국제주의코뮤니스트전망(ICP)

이번엔  IBRP의 영국조직인 CWO의 발제문입니다.  (요즘들어 IP와  IBRP의 토론과 교류가 활발해진것 같습니다)       Communist Workers' Organisation (IBRP) Address to the Midlands Discussion Forum Meeting  25 April 2009       The CWO welcomes this meeting and the opportunity it gives for us to meet other revolutionaries face to face. Above all we share the view of the organisers that the current crisis of capitalism is potentially greater than the Great Depression of the 1930s. In a few months we have gone from "there is no alternative to capitalism" to the point where the very fate of capitalism is in question. The fatuousness of the outcome of the G20 in London this month only underlined the fact that our rulers have no solutions to offer. They are almost in a state of panic. And the G20 Meltdown March on the Saturday before it only underlined that the unions and their allies can only beg for more state capitalist measures to shore up the system. But this is not a simple "meltdown" nor is it just a "credit crunch". It is the latest act in a crisis of capitalist accumulation which has been going on for 35 years. Despite all the assumptions of the G20 leaders they cannot put the world back as it was. The attacks which are already taking place increasing unemployment, homelessness, and cuts in the social wage are only the start of long road to barbarism. The only alternative is working class revolution. However as long as the working class accepts the propaganda that this is just a credit crunch and that normal exploitation will be resumed as soon as possible the system can drag us all down to barbarism unless we recognise we are part of the alternative, and an important part at that. As the comrades of the Midlands Discussion Forum have stressed "a heavy responsibility lies on our shoulders". We accepted this and asked for their criteria for inviting groups. They replied that these were "fairly pragmatic" but included "formal commitments to internationalism and defence of workers' interests". But it occurred to us that such criteria could also be applied by Trotskyists, and even by ex-Stalinists. This got us thinking about what we all do share. Some may wish to disagree but we think that the invitation is to those groups which see the working class as the main agent of revolution, and probably have a similar vision of what communist society will look like. After all we all know that we do not see a repeat of the experience of the state capitalism of the USSR as offering anything for the working class. The society which we envisage will have abolished the exploitation of wage labour, national frontiers, money, the state and all standing armies. We all probably agree that such a society cannot be built by the working class passively following a particular set of leaders who will be expected to have the right polices. Socialism or communism is a different mode of production which demands a totally different social commitment. Either the working class actively as a mass build the new society or it will not come about at all. It is only in this way that we will arrive at a society of freely associated producers, run by those producers themselves. What really divides is are the differences about how that society can be achieved. Here we have two problems - one the ideological hangovers of the past where we have a series of different workers' traditions. Thus here today we have left communists, left social democrats (SPGB) and anarchists. We not only disagree about how the new society will come about but even about what the process of revolution will entail and even the definition of what constitutes the working class. On top of this there are the divisions created by the counter-revolution that followed the revolutionary wave of the 1920s. For example this is now what keeps the left communists and libertarian or council communists apart. And these differences are just as deep as the ones based on the different traditions in the workers' movement. The biggest difference of all is of course over the question of the party since the great tragedy of the Russian Revolution was that the very party which expressed the workers' programme the clearest in 1917 was the one which a few short years later gave expression‎ to a new state which became the very opposite of what it set to be in 1917. To some this proves for all time that all parties are bourgeois and that the road to proletarian revolution lies only through spontaneous grassroots organisation or some variant on this theme. Obviously as the British affiliate of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party we do not share this perspective which seems to us like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We don't expect in a few brief opening remarks to be able to convince anyone of our point of view but our basic case rests in the nature of revolution and in the uniqueness of the workers' revolution. Basically the working class has no property to defend. It sells its labour power. It is the ultimate exploited class. As Pannekoek once wrote it has only its consciousness and its capacity for organisation. What we say is that the two are inextricably linked. The world wide resistance to global capitalism even in this most global of all capitalist crises will not spontaneously lead to revolution overnight. Workers will resist in Greece, then in Guadeloupe and then in China and so on. But the one organisation which keeps alive the sparks of consciousness from one place to the next, from one time to the next, is the political organisation of the class. Call it what you like but it is party. It is a part of the class. This party is not a world government in the making. It seeks no votes. It is an original kernel of those workers who through their own experience have come to understand that the continuing survival of capitalism is inconsistent with the future of humanity. From this it forms an international body which links and supports struggles, which leads then where necessary, and which always poses the question of the overthrow of the capitalist state. Such a party has to exist before any wider revolutionary outbreak in order to combat all the tricks and obstacles which a determined capitalist ruling class will throw in front of us. Its leading organs are not the organs of any state (that is a task which the workers themselves must decide in any area). It is the guide for world revolution and does not as a body become the local government even if its local members play the most active part in the fight for a communist programme in the class wide bodies of the working class. For us the present crisis has not yet created the level of resistance which we expect although the signs of the world working class stirring are increasing. What is mainly happening is that workers are mainly holding their breath and are hoping to avoid redundancy. Some are buying the bosses tactic (which is more widespread than the media are telling us) of proposing quite substantial wage cuts (£100 a week in some cases) in return for keeping their jobs. They then find that some of them get the sack anyway in a sort of salami fashion as one layer is peeled off after another. Those who suffer direct attack are responding with vigorous if limited struggles (including occupying factories to try to hold the (deval‎ued) constant capital as hostage for their now eroded rights in terms of redundancy etc). In France this has even gone on to taking the bosses hostage (so-called "bossnapping" which on at least one occasion has produced promises of proper redundancy pay). As the unions are also heavily involved these though are often not the victories that they seem so that once the occupation is over the bosses renege on the supposed deal (as seems to have happened with the Visteon workers). Generally what we revolutionaries are looking for are struggles which become wider and draw in more sections of the class. Struggles which internationalise themselves and at the same time expose the bourgeois nature of the trade unions, the social democracy and the capitalist left parties. As the earlier remarks on the party make clear the only way this can happen is if revolutionary organisations get a presence in these struggles to provide the historical dimension to the struggle and to point the way to communist society. We need a long period of struggle such as 1905 in which the working class can throw off the muck of ages and take up a revolutionary perspective - a period of mass strikes in which the class finds not only itself, its collective will to struggle but also its programme based on the acquisitions it has made in its own historical fight for emancipation. Having an international political organisation of revolutionaries in place before such wider struggles come about seems to us to be an indispensable condition for success. To this end we would be willing to deepen this discussion with any of the participants to this meeting or any future meetings, as we believe the future of our class, and ultimately humanity itself, rests on this. Communist Workers' Organisation British affiliate of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party April 2009