facts and to dogmatically cling to a disproved theory.

Two periods

A product of the ICC’s dogma that capitalism has not been able to offer concessions since 1914 is that the ICC divides capitalism into two distinct periods – pre-1914 and post-1914 – during which different, and in the event diametrically opposed, policies are appropriate.

In the ICC’s view, whereas after 1914 revolution has been the only way to defend working class living standards, before 1914, when capitalism was still expanding and so capable of offering concessions, these could also be defended, and improved, by pressure in parliaments to enact social reforms and by trade union action, which were both therefore worthy of socialist support. In other words, the policy of European Social Democracy of having, in addition to the maximum programme of socialism, a minimum programme of social reforms to be achieved within capitalism was justified. Hence what became horribly wrong after 1914 was right before 1914.

Thus we are criticised, for instance, for having completely written off the Second International in an article on its 1910 Copenhagen Congress. The ICC takes the view that before 1914 socialists should not have broken away from the Social Democratic parties of the time and that, in Britain, the “impossiblists” in the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) should have stayed within it as a leftwing faction struggling for its reform programme to be achieved by mass action rather than through election deals and parliamentary manoeuvres. In short, the SPGB should never have been formed. Those who founded the Socialist Party should have remained within the SDF, which later became the SDP and then the British Socialist Party, and should have gone over, with the bulk of the membership of the BSP, to the Communist Party of Great Britain when it was formed in 1921.

The March article accuses the SPGB (and the Deleonist Socialist Labour Party, another impossibilist breakaway from the SDF) of making the same mistake that the ICC see William Morris and the Socialist League as having made in the 1880s, of rejecting “the struggle for reforms” and opposing “any support for reforms”. The Socialist League is even denounced for having taken up the position that the ICC now holds of rejecting “participation in parliament” and opposing “participation in elections”. What was then “sterile purism” is today a key revolutionary position, even a “class frontier”!

It’s the same with trade unionism. The early members of the SPGB are criticised for not taking a more positive attitude towards trade unions, for not seeing “the unions in a dynamic way, as part of the process of the class coming to consciousness”. The early members did in fact support trade union action on sound class lines and a large number of them were active trade unionists, but it is true that they saw such action, though part of the class struggle, as being essentially only defensive. This is still our position. But times have moved on for the ICC and, whereas they criticise us for not having been pro-trade union enough before 1914, they criticise us now (as in World Revolution 11 in 1977) for holding the view that . . . “the working class can defend itself through trade unions”. Instead, we ought to be calling, like the ICC, for the unions to be “smashed”.

If we in the Socialist Party take the same position on (not advocating) reforms and on trade unionism now as in 1904 this is not because we are committed to an “invariant dogma” as the ICC argues but because we don’t accept their particular argument that capitalism became economically decadent in 1914, and its corollary that very different policies were appropriate before and after that date. We do say, of course, that capitalism has become historically redundant, but this dates from when it had finished creating the material basis for a world socialist society, which would be some time in the last quarter of the 19th century. We can agree, too, that this justified a change of policy in some respects: the abandoning of the support Marx gave to measures and events that he felt would help capitalism create this material basis as rapidly as possible, for instance, in particular support for various nationalist movements and taking sides in wars. For our position on this see the article “Marx in his Time”.

The year 1914 was significant in that it was the year that the first world war broke out, thus confirming that capitalism had become the dominant world system and which ended by reinforcing this through the collapse of the last three dynastic states in Europe (Imperial Germany, Hapsburg Austria and Tsarist Russia). But significant as 1914 was, this was not because it was the date by which capitalism had become economically decadent in the Luxemburg/ICC sense and it did not require a change of socialist “tactics”.

Conspiracy theories

The April and May articles criticise our members for having opposed the two world wars as “conscientious objectors” which the ICC sees as a mere individual and even pacifist opposition. This is an easy, not to say cheap, criticism from people who have no doubt never faced the dilemma of what to do when threatened with coercion into being trained to kill fellow workers in a war. Some SPGB members in both world wars did refuse, as a matter of principle, the status of “conscientious objector” but most took the view that if the state allows this why refuse to take advantage of it? In fact, many SPGB members were able to carry on important political work for socialism precisely because of this, something which seems to bypass the ICC completely.

The suggestion that during the Second World War the SPGB, in the words of the July article, “was used by the ruling class as a safe channel for the questioning and anger produced by the war” is a typical example of the sort of other-wordly paranoid conspiracy theory for which the ICC is well-known. This is also exemplified by their credulous reliance in the same article on a pamphlet by a disgruntled ex-member of the SPGB which advances a conspiracy theory about “factions determined to take over the Party”.

What SPGB members should have done in both world wars was, apparently, to have worked to turn, as advised by Lenin, “the present imperialist war into a civil war”. This should have involved “illegal organisation and propaganda within the army”, which presumably means that socialists should have joined the army after all. But this would have been suicidal for the individuals involved (the quickest way to a firing squad for mutiny) and massacre for the working class (as happened in Dublin in 1916 when a section of the Irish nationalist movement tried to start a civil war in the midst of an imperialist war). SPGB members rightly rejected such irresponsible advice and adopted the correct socialist position of a plague on both your houses and not a drop of working class blood for either side.

Democracy and dictatorship

Whereas the ICC is all in favour of elections, parliaments and “bourgeois democracy” before 1914, after then all these became anathema to them. In fact, our refusal to denounce political democracy seems to be our worst failing in their eyes. “Through its defence of the democratic principle,” they say of us, “it actually reinforces one of the greatest obstacles facing the working class.”

Excuse us if we disagree, but we don’t regard universal suffrage and political democracy within capitalism as “one of the greatest obstacles facing the working class”. The vote is a gain, a potential class weapon, a potential “instrument of emancipation” as Marx put it. Despite Lenin’s distortions quoted by the ICC, Marx and Engels always held that the bourgeois democratic republic was the best political framework for the development and triumph of the socialist movement. This is another pre-1914 socialist position we see no reason to abandon.

Certainly, political democracy under capitalism is not all that it is purported to be by many supporters of the system and it is severely limited, from the point of view of democratic theory, by the very nature of capitalism as an unequal, class-divided society. Certainly, “democracy” has become an ideology used to give capitalist rule a spurious legitimacy and to mobilise working class support for wars. But it is still sufficient to allow the working class to organise politically and economically without too much state interference and also, we would argue, to allow a future socialist majority to gain control of political power.

If political democracy under capitalism really was the great obstacle facing the working class that the ICC claim, then socialists ought logically to work for and welcome its abolition even within capitalism. While the ICC stridently calls for other such (in its view) obstacles, for instance trade unions, to be smashed, it has not dared call for the workers’ vote to be abolished or for the smashing of ballot-boxes. However, Bordiga, who they quote with favour in the May article as a commentator on “the democratic principle”, did indeed take opposition to this principle to its absurd logical conclusion, arguing in an article written in 1948 that socialists “must gladly welcome” the coming of fascism on the grounds that it is supposedly easier to mobilise the workers when there’s a naked capitalist dictatorship than when this is disguised by a democratic façade. He even claimed that workers were less oppressed under fascism than they were under democracy (see “Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle” (Part III) in Communist Program 3 of May 1977). The ICC itself, in its July article, challenges the statement that “it is better to live in a society where there is some degree of democracy than in one where opposition to the regime is not tolerated”. It is thus rather the ICC, in toying with such ideas, not us, that is trying to spread dangerous ideas amongst the working class.

Of course political democracy is better, from a working class point of view, than political dictatorship. The point shouldn’t need arguing. We don’t deny that having a positive attitude towards “bourgeois” political democracy under capitalism has sometimes created theoretical and policy issues for us when it has been under attack (as between the wars) and when it has not yet been established (as in the former USSR’s empire). But it’s not a solution – in fact, it’s a cop-out – to evade the problem by trying to argue that there’s no difference between political democracy and political dictatorship, that they are as bad as each other, and that workers should be indifferent as to which one exists. Our position is that political democracy is a gain for the working class but that this does not justify socialists allying themselves with capitalist parties to get it or supporting one side in a war to supposedly defend it.

Consciousness

The ICC attributes to us a caricatured position of seeing “the development of consciousness as an accumulation of individual socialists”, as the conversion of workers one by one to socialism until there’s a “mathematical majority”, as if anyone could hold such an absurd position. Of course, as Marxists, we hold that socialist consciousness develops out of the workers’ class experience of capitalism and its problems.

If we use terms such as “majority” and “majoritarian” this is not because we are obsessed with counting the number of individual socialists, but to show that we reject minority action to try to establish socialism – majority as the opposite of minority. Socialism can only be established when through the experience of capitalism, including hearing the case for socialism (itself the distilled past experience of the working class), a majority (yes, but in the democratic rather than mere mathematical sense) have come to want it. For, despite Lenin and Bordiga, socialism can’t be imposed from above on a working class that doesn’t want or understand it. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. And of course, unlike the ICC, we don’t think that the seizure of power by the minority Bolsheviks in November 1917 was a “proletarian revolution”.

The ICC’s own conception of the development of socialist consciousness is not at all convincing. Because, as mentioned, they think that since 1914, and still today, capitalism is unable to grant any concessions to workers that will improve their living standards, they argue that socialist consciousness will arise out of struggles by workers to stop their living standards getting worse. Thus they see the task of socialists as being to get involved in such struggles and to try to push them towards revolution as the only way of winning them in the sense of getting an increased standard of living.

We have no objection to socialists getting involved in industrial struggles but without illusions, in particular the illusion that they can have a revolutionary outcome. The socialist revolution is not likely to start from some strike over wages spreading to the whole of the working class. Certainly, workers can learn from the experience of industrial struggles against employers that socialism is the only way out and, in this sense, strikes can contribute to a growth of socialist consciousness. But so can the many other experiences of the way capitalism works againt the interests of workers (bad housing, poor health care, pollution, wars and the threat of war, etc, etc).

The ICC’s obsession with strikes shapes their whole activity beyond abstract (very abstract in their case) propaganda. When a strike occurs they go down to the picket line with leaflets denouncing the trade unions and calling on the strikers to spread the strike – unsurprisingly with no success, since when workers are on strike they are generally concerned with getting a favourable settlement not with launching a revolution (and, despite the ICC’s theory, concessions today can still be extracted from employers).

Indeed, since the ICC is rabidly anti-union, sees no difference between political democracy and political dictatorship, and espouses an anarchist stance on elections and parliament, as well as having a penchant for conspiracy theories, we suggest that they are not in a position to give other groups any lessons in how to spread socialist ideas while avoiding the dangers of sectarianism.

Adam Buick

Fascism and the State (1927)

Editorial from the December 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

When we urge the supreme importance of the working class capturing Parliament, with the administrative departments and local councils which it controls, we are often met with the argument that the Fascists came to power in defiance of the then constitutionally elected Italian Government. Even if this were true it would still not necessarily follow that the overthrow of capitalism could be achieved, or could best be achieved by methods which succeeded well enough in a quite opposite object, i.e., the strengthening of the capitalist state in the interests of a section of the ruling class.

But, as we have pointed out before, the Fascist seizure of power took place not in defiance of, but with the approval and active assistance of, the democratically elected Italian Government. But for that active assistance Mussolini and his followers would have been helpless. Then, as before and since, the possession of the State machinery proved to be the deciding factor.

Our view has received interesting confirmation from three sources—the Italian Communist, Bordiga; Professor Salvemini, a Liberal; and Modigliani, of the Italian Socialist Party.

Bordiga says (Labour Magazine, February and March, 1923):

  After the Nitti, Giolitti, and Bonomi Governments, we had the Facta Cabinet. This type of Government was intended to cover up the complete liberty of action of Fascism in its expansion over the whole country. During the strike in August, 1922, several conflicts took place between the workers and the Fascisti, who were openly aided by the Government. One can quote the example of Bari. During a whole week of fighting, the Fascisti in full force were unable to defeat the Bari workers, who had retired to the working-class quarters of the city, and defended themselves by armed force. The Fascisti were forced to retreat, leaving several of their number on the field. But what aid the Facta Government do? During the night they surrounded the old town with thousands of soldiers and hundreds of carabineers of the Royal Guard. In the harbour a torpedo boat trained its guns on the workers. Armoured cars and guns were brought up. The workers were taken by surprise during their sleep, the Proletarian leaders were arrested, and the Labour headquarters were occupied. This was the same throughout the country. Wherever Fascism had been beaten back by the workers the power of the State intervened; workers who resisted were shot down; workers who were guilty of nothing but self-defence were arrested and sentenced; while the magistrates systematically acquitted the Fascisti, who were generally known to have committed innumerable crimes. Thus the State was the main factor in the development of Fascism.

Professor Salvemini gives similar testimony (Manchester Guardian, October 19th, 1927):—

  Mussolini was assisted in the civil war (1921- 1922) by the money of the banks, the big industrialists and landowners. His Black-shirts were equipped with rifles, bombs, machine guns and motor lorries by the military authorities, and assured of impunity by the police and the magistracy; while their adversaries were disarmed and severely punished if they attempted resistance.

And lastly Modigliani tells us (Daily Herald, October 27th, 1927):—

  It was by their (the Italian Cabinet's) contrivance and with the help of military forces of the State that Mussolini and his gangs were able not only to administer Castor Oil, but to murder and burn for two years. And it is in that way that they finally reached the point of the march on Rome, in face of which the King openly and personally sided with the anti-Labour onslaught.

Bordiga and the First World War (2017)

From the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The concluding article on the political ideas of Amadeo Bordiga up to 1917

In an article in Avanti, the newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), in August 1914 Bordiga identified as a dangerous development 'a sympathetic feeling for the Triple Entente [the alliance between Britain, France and Russia], not only justifying, but praising the attitude of the French socialists, to support that Italian socialists should hasten to fight in defence of France’. This was to become the position of Mussolini, at that point editor of Avanti.

For Bordiga, the concept of ‘fatherland’ was by definition anti-socialist and a defensive war on its behalf inconceivable. In September, in an article in Il Socialista on ‘Avanti and the war’, he addressed Mussolini's attitude openly, criticising the ambiguity of the line he had taken on the war in the party’s newspaper.

The ‘Manifesto against the War’ by the leadership and the parliamentary group of the party was published soon after, of which Mussolini claimed authorship. However, a few days later Mussolini’s famous article on 'active and operative neutrality' appeared in Avanti and which led the party to dismiss him as editor. Bordiga responded to Mussolini’s article with an editorial in Il Socialista entitled 'For an active and operative antimilitarism'. In it he wrote of the ambiguity of the concept of ‘neutrality’:

'The neutrality concept has for subject not socialists, but the State. We want the State to remain neutral with regard to the war, absolutely, until the end, whatever happens. In order to achieve this we act upon the State, against it, in the field and with the means of the class struggle. So we do not want to disarm. Our war is a permanent war.'

When Mussolini then started to attack the PSI, Bordiga, writing in Il Socialista, launched an appeal to boycott him. Finally, in December 1914 Mussolini's ‘socialist’ story came to an end. Because of his continuous attacks on the PSI he was expelled from the party. Bordiga reported this news in Il Socialista with satisfaction, and stressed that 'convictions against traitors are without appeal’.

Another series of his articles appeared in Avanguardia entitled 'Socialism of yesterday before the war of today', which give us some interesting insights into his thinking:

'The war . . .  is certainly a destruction of capital, but the bourgeoisie as a class cares more for the preservation of the juridical relations which allow it to live off the work of the large majority than for the material possession of capital. Those relations, basic in every nation, consist of the right to monopolise the means of labour, which in turn are alsothe product of the work of the proletarian class. Thus for the proletariat the war is disastrous from all points of view while for the bourgeoisie it is a damage to material wealth, but it preserves and strengthens the potential relations for rebuilding such wealth, because it causes the class struggle to fade and turns it into national glorification.’

Modern states, he insisted, with their ‘democratic regimes’, maintain in economic slavery the working class who can be mobilized in 24 hours for the war front. For this reason, he noted, a revolutionary uprising will always have more chance of success in time of peace than on the eve of a war.

Bordiga, who still had some faith in the Second International, identified the real failure of socialism in the support of the socialist parties of France and Germany for the war. He argued that the leaders of those parties often due to their ‘superior culture’ (i.e. bourgeois culture) had too many links with bourgeois ideologies and felt more represented by ‘the nation’ than by socialism. So socialism must 'replace on a more solid basis antimilitarist action and review in a more revolutionary sense its parliamentary action’.

On the national question, Bordiga developed the notion that wars now were carried out by states and not by nations. He therefore distinguished wars of national unification from imperialist wars and pointed to the justification, still used today, about spreading democracy at the point of a bayonet.According to Bordiga, this was obviously a bourgeois excuse. He published an article on the principle of nationality in Avanti in January 1915. His position on this is interesting if compared with the discussion on it between Luxemburg and Lenin, of which Bordiga was unaware at the time. He developed his own independent ideas on the national question, in which he distinguished wars of national unification (which he was prepared to support) from imperialist wars. According to him, cultural identity did not match the concept that the bourgeois state had of the 'nation'. The state cared about economic interests not about cultural identity.

He went on to state, in clear contrast to the left reformists:

'Pacifism? No. We are advocates of violence. We are admirers of the conscious violence of those who rise up against the oppression of the strongest, admirers of the anonymous violence of the masses, which revolts for freedom… But legal violence, official, that the authorities are free to use in a disciplined way, … that violence… is disgusting and repugnant.'

Several time he cited Karl Liebknecht for his anti-militarism and his speech in the Reichstag on 2 December 1914, opposing the war and the approval given by the German Social Democrats to war credits. Bordiga explicitly linked his own antimilitarism to that of Karl Liebknecht, the Social Democratic members of the Russian Duma, the Serbian Socialist Party, the British Independent Labour Party (probably referring to an article by J. Bruce Glasier in Avanti in which he mentioned Keir Hardie’s position inthe Labour Party) and the anarchist Sébastien Faure in France. This list shows that he was not taking into account the other policies of these figures, only their antimilitarism.

On the Russian revolution, we limit ourselves to Bordiga’s writings in 1917. This is because post-Lenin his political views changed significantly. In 1917 Bordiga wrote a series of articles in Avanguardia entitled 'The Russian revolution in a socialist interpretation'. He saw the Russian revolution as a phenomenon that has already lasted fifty years. In contrast to Antonio Gramsci, who while supporting the revolution without reservation saw in it a contradiction with Marxian thought, Bordiga commented that, while it might seem that 'the most rigorous application of the lines of the Marxian system' was ill adapted to a politically underdeveloped country like Russia, 'here a strong Party was formed – perhaps the most orthodox in the world'. He was referring mainly to the Bolshevik movement. In fact, a few lines later he wrote of them that 'the extremist current is the most genuine … wants peace, it refuses even transitory collaboration with the other classes and calls for the seizure of power to apply the Communist Programme'. He noted, however, as did many other socialists, that socialist methods did not sit well with a country mainly consisting of immense masses of peasants.

Bordiga concluded his series of Avanguardia articles in December 1917 commenting on the triumph of the 'Maximalists', i.e. the Bolsheviks. 'Finally, the government is overthrown’, he wrote, ‘and the seizure of power by the Soviets, in which the extremists have become the large majority, has taken place. While we write, in the jumble of contradictory and biased news coming to us, it is understood that socialists work to realize a programme along simple and grand lines – the same one as that of the Communist Manifesto – that is the expropriation of the private owners from their means of production, and in the meantime proceeding logically and consequently with getting rid of the war.'

Thus began Bordiga’s transition to Bolshevism and Leninism for which he is most well-known. The pre-Lenin Bordiga, however, showed himself to have had a clear idea of what revolutionary Marxist socialism meant. He was an intransigent, anti-reformist, class struggle socialist, though with a predisposition for anarchist-type direct action including the use of violence. Post-Lenin he was to lean towards Blanquist centralism, from which we can only distance ourselves.

Cesco

Early Bordiga and Electoral Activity (2017)

Amadeo Bordiga

From the February 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The second part of our series on the views of Amadeo Bordiga up to the 1917 Russian revolution.

In March and April 1913, the magazine Avanguardia published a series of articles by Bordiga entitled 'For the Theoretical Conception of Socialism'. In them he expressed his political vision.

'We should not be philosophers but men of action… the proletariat is still in search of its programme and it will not find it permanently until after a long series of struggles and inevitable mistakes committed in action. (….) We have a programme de facto: the abolition of private property and of the wages system. We have to pay attention to the deceits of bourgeois thought and in particular to idealist forms that seek to distract the attention of the proletariat from the economic problems that it seeks to resolve with the violent suppression of their domination.’

If, on the one hand, this is a Marxist revolutionary position, on the other hand it has a strong taste of anarchist actionism. In a further Avanguardia article, in July 1913, Bordiga commented both on the recently translated book Revolutionary Socialism by the French revolutionary syndicalists Charles Albert and Jean Duchène and on an editorial on it by Mussolini in Avanti, the newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).  According to Bordiga, the anarchists and syndicalists were too often criticized from the reformist point of view, that is, for rejecting legal revolution in favour of violence. Instead, for him, the shortcomings of the anarchist and syndicalist movements were in how they wanted to reach their revolutionary aim; the anarchists were too abstract and the syndicalists were too simplistic in believing that the unions would be sufficient to achieve everything.

Bordiga disagreed with the authors that Marxism was a fatalistic doctrine. On the parliamentary tactic, a key element of what would become Bordiga's future thought on the question can be discerned in this article. He agreed with criticism of the justifications the anarchists gave for abstentionism. On the other hand, he accepted Albert and Duchène's criticism that parliamentary action would suffocate any other activity, commenting that ‘it cannot be denied that the facts seem to prove that’. But for him, at this time, it was a question of whether parliamentary and electoral activity was of use or not for the maximum programme of socialism. A few years later his answer was to be that it was not, with the same justification for this given by Albert and Duchène. It was from this that his abstentionism originated.

In November 1913 Bordiga discussed the elections that had just taken place:

'It is, in fact, undisputable that the conquests of Socialism, from the maximum to the immediate, must be a product of the large masses, which form a collective consciousness of their own interests and of their own future. The large masses must be convinced that, to guarantee and effectively materialize those conquests, they should not abdicate their safety into the hands of a few executives; they should also not ask for help of any kind from the economically opposing class. The Socialist Party must nurture and spread this collective consciousness… Nobody can deny the truthfulness of the observation that a man obliged to do manual labour is inclined to delegate to others, to the intellectuals, the management and therefore the control of social life. Even nearly conscious masses tend to entrust the achievement of whatever aim they have to a man or a few men, whom they follow too blindly… We want to deduce from it that, in the current conditions, any form of class action – not only the elections, but also syndicalist action and even street uprisings – present the risk that the masses will give up actual control of their own interests and entrust it to a given number of “leaders”.'

So at this time Bordiga favoured participation in elections as an opportunity for propagandising but at the same time he was concerned that elections could be used as a way for an intellectual elite to take control of the workers’ movement. He already foresaw how easy it was for electoral activity to degenerate into mere vote-catching, 'to lose any aim which was not the numerical outcome’.

At the XIV National Congress of the PSI in Ancona in April 1914, Bordiga gave the leadership’s political report and also a report on the Southern question. He spoke on the Party’s tactic in 'administrative elections', i.e. elections to local and regional councils. He was for a policy of absolute intransigence against any type of coalition with bourgeois parties in the South as well as elsewhere in Italy, against the so-called blockists (blocchisti) who favoured electoral alliances with other parties. Despite the special conditions of the South of Italy, Bordiga invited the PSI to approach the question of the local and regional elections with the same political line everywhere on Italy, and ‘to make socialist municipalities a weapon against the capitalist and bourgeois State’.

On 7 June 1914, to commemorate the Albertinian Statute (the constitutional charter of the Italian monarchy), republicans and anarchists in Ancona organized a demonstration where a large crowd gathered. The gendarmerie opened fire on the crowd killing three people. Workers all over Italy reacted to this violent act with street demonstrations. The reformist leaders of the union, the General Labour Confederation (CgdL) were obliged to proclaim a mass strike. Writing in the 1960s Bordiga commented on what he regarded as a typical conclusion to an insurrection in Italian history:

'... on 12 June when state power and the bourgeoisie were in trouble, the CGdL provided them one of its countless services; it ordered the end of the mass strike. It was straight from the anarchist and Sorelian syndicalist tradition, according to which the Union has the function of direct and violent action and the party the legal one.'

Though he never wrote about it, Bordiga’s involvement in this action had personal consequences for him. He was dismissed from the State Railways where he worked as an engineer for taking part in a demonstration in Naples. He had published a short note in Il Socialista on 25 June in which he extended greetings to the rioters in the name of the Neapolitan Section of the PSI.

When in his article 'Democracy and Socialism' Bordiga stated that socialism 'established itself as the solemn condemnation of the historical failure of the democratic formula, and of the deceits that this contains’ he was referring to bourgeois democracy.  He wrote that democracy (i.e. bourgeois democracy) 'sees in the representative system the means to solve any problem of collective interest; we see in it the mask of a social oligarchy that uses the deceit of political equality in order to keep the workers oppressed’. In a key passage in this series of articles he wrote about what socialism means:

'… socialism means thinking that today, based on an examination of the existing economic and social conditions, a class action is possible, which aims to destroy capitalism and substitute it with a new social order. Acting as socialists means to seek to spread the consciousness of such a possibility in an ever growing number of proletarians and with the greatest simultaneity possible in all countries and nations. Whoever, even if they recognize that the destruction of capitalism is a good thing, does not think that this is the moment to act but believes that it is better to first solve other problems, is not a socialist.'

In this series of articles Bordiga continued to support the ‘municipalist’ thesis that workers should aim to win control of municipalities through elections, close to the argument of Mussolini in Avanti. At this point, for Bordiga, while what might be able to be achieved for workers at the municipal level should not be ignored, the role of the party remained one of propaganda, proselytism and preparation for the final clash of classes.

CESCO

(Next month: Bordiga and the First World War)

The first article in this series can be read at the following link.

Amadeo Bordiga as Intransigent Socialist (2017)

Amadeo Bordiga

From the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

We begin a three part series on the pre-1917 political views of this Italian thinker who later became the first leader of the Italian Communist Party and then a Left Communist critic of the state capitalist regime in Russia.

Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970) was probably the closest among Italian political thinkers and activists to the revolutionary ideas put forward by the World Socialist Movement. We would share his consistent opposition to reformism, militarism, and all forms of nationalism as well as some of his views on the use of parliament. We would, however be entirely opposed to his advocacy of insurrectionary violence, his aversion for democracy (which was determined by his identification of it with the freemasonry of his day), and his support for a centralist control model.

His early political activity began when he joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in Naples in 1910 at the age of 21 while a student of engineering.  According to Bordiga’s own later account, his enrolment in the PSI was a reaction to pressure being put on him to join the freemasons, which he despised. The situation inside the PSI when Bordiga joined it was complicated. In theory, it was organized along the lines of the German Social Democratic Party, with the difference that the PSI did not have funds and so lacked organisers and professional politicians. There was a group headed by the leader and party secretary and as well as a parliamentary group elected by party members but there was often disagreement between the two, especially on political strategy. The parliamentary group was headed by Filippo Turati, who had been largely responsible for the creation of the party in 1882 and was a reformist despite the fact that he considered himself, and was often recognized as, an orthodox Marxist. 

The PSI had expelled the anarchists in its ranks at its second congress in 1892 and likewise the revolutionary syndicalists in 1907. Yet in 1910 it was still home to a variety of political  positions. There were ‘right-wing’ reformists such as Leonida Bissolati and Ivanoe Bonomi, the ‘left-wing’ reformists of Turati and Giuseppe Modigliani, and the ‘the revolutionary intransigent fraction’ led by Costantino Lazzari, who, according to Luigi Gerosa, influenced much of Bordiga’s early thinking with his 1911 pamphlet ‘The Principles and Methods of the Italian Socialist Party’. In his pamphlet Lazzari harked back to the Party’s 1892 programme and the various ‘degenerations’ of it that had taken place since then. As explained in a previous article (Antonio Labriola: A strict Marxist?, Socialist Standard, February 2016),  it is arguable that the 1892 programme put forward a vision of Marxist socialism substantially as conceived by the World Socialist Movement today. Bordiga wanted it to remain faithful to its maximum goal, which was the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism rather than the minimum goal of changing capitalism by means of reforms.  It was at this stage too that Bordiga started to develop the idea of a party that did not need leadership by individuals, but required, rather, a clear and unchangeable programme to be followed by its adherents.             

Bordiga began stating this position in the PSI’s youth magazine Avanguardia  and writing in particular in opposition to the Italian government’s colonial policy and to masonic anti-clericalism. In October 1911 when Italy invaded Libya, which was part of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, Bordiga attacked not just the government but alleged socialists in the PSI who supported the invasion. He also criticised revolutionary syndicalists such as Arturo (not to be confused with Antonio) Labriola who espoused the view of the economist Achille Loria that colonial expansion would present an opportunity for the socialist cause. Bordiga argued from the start that nationalism was a capitalist ideology which had nothing to do with socialism, since socialism was by its very nature anti-nationalist and anti-patriotic. This was an idea he would never depart from.

In the years 1911 to 1914 Bordiga and other like-thinking members of the PSI in Naples engaged in opposing those factions who favoured a policy of coalitions with capitalist parties, so-called blocchisti who they saw as revisionists. Bordiga wrote widely on the situation of the party in Naples, arguing strongly against the right of those factions to be in the Party, and also became the regional spokesperson for the Italian Federation of Socialist Youth. 

In April 1912 Bordiga founded the ‘Carlo Marx Circle’ aiming at propaganda activity and the study of Marxist writings. Already in March that year he had denounced the action of some exponents of the parliamentary group such as Bissolati, Cabrini, and Bonomi for supporting the King of Italy after he had been wounded during an assassination attempt. Bordiga demanded their expulsion from the Party, something that actually took place at that year’s Congress, incidentally allowing one Benito Mussolini to take up a primary position in the PSI. The Neapolitan Portici section had sent Bordiga as spokesperson to the Congress with the following motions: 1. to extend the tactic of ‘intransigence’ to local elections; 2. to exclude from the PSI members of bourgeois political associations such as the freemasonry.    

In the same year, at the Congress of the Bologna Youth Federation, Bordiga was involved in discussions that took place on ‘the question of the culture of socialist youth’.  While some of the participants saw the youth movement as having the role of imparting basic political education to its members while not questioning the party’s rulings, Bordiga proposed that the Youth Federation should have its own autonomy and its own magazine and engage in its own struggles against the system. Bordiga won the day and, in the magazine Avanguardia, he wrote, in reply to Gaetano Salvemini, editor of the newspaper L’Unità, that education should be based on action and that instead of saying to the people ‘you are exploited because you are ignorant, free yourself from the priest and you will be free’, socialists should say to workers ‘you are ignorant and cowardly because you are exploited, you are exploited because you submit to the yoke of slavery; revolt and you will be free and you will be able to become civilised.’ For Bordiga, therefore, socialism was based not on education or political culture but on proletarian sentiment and action.

In November 1912, in the Avanti newspaper, Bordiga wrote a piece on ‘Southern socialism and the moral questions’. Here he described the backwardness and inadequacy of the southern Italian capitalist class. He pointed out that the Italian State, which was managed by the capitalist oligarchy of Northern Italy, did not intend to develop the South, because the economic, agrarian and industrial development of the South could only ‘harm the present monopolistic groups of big industries, which are protected and have in the South their natural market of consumption’. The ineptitude of the Southern capitalist class and the corrupt administration of the South was, he argued, exploited by local political factions to further their own self-interest and this was often with the support and collaboration of the clergy. The main opponents of this he saw as the anti-clerical bourgeoisie, who put forward the ‘moral’ argument that what was needed was an honest bourgeois administration, an uncorrupted and ‘efficient’ bourgeois capitalism. Bordiga opposed this way of thinking too, stating that ‘thieving or honest bourgeoisies are the same thing’ and that the PSI should be ‘ultra-intransigent’ against these ‘moralists’, because socialism demanded something quite different.

Rewriting of the PSI’s pamphlet entitled Il soldo ai soldati (‘On Soldiers’ Pay’) was assigned to Bordiga and was then discussed at the 1912 Bologna Congress of Socialist Youth. In this pamphlet Bordiga railed against the ‘barracks’ as being an institution of bourgeois democracy, but took the position on elections that they should be contested but without any kind of agreement with the  bourgeois parties. At this time he saw electoral activity largely as a means of propagating socialist ideas and winning supporters, but his distrust of the electoral system grew as the PSI suffered recurring defeats in elections despite the considerable effort it put into them. Increasingly Bordiga was developing the view that the PSI had ‘degenerated’, that reformism had ‘drowned’ it and that what was important was a defence of its original revolutionary programme based on the formation of class consciousness and working class anti-militarism. In the article ‘Our Mission’, published in February 1913, Bordiga expressed the view that the PSI’s role was to be the vanguard of the proletariat in the class struggle. In it he quoted the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin on the principle of mutual aid and affirmed what he saw as the natural altruism of the proletariat. At the same time he argued that it would be wrong to believe that the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, dominated by means of workers’ ignorance; instead it dominated by means of culture, by being able to impose its own culture on workers, so the tenets of bourgeois education took on a ‘moral’ dimension in workers’ minds.

Cesco

(Next month: Bordiga’s attitude to contesting elections)         

The Central Asian Holocaust of the First World War (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Way back in the Socialist Standard of August 1918 we referred to a 'Mr. Price from Russia itself, in his article in the Manchester Guardian for November 28th , 1917, where he describes the cold-blooded slaughter of 500,000 Khirgiz Tartars by the Czar’s Government in 1916. And he caustically remarks: “While Western Europe has heard about Armenian massacres, the massacre of the Central Asian Moslems by the Tsar’s agents has been studiously hidden.”'

Under Tsarist Russian rule, Turkestan was converted to a major cotton-growing region. Cotton cultivation was imposed to compensate for the loss of the US cotton supply in the 1860s due to the American Civil War. The resulting economic development brought some small-scale industry to the region, but the native people of Turkestan were worse off than their Russian counterparts, and the new wealth from cotton was spread very unevenly. On the whole, living standards did not improve, and many farmers became indebted. Cotton price fixing during the First World War made matters worse, a large, landless rural proletariat soon developed, gambling and alcoholism became commonplace, and crime rose considerably. Historian Togan wrote 'after the proliferation of cotton planting in Ferghana [imposed by the Tsarist state at the expense of cereal cultivation] the economic conditions deteriorated'.

On 25 June 1916 the Russian Imperial Decree ordered the compulsory conscription to military service of Muslims in the Central Asian region of Turkestan. This was the beginning of the 'Basmachi' movement or the Turkestan National Liberation movement which was documented by historian and participant Zeki Velidi Togan (1890-1970) who wrote: 'Basmachi is derived from “baskinji” meaning attacker, which was first applied to bands of brigands. During Tsarist times, these bands existed after Turkestan independence was lost and Russian domination began'.

On 11 July 1916, the first mass protest meeting took place in Tashkent and Russian police fired into the crowd. Arrests and summary executions followed. The Russian settlers, who had been brought  into Tashkent some thirty to forty years earlier, began looting, apparently at the instigation of the Russian police. Protest meetings spread to Marghilan, Andijan and Hojend; attacks on Tsarist officials took place in Akkurgan, Akmesjid and Kanjagali. The people of Jizzakh destroyed the railroad at several points. In the middle of August the resistance spread to Ashkhabad, Mervto Akmola, Turgay, Yedisu, Karakul and Chu basin.

The Imperial Russian state declared martial law in Turkestan, and as a concession announced a lower quota of workers to be conscripted under the 25 June decree. Russian generals Kuropotkin and Kalbovo armed the Russian settlers in Central Asia to act as additional military units to reinforce their existing and well-armed regular forces. Russian generals Ivanov and Rynov moved all their forces against Jizzakh. Fully equipped Russian regiments under General Madridov attacked the people of Khiva region, and according to eyewitnesses, massacred even babies in the cradle. Those who were not killed were stripped of their all possessions. Contemporary reports estimated that between 25 June 1916 and October 1917, some 1.5 million Turkic peoples were killed by the Russian forces and settlers. At least half of the Central Asian livestock was destroyed and an inestimable amount of personal property was looted by the Russian military forces and settlers.

Amadeo Bordiga once pointed out that extermination of peoples 'occurred not at a random moment, but in the middle of a crisis and an imperialist war. It is thus from within this gigantic enterprise of destruction.' This can be seen in the midst of the First World War with the Ottoman Empire's genocide of 1.5 million Armenian people but also the 'Central Asian Holocaust of the Turkic Peoples'.

Steve Clayton

The thin red line (1988)

Book Review from the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Faced with a social system which creates problems faster than its politicians can make promises, responses range from the stupidly complacent, to those whose self-righteous radicalism leaves no time for actually solving the problems they shout about. Would-be "leaders" the world over, rush to defend the indefensible. Political parties compete to run a system of organised poverty and obscene contradictions, which has built weapons to destroy humanity while millions starve. Most political debate is as irrational as the system of class division and profit which, in one form or another, it seeks to defend. It is therefore very refreshing indeed when a glimmer of social sanity shows itself through this dense fog of doublethink.

Just such an encouraging and exciting event took place late last year, with the publication of a book which is of significance. Until now, those historians who claimed to deal with the "labour movement" or the opposition to capitalism have focused, almost entirely, on the opportunists who have come to power by riding on the back of social discontent and perverting the idea of social freedom, through the Labour Party, the Communist Party or the Trotskyist fringe. Those who have upheld a clear and principled socialist alternative in the face of fierce hostility have all too often been relegated to a contemptuous footnote  in small print, if they were mentioned at all.

Now the record has been set straight. Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries is a fascinating and compelling account which deals exclusively with those who have seen through the nonsense of the profit system and who have stood clearly for the abolition of capitalism in any of its forms, whether private or state controlled and its replacement by a system of production for use, with human needs being met through free access to all goods and services. Socialist ideas are explained in a historical context which makes them all the more powerful and urgent. Moreover, it is demonstrated that capitalism really does "produce its own gravediggers", as various groups at different times and places have independently reached (and continue independently to reach) the same conclusion - that since the problems of the working-class majority cannot possibly be solved through the reform of the capitalist system, therefore it must be replaced.

Following the pattern used in each of the chapters of the book, let us first set out the background and central idea put forward in this work, before summarising the content and moving on to weigh up its strengths and weaknesses as a book. Non-Market Socialism, edited by Maximillien Rubel and John Crump, published by Macmillan and available in paperback at £8.95, arose out of a conference of discussion and debate which took place in York in September 1984. The revolutionary basis on which the book develops is made clear from the formal dedication on the very first page, which states

This book is dedicated to the men and women of the thin red line of non-market socialism who have kept alive the vision of socialism as a society of personal freedom, communal solidarity, production for use and free access to goods.

Socialism defined

In Chapter Two, written by John Crump (who for some time was a member of The Socialist Party), four key features are outlined, as a definition of socialism which is to be used throughout the book. These are that:

• Production will be for use and not for sale on the market.
• Distribution will be according to need and not by means of buying and selling.
• Labour will be voluntary and not imposed on workers by means of a coercive wages system.
• A human community will exist and social divisions based on class, nationality, sex or race will have disappeared.

Crump them goes on to elaborate excellently on all the implications of such a revolution in social relationships, dealing very clearly with all the common myths of "human nature" which have sometimes been used to obstruct such discussion. He also explains the historical emergence of the "Social Democratic" and Leninist movements which distorted and confused this fundamental concept of the socialist alternative. The way in which the Russian Revolution of 1917 established a regime of state capitalism is also clearly stated, with quotations from the Socialist Standard from that period to demonstrate how socialists were able to make such an analysis even then. Also in Crump's chapter, the whole notion of a "transitional society" between capitalism and socialism is explored and rejected.

At this stage, the central thesis and claim of the book is explained. This is that there have been various movements which have stood openly for the socialist alternative as defined above, the five most significant such "tendencies" to be dealt with in detail in subsequent chapters. While agreeing on their object or aim, these movements have been in conflict over how to achieve that goal and over various other points of detail. Crump argues that such differences constitute a "periphery" which, at the present time, is less important than the "core" idea of defining socialism, introducing workers to this and encouraging them to adopt it as the only practical alternative to the exploitation of the capitalist system. We will consider this general thesis in more detail below but let us first take a look at the contents of the other chapters.

A background survey which explores the nineteenth century origins of socialist idea is provided by Maximilien Rubel, a recognised authority and scholar of Marx, based in Paris, who has been in close contact with The Socialist Party. Rubel takes as his starting point the 1848 Communist Manifesto's list of categories of "Socialism" and finds there some early progenitors of both the modern idea of "market socialism" (of course, a contradiction in terms) and of the non-market alternative. He seeks to rescue from relative obscurity and rehabilitate into their deserved place of recognition such early socialist thinkers as Wilhelm Weitling or Flora Tristan and many others. In contrast to "vulgar materialism", Rubel presents the need for socialism as an "ethical imperative": a term whose use has been debated in the columns of the Socialist Standard when Rubel has corresponded with us on that issue. Finally, and with great eloquence, he demolishes the very damaging claims of the Bolsheviks to have established "socialism" in Russia, with their perversion of "Marxism" into a distorted religious ideology.

In a chapter on "Anarcho-Communism", Alain Pengam develops further the rich heritage and background of ideas from which the modern socialist movement has developed, by focussing on those early anarchists who embraced most clearly the idea of abolishing property relationships. Déjacque, for example, wrote in 1858 that social revolution means that "Commerce . . . this scourge of the 19th century, has disappeared amongst humanity. There are no longer either sellers or sold" (p.64). Kropotkin is also extensively quoted on the need for the abolition of the wages system. Beyond this, however, Pengam struggles in vain to find any substantial threads of such a tradition extending into the twentieth century, referring for example to the military defeat during the Mexican Revolution of those anarchists who sought in vain to establish agricultural co-operative communes there.

World Socialist Movement

This brings us to Chapter Four, on "Impossibilism", which is written by Stephen Coleman and focuses on The Socialist Party itself. In a postscript to the book it is pointed out that the Socialist Party of Great Britain, "with a record of over eighty years' unbroken commitment to non-market socialism" is an exception to the general rule, whereby other groups proclaiming allegiance to the ideas of non-market socialism have tended to be rather more fleeting in their organisational existence. Coleman makes it quite clear in his chapter how and why that consistency of both organisation and principle has been achieved by The Socialist Party.

The formation of The Socialist Party in 1904 is described, as is the formation of its similar predecessor, the Socialist League in 1884, both as breakaway groups from the Social Democratic Federation. From the League, William Morris is quoted on the need to "put an end for ever to the wage-system" so that everyone could have "free access to the means of production of wealth" (p. 85). There is also a brief description of the ideas of Daniel De Leon and of the Socialist Labour Party, with their notion of the need for "labour vouchers" in a socialist society clearly dealt with.

Coleman then goes on to produce an excellent, sweeping survey of the history and ideas of The Socialist Party and its companion parties in other countries, referred to as the World Socialist Movement. This is of great historical significance in itself, since until now we have been faced with an overwhelming silence from labour historians in relation to the unique and inspiring record of The Socialist Party, in putting forward a consistent case for socialism in a way which is now properly documented and described in this chapter. In fact, the only other book previously published dealing with The Socialist Party was produced in 1975 under the title of The Monument, and consisted of a series of (often inaccurate) anecdotes, failing to deal at all seriously with the development of socialist ideas.

The work in question, on the other hand, sets this record straight. Using a wide assortment of examples, ranging from India to Canada, Britain and elsewhere we see how socialism was positively put and reformist compromise consistently opposed throughout the upheavals of these years. We read how both world wars were actively opposed, and how the Socialist Standard has been published every month without fail, despite the difficulties that have been involved.

A careful reading of Coleman's chapter also shows that there are two false assumptions which emerge elsewhere in the book. First, in his introductory chapter Crump claims that The Socialist Party is separate from the other traditions referred to because it has a "parliamentary strategy" which is "anathema to the other currents of non-market socialists". In fact, it would be more accurate to state the emphasis of Socialist Party material has been democratic, concerning on the need for socialism to be established by a conscious majority, since means must harmonise with ends. Coleman contrasts the "parliamentarianism" of the reformists, which involves sending representatives to Parliament to run capitalism, with the socialist policy in which a socialist majority mandates recallable delegates in order to dismantle the state machine, from a position of control. Coleman tells the story of the socialist speaker who referred to socialism coming not just through the ballot box, but through the "brain box" and points out that

it is clearly those who insist that ballot boxes and parliaments can play no part in the establishment of socialism and assert that socialism can only be established via industrial organisation alone, who are being dogmatic and historically fetishised in their thinking about the revolution. (p.94)

Second, one might think from reading the introductory sections of the book that the various tendencies considered differ fro one another only in their ideas about how socialism is to be achieved. It is clear however, from looking at the closing section of Chapter Four in comparison with other chapters, that there is another important difference which distinguishes The Socialist Party in particular from those other tendencies. This is that The Socialist Party is alone in remaining organised on a significant scale and politically active in Britain today.

Possible exceptions to this, it might be argued, would be found under the heading of "Council Communism", which is dealt with in Chapter Five by Mark Shipway. It is, however, stated in the Postscript that "it is doubtful whether any 'orthodox' council communist groups exist today". Of the organisations which are then listed, the International Communist Current has been found in debate with The Socialist Party to adhere to a fundamentally Leninist position and the group Wildcat, of which Shipway is a member and which is reviewed critically in the December 1987 Socialist Standard, state that "we struggle in favour of strikes, riots and all other acts of rebellion against capitalism", which hardly suggests credibility in terms of democratic organisation.

Council Communism
Shipway presents an historical account of the emergence of the Council Communist movement in the wake of the First World War, quoting extensively from Anton Pannekoek. Unlike other tendencies dealt with, the Council Communists were generally more preoccupied with a detailed discussion of how the revolution would take place -  as far as they were concerned, through the setting up of workers' councils to rival the capitalist state - rather than focusing, in any detail, on what end result was to be achieved through this process. In the course of his analysis, Shipway accepts the somewhat suicidal notion of workers forming their own militias to rival the capitalist armed forces (p.117), refers somewhat confusingly to "periods of revolutionary turmoil" (p.108) and quotes approvingly the need for a party to "win the trust of the masses" (p.124). He states, rather hopefully, that Council Communist intervention in working class struggles "should" be based on nothing less that the final goal of communism, while recognising that this has not generally been the case. (p.124). Further, support is given to Pannekoek's emphasis on theories of economic breakdown (p.120) and to his rather obscure and vanguardist references to building up the "spiritual power" of workers (p. 122).

Bordiga
In Chapter Six, Adam Buick presents a detailed view of "Bordigism", the movement named after the Italian marxist Amadeo Bordiga, who died in 1970 after a great literary and political output. After an historical explanation of the succession of parties influenced by Bordiga's thinking, culminating in the International Communist Party, among others, Buick goes on to show how Bordiga's concept of socialism was explicitly based on the abolition of the market system and of all property relationships, including those of state capitalism.

By quoting extensively from Bordiga himself, Buick methodically and clearly demonstrates just how emphatically capitalism in all its manifestations was understood and rejected by Bordiga. Many good examples of this are given, perhaps one of the simplest being that "where there is money, there is neither socialism nor communism, as there isn't, and by a long way, in Russia" (Bordiga, 1959, quoted on p.139).

Buick also explains the paradox, that alongside this very clear revolutionary concept of the socialist alternative, the Bordigists have remained élitist in terms of political strategy, believing that socialist understanding on the part of the working class majority could be developed after, rather than before, socialism is brought about.This, again, relates to the underlying thesis of the book, because whereas Bordigist means of obtaining their goal can be seen in this chapter to stand at odds in many ways with their goal, it is argued by Crump in Chapter Two that this is "peripheral", since workers who are educated by Bordigism into revolutionary ends can themselves prove the Bordigists wrong in practice about the means required to bring this about. It is perhaps worth noting, however, that means often determine ends rather than the other way round and that of course ultimately the two cannot be separated. Buick implicitly recognises this fact by showing how the Bordigist conception of socialism itself is "non-democratic" and "technocratic", involving not full participation in the control of production but the appointment of experts to make decisions in the best interests of others - an angle which would perhaps be regarded with more cynicism by many workers in the 1980s than in former decades. Also, despite these reservations, there is clearly validity in Crump's point that Bordigism, together with the other movements considered, has definitely played a positive part in introducing workers to the idea of the abolition of the wages system and its replacement with a system of production for use.

Situationists
Finally, the movement of "Situationism" is dealt with in Chapter Seven, again by Mark Shipway. The Situationist International was a small group based in France which produced a substantial amount of literature between 1957 and 1973 and which became widely known, out of all proportion to its numbers, as a result of the May 1968 "Events" in Paris. They were explicit in their opposition to modern capitalism, which they called the society of the "Spectacle", because of the passivity and alienation it produced and in their support for socialist revolution. Shipway clearly explains their theories of consumerism, with key texts by Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, finding roots in Marx's theory of alienation and weaknesses in that Situationist was based rather narrowly on conditions in the post-war boom in France. What also emerges, however, is that they developed some very important cultural and psychological insights into capitalism which complement much of the more traditionally political and economic analysis focused on in the rest of the book. Finally, Shipway ends the book with a comment on reformism which appears rather at odds with the rest of the book:

Of course it would be ideal if every time workers went on strike it was for the abolition of the wages system. But while this is not the situation in which revolutionaries presently find themselves, neither is it a reason for ignoring or abstaining from any struggle which starts out on the basis of ostensibly reformist demands. (p.169)

It is worth pointing out in relation to this that each author was separately responsible for his own chapter and clearly some have been more clear on such issues than others. A good reason, for example, why revolutionaries must abstain from struggles which start out "on the basis of ostensibly reformist demands" is suggested in a very clear passage by Crump in Chapter Two, in which he explains that there can be no halfway house between the two "all-or-nothing" options of world capitalism and world socialism:

the means of production must either function as capital throughout the world (in which case wage labour and capitalism persist internationally) or they must be commonly owned and democratically controlled at a global level (in which case they would be used to produce wealth fro free, worldwide distribution) . . . the changeover from world capitalism to world socialism will have to take the form of a short, sharp rupture (a revolution), rather than an extended process of cumulative transformation. (pp.54,55)

In conclusion then, the detailed chapters on the five main tendencies which have supported the idea of "non-market socialism" suggest that the original thesis was to some extent a victory of hope over reason. In terms of practical and active organisation in 1988, and particularly in Britain, the organised movement for socialism is somewhat more unitary than this volume might suggest. Also in terms of developing a practical strategy for establishing socialism which takes due account of the importance of both majority consciousness and democracy and which recognises the need to relate means to ends, then again the "thin red line" is perhaps thinner than we might wish it.

Despite such reservations, those who have collaborated in the production of this book have effectively broken a silence of decades. We hope this will also generate further discussion and debate among that growing number of individuals and groups who have come to reject capitalism, in all its forms, and seek to develop a non-market alternative. It is a strong vindication of Marx's Materialist Conception of History that from a variety of times, places and backgrounds within capitalism workers have reached similar conclusions about the need to establish a new social system capable of meeting the needs of all. The fact that workers now continue to seek such answers shows that non-market socialism is both practical and urgent. Those who wish, then, to further their understanding of the movement for socialism are recommended to get hold of this book. In continuing such discussions, we are helping to ensure that the "thin red line" does not remain so thin in the immediate future.

Clifford Slapper