Prometeo – The Tactics of the Comintern 1926-1940

In March 1926 the 6th Enlarged Executive met in Moscow, and Bordiga would conclude his intervention by
declaring that the time had come for the other parties in the International to repay the Russian Party for
having given them so much in the ideological and political spheres, and ask specifically that the Russian
Question be put on the agenda of discussions for subsequent meetings of the International.

If from a formal point of view this proposal was accepted, and there was lengthy discussion of the Russian
Question at the 7th Enlarged Executive and the successive plenary session of the ECCI, nothing substantial
came of it since the parties belonging to the International all united around the theoretical, political and
disciplinary solutions previously put forward by the Russian Party. These solutions were entirely at odds with
the founding principles of the Communist International and led to those fundamental changes at the heart
of the Russian Revolution which would lead to the ruthless repression of the architects of the revolution and
the overthrowing of Soviet Russia, eventually to become one of the main instruments of the counter-
revolution and of preparations for the imperialist 2nd World War.

Thanks to Zinoviev’s "bolshevisation" which had triumphed at the 5th World Congress in 1924, the fact is
that by 1926 every party had already had radical modifications made to their leading cadres. Those currents
which in 1920 with the rise of the International had flowed organically towards the same revolutionary outlet
which had been affirmed in such a decisive way by the October victory in Russia, would find representatives
of other tendencies stepping into their shoes. These parasitic tendencies, who just like horseflies (mosche
cocchiere)1 had hitched themselves to the victorious cart of the Russian revolution after contributing nothing
to the formation of the communist parties, and lain dormant inside them waiting for their hour to strike,
would inevitably rally to the cause of the encroaching counter-revolution, then in its preliminary stages, and
help in the job of smashing the cadres of the International.

If we have recalled the Italian Left’s proposals which Bordiga brought before the International’s 6th Enlarged
Executive, we have done so to underline the fact that this current had already had a presentiment about the
seriousness of incipient events and the central point on which they pivoted: the radical changes brewing in
Soviet Russian politics.

The meeting of the 6th Enlarged Executive would also be the last time the Italian Left was allowed to put
forward its views as a member of the International and the Party. Within a year it had been expelled from
the International along with every other opposition current, and the new conditions of admission would
become recognition of the theory of "Socialism in One Country", representing a clear departure from the
programme on which the International had originally been founded.

The enslavement of the Comintern to the interests of the Russian State was now a fait accompli, and rather
than working towards the uniquely communist goal of real revolutionary struggle against capitalism, the
Comintern now started to use the communist parties of the various nations as pawns in Russia’s diplomatic
chess game with the other powers. Eventually, whenever required by diplomatic considerations, the most
bankrupt compromises would be struck with the forces of centrist opportunism and the bourgeoisie.

This study, which simply aims to provide facts about the Comintern’s tactics from 1926 to 1940 and doesn’t
claim to be an exhaustive treatment of such a huge subject, restricts itself to outlining the main features and
progression of these tactics which we list as follows:

1) Anglo-Russian Committee (1926)

2) Russian Question (1927)

1
’Mosche Cocchiere’, the plural of, literally, coachman fly, is a pun on the word ’mosca’, meaning ’fly’ or ’Moscow’. The
mosca cocchiera is the fly which rides on the back of a horse, as though steering the larger animal.
 3) Chinese Question (1927)
4) The Tactic of the Offensive and Social-Fascism (1929 - 1933)
5) The Tactics of Anti-fascism and the Popular Front (1934 - 1938)
6) The Tactics of the Communist Parties during the 2d Imperialist World Conflict.

1. The Anglo-Russian Committee

In 1926, an extremely important event shattered not only the analysis of the situation given by the
International’s 5th Congress (1924), but also the policies for Russia and other countries which derived from
it. The global situation had come to be characterised by the "stabilisation" formula. Whilst the formula itself
didn’t exclude the possibility of a new revolutionary wave, the tactical consequences which followed on from
it in fact fell far short of preparing the International for a revival of the proletarian struggle, and the
International party became the prisoner of a set of tactical and organisational formulations which couldn’t
just be dropped or changed overnight.

The political process isn’t made up of a mass of different tactical devices such that the party can apply a
corresponding tactic to each situation like a doctor after diagnosing an illness. The Party, a living factor of
historical evolution, is inevitably shaped by the tactics and politics it employs and is equipped to intervene in
a revolutionary situation only insofar as it has made the necessary preparations beforehand. If there is no
preparation, clearly the party, trapped in an inappropriate political procedure, will end up getting hemmed
in by it and deprive itself of the opportunity of leading the proletarian struggle.

Now, when "stabilisation" was discussed in 1924, obviously the formula wasn’t limited to a purely statistical
and technical explanation of economic evolution, rather it referred, on the strength of the indisputable
observation that the revolutionary wave had receded after the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923, to
a political conclusion which had the additional merit of being in perfect harmony with the tactical decisions
of the Comintern. These tactical decisions, in their turn, hinged on the fundamental objective of maintaining
communist influence over the broad masses, and since in said unfavourable climate it was only possible to
establish contacts with the masses by entering into political relations with the social-democratic
organisations who were benefiting from the revolutionary ebb, the formula of "stabilisation" included the
tactic of "meshing" with the leaderships of the social-democratic parties and trades unions.

When a huge miners’ strike broke out in Britain in 1926, the International had to therefore accept the
consequences of previously established tactical premises. The trade-unionist leaders in Britain hastened to
establish permanent treaties with their Soviet counterparts, and the Anglo-Russian Committee was forced to
assume the role events had dictated.

When the strike turned into a general strike the economic analyses of the 5th Congress fell apart, and yet the
tactics derived from them were kept. The International found itself not only prevented from exposing the
counter-revolutionary role of the trade-unionists to the masses, but also forced to carry on maintaining
solidarity with them throughout this important proletarian agitation taking place in one of the main sectors
of world capitalism.

In order to get a better grasp of the International’s tactical answers to this question we should remember
that the right-wing Bukharin-Rykov tendency had triumphed in Russia at the same time. This tendency, which
emerged within the general framework of a political line which linked the fate of the Russian State to the fate
of the world revolution, now made the politics of the communist parties depend on the necessity of that
State. Thus Bukharin was able to justify the tactics adopted by the Anglo-Russian Committee as in the
"diplomatic interests of the USSR" (May 1927 meeting of the International Executive).

Suffice to recall that at the Berlin conference of the Anglo-Russian Committee in April 1927 (following the
Conferences in Paris, July 1926, and Berlin in August 1926) the Russian delegation, who had recognised the
General Council as "the sole representatives and spokesmen of the English trade-union movement", set itself
the task of "not undermining the authority" of the trade-union leaders even after the open betrayal of the
social-democratic leadership during the General Strike. And it is not superfluous to recall that as soon as
English capitalism had managed to liquidate the General Strike it would repay the Russian leaders for having
been so obliging with its customary gratitude: by having the Baldwin Government, directly in London, and
indirectly in Peking, launch an offensive against the Soviet diplomatic deputations.

In the review edited by the Italian Communist Party in Paris, Lo Stato Operaio (number 5, July 1927) there is
an article on "The Executive [of the International] and the Struggle against the War" which engages in
polemics against the Russian Opposition. About the Anglo-Russian Committee, we read: "This tendency [the
Opposition -ed.] is revealing itself ever more clearly in the criticisms aimed at the Anglo-Russian meeting.
Due consideration must be given to the Berlin meeting of the Anglo-Russian Committee and it should be
weighed up attentively in an unhurried and unprejudiced way. When the ARC met in Berlin, it was at an
internationally crucial juncture. The Conservative Government of England was getting ready to break with
Russia. The campaign to isolate Russia from the rest of the civilised world was in full swing. Was the Russian
trade-union delegation well or badly advised to make some concessions at that time with the aim of avoiding
a complete rupture with the English trade-unions?". This document poses in interrogative form the question:
how good were the tactics adopted by the Russian trade-union delegation in Berlin? But, as we have seen,
Bukharin was much more explicit when he affirmed that in the diplomatic interests of the Russian State the
Anglo-Russian Committee shouldn’t be disbanded, even if it was a committee which had served to cover-up
the trade-union leaders’ sabotage of the General Strike by officially affording them recognition as the "sole
representatives of the English trade-union movement".

Even official documents posed the problem in an unequivocal way: a powerful proletarian movement would
be sacrificed because the defence of the Russian State required it.

Incidentally, here is new evidence of the role played by the ARC within the English movement. In an article
by R. Palme Dutt on the subject of the Plenary Assembly of the English Communist Party which appeared in
the review L’Internationale Communiste (number 17, 15/8/28 ), we find the following assertions: "We have
here a decisive change in the attitude of the Communist Party towards the masses. Until now the Party has
played the role of independent critic and agitator (and therefore of ideological leader) in a movement led by
the reformists. From now on the party’s task is to fight the reformist leaders in order to put itself at the head
of the masses", and in a note the author adds: "Sometimes it is said that we have passed from the slogan
"struggle for the leadership" to "change of leadership". Not at all. In fact the slogan "change of leadership"
had already been adopted before the new tactic, even when we were fighting against the new tactic, and it
meant one thing: that we must substitute the "right" of the Labour Party with the "left" of the same party.
At the moment the party is fighting for its own interests, and not to correct the errors of the Labour Party. It
is necessary to regroup the masses behind the Communist Party and the elements which are associated with
it (minority movement etc.). It is in this sense that the slogan "change the leadership" is valid for the present
period".

The Party’s role in 1926 was therefore that of acting as "ideological head" of the movement led by reformists
and "correcting the errors of the Labour Party". As for the "New Tactics", which will be just as harmful for the
proletarian movement as the Anglo-Russian Committee, we will refer to that in the chapter on the "offensive"
and "socialism".

2. The Russian Question

In 1926-27 Russia was going through a severe economic crisis. As early as 1923-24, two opposing positions
had been defended within the Russian Party: that of the right-wing Bukharin-Rikov who, breaking with the
prejudicial conditions set by Lenin in the NEP (see "Tax in kind"), advocated support for the expansion of the
capitalist strata, especially in the countryside; the other of the Trotskyist left who, on the basis of Lenin's
formulations, tended to establish an economic plan centred on strengthening the state and socialist sector
to the detriment of the private and capitalist sector.
The Russian party is moving on to the fight against Trotsky, but the ruling bloc that goes from Bukharin-Rikov
to Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev if it proceeded together in the fight against the alleged "Trotskyism", does not
reach a unity of views on the positive side of the solutions to be adopted in the face of the serious economic
problems that had given rise to the establishment of the NEP. The right wing launches the word “enriching
peasants”, which openly threatens the monopoly of foreign trade, but it fails to set up an economic and
political plan clearly oriented towards the annihilation of the prejudicial conditions laid down by Lenin in the
NEP, nor does it differ clearly from the centre then played by Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev (to limit itself to the
most important Russian leaders). As always, the Right has no need to be clear and relies above all on the
direct impulse of events, which, in circumstances unfavourable to the revolutionary movement, can only be
favourable to it. The essential thing for it is the fight against the proletarian tendency, and for this purpose it
uses the centre, which will be more able to carry out this counter-revolutionary task than it is.

The years 1926 and 1927 saw a situation in which the different currents within the Russian Party did not
confront us in view of particular solutions to be adopted in the face of the serious economic problems in
which Russia finds itself, but the debates were mainly about general and theoretical issues. The practical
solutions will intervene later, at the XVI Conference of the Russian Party (1929), where the first five-year plan
will be decided. In 1926-27 the struggle was limited to the essential task of the hour: to dispel any proletarian
reaction within the Russian Party. According to the report of the plenary meeting of the Central Committee
and Central Control Commission of the Russian Party (see Workers' State of September 1927) and

"The opposition is divided into three groups:

1st was an extreme left-wing group headed by their team mates Sapronov and Smirnov;

2nd the group that accepts the hegemony of Trotsky and which include, among the most well-known,
Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc..

3rd, a group that strives to take an intermediate position between the opposition currents and the Central
Committee (Kasparova, Bielincaia, etc.)".

With respect to the first group, the following points in the official document characterise its analysis of the
situation:

(a) the struggle within the party has a class struggle character, between the party's worker side and the army
of officials;

(b) this fight cannot be confined to the party itself, but must concern the large, partyless masses, the support
of which the opposition must win;

c) it is possible that the opposition will be defeated; it must therefore constitute an active framework, which
will also defend the cause of the proletarian revolution in the future;

d) the Trotsky Zinoviev block does not understand this need, it tends to compromise with the Stalin Group,
it does not have a clear tactical line; having mistakenly signed the declaration of 16 October 1926 of
obedience to the Party, it must trample on its commitments; the hesitations of Trotsky and Zinoviev must be
denounced and exposed like those of the Stalin Group;

e) in recent years, the capitalist elements of production have developed more rapidly than the socialist
elements; given the technical backwardness of the country and the low level of labour productivity, it is not
possible to move to a true socialist organisation of production without the help of technically advanced
countries or without the intervention of the world revolution;

(f) The main mistake in the party's economic policy is to reduce prices, which benefits not the working class,
but all consumers, and therefore also the bourgeoisie and the small bourgeoisie;
(g) the liquidation of party and working-class democracy in 1923 was the prelude to the establishment of a
rich farmers' democracy;

h) in order to change this state of affairs, it is necessary to move on to the organisation of large state-owned
farms with perfect production techniques for processing agricultural products;

i) the GPU, instead of fighting against counter-revolution, fights against the justified discontent of the
workers; the red army threatens to turn into an instrument of bonapartistic adventures; the C.C. is a
"Stalinist" fraction which, starting the liquidation of the party, will lead to the end of the dictatorship of the
proletariat; the system of the Soviets must be "restored".

This current is considered by C. C. "a group of enemies of the party and the proletarian revolution". The same
C. C. states that it "is firmly constituted in the illegal fraction not only in the sense of the Party, but in the very
sense of the Trotsky-Zinoviev fraction. It turns out that one of the groups in this fraction, the Omsk group,
had planned to prepare for a general strike throughout Siberia and halt the activities of the large electricity
companies in the region".

As for the Trotsky-Zinoviev Group, the same document from the C.C. of the Russian Party writes:

"The Trotsky-Zinoviev Group is responsible for the most violent attacks against the C. C. and its political line,
and for the most brazen fraction activity developed during 1927, openly violating the solemn commitments
made in the declaration of October 16, 1926.

In recent times this group has concentrated its attacks against the party line in international politics (China,
England) speculating on the difficulties that have arisen in this field. It has responded to the preparation of
the war against the USSR with declarations which represent a sabotage of the action that the Party carries
out for the mobilization of the masses against the war and for the resistance. Of this kind it is the affirmation
that the C.C. of the Party is on a plan of Thermidorian degeneration, that the course of the party politics is
"national-conservative", that the line of the party is a line from "old peasants", that the greatest danger
threatening Russia is not war, but the internal regime of the party etc.

These statements were accompanied by acts of violation of discipline and open fractionism: publication of
fraction documents, organisation of fraction circles, conferences, etc., Zinoviev's speech against the C.C. in an
assembly without party, Trotsky's attitude at the executive meeting, accusation of "thermidorism" brought
by Trotsky against the Party in a C.C. control meeting, public demonstration against the Party at the departure
of Smilga from a Moscow station. Finally, a campaign of petitions against the C.C. was organised, circulating
a document signed by the 83 main exponents of the opposition. Furthermore, the Trotsky-Zinoviev Group has
maintained its relationship with the extreme left group excluded from the German Party (Maslov-Fischer).

All this shows that the Trotsky Zinoviev group not only violated all the commitments made in its declaration
of 16 October 1926 but: 1) went down a path that leads to being against the unconditional defense of the
USSR in the fight against imperialism; the accusations of thermidorism levelled against the C.C. have as a
logical consequence to proclaim the necessity of the defense of the USSR only after this C.C. has been
overthrown; 2) has set itself on the path that leads to the splitting of the Comintern; 3) has set itself on the
path that leads to the splitting of the Russian Party and to the organizing of a new party in Russia".

As far as the intermediate group is concerned, the C.C. of the Russian Party considers it

"a group of undisclosed opposition, probably indicating a certain loss that has arisen in some of the less self-
confident elements in the face of the serious difficulties of the moment".

All this quotation allows us to realise the seriousness of the situation in Russia at this time. Although there
are evident exaggerations in the way of presenting the points of view of the extreme left fraction and of the
Trotsky-Zinoviev fraction, it is clear that not even what the C.C. accuser writes authorises the conclusion that
the two opposing groups could be equalled to the mensheviks and the counter-revolutionaries.
As for the positions defended by the right, they were undoubtedly the vehicle for a restoration of the
bourgeois class in Russia according to the classic type of reconstitution of an economy based on initiative and
private property. But history had to exclude this possibility. In the phase of monopolistic imperialism and
state totalitarianism, the overturning of Russian policy will take place along the other path of the five-year
plans, which we will talk about later, and state capitalism.

But, as we said, before reaching this decisive step, it was necessary to definitively win the battle against the
different opposition groups, a battle that was in fact directed against the Party itself and against the
International, since it concerned the fundamental point of Marxist doctrine: on the international and
internationalist notion of communism.

The C.C. resolution referred to above was a 'half measure' since the issues had not been definitively resolved.
It was in December 1927, at the XV Congress of the Russian Party, after the failure of the trial of strength
attempted by the opposition with the demonstration in Leningrad, that the problems will be fully addressed.

The great battle of the XV Congress took place around the new theory of "socialism in one country" and the
incompatibility between belonging to the Party and to the International and the rejection of this thesis.

On this fundamental point the 7th Enlarged Executive (November-December 1926) expressed itself in these
terms:

"The Party starts from the point of view that our revolution is a socialist revolution, that the October revolution
is not only the signal for a leap forward and the starting point of the socialist revolution in the West, but: 1)
represents a basis for the future development of the world revolution; 2) opens the period of transition from
capitalism to socialism in the Union of the Soviets (the dictatorship of the proletariat), in which the proletariat
has the opportunity to successfully build, through a just policy towards the class of peasants, the complete
socialist society. However, this construction will only be achieved if the strength of the international workers'
movement, on the one hand, and the strength of the proletariat of the Soviet Union, on the other, are so great
as to protect the State of the Soviets from military intervention".

It should be noted that the realisation of the "complete socialist society" no longer depends, as in Lenin's
times, on the triumph of the revolution in other countries, but on the ability of the international workers'
movement to "protect the State of the Soviets from military intervention". The events have shown that it will
be the two most powerful imperialist states, Great Britain and the United States, that will " protect " the
Russia of the Soviets.

Both at the 7th Enlarged Executive and at the other numerous meetings of the Russian Party and the
International Executive, the Russian and international proletariat lost its battle. The consecration of this
defeat took place at the XV Congress of the Russian Party (December 1927) when the incompatibility
between belonging to the Party and the denial of the "possibility of the construction of socialism in a single
country" was proclaimed.

But this defeat was to have decisive consequences both in Russia and in the world communist movement.
The battle of the classes does not admit intermediate paths, especially in the climaxes, such as those of our
time. The proclamation of the theory of socialism in a single country, because it could hardly be resolved in
the extraction of Russia from a world in which - after the defeat of the Chinese revolution - capitalism passed
everywhere to counter-attack and, for the very fact of breaking the necessary link between the struggle of
the working class of each country against their capitalism and the struggle for socialism in the bosom of
Russia, denied the factor of the proletarian class, had inevitably to admit another, on which Russia was
increasingly relying: world capitalism. Evidently, this shift in the Russian state was possible only under two
conditions:

1) that the communist parties would cease to pose a threat to capitalism;

2) that within Russia the principle of the capitalist economy - the exploitation of workers - be re-established.

In this chapter we will deal with the second point; in the following chapters the first.

***

On the basis of a logic that we would like to call "chronological", the opinion has been formed that the line
of degeneration of the Russian state starts from the adoption of the NEP in March 1921 and inevitably arrives
at the new course introduced after 1927.

This opinion is superficial and does not correspond to an analysis of events conducted according to Marxist
principles.

We must make it clear that the economic manoeuvre was necessarily required by events, by the
insurmountable difficulties in which the proletarian dictatorship found itself, and it was possible precisely
because it was being carried out under a regime of proletarian dictatorship. This obviously does not mean
that the bourgeois economic forces did not grow and that the relationship of political forces did not tend to
change: however, this change in relations to the advantage of the bourgeois forces, brought about by the
NEP, could become dangerous and lethal for the proletarian dictatorship in Russia only if the international
power relationship had moved, as happened, towards the prevalence of the bourgeois reaction and the
outflow of the revolutionary wave. Otherwise, the momentary recovery of the bourgeois forces would have
been overwhelmed by the proletarian dictatorship which had maintained its political positions.

Lenin's position, since 1917, is based on these main considerations:

1) an absolute political intransigence which will lead the Bolshevik Party to adopt the positions of the most
open struggle against all bourgeois political formations, including those of the extreme social-democratic left.
It is well known that, in January 1918, Lenin, after having analysed the results of the elections for the
Constituent Assembly not according to the trivial criteria of parliamentary democracy, but according to the
opposite classist criteria, and after having ascertained that the Bolsheviks were a minority from the
arithmetical and global point of view in the country, were, however, a majority in the industrial centres,
moved on to the violent dispersion of this Assembly elected on the basis of democratic principles.

2) a wise economic policy that delimited the possibilities of the proletariat - and as a consequence of the
Class Party - in connection with the concrete possibilities offered by the modest degree of development of
the forces and of the production technique. The Lenin programme simply involved "control of production",
which meant the permanence of the capitalists at the head of the industries.

This apparent contradiction between an economic policy of concessions and an extremely intransigent
general policy is inexplicable if we do not place ourselves - as Lenin constantly did - on an international level
and therefore do not consider the Russian revolution in connection with the development of the world
revolution. If, from the Russian national point of view, concessions in the economic field are inevitable
because of the backwardness of the country's industrial development, from the political point of view, on
the other hand - since the experiment of the proletarian dictatorship is a function of international events -
the most intransigent policy becomes not only possible but necessary, since it is, in the final analysis, an
episode in the world struggle of the proletariat.

Lenin acted in function of Marxist principles both in 1917 when he limited himself to the "control of the
industries", and during the Communism of war between 1918 and 1920, and when he recommended in
March 1921 the policy of the NEP. The whole of its policy stems from an international approach to the Russian
problem and NEP itself will be considered inevitable because of the delay in the revolutionary rise of the
world proletariat, while on the other hand the fundamental conditions will be specified within which the
concessions contained in NEP's policy must be strictly maintained.
It is known that Lenin, replacing the tax in kind (the farmer became free to dispose of the remaining product
after the transfer of the share devolved to the state) to the system of requisitions (which deprived the farmer
of any possibility of disposing of his product) and authorising the re-establishment of the market and small
industry, divided the Russian economy into the two socialist and private sectors. The first sector - the state
sector - had to engage in a speed race against the second in order to defeat it in the economic field thanks
to the superiority of work performance and increased production.

However, the socialist status given to the state sector did not in any way mean that the state form was
sufficient to determine the socialist nature of this sector. Lenin insisted a thousand times that the chances of
success of the state sector did not result in any way from the fact that, instead of the private sector, it was
the state that managed the industry, but from the fact that this was a proletarian state closely linked to the
course of the world revolution.

Lenin established the NEP in March 1921. It was in 1923-24 that the first results of the NEP manifested
themselves and at the same time the struggle within the Russian Party showed that the forecasts based on a
development of the socialist sector to the detriment of the private sector were not confirmed by events.
While Trotsky recommended measures to develop the socialist sector and fight against the reborn
bourgeoisie, especially in the countryside, the right wing of Bukharin saw no other solution to the economic
problems than greater freedom in favour of the capitalist elements of the Soviet economy.

In 1926-27 the battle took on, within the Party and the International, the proportions we have mentioned
and the defeat will be total for the left-wing elements who can only remain in the Party on the condition of
abjuring the international and internationalist principle of the struggle for socialism.

Historical evolution does not obey formalistic criteria to such an extent that a restoration of the economic
principles of capitalism could only be considered possible in Russia through the re-establishment of the
classical form of individual property. Russia was to find itself in 1927 and later increasingly in a world situation
characterised, as in the last century, not by the reflection of liberal economic principles in the private
appropriation of means of production and surplus value, but by another situation which knew state
totalitarianism and the subjugation to it of all forms of private initiative.

After the defeat of the Left in the Russian Party, we do not see - because of the characteristics of the general
historical evolution - a triumph of the Right, but the fact that the solution to the economic problems can only
be achieved through a fight against the capitalist stratifications that arose during the NEP.

But between the policy of the NEP and that which was then to triumph, the five-year plans, is there or is
there not a solution of continuity? In order to answer this question, we must first consider that, as Charles
Bettelheim demonstrates in his book "Soviet Planning", the NEP had not achieved its objectives either in the
political field, since it had led to a hypertrophy of bureaucracy, or in the economic field, since instead of
having ensured the victory of the socialist sector, it had led to a strengthening of the private sector, or, finally,
in the more general economic field, since 1926-27 had experienced a serious economic crisis in Russia.

In the presence of what Bettelheim will qualify as "the failure of the NEP" the question arises whether 1927
should inevitably mark the time of the reckoning and if, due to the very unfavourable international
circumstances, no further possibility existed to hold the proletariat to the Russian state. But we must not
deal with this problem, our task being mainly to provide information on the course of events.

The indisputable fact is that the reinstitution of the economic principle of capitalist exploitation is
consecrated by the Five-Year Plans, the first of which will be decided at the XVI Conference of the Russian
Party in April 1929 and approved by the V Congress of the Soviets in May 1929; the fundamental point of
these Plans is that of reaching first and then continuously exceeding the production indexes, taking as points
of reference both the period prior to 1914 and the results obtained in other countries. In a word, what will
be the substance of the new Soviet reconstruction? Official documents make no secret of this: it is a matter
of reconstructing an economy of the same type as the capitalist economy and it will be described all the more
as " socialist " the higher the summits reached by production are.

The economic plan conceived by Lenin and approved at the IX Congress of the Russian Communist Party in
April 1920 imposed the whole problem on the increase of the consumer industry: this meant that the
essential aim of the Soviet economy was the improvement of the living conditions of the working masses. In
contrast, the theory of the five-year plans aims at the higher development of heavy industry at the expense
of consumption. The outcome of the five-year plans in the war economy and in the war was therefore as
inevitable as the corresponding structure of the economy in the rest of the capitalist world.

Corresponding to the substantial modification that will occur in the purposes of production, which will be
solely those of a constant accumulation of capital in heavy industry, another modification will be made in the
conception of "socialist industry" whose distinctive criterion will be established in the non-private and state
form: the master state will become the god to which will be sacrificed not only the sacrifices of millions of
Russian workers who will have to revalue zealously in the quantity and quality of production in order not to
incur the accusation and condemnation of "Trotskyites", but also the corpses of the architects of the Russian
revolution.

The economic principle of the increasing exploitation of workers, typical of capitalism, will be re-established
in Russia, in parallel with the general laws of historical evolution, which lead to a growing and totalitarian
intervention of the State. The right-wing man, Bukharin, and his companion, Rykov, will also be executed.
Who triumphs in Russia is who must then triumph in all countries: state totalitarianism, and the consequence
can only be the same in Russia: the preparation and gigantic participation in the Second World War.

The Italian Left, seeing the substance of political evolution in Russia from the very beginning, did not allow
itself - like Trotsky - to be trapped by the state form of property in Russia and as early as 1933 it raised the
need to assimilate Soviet Russia to the capitalist world by advocating the same tactic during the imperialist
conflict, where it would inevitably have been conducted by the theory of "socialism in a single country" and
by the theory of the five-year plans.

3. The Chinese Question (1926 – 1927)

"If the British reactionary trade unions are prepared to form a coalition with the revolutionary trade unions
in our country (Russia) against the counter-revolutionary imperialists in their country, why would this block
not be approved?"

(Stalin at the joint session of the C.C. of the Russian Party and the Central Control Commission, July 1926).
Rightly Trotsky replied:

"If the reactionary trade unions were able to fight their imperialists, they would not be reactionary".

If Chang-Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang were willing to fight for revolution... But the stacks of murderers who
ended the epic struggle of the Chinese workers had to lugublously prove that Chang-Kai-Shek and
Kuomintang could not be anything other than the executioners of the proletariat and the peasants of that
country.

In his book "The Communist International after Lenin", Trotsky rightly characterises the general situation in
China in the following terms: "Land ownership, large and medium, is intertwined in the most intimate way
with the capitalism of cities, including foreign capitalism" (pg. 277 of the French edition Rieder), "An
extremely rapid internal development of the industry based on the role of commercial and banking capitalism
which has subjected the country, the complete dependence on the market of the most important peasant
regions, the enormous role and continuous development of foreign trade, the total subordination of the
Chinese countryside to the city; all this confirms the unconditional dominance, the direct domination of
capitalist relations in China" (op. cited pg. 305).
In the study that will be dedicated to Trotskyism, the journal will explain the reasons that Trotsky was
supposed to bring, despite an analysis that highlighted the determining relations of the entire Chinese
economic order (including feudal and prefeudal relations numerically much higher than capitalist ones), to
absolutely insufficient tactical conclusions, such as the participation in the Kuomintang and the raising of that
set of democratic slogans that Trotsky defended against Stalin after the definitive defeat of the Chinese
revolution, after the failure of what the Comintern qualified: "The Canton Insurgency" (December 1927).

Our current, on the other hand, departing from an analysis collimating with that of Trotsky, defended the
thesis of principle of not adhering to the Kuomintang and, while fighting the tactic of the Comintern of the
"revolutionary offensive", maintained integral its previous positions against the "democratic order words",
remaining firm on the the thesis that the only word to raise in the question of power was that of the
proletarian dictatorship.

The events in fact had to confirm that neither a revolutionary situation existed in China after 1927, nor a
democratic era of bourgeois and anti-imperialist independence in China could open after and despite the
revolutionary defeat of 1926-27.

It was in 1911 that Manciano's dynasty abdicated in favour of the Republic. And it was at this time that the
"People's Party" of the Kuomintang was founded. The policy of Sun-Yat-sen, the founder of the Party, even
though he proclaims anti-imperialist pretensions for " the independence of China ", is however forced to limit
himself to verbal statements that will not worry foreign imperialisms at all. History will condemn China to
being unable to rise to the role of a great nation-state and Sun-Yat-Sen is so convinced of this that, after
China had taken a position for the Entente in the run-up to the 1914-18 war, in 1918 he turned to the victors
for help in China's economic development, and tried to rely on the nearest and then least intrusive
imperialism, Japan, to loosen the grip of British imperialism, which held the most important positions.

In the dominance of capitalist relations in the interior of the country and in the historical framework of the
financial imperialism of capitalism, which opened up no prospect of independent nation states being elevated
to colonial and semi-colonial countries, Chinese events began in 1925, developed in 1926, and ended with
the violent suffocation of the so-called "Canton insurgency".

Can these events, which take on above all the military aspect of a march that starts from the South and goes
from victory to victory towards the North, to the point of conquering the whole country, be characterised as
a "democratic-revolutionary, anti-imperialist war of the Chinese bourgeoisie"? Obviously, during these
tumultuous events, there were attacks against foreign concessions, but, apart from the fact that these attacks
never responded to decisions of the centre of the Kuomintang, but were the result of local initiatives which,
on the other hand, as events diminished, were even disavowed by the central management of the
Kuomintang, the problem was different and it was a question of characterising the whole by what it had
really revealed and not of adding up the episodes which had no decisive influence on the general course of
events.

At the end of 1927, the victory of the counter-revolution was decisive, and this victory was not unfortunately
short-lived, since twenty years later we were in the same situation and, despite the Japanese defeat, there
was no autonomous affirmation of the Chinese bourgeoisie, if it can dispute with France the rank of the IV
or V among the five Great, it cannot, however, prevent China, after the defeat of the revolutionary movement
of 1926-27, from being reduced to becoming an immense territory where the clash manifests itself among
the great foreign capitalisms, but not on a front that sees the Chinese bourgeoisie rise up against all of these
capitalisms. Against Stalin and also against Trotsky, the answer of history is absolutely unequivocal; it was
not, in 1926-27, a revolutionary anti-imperialist war susceptible to evolve into a frankly proletarian and
communist movement, but a gigantic uprising of hundreds of millions of exploited who could find only in the
proletarian vanguard the guide that, establishing the proletarian dictatorship in China, would have
intertwined with the development of the world revolution.
The role of Chang-Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang could not be that of the French bourgeoisie of 1793, but that
of the Noske and their companions in the most advanced countries. From the beginning, they represented
the bank of defence against the gigantic revolt of the Chinese exploited and the Kuomintang was the effective
instrument of this cruel and victorious resistance of the Chinese and world counter-revolution.

As for the Chinese bourgeoisie, like the bourgeoisie of India and other colonial and semi-colonial countries,
its function was not to tend towards national autonomy, but to get stuck with the organisation of the
dominant imperialist and foreign bourgeoisies. Chang-Kai-Shek had to show a terrible brutality against the
Chinese proletarians as soon as circumstances (the descent of the revolutionary flow) allowed it, at the same
time as an angelic genuflection ability towards the most powerful foreign imperialisms.

On the other hand, at the 7th Enlarged Executive at the end of 1926, the Chinese delegate Tang-Ping-Sian
declared in his report on Chang-Kai-Shek:

"In the field of international politics, he has a passive demeanour in the full sense of the word. He is not
prepared to fight against English imperialism; he is prepared to compromise with the Japanese imperialists
under certain conditions".

And Trotsky specifies suggestively:

"Chang-Kai-Shek made war on the Chinese militarists, agents of one of the imperialist states. It is by no means
the same thing to wage war on imperialism" ( Trotsky, op. cit., p. 268).

At the bottom of the struggle between the revolutionary masses and the counter-revolution, the war that
the generals of the South and of the North will find, fundamentally, no other explanation but that of seizing
the risen proletariat and, secondly, of tending towards the unification of China dispersed in the thousand
provinces under central authority. Central authority, we repeat, without any prospect of raising China to the
level of a great and independent nation state.

Moreover, the imperialisms will not set their preferences in a decisive way on one or the other general, but,
conscious of the revolutionary reality in China and of the danger that it represents for their class dominion
in the world, they will let the counter-revolutionary intervention of the International develop in full. After
the interruption caused by the war, the interweaving of capitalist relations was re-established, starting from
the metropoles, the Chinese bourgeoisie was annexed and its dominion extended over the immensity of the
Chinese lands.

***

From a programmatic point of view, the International had, as a fundamental document, the Theses of the
Second Congress (September 1920). The last paragraph of the 6th "supplementary" thesis says:

"Foreign domination constantly obstructs the free development of social life; therefore the revolution’s first
step must be the removal of this foreign domination. The struggle to overthrow foreign domination in the
colonies does not therefore mean underwriting the national aims of the national bourgeoisie but much rather
smoothing the path to liberation for the proletariat of the colonies".

One can see that the perspective that permeates many documents of the foundation of the International,
which is also contained in the same "Manifesto" (when Marx speaks of the bourgeoisie that digs its own
grave extending its dominion to all countries) has not been confirmed by events. In fact, faced with a
movement of the magnitude of that of China in 1926-27, which will see hundreds of thousands of workers
and armed peasants, a movement that has the unquestionable connotations of indomitable historical forces,
if the alleged goal of liberation from foreign rule had been likely to determine the events we would have
witnessed a struggle of these masses that, under the direction of the indigenous bourgeoisie, would have
come to a decisive blow against foreign imperialism, or this same movement that, bypassing the primitive
bourgeois direction, would have taken the strength of a proletarian revolution interwoven with the world
revolution.

Now not only the impact against the imperialisms did not occur, but the historical function of the Chinese
bourgeoisie has proved to be exclusively that of a powerful counter-revolutionary bastion to tame the masses
with terrible violence, and this while foreign imperialisms could not but rejoice in the excellent work done by
their commissioners: the Kuomintang and all its tendencies, the right wing of Chang-Kai-Shek, the center of
Dai-Thi-Tao, as the left self-styled communist led by delegates of the Communist International in China.

The theses do not limit themselves to formulating a perspective, but, after formulating the guiding criterion
for the analysis of historical situations, they determine guarantees which, it goes without saying, have been
shamefully betrayed by the International.

As a guideline, Point 2 of the cited "Theses" states:

"As the conscious expression of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and
in accordance with its main task, which is the fight against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies
and hypocrisy, the Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national question on abstract
and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all
economic milieu. Secondly it should emphasise the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed
classes, of the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national interest, which means the
interests of the ruling class. Thirdly it must emphasise the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent
nations which do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, exploiting, privileged nations, as a counter to
the bourgeois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority
of the world’s total population, by a tiny minority of the richest and most advanced capitalist countries, that
is characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism".

As for the guarantees, the 5th Thesis says:

"A determined fight is necessary against the attempt to put a communist cloak around revolutionary
liberation movements that are not really communist in the backward countries. The Communist International
has the duty to support the revolutionary movement in the colonies only for the purpose of gathering the
components of the future proletarian parties – communist in fact and not just in name in all the backward
countries and training them to be conscious of their special tasks, the special tasks, that is to say, of fighting
against the bourgeois-democratic tendencies within their own nation. The Communist International should
accompany the revolutionary movement in the colonies and the backward countries for part of the way,
should even make an alliance with it; it may not, however, fuse with it, but must unconditionally maintain
the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo".

The application of these fundamental directives during the course of the Chinese events would certainly have
determined a progressive clarification of some of the hypothetical elements contained in the Theses, which
was, on the other hand, clearly provided for in the first line of the 2nd Thesis that we have reported, where
it speaks of the necessity of "a clear notion of the historical and economic circumstances". This notion could
only lead to the recognition of the exclusively counter-revolutionary character of the Kuomintang and the
absence of any historical possibility of anti-imperialist struggle in function of the development of those
economic forces (Thesis 6).

Our current, in violent opposition to the direction of the International and against Trotsky himself, supported
the thesis of not joining the Kuomintang from the beginning, qualifying this "People's Party" for what it was
in reality and for what it should then cruelly reveal itself after the massacres of the proletarians and peasants
of 1927. It was linked to what Lenin said in 1919 when he wrote:

"The strength of the proletariat in any capitalist country is much greater than what the proportion between
the proletariat and the total population implies. This is because the proletariat economically commands the
centre and the nerves of the whole system of the economy of capitalism and also because in the economic
and political field the proletariat expresses under capitalist domination the real interests of the enormous
majority of the workers" ("Complete Works", vol. XVI, pages 458, quoted by Trotsky in "The International
after Lenin"). And as for the capitalist nature of economic relations in China, let us remember what we have
already said by marking our agreement with the analysis made by Trotsky.

Let's see now, briefly, the tactical approach of the International. It can be summarised in the formula of the
"block of the four classes" (bourgeoisie, peasants, small urban bourgeoisie, proletariat), a formula that was
expressly drafted in the resolutions of the International.

The magazine of the Communist International in its No. 5 of March 10, 1927 (note, a month later only Chang-
Kai-Shek will unleash terror against the proletarians of Shanghai), contains a particularly evocative article by
Martinov. After having stated that

"China's national liberation must necessarily, if successful, turn into socialist revolution, that China's
liberating movement is also an integral part of the world proletarian revolution, differing in that respect from
the earlier liberating movements that were an integral part of the general democratic movement",

after having therefore given this movement, which is of "national liberation" only in the heads of the leaders
of the International, a much more advanced characteristic than that which preceded it in the history of the
formation of the bourgeois nation-states in Europe. Martinov arrives at the confusion that while

"In Russia, in 1905, the initiative of the leadership emanated from the proletarian party" and "the Russian
liberal bourgeoisie, during a certain time, dragged on, striving at every temporary stop of the movement to
conclude an agreement with the Czarist autocracy", In China, "the initiative emanates from the industrial
bourgeoisie and bourgeois intellectuals" and therefore "the Chinese Communist Party must strive not to
create obstacles [our emphasis] to the revolutionary army against the great feudal lords, against the
militarists of the North and against imperialism".

Stalin, for his part, wrote in a polemical article against the Russian opposition (see Workers' State of May
1927):

"In the first period of the Chinese revolution, in the period of the first march towards the North, when the
national army approaching the Yang-Tze passed from victory to victory, a powerful movement of workers
and peasants had not yet developed and the indigenous bourgeoisie [with the exception of the
"compradors"] marched together with the revolution. This, then, was the revolution of a single front that
extended to the whole nation [our emphasis]. This does not mean that there were contrasts between the
indigenous bourgeoisie and the revolution. This only means that the indigenous bourgeoisie, by giving its
support to the revolution, strove to exploit it for its own purposes, directing its development essentially in
the line of territorial conquests and trying to limit its development in a different direction".

The events had to cruelly prove through the unleashing of terror, starting from April 1927, that the
"revolution of the single front of the entire nation" was in reality the incorporation of the masses that would
be submitted to the direction of the generals, and that finally there was clear, strident, violent opposition
between the "military march to the North under the direction of the Kuomintang" and the class struggles of
Chinese workers and peasants. All the lactic matter in the Comintern will finally be summed up in the directive
that Martinov had specified:

"Do not create obstacles to the revolutionary army" (see quotation above).

Finally, with regard to the tactical approach of the International, we recall the declaration of Tan-Pin-Sian to
the 7th Enlarged Executive:

"As soon as Trotskyism arose, the Chinese Communist Party and Youth immediately unanimously adopted a
resolution against it".
It is well known that under the label of Trotskyism were included all the tendencies that opposed the
direction of the International. If we have quoted this quote, it is to prove that the Chinese Party had been
energetically "purified" to be able to carry out, with full success, its counter-revolutionary policy.

***

The second half of 1926 and the first quarter of 1927 will see the greatest explosion of the Chinese events.
Throughout this period - which is frankly revolutionary - the International violently opposes the tendencies
that are manifested in the bosom of the proletarian vanguard towards the constitution of the Soviets; it is
firm on the directive of the block of the four classes.

The Russian delegation in China, which was living in direct contact with the events, will write a letter2
addressed to the Centre of Moscow, criticising the Chinese Party's policy and showing how much counter-
revolutionary vigilance had been exercised in carrying out the tactical measures that were to lead to the
collapse of this grandiose movement. It says so:

"According to the report of the Chinese Communist Party of 13 December 1926 on the dangerous tendencies
in the revolutionary movement, the statement asserts that "the greatest danger consists in this: that the
movement of the masses progresses towards the left" [emphasis added].

On the question of the relations between the Party and the masses, one can deduce what they were from
this passage:

"The relations between the party leadership, the workers and the peasants were formulated in the best
possible way by Comrade Petrov, a member of the C.C., on the occasion of the examination of the question
of the recruitment of students for the special course [communist university of workers of the East]. It would
have been necessary to obtain the following breakdown: 175 workers and 100 farmers. Petrov told us that
the Central Committee decided to appoint only students and intellectuals".

On the peasant question:

"At the December Plenum [1926 ED.] of the C.C., with the participation of the representative of the E.C. of
the C.I., a resolution was adopted relative to the peasant question. In this resolution, there is no word about
the programme and the fight against agriculture. The resolution only responds to one of the most irritating
questions, the question of peasant power, and it responds negatively to it: it says that the slogan of peasant
power must not be launched in order not to frighten the small bourgeoisie. From this comes that the organs
of the Party have ignored the armed peasant".

[In fact, they did not ignore it because they pushed the armed peasants into the arms of the generals of the
Kuomintang, ED.]

On the question of the workers' movement:

"More than one million organised workers are deprived of an executive centre. The trade unions were
detached from the masses and, to a large extent, remained staff organisations. Political and organisational
work was always and everywhere replaced by constriction and the main fact was that reformist tendencies
grew within as well as outside the revolutionary trade union movement. Cordial familiarity with
entrepreneurs, participation in benefits, participation in raising labour productivity, subordination of trade
unions to employers and leaders are the usual phenomena".

On the other hand, refusal to defend the economic demands of workers. Fearing the elementary
development of the workers' movement, the Party allowed compulsory arbitration in Canton and later in
Hang-Kéou (the very idea of arbitrage belongs to Borodine, official delegate of the C.I.). Particularly serious

2
This document under the title "La lettre de Shanghai" was published by the French "Léniniste opposition", and its
authenticity has never been denied.
is the fear of the leaders of the Party of the Non-Industrial Workers' Movement. On the other hand, the
overwhelming majority of workers organised in China are non-industrial workers.

The report of the C.C. to the Plenum of December 1926 says:

"It is extremely difficult for us to define tactics towards the middle and lower middle classes, because the
strikes of the workers working for the craftsmen and the strikes of the employees are only conflicts within
the same class. And both sides in the struggle (i.e. the entrepreneurs and the workers) being necessary for
the single national front [the front of the revolution, as Stalin says, see quotation above ED.], we can neither
support either contender, nor remain neutral".

On the army:

"The characteristic of the Party's demeanour towards the army was given by Tchou-En-Lai in his report. He
says to the members of the Party: 'Go into this national-revolutionary army, strengthen it, increase its combat
capacity, but do not lead any independent workers'. Until recently, there were no cells in the army. Our fellow
political advisers were exclusively concerned with the political-military work of the Kuomintang".

And beyond:

"The December C.C. Plenum took the decision to create cells in the army, cells formed only of commanders
with the prohibition of letting the soldiers enter".

The straitjacket around the masses of insurgent Chinese workers is solid and, unfortunately, indestructible.
The whole movement is incorporated in the framework of the unity of all, exploited and exploiters, for the
insistent war of "liberation". In the bosom of the "purified" Party, the proletariat is rejected at the last level,
after the intellectuals, in the trade unions it is proclaimed that the struggle between capitalist entrepreneurs
and the proletariat is a conflict "within the same class", the armed peasants must be disciplined within the
"national" army, while the "communist" cells are reserved for the officers.

The slipknot was ready. It was pulled on Shanghai on 12 April 1927 when Chang-Kai-Shek unleashed the terror
against the masses.

Before moving on to the treatment of the following events, it is necessary to highlight the spontaneous
coupling, it should be said (to use the terminology used by Engels in the study on the development of the
class struggle) natural between the mass movement and the Communist International. This was to respond
to the many builders of revolutions, parties and Internationals who swarm a little everywhere in other
countries, and who fortunately do not arrive in Italy to make themselves known, who would like to give the
impression that the Left would have made the mistake of not separating themselves from the International
before and founding another organization.

The Chinese revolutionary movement is part of the same historical complex that had its origin and in October
Russian and Communist International. The precedents (the German defeat of 1923 and the events within the
Russian party) explain why this counter-revolutionary direction had become an inescapable historical
necessity. And this same counter-revolutionary direction should not directly evoke the antagonist force
susceptible to overpower it, but only determine the premises for a much more distant reconstruction of the
international body of the proletariat, so distant that even today the historical possibilities do not arise, nor
can they be determined by revolutionary militants.

Chang-Kai-Shek's violent action of April 12, 1927 closes the phase of the greatest revolutionary intensity in
China. The Eighth Enlarged Executive of the International in May 1927 and the Chinese Party's C.C. Plenum
of August 7, 1927 will mark a turning point in international tactics.

When the situation goes left, as until April 1927, block of the four classes, channelling the movement of the
masses under the discipline of the Kuomintang. The situation shifted, it went to the right, the international
went to the left and in the two meetings indicated the first signs of what was called the "insurrection" of
Canton in December 1927 were already seen.

The united Kuomintang leads to the anti-worker terror of April 1927. A split will take place in the "People's
Party" and a left-wing Kuomintang will form in Ou-Thang. The communists even enter the government while
Stalin proclaims that

"the basis of the Chinese revolution consists in the agricultural upheaval".

The C.C. of the Chinese Party in the cited session declares that

"There is an economic, political and social situation that is favourable to the insurgency and that since in the
cities it is no longer possible [Chang-Kai-Shek, thanks to the tactics of the Comintern, was in charge of realizing
this impossibility ED.] to unleash revolts, it is necessary to transport the armed struggle to the countryside.
It is here that the hotbeds of the uprising are to be found, while the city must be an auxiliary force".

And the said C.C. will conclude:

"it is necessary, wherever objectively possible, to organise insurrections immediately".

The result of this turning point, characterised on the one hand by an analysis that considers the existence of
a revolutionary situation at the same time that denies it as far as the city is concerned, and on the other hand
by the participation of the Communists in the government, should not have taken long to manifest itself
through the terror of the left-wing Kuomintang against the peasants who continued the struggle.

***

This led to the "insurrection" in Canton in December 1927. Political elements of evaluation, preceding this
"insurrection" we will find them in the Plenum of the C.C. of the Chinese Party of November 1927, with regard
to which the resolution of the Canton of the Province of Kiang Sou of the Chinese Communist Party, of 7 May
1929, provides interesting indications.

Let us remember that the sacrifice of the masses to the Kuomintang had led to the violent crushing of the
workers' movement in the cities, that the sacrifice of the peasant masses to the Kuomintang on the left had
led to a similar violent repression of the peasants in Hounan. And so it was that we began moving towards
the final chapter of December 1927.

Was it really an "insurrection"? The IXth Enlarged Executive of the International to be held shortly after, in
February 1928, would render

"N. responsible for the fact that in Canton there was no elected soviet" (underlined in the text of the
resolution).

In the communist movement no doubt could exist that the soviets appear only in the course of a
revolutionary situation and that therefore either political conditions exist that determine them, and then
they can only be elected, (apart from the formal and trivial question of the election, what interests is that
they are the spontaneous product of the movement of the risen masses), or they do not exist and the name
of Soviet that will be attributed to artificially constituted bodies, will not correspond at all to a real possibility
of the exercise of power by the proletariat.

But, in fact, we were witnessing only the maturation of the new turning point of the International whose
primitive elements are found in the 8th Enlarged and in the meeting of the Chinese Party's C. C. in August
1927. The "insurrection" will be decided by the central bodies just when the possibilities for its triumph will
no longer exist. It is then only that one will speak of the Soviet, of that same word that had been rigorously
banned in the midst of the revolutionary offensive of the masses, in the second half of 1926 and in the first
quarter of 1927. The proletarians of Canton (note that it is precisely the least proletarian city in China) will
be hit against all the tendencies of the Kuomintang and the "insurrection" limited to a single centre,
historically isolated (since the revolutionary movement was clearly in descent), could not but be rapidly
liquidated. In the meantime, the International could achieve a third counter-revolutionary decoration (after
those of Chang-Kai-Shek and Hounan) since a mortal blow will be given to the revolutionary aspiration of the
Chinese masses who must now be convinced of the impossibility of realizing their Soviet power.

Here, in the tactics followed in Canton, we have an anticipation of the tactics that will be followed in all the
countries, from 1929 to 1934, of that tactics of the "revolutionary offensive" that we will talk about in the
next chapter. At that time, our current could only limit itself, on the one hand, to pointing out that the
proletarian movement could only encounter the violent opposition of all the ruling classes of the country and
of all their political formations, even in colonial China, to underline the reasons for the immediate defeat due
not to the fact of the unworkability of the proletarian power, but to the fact that these directives had been
given not when the objective conditions for the revolutionary victory existed but when they had been
sacrificed by the counter-revolutionary tactics of the discipline to the Chinese bourgeoisie.

From 1928 the situation in China will take a step backwards. The fragmentation will become even more
serious than before the revolutionary movement of 1926-27, the generals will constitute their particular
areas, and will also rise the "Communist China". These are some of the most backward regions in China,
where, together with the rudimentary forms of the primitive economy, there is a need to exploit the masses
even more intensively than in other areas. The "communist" ruling clan will establish together with the
payment in kind of wages (a real market does not exist and the current system is that of bartering), the
compulsory conscription extended to the entire population, since the army has not only the military task of
defending "the communist country", but also the other economic and social product sharing. And the
hypothesis of seeing a mobilization of the masses in defence of these extra-reactionary regimes cannot be
excluded at present, should the evolution of the capitalist world cross a phase of conflict between the United
States and Russia in the territories of Asia.

In the situation that arose after the "Canton Insurgency", a violent controversy will arise between our fraction
and Trotsky. The respective fundamental positions are not new, but prolong, in the Chinese question, the
differences that were determined at the IV and V International Congress. In the new circumstances that
evidently no longer allowed to launch the slogan of the proletarian dictatorship, Trotsky argued that an
intermediate slogan should be raised in the question of power: that of the Constituent Assembly and of a
democratic constitution in China. Our current, on the other hand, maintained that if the non-revolutionary
situation did not permit the raising of the fundamental slogan of the dictatorship, if, therefore, the question
of power no longer arose in immediate form, this did not mean that the programme of the party had to be
completely reaffirmed on the theoretical and propaganda levels, while the withdrawal could only take place
on the basis of the immediate demands of the masses and their corresponding class organisations.

In the course of all this controversy of rumours, it came to our knowledge that an opposition had arisen
within the Trotskyist organization itself, but there was no possibility of establishing links with these militants;
in fact, while the possibilities of communications were extended, the forms of the cloistered solidification of
the non and counter-revolutionary organisations were also extended, and these formed a wall against the
institution of links between the forces of the Revolution.

We were keen to give - within the limits of an article - the most documented report on these formidable
events which, in an extremely backward economic environment, had shown the revolutionary possibilities of
the proletarian class even in far-off China. As in the advanced England, with the Anglo-Russian Committee,
so also in China the International showed to be the decisive instrument of the counter-revolution since it
alone had the authority and the possibility to fight a revolutionary movement of incalculable historical
importance and that had to end in a disastrous failure of the communist movement.
4. Tactics of the Offensive and Social Fascism (1929-1934)
In the bosom of the socialist parties of the Second International, both before 1914 and immediately after the
war, between 1919 and 1921, the communist parties were founded in all countries, the reflection in the
organisational field, of the political positions of the reformist right and of the revolutionary left, was opposed
and consisted in a unitary attitude of the first, a splitter of the second. In Italy it was the abstentionist fraction
that - in strict accordance with the decisions of the 2nd International Communist Congress of September
1920 - took the initiative of splitting the "old and glorious Socialist Party". While all currents of this party,
reformist right and maximalist left, including Gramsci and the New Order, were for unity "from Turati to
Bordiga".

The Communist International - under the leadership of Lenin - correctly followed Marx's method in the
construction of the fundamental organ of the proletariat class: the class party. This can only arise on the basis
of a rigorous definition of a theoretical program and a corresponding political action which finds in the
organisation of the Party, exclusively limited to those who adhere to this program and to this action, the
instrument suitable to determine that shifting of situations which is allowed by the degree of their
revolutionary maturation. That both the right and all other intermediate political currents are for unity should
not come as a surprise, since they ultimately act along the lines of preserving the bourgeois world. On the
contrary, the Marxist Left cannot tend towards the upheaval of this bourgeois world other than the condition
of realising its premise in the ideological, theoretical and organisational fields through that decisive split
which determines the historical autonomy of the proletarian class.

In the Third International the process manifests itself in a different way. The influence at first, and later the
capture of this organisation by capitalism, was accomplished through the expulsion from its bosom of any
current that did not bow to the counter-revolutionary decisions of the ruling centre. The fact that determines
this modification is the presence of the proletarian state which - in the current historical phase of state
totalitarianism - cannot tolerate any stumbling block, obstacle or opposition. If it is true that the bourgeois-
democratic state can still tolerate those discussions or oppositions which, since they take place on the
outskirts of its activity, can never upset the evolution determined by the fulcrum found in the process of
development of financial monopolism, as regards both the proletarian state in the process of degeneration
and the bourgeois state in the fascist type (resulting from the most advanced stage compared to the
democratic one of the struggle between the classes), the dictatorship of the ruling centre is completed with
the exclusion of any possibility of opposition of tendencies acting also in the peripheral field.

It is well known that, at the time of Lenin, the Russian Party had intense discussions in its midst and that,
until 1920, even organised fractions could exist in its midst. But then it was the period in which the adaptation
of the politics of the proletarian state to the needs of the world revolution was anxiously sought. Then the
problem was reversed and it was a matter of adapting the politics of the Party to that of the State, which
increasingly obeyed the contingent, changing and contradictory needs of its alignment with the general cycle
of the historical evolution of the international capitalist regime, in which it was about to be incorporated.

The ruling centre must have absolute and monopolistic control of all the organs of the state; it begins with
the expulsions from the party, and will end with the summary execution not only of those who unswervingly
oppose the established course of the counter-revolution but even of those who try to save their lives with
the abjuration of their previous opposition. In spite of these understandings, the various opposition groups
within the Russian Party have been wiped out by violence and terror. Trotsky, for his part, remains firm in his
uncompromising opposition to Stalin; but, since he follows the course of the Russian revolution in the pattern
of the French revolution, he considers that the reversal of the function of the Russian state from
revolutionary to counter-revolutionary can only come about with the appearance of Russian Bonaparte. Until
this apparition, since there is an impossibility of intense industrialization of Russia and the inevitability of the
military attack of the rest of the capitalist world against Russia presents itself, there are also the conditions
to "straighten out" the International both from within and, when this will prove impossible due to the regime
of purification in force in the International, even through the socialist left.

The Italian Left, instead, in close connection with the same positions of Marx, Lenin and with the indicated
procedure followed for the foundation of the Party in Livorno, never entered both in the way of Zinoviev's
capitulations and in the way of Trotsky's straightening, but from the programmatic opposition in the political
field the consequent fractionist procedure descended, constantly raising the problem of the replacement of
the counter-revolutionary political body with the opposite one which remained in the orientation of the
world revolution.

In a word, in the socialist parties of the Second International, progressive corruption was affirmed under the
suggestion of the power of inertia of the historical forces of bourgeois conservation, which tried to attract in
their group also the Marxist and proletarian tendency, keeping it within the "United Party". Instead in the
communist parties, because of the existence of the "proletarian" state, the bourgeois pollution could only
come about thanks to the disciplinary elimination first, then violent of any tendency that did not adapt to the
changing needs of the counter-revolutionary evolution of this state: of those oriented towards the left as
well as of the others on the right; after the Zinoviev process there will also be that of the right-wing Rikov
and Bukharin.

On the political level, then, while the process of development of the reformist Right follows a logical chain
that allows us to find, in the theoretical assault of Bernstein and revisionism at the end of the last century,
the premises of the betrayal of 1914 and of the Noske in 1919, as far as the degenerative course of the
Communist International is concerned, we will see a succession of political positions in violent contrast with
each other. Trotsky sees, at the dawn of the "third period" of which we are particularly concerned in this
chapter (at the time of the Sixth Congress in 1928), a leftist orientation capable of evolving towards a
"straightening" of the International; our current instead sees it as a moment of that development process
that was to lead the communist parties to become one of the essential instruments of world capitalism, a
process that was destined to reach its completion unless it was broken up thanks to the victory of the
fractions of the Marxist left within the communist parties.

Furthermore, our current did not derive from the growing distance between the degenerative politics of the
International and the programs and interests of the proletarian class the conclusion of the necessity of the
construction of the new parties. The fact that this distance worsened while the historical process did not
determine the opposite reaffirmation of the proletarian class, pushed us not to commit adventures like the
one predicted by Trotsky who went so far as to support, after Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933, the
entry of the opposition into the socialist parties. Our fraction continued to prepare the conditions for
proletarian recovery, through a real understanding of the evolution of the capitalist world, into whose orbit
Soviet Russia had also entered.

We have already seen in the chapter devoted to the Chinese events of 1926-27 that the characteristic of the
tactics of the International is given not only by positions that are merely opportunistic, but by positions that
are violently opposed to the immediate and finalistic interests of the proletariat. The International cannot
remain halfway, it must go all the way: this is required by the needs of the counter-revolutionary evolution
of the state that is in its bosom and that, after the triumph of the theory of "socialism in a single country",
after having broken with the interests of the world proletariat, cannot remain suspended in the air, and must
turn directly and violently towards the opposite interests of the conservation of the capitalist world.

When the revolutionary possibilities existed in China, until March 1927, the politics and tactics of the
discipline of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie were preconceived; when these possibilities no longer existed,
one oriented oneself towards the Canton insurrection of December 1927; thus completing that political
course that was to lead to the crash of the Chinese proletariat.
In 1928, the formidable economic crisis that broke out the following year in America matured and
subsequently spread to all countries. The tactic of the International remains; in 1928, still impregnated with
the criteria followed in England with the Anglo-Russian Committee and in China with the block of the four
classes.

The "insurrection" of Canton is still just an episode, which as we saw in the previous chapter, is even criticised
- albeit muted - by the Enlarged Executive of February 1928. The events, however, had to show that it was
not at all an incidental episode but a forerunner that characterises well the tactics of the "third period" that
is established only in the following year. In the meantime, the tactic of "republican discipline" (which goes by
the name of the "Clichy tactic ") was applied in France, leading the Communists to ensure the election of the
socialist and radical-socialist senators against the right wing of Poincaré and Tardieu; in Germany, the policy
of the "popular" referendum against allowances to the principles; while the Italian Party - in correlation with
the policy followed in the first period of the Aventine in June-November 1924 - launches the directive of the
"Anti-Fascist Committees" (a block that postulates the accession of socialists, reformists and all opponents
of fascism). The C.C. of the Party writes on the other hand in a letter direct to our current and published in
No. 4 of August 1, 1928 of Prometeo (foreign edition):

"We must also put ourselves at the head (underlined in the original) of the struggle for the republic, but give
this struggle, immediately, a class content. Yes, we must say, we too are for the republic guaranteed by an
assembly of workers and peasants".

The Italian republic has come and it - as we all know - is "guaranteed" by the assembly of workers and
peasants, who in the Montecitorio barracks are anxiously watching over the success of the reconstruction of
capitalist society after the upheavals caused by war and military defeat.

In 1928, therefore, the International remained within the framework of the tactics of 1926 and 1927 and
acted as the left wing of the political formations of bourgeois democracy.

Then we move on to a radical change.

We begin by examining the theoretical aspect of the new tactic, which on a progressive scale will be decided
by the 9th Enlarged Executive (March 1928), the 6th World Congress of the International and the
simultaneous 4th International Congress of the Red Trade Union in the summer of 1928, the 10th Enlarged
Executive of July 1929 and finally the 11th Enlarged Executive of 1931.

In the "Resolution on the role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution" the 2nd Congress of the
International had warned:

"The notions of Party and class must be distinguished with the greatest care.

The "tactic of the third period", after completely distorting the criteria of delimitation of the class, reaches
the demagogic identification of the class in the Party.

In the economic and social field, Marxism delimits the class according to the foundations of the capitalist
regime of the salaried and considers that those who live on their wages belong to it.

The transformation is now radical: those who make up the class in a prevailing way are the part of the workers
hit by the violent economic crisis, that is, the unemployed, to whom Nazi demagogy also addresses. The
Party, as a consequence, does not establish a plan for the total mobilisation of the proletariat, but limits its
action to the mobilisation of the unemployed. Correspondingly, the disorganised are considered more
conscious than the workers within the trade unions and the "Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition" is
founded, while all work within the trade unions led by the "social-fascists" is neglected. The proletariat is
thus divided into two: the part controlled by the Party, which then includes the vanguard, is divided from the
rest of the working class and launched into offensive actions, which were to offer the best conditions for the
success of capitalist repression.
In the more forthrightly political field, the new tactic does not aim at hitting the capitalist class as a whole,
but isolates one of its forces, the social-democratic one, which will be qualified as "social-fascist". In Germany,
where then it is the pivot of the evolution of world capitalism and where the liquidation of the democratic
personnel is being prepared to replace the Nazi one while the corresponding modification of the structure of
the capitalist state is underway, the Comintern, instead of setting the class action of the proletariat against
capitalism, calls the masses to fight against "social-fascism" in isolation as the number one enemy, which was
to make the Communist Party a supporter of Hitler's attack. And when he takes the initiative of a "popular"
referendum to overthrow the social-democratic government of Prussia, the Party actually tends towards the
same goal because it does not make his intervention in the referendum a moment of general action against
the capitalist class, but remains within the framework of the struggle against "social-fascism".

On a more general political level, the politics of the Party are synthesised in the formula "class against class".
The proletarian class is now constituted by the Party from which all the annexed formations emanate
(revolutionary trade union opposition, anti-imperialist League, Friends of the USSR and the many other
collateral organisms): everything that is outside the Party and its annexes (and let us not forget that all the
Marxist currents had been expelled from the Comintern) is the bourgeois class or, more precisely, the "social-
fascism". The mass organisms no longer derive from the bases of the capitalist economy but result from the
initiative of the Party, while the union fractions are practically eliminated and lack their reason for being,
given that the unions - acting outside the orbit of the Party - are "social-fascist" organisms.

It was in this period that the great divinity of the "political line of the Party" rose. How far away we were
from Lenin's time when the tactical positions of the Party were subjected to the verification of events and
anxious attempts were made to determine their validity! By now the "political line" was consecrated a divine
institution and became a crime not only to contest its infallibility, but also not to understand its hidden
meaning. This was absolutely impossible, since the "political line of the Party" obeyed only the indicated
necessities of the adaptation of the Russian State to its new role of instrument of the world counter-
revolution, and who could reflect its vicissitudes was only the managerial centre at the head of this State.
The result was abrupt and repeated turns that regularly let fall into the hell of those guilty party leaders who,
for not having completely abandoned the faculty to reason and reflect, proved not to be "real" Bolsheviks
because they were not able to defend today with equal enthusiasm the opposite of what they said yesterday.

One could, by virtue of a superficial analysis, consider that the successes achieved in the field of
industrialisation in Russia, the economic and therefore military strengthening of the Russian state and the
simultaneous unleashing of the "revolutionary" offensive in other countries should have led to a violent
replication by capitalism against the Russian state. Not only did this not happen, but shortly after Hitler's
victory in Germany, the United States officially recognised Russia which - according to the statements of the
leaders of the Comintern - was thus achieving a very important diplomatic victory, while the doors of the
League of Nations - what Lenin accurately described as the "robber society" - were opening at the entrance
to Russia of the Soviets. This was the logical epilogue of the course followed by the Comintern policy.

In fact, there was a very close coincidence between the successes of the five-year plans (made possible also
thanks to the competition of capitalism, which imported raw materials into Russia against the export of
wheat, while the rations of bread were absolutely insufficient) and the policy of the "revolutionary" offensive.
In Russia, the " colossal victories of socialism " were in reality the result of the intensified exploitation of the
proletariat, and in the other countries the proletariat class was placed - thanks to the tactics of the "third
period" - in the impossibility of reacting to the capitalist offensive. And Russia's victory in the field of
industrialisation and in the diplomatic field, as well as Hitler's conquest of power in Germany, are two aspects
of the same course: of the victorious course of the counter-revolution of world capitalism, both in Russia and
in other countries.

***
We now move on to a brief analysis of the official documents of the Comintern and the events that
characterise the tactics of the "third period". Why "third"? The VI World Congress thus specifies:

1st period (1917-23), between revolutionary victory in Russia and revolutionary defeat in Germany. That of
the "acute crisis" of capitalism and revolutionary battles;

2nd period (1923-28). That of the "capitalist stabilisation";

3rd period (which began in 1928 and was supposed to end in 1935, when the capitulation was made from
"social-fascism" to the Popular Front). That of the " radicalisation" of the masses.

Let us begin by pointing out that this schematisation of situations has nothing to do with Marxism, which
does not distinguish "compartments" but represents the process of development that closely links situations
and in which the Marxist criteria of the struggle of the classes allow us to perceive the favourable and
unfavourable fluctuations. These move, in the period from 1917 to 1927, from the revolutionary victory in
Russia, and its reflection in the foundation of the Communist International, - victory of the international and
internationalist principle - to the denial of this principle, when, in the footsteps of the defeat of the revolution
in China, the national and nationalist theory of "socialism in one country" triumphs.

The classification of the VI Congress leaves for example in the first period of the revolutionary advance in
November 1922 in Italy, an event that had an exceptional importance not only for the Italian sector but for
all the political evolution of the capitalist world.

As for the characterisation of the "third period", the VI Congress will thus detail its analysis:

War is imminent. Those who dare to deny this imminence are not Bolsheviks. War not only between
imperialisms (at this time the fundamental constellation is presented in the framework of the violent
opposition of England and the United States). War also of all imperialisms against Russia: there would be
"inevitably" brought both England, which will see there the "preliminary condition for its further struggle
against the American giant", and the United States which, if they do not have such an urgent interest in
bringing down "socialism in Russia", can only aim to extend their rule in this country.

The aggravation of the class struggle.

"The proletariat does not remain on the defensive, but passes to the attack".

The more disorganised the masses are, the more "radicalised" they are.

The new role of social democracy that has become 'social-fascist'. In 1926-27 social democracy is an ally to
which (see Anglo-Russian Committee) the Comintern abandons the direction of the proletarian movements.
Today it is the number one enemy. The Nazis unleash the offensive in Germany: the Party will not set up a
plan to fight capitalism on the basis of class struggle, but exclusively against "social-fascism". At the same
time, since the mass trade union organisations are framed by a "social-fascist" organisational apparatus, it
follows the necessity to abandon the masses that find themselves there and to move on to the construction
of another organisation: the "Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition", which defends "the political line of the
Party".

It is worth noting the flagrant contradiction between the two imminences: that of the revolution and that of
the war. Heretical is whoever admits only one. The Marxist is therefore heretical, who, by virtue of the
materialist interpretation of history, if he observes an imminence, can only exclude the opposite imminence
and is therefore founded on the reversal of situations during the course of the historical process that leads
the war to its opposite: the revolution.

Events proved that, point by point, the cornerstones of the new tactic had to be completely disproved.
Indeed:
The war was not at all imminent in 1919 and, when it broke out in 1939. the constellations were completely
different, England becoming the ally of the United States and these two imperialisms - the richest - becoming
in turn allies of the "Country of Socialism".

Not the working class but capitalism goes on the offensive that obtains its successes in Hitler's victory in
January 1933 and finally in the unleashing of the Second World Imperialist War.

We do not enter a "social-fascist" era, but in Germany it will be fascism that triumphs. Capitalism temporarily
liquidates social democracy, except to recall it during the war, when, in cahoots with democrats and national-
communists on the one hand, fascists and national-socialists on the other, the capitalist world will plunge
into war in 1939-45.

***

Let us now move on to a brief overview of the most important facts, which marked the "tactics of the third
period".

We have already indicated that the predominant political fact was Hitler's coming to power in January 1933.
There were numerous other political demonstrations during which this tactic had the opportunity to show
its "virtues", but, within the narrow framework of this article, we can only limit ourselves to the essential and
that is the events in Germany. It was in September 1930, only five months after German capitalism sacked
the coalition government chaired by the Social Democrat Mueller, that the fascist advance began. Contrary
to what happened in Italy in 1921-22, German Nazism follows a predominantly legalistic tactic. The
democratic mechanism is perfectly suited to bringing about the conversion of the capitalist state from
democratic to fascist, which is hardly surprising for a Marxist and which is also known by the current national-
communist and socialist swindlers who are in government in Italy and elsewhere. Instead of attacking, as the
fascists did in Italy, with violence and under the protection of the democratic police, the class fortresses of
the proletariat, the German Nazis employ the method of the progressive legalitarian dismantling of the
apparatus of the state of the executive positions held by their accomplices: the parties of German democracy
and Social Democracy. This fact alone, of the possibility that capitalism is offered not to resort exclusively to
the extra-legal action of the fascist squads, proves the profound modification carried out in the situation, in
which the threat of the class party of the proletariat no longer acts.

This reality will naturally be reversed by the Comintern. An article by Ercoli (Workers' State, September 1932)
states, among other things:

"The first difference (between the Nazi assault in Germany and the fascist one in Italy - Ed.), the most
important, the one that immediately catches your eye, is the one that passes between the period in which
the march on Rome was completed and the current period. Then we were at the end of the first post-war
period and on the eve of the period of stabilisation of capitalism. Today we are in the heart of the third
period, in the heart of an economic crisis of unprecedented breadth and depth, of a crisis that has had and
has its most serious manifestations precisely in Germany ... In the second place it is necessary to stop the
attention on the line of development of the movement of the masses" (...) "Descending Line" (in Italy), while
in Germany "the decisive fights are still in front of us and the movement of the masses is developing over an
ascending line, in the direction of these decisive fights".

In reality, the decisive fighting of the masses stood neither forwards nor backwards, and just a year later
Hitler was given the government by Hindenburg. The Party, which a few days earlier had organised a
"colossal" event at the Sportpalast in Berlin, will completely crumble on the same day as Hitler's ascent to
power.

The essential moments of the Nazi advance are: On 9 August 1931, the plebiscite against the social-
democratic government of Prussia, plebiscite requested by Hitler.
The elections for the presidency of the Reich of 13 March 1932. From the point of view of electoral tactics,
the question of the party's intervention both in the plebiscite organised by the fascists and in the elections
with its own candidate, against Hindenburg and Hitler, cannot offer any doubt. The Communists could not
lend themselves to social-democratic manoeuvring and had to intervene; but there were two ways of doing
so. The Marxist one to make these two electoral demonstrations two occasions for propaganda aimed at
mobilising the proletariat on a class basis and against the capitalist regime, which resulted in the struggle
against the development that was underway in the capitalist state from democratic to fascist, a development
that could not be fought except by the proletariat and its party against all capitalist forces (democratic and
fascist) solidly united against the triumph of Nazism; and the one descending from the "tactics of the third
period", consisting in detaching these two electoral demonstrations from the real process in which they were
stuck, making them two episodes of validation of the "political line of the party" that no longer fights the
bourgeois class but only one of its forces: social-fascism. The plebiscite that the Fascists organise in order to
overthrow the Prussian social-democratic government of Braun Severing becomes the "red plebiscite" to be
turned to validate the "party politics". In the presidential elections, the masses are being called upon to vote
against Hitler and Hindenburg and for the leader of the Thälman party, but not for the proletarian
dictatorship. But for the implementation of the "national emancipation programme". Now, since these
elections were so many moments in the transformation of the bourgeois state from democratic to fascist,
the participation of the Party not in function of the fight against capitalism, but of the fight against "social-
fascism", could only lead to facilitate the said transformation of the state. That is, in the first case, it was a
question of carrying out the expulsion of the Socialists from the Prussian government, in the second case, of
entrusting the party with the objective of "national emancipation". It is clear, therefore, that the Party took
a position competing with that of the Nazis and, if the events of the time led to the victory of Nazism, nothing
excludes that in the current situation the same program will be unaltered by the "unified socialist party" of
Germany which, under the hegemony of Russian imperialism, speaks of "national emancipation" against the
same "national emancipation" that Anglo-Saxon imperialism wants to achieve for its own benefit.

As for the party's policy in the social field, it derived from the aforementioned criteria of the fight against
"social-fascism", the multiplication of skirmishes and the "politicisation of strikes".

Wherever the violent economic crisis determines a movement of resistance of the workers and particularly
of the unemployed, the party intervenes immediately to make it an episode of "revolutionary" realisation
with the consequence that, while the minority is machine-gunned, the rest of the mass assists to discourage
the victorious solemn advance of the capitalist offensive. The most characteristic episode of this tactic is the
demonstration of the first of May 1929 in Berlin when Zörgiebel - the socialist quaestor worthy of Noske's
successor - can lay twenty-nine proletarians on the ground without any movement of the masses being
determined, which moreover will not participate at all in the demonstration against "social-fascism".

As the Nazi movement progressed by gigantic steps, "L'Internationale Communiste" in its issue of May 1,
1932, after the presidential elections, noted

"the party's particular withdrawal in the industrial regions, a withdrawal that is manifested precisely in those
regions where the National Socialists achieve a series of great victories".

But the bass drum of demagoguery will not be silent for this. Thälman declares:

"We will sow disintegration in the field of the bourgeoisie. We will widen the gap in the ranks of social
democracy and increase the process of effervescence within this party. We will form even deeper breaches
in Hitler's field".

This tactic which, as we have seen, is, in the final analysis, a support for Nazi politics, receives no other
justification from the International apart from the re-enactment of the role played previously by the Social
Democrats. "Workers' State" of July-August 1931, in an article intended to justify the policy of the German
party, writes:
"who accuses the communists of being the allies of fascism? They are the police ministers of Prussia, the
gunners of workers, and Mr. Peter Nenni, the first-hour fascist. These considerations would suffice to judge
the case'3.

When Hindenburg, on January 30, 1933, handed over power to Hitler, we witness, in substance, the replica
in Germany of that victory of international capitalism which had been consecrated in Russia in December
1927, when the "theory of Socialism in one country triumphed". A simple inversion of terms in the same
formula. In Russia socialist nationalism, in Germany national-socialism. The conditions are thus laid for the
world to begin towards the Second World Imperialist War, after the intermediate stages of Abyssinia and
Spain.

The defeat inflicted on the international proletariat in Germany does not trigger any reaction in the bosom
of the International against the tactics followed by the Comintern. Manuilski welcomed this and declared it
at the plenary meeting of the International Executive (see Workers' State, February 1934):

"The attitude on the German question was a touchstone of the degree of Bolshevization of the sections of
the Communist International, of their Bolshevik temperament, of their ability to face the abrupt turns of the
situation with their heads held high. It must be acknowledged with satisfaction to this Plenum that the
Sections of the Comintern have passed this test with honour. Think about what would have happened if these
events had happened some years ago when the Bolshevization of the International Parties was taking place
through continuous crises. They would have provoked without a doubt a deep crisis of the Comintern".

We could not be more cynical and at the same time more explicit about the meaning of " Bolshevization ".
Manuilski tells us unequivocally: it is the full success of the Bolshevization that immunizes the International
from any reaction against the success of the tactic of flanking the Hitler attack in Germany. After this decisive
test, the Comintern can only be perfectly suitable for the subsequent phase of warmongering policy in Spain,
waiting to become the accomplice of the democratic and fascist forces during the Second World Imperialist
War.

The German events were to accentuate the gap between the political positions of Trotsky and those of our
current, a gap that had already manifested itself not only on international issues in the criticism that Trotsky
made of the politics of the Comintern during the German events of 1923, criticism that Bordiga considered
insufficient (see "The Trotsky question" by A. Bordiga), but also - as we have seen in previous chapters - on
the Russian and Chinese questions.

Trotsky, following on from the German situation the tactic followed by the Bolshevik Party between 1905
and 1917 and particularly that applied in September 1917 at the time of the threat of Kornilov against the
Kerensky government, started from the premise that social democracy was historically an opposition force
to the fascist attack, and concluded that the single front had to be advocated in order to oppose the Nazi
attack. And our current was accused by Trotsky of "Stalinism" because it repeated, with regard to the German
situation of 1930-33, the policy followed by the Party of Italy in 1921-22, which consisted in the single trade
union front for the partial claims that led to the mobilisation of the working class, as a whole, against the
capitalist class. On the other hand, on the question of power, for us the central position of the Proletarian
Dictatorship had to remain unchanged and could not know any surrogate. Trotsky not only did not accept
the polemic with our current, but he was also intolerant of the criticisms that it made of the international
opposition, he could not find any other solution but the administrative one of our expulsion from the said
international Opposition, sanctioned in 1932. Trotsky did not understand that it was not possible to judge
the development of the capitalist state of 1930-33 in relation to the development that had occurred in the

3
Nenni, the "first-hour fascist" remained consistent with his 1919 program. He was a warmonger in 1914-18, he
remained during the Spanish War and the World War of 1939-45. Togliatti and his congeners reached Nenni becoming,
if possible, more warmongers than him for the success of the imperialist war in Spain first, and in the whole world
afterwards.
period prior to the First World Imperialist War. If before the capitalist state evolved according to the
democratic procedure, this depended on the historical particularities of the time. In the period of financial
imperialism, and where the struggle between the classes had reached its climax, the state was led - by the
new historical circumstances - to develop in the totalitarian and fascist sense, and all the political forces of
capitalism could only favour and jointly contribute to this outlet. As a result, social democracy, although
destined to be one of the victims of this process, could only be a factor in its development, while only the
proletarian class and its Class Party could determine the breaking of this course of the capitalist state. This
course cannot be explained by historical precedents, but by the dialectic of the struggle between classes in
its most advanced stage.

The International, founded for the triumph of the world revolution, thus establishes the "tactic of the third
period", which facilitates and accompanies the triumph of Nazism in Germany. The path that had begun in
1927 continues tragically and sun remains in the breach, to defend the Marxist positions, the sparse patrols
of the Italian left.

5. Tactics of anti-fascism and the popular front (1934-38)

Hitler's coming to power (January 30, 1933) did not immediately bring about a radical change in the tactics
of the Comintern, which continued to be concentrated in the formula of anti-fascism that we examined in
Chapter 4.

The Second International launches the proposal of a boycott of German products and invites the Comintern
to participate in an international campaign aimed at raising the indignation of the "civilized world against
Nazi tyranny". The Comintern refuses, but presents no objection of principle, what on the other hand it could
hardly have done since in 1929 at the time when the tactic of the alliance with social democracy had not yet
been abandoned - it was it who proposed a vast international action for the boycott of fascist Italy. And at
that time it was the Second International that employed the expedient of prevarication, thus providing the
pretext for the use of the same method by the Comintern after the advent of Hitler in power.

The "boycott" of German products, since it involves the incorporation of the proletarian movement into the
bosom of "anti-fascist" capitalism, remains fully within the logic of social-democratic politics, which since
1914 had appealed to the working masses to throw themselves into the war between the capitalist states,
making common cause with that imperialist constellation that declared it was fighting "for freedom and
civilization". The class that, both in the field of production and in that of international trade, could decide
whether or not to boycott a given sector of the world economy, was obviously the bourgeois class. The appeal
to this class by the social-democracy did not represent anything new, but the confusion that already reigned
in the ranks of the proletarian vanguard had to manifest itself in the adhesion that the Trotskyist movement
gave to this campaign of the boycott, which is heading towards the tactic that was qualified as " entryist " -
that is, of adhesion to the socialist parties to strengthen the left wing -, and the S.A.P. (Sozialistische Arbeiter
Partei), born from the conjunction of the left-wing currents of the German Communist and Socialist parties.

We have already said that the Comintern had not taken a frontal and class position against the proposal of
the Second International. And this is quite natural if one takes into account that all the tactics of "social-
fascism" had been ultimately side by side with the Nazi movement, and that the advent of Hitler involved a
better organisation of Russian-German economic exchanges. As the State's intervention in the economic field
increased, Hitler took special measures for a State guarantee in favour of industrial groups which received
orders from Russia and which had to wait a very long time for payment.

On the international level, Russian diplomacy acted on a convergent line and Litvinov met with the Italian
and German delegations at the Geneva Conference of Disarmament, to support the "pacifist" thesis of
disarmament by plans, of immediate realization, against the French thesis, equally "pacifist" and based on
the formula of the primacy of the notion of security (that is, the guarantee of the dominance of the winners
of Versailles) over the notions of arbitration and disarmament.
It was in this moment that Mussolini conceived the idea of the Pact of Four (France, Germany, England and
Italy); idea of the Four Great, which will be taken up by the arch-democratic Byrnes in 1946 and supported
by Labour Bevin, although the actors have changed.

The Four-Party Pact signed in Rome on 7 June 1933 sanctions:

"The High Contracting Parties undertake to consult one another on all their matters and to make every effort
to pursue, within the framework of the League of Nations, a policy of effective cooperation between all the
powers for the purpose of peace-keeping".

The Pact is signed for ten years and contains the hypothesis of a revision of the Treaties. This hypothesis had
already become a reality, since, after the moratorium proclaimed in 1931 by Hoover at the Lausanne
Conference in 1932 - and when there was still a "democratic" government in Germany - Germany had been
explicitly freed from the payment of reparations.

It is well known that not through parliamentary consultations, but through the great twists and turns Hitler
dismantled the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles one by one. Four months after the signing of the Pact of
Four Hitler leaves the League of Nations and announces a spectacular plebiscite. This system of "fait
accompli", of "pugno sulla tavola" fully responded to the needs of the accentuated preparation of the masses
for war and Hitler was forced to resort to it by the fact that the German economy could find no other way
out of the situation outside of an immediate intensification of the war industry. And, for this, a contemporary
and plebiscite adhesion of the masses was necessary. The "democratic" powers were temporarily allowed to
do so, waiting for the international situation to reach the point of saturation required for the unleashing of
the Second World War.

But the essence of the Pact of Four consisted above all in a manoeuvre of estrangement of Russia from
Europe and, at the same time, in an orientation of support to Germany so that this overflowed not towards
the French-English West, but towards the East of Russia and, particularly, towards Ukraine.

It is in these particular international contingencies that the new tactic of the Comintern of anti-fascism and
the Popular Front matures: Russia orients itself towards the "democratic" powers. In the autumn of 1933 the
United States recognised Russia "de jure", and Rundschau wrote an article entitled: A victory for the USSR -
A victory of the world revolution.

On the political front, the first symptom of the change in tactics was the Leipzig process in December 1933.
The Dutch anarchist Van der Lubbe, who set fire to the Reichstag Building on 27 February 1933, a month after
Hitler took power, had to be judged here. Comintern and the Second International immediately give vent to
an obscene campaign of demagogy: it is fascism, Nazism that has destroyed the sacred place of German
democracy; a counter-process will be organised in the epicentre of the most conservative capitalism, in
London; a "Bruno Book" will be published by the anti-fascists and Hitler, who has magnificently grasped the
real meaning of this filthy world farce, adds additional notes to the sacred universal indignation against the
attack brought to the seat of bourgeois democracy: the foreign press will be admitted to the trial in Leipzig
where one of the defendants, the centrist Dimitrov, will conclude saying:

"I ask, in consequence, that Van der Lubbe be condemned for having acted against the proletariat".

And the Nazi judges "avenge" the proletariat, since Van der Lubbe is condemned to death and therefore
executed, while the other centrist defendants will be absolved and washed by the "infamous accusation".

In the shadow of all this international barking, Hitler's ferocious repression against the German proletariat is
developing. While the campaign around the Leipzig process reaches its climax only a few lines are dedicated
to the contemporary Dessau process (November 28, 1933), reduced to an insignificant episode in the news:

"Ten death sentences have been pronounced by the Court of Dessau against the Communists accused of
killing a Hitlerite militant".
We saw, in the 4th Chapter devoted to the tactic of "social-fascism", that Hitler, contrary to the tactic
followed by Fascism in Italy in 1921-22, had set his action on the predominantly legalistic level of the
progressive dismantling by the German democratic institutions of his social-democratic accomplices. What a
magnificent opportunity for the Marxist revolutionaries to take international action to stop the hand of the
Nazi executioner who was beating the anarchist Van der Lubbe who was responsible for setting on fire one
of the fundamental institutions of capitalism, which had also served so well to promote the rise of Hitler to
power! But the Marxist revolutionaries were reduced to the narrow circle of the Italian left, which imposed
the class struggle both against the victorious Nazism and against the unsuccessful democracy in Germany,
while the same Trotskyites ran in support of social democracy deciding their entry into the socialist parties.

As we have said, it is on the international level and on the level of the particular and specific interests of the
Russian State that the new tactic of the Comintern is set out. To the formula of the "social-fascism" will
succeed the opposite formula of the anti-fascism, of the democratic block, of the defence of the democracy,
of the fight against the factious (the fascists), tactic that passes through the defence of the Negus of
Abyssinia, of the anti-Franco fight, and finally falls in the institution of the volunteering through the
movements of the "Resistance" during the second imperialist world war.

***

In Russia, in 1932, the first Five-Year Plan had achieved complete success. It was achieved in four years
instead of five, and had, in heavy industry, surpassed the targets set at the beginning. In chapter 1 of this
review of Comintern's tactics, we pointed out that while one cannot imagine any opposition between Lenin's
first plans of 1918 and Lenin's considerations of principle that led him to withdraw under the name of NEP,
there is opposition of principle between Lenin's first economic plans, the NEP and Stalin's five-year plans.
Following in the footsteps of Marx and his schemes on the capitalist economy, Lenin's idea of the
indispensable planning of the economy was centred on the development of the consumer industry to which
the development of the production industry had to adapt. The NEP itself is based on this consideration of
principle, and there would have been no need to achieve it if the objective had been not that of improving
the living conditions of the workers, but the other, frankly capitalist type, of an intense accumulation for the
development of heavy industry. Lenin would have had no need to make concessions to the peasants and the
small bourgeoisie - economic and political elements that were not useful but harmful to the colossal industrial
achievements - but he had to make these concessions in order to maintain the orientation of the Soviet
economy towards a constant improvement in the living conditions of the workers. Stalin breaks with the
Marxist principles of Lenin both on the internal economic field in Russia, when he establishes the five-year
plans which cannot reach the summit of industrialisation, and thanks to an intensified exploitation of the
workers, and on the political field with the expulsion from the Comintern of any tendency that remains on
the international and internationalist level and opposes the national and nationalist theory and politics of
"socialism in a single country".

The 1st Five-Year Plan is a total success. Following in the footsteps of his fellow capitalists from all countries,
Stalin approaches the second Five-Year Plan (1932-1936) stating that it is now a question of achieving goals
that will actually be completely opposite to those declared. Since its rise to power, capitalism has always said
that improving the general living conditions of workers depends on the development of the economy and
that the greater the amount of production, the greater the share reserved for workers. When preparing the
second Five-Year Plan, Stalin will say the same thing: heavy industry is reconstituted, it is now a question of
reconstituting the other branches of the Soviet economy and consequently of improving the living standards
of workers. It is during the second Five Year Plan that the new deity rises: Stakhanov; the essence of socialism
comes to consist in a competition for maximum work performance and at the same time strengthening the
economic and military possibilities of the Soviet state, on the altar of which any wage demand must be
sacrificed.
This economic direction finds no possibility of a Marxist reaction within the Russian Party and when, at the
end of 1934, Nicolaiev resorted to an attack killing the secretary of the Leningrad Party, fierce repression hit
the "Leningrad Centre". Stalin, in anticipation of the proceedings that the Nazis and Democrats will apply
during the Second World Imperialist War, moved on to reprisals. No trial and 117 people shot. In the
meantime Litvinov associates himself, in Geneva, with a motion that condemns terrorism and supports
"Marxist" arguments according to which Marxism and terrorism are irremediably opposed. In order to
finance the second plan and obtain the necessary raw materials, Russia must export grain. On the basis of
the invoked prospects of improvement in the conditions of the workers, the C.C. of the Russian Party
abolished on 1 January 1935 the bread card and the rationing of the agricultural products. Thus, the workers
are forced to increase their work effort so that wages can be obtained from the free market, since the
"proletarian" State no longer guarantees - through the state warehouses - control of basic necessities.

It is therefore because of considerations inherent to the Soviet State on the international level, and in
growing opposition to the interests of Russian workers, that the change in the tactics of the Comintern
matures.

The cruel Chinese defeat of 1927 had definitively dragged the Communist International into the vortex of
betrayal: of what was once the International of the Revolution could not now be part that those who wanted
to fight for the national and nationalist program of "socialism in one country". The others, the
internationalists, are first expelled and then, in Russia and Spain, massacred; in the other countries they are
indexed and, to the extent that the connivance of the Communist Parties with the apparatus of the bourgeois
State is accentuated, this "democratic State" is asked to prove its "anti-fascist" virtues with facts, abandoning
any prevarication and using repressive violence against the "Trotskyites". Everyone is qualified as a Trotskyist
when they oppose the counter-revolutionary direction of the International. As in the era that followed the
liquidation of the First International, the political scene is now occupied by a mark that not only multiplies
the dispersion and ideological confusion but tends to polarize the attention of the rare proletarian
revolutionaries who survived this tragic massacre around an absolutely harmless sign.

In 1866-70 everyone was called anarchists, including Marx; and it is known that Marx's proposal to move the
seat of the First International from Europe to America responded to his conviction that the new historical
situation that had arisen with the defeat of the Commune did not contain the possibility of maintaining an
international organisation of the proletariat. Its maintenance could only favour the victory of the anarchist
tendencies against the purely proletarian and revolutionary ones. After 1927, the popular epithet was the
"Trotskyist" one. The worst was that Trotsky himself fell into this trap and let the international organisation
of the Opposition qualify itself as "Trotskyist". When Marx had said that he was not a Marxist, he wanted to
indicate that the theory and politics of the proletariat are set out in the course of the class struggle, that they
constitute a method of knowledge and interpretation of history, not a set of biblical verses to be recited after
using all the sacraments necessary to establish the will of the creator. And Trotsky - definitively breaking with
what had been uniform from Marx, Engels and Lenin, on the fundamental problem of the construction of the
Party of the Proletarian Class - found that Hitler's victory nullified the possibility of "straightening" the
Communist International and after an analysis of the situation where the dazzling form of the exhibition takes
the place of a Marxist understanding of reality, launches into the adventure of the entry of the Opposition
into the Socialist Parties. On the political level, he is implying from the historical hypothesis that not Stalin
but Hitler is the super-Wrangel who will concentrate the attack of international capitalism against Russia
brought to a head by the impossibility of realising the five-year plans. While such a political scheme had to
be completely denied by the events, the concentration of the proletarian vanguard on the level of the
defence of the Russian State, brought to the point of disaster by Stalin, rendered completely harmless the
political uproar that Trotsky and his organisation made in every country: not only Stalin, from the moment in
which he had been able to bend the Russian proletariat to undergo an intense exploitation, could realise the
five-year plans, but the Soviet State, incorporated in the system of world capitalism, had to know not already
the disaster, but the victory during the war of 1939-45. By seeing everywhere - even when Mussolini attacked
the Negus - an episode in the struggle of world capitalism against Russia, when this Russian state was by now
- in the same way as the democratic and fascist states - an instrument of the world counter-revolution,
Trotsky, who had been one of the greatest leaders of the October Revolution, had become completely
harmless to capitalism; and the Trotskyist epithet attached to all was an additional element of the ideological
confusion in which the proletariat lay; and all the more so since Trotsky and its organisation saw a growing
revolutionary success in the fact that their political goods knew the successes of great journalistic advertising.

After the outbreak of the world economic crisis of 1929, the Comintern had turned upside down the terms
of a political manoeuvre that had led to the immobilisation of the proletarian class: first an alliance with the
trade unionists and Chang-Kai-Shek, then a struggle against "social-fascism". If terms change, the substance
is the same. And, during these two phases of the tactic of the progressive dismantling of the proletariat class,
both in Russia and in other countries, the Comintern relies on a multiplicity of subsidiary bodies which favour
the ideological and political dispersion of the proletariat. During the first period these peripheral organisms
are polarised around the slogan of anti-fascism, during the second period - that of social-fascism - the
polarisation is done around the formula of the fight against war and the defence of the USSR.

***

After Hitler's victory, we move towards the tactics of the Popular Front and yesterday's social-fascists become
"progressive democrats". But the evolution of the economic and political situation imposes a corresponding
advance on the path towards the classification of the working masses in the meshes of the capitalist State.
Until 1934, the Comintern found in all the peripheral organisms a sufficient vehicle to advance its counter-
revolutionary positions; starting from 1934, when the capitalist world could find no other way out of the
formidable economic crisis that devastated it but that of the preparation of the Second World Imperialist
War, it had to go further and make the masses accept as an objective the modification of the form of
government of the bourgeois class. The movement of the masses must be reunited and welded around the
capitalist state and this is what the new tactic of the Popular Front consists of, whose experimental centre is
located first in France and then in Spain. And it is not at all surprising that the Soviet State, which had
definitely and definitively broken with the interests of the Russian and international proletariat in 1927, can
operate with such ease so radical and contradictory changes and that on the same line the policy of the
Comintern is carried out. Already Mussolini, when in 1923 he boasted of being the first to recognize "de jure"
the Russian State, pointed out that this did not commit him to making the slightest change to his fiercely anti-
communist policy. Hitler repeated the same thing after taking power.

In fact, the welding point between the politics of the bourgeois states is on a class basis and in this regard
the conjunction is perfect between Stalin's anti-communist politics and those of all the other capitalist
governments that re-establish "normal" relations with the Russian state that has become a "normal" state of
the international capitalist class. The reflection in the international field of this anti-communist policy, which
is common to both democratic states and fascist and Soviet states, only formally expresses itself in a
contradictory way, while substantially the line is unitary and tends towards the outlet of the imperialist
conflict where all the "idealities" will be magnificently commercialised to stuff the skulls and throw against
each other the proletarians of the different countries.

Marx, in his "Critique of the Gotha Programme", refutes the Lasallian idea of the existence of a single
reactionary bourgeois class, because Lassalle's simplistic approach led not only to the impossibility of
understanding the intricate social process that capitalism is able to polarise to its advantage, but also to
connect the proletarian movement with those blatantly capitalist forces that do not belong to the category
qualified as "conservative". Therefore, those who move along the line of Lassalle, who conceived a statist
socialism based on Bismarck, are the political forces that suffer from the desire to "correct" the abuses of
capitalism, when instead they ensure the success of these abusive forms, the only ones that have the right
to citizenship in the historical phase of the decadence of imperialist and monopolist capitalism.
That in Germany and Italy these forces are called fascist, while in France they are called socialist and
communist, the political program is the same, and if Blum does not realize it, while Hitler above all obtains
unquestionable successes in state interventionism, this depends on the different particularities of the two
capitalist states and on the place they occupy in the process, of the becoming of capitalism in its international
expression.

As for the contrasting formal expression of a process that is international and unitary, as regards the fact that
one state calls itself a fascist and the other a democrat, that bourgeois domination is exercised in one country
in a specific form, in another country in another form, this does not present any difficulty in understanding
for Marxists. The bourgeois class, which is an all of which - unless they leave the straight path of Marxism -
no force can be detached from the whole and condemned or presented in opposition to the whole, has seen,
in the period of development coinciding with the end of the last century, a clash between its political and
social forces of the right and left (the conservatives and the democrats), but in the historical phase of its
decline can not use the ancient division into right and left that for the purposes of propaganda and the
interests of its rule over the proletariat.

Both the Popular Front in France and Nazi Germany are on the same level imposed by history on capitalism
and if one has recourse to anti-fascist ideology, the other to Nazi ideology, the aim is unique: to frame the
masses under the firm discipline of the State and then launch them into the massacre of war. The relations
between the different bourgeois states have no fixed character since they depend on their evolution in the
international field and on the impossibility of the intervention of an element of conscious and voluntary
leadership of the different bourgeoisie. Churchill is an example of how one can remain consistently and
fiercely anti-communist by passing with great ease from the fight to the alliance with Russia or with Germany.

As the process of the unity of the state in the imperialist phase of capitalism develops, we are witnessing
certain states finding in the states, which are opposed to them for the defence of their interests, the political
material that facilitates the mobilisation of the masses to subjugate them to their bandwagon and unhook
them from their class bases. In January 1933, in correspondence with Hitler's rise to power, we saw the
creation in France of the government formula that seemed the most left-wing, given the circumstances of
the moment, while Daladier was called to the government by a parliament that had experienced, in 1932, an
electoral victory of the left.

As for the politics of the Russian State and the corresponding tactics of the Comintern, it is everywhere
counter-revolutionary but takes on contradictory expressions over time. It is that of "social-fascism" in 1930-
33, because the objective of international capitalism was then concentrated in Hitler's victory. Once this
terrible defeat was inflicted on the German and world proletariat, and this victory was firmly established, the
goal shifted to other countries, particularly France. The result is a policy that will be specified in the formula
of the Popular Front, a policy that will do the business of both French capitalism and German capitalism and
that of all the other countries. And the idea of homeland will be validly invoked by both sides since it is clear
that on both sides of the fence there is now only one end: that of threatening "national integrity" with war.

The essence of the new tactic consists, therefore, in the organisation of the proletariat within the respective
state apparatuses, while the alternation of the international objectives of capitalism will determine the anti-
fascism or pro-fascism of the Soviet State and the formal expression of the tactics of the Comintern: alliance
with social democracy, social-fascism, Popular Front.

***

We saw in the first parts of this chapter, what the essence of the new chapter of Comintern consisted of,
from "social-fascism" to "anti-fascism". The economic crisis that began in New York in 1929 and subsequently
spread to all countries had found no solution after 1934 other than to prepare for the second imperialist war.
In correspondence with the economic reality that imposed the extreme solution of war on capitalism, the
extreme must also become the objective of the communist parties, which became instruments of the
counter-revolution and accomplices of the other bourgeois, fascist, socialist and democratic forces. If
previously the communist parties oriented their moves towards an inevitable defeat, now they channel them
into the bed of their respective capitalist states.

As the theory of social-fascism had no direct relevance in the countries not threatened by a fascist attack and
its international character resulted from the fact that Germany - where this tactic had a decisive importance
- was at that time the pivot of world capitalist development, so the new anti-fascist tactic has no direct impact
in the countries where fascism is firmly established (Germany, Italy), but has great importance in France first,
then in Spain, that is, in the two countries where not only classes and indigenous parties clash, but an
international order that had to work at full capacity during the 1939-45 war is developed.

During this period (1934-38), for the first time, the particular character of a political evolution in which we
are still immersed is revealed. Contrary to what generally happened in all countries and particularly in 1898-
1905 in Russia, when the impetuous strikes generated the affirmation of the class party, the powerful
Austrian, French, Belgian and Spanish movements not only did not determine the assertion of a proletarian
and Marxist vanguard, but leave the Italian left in fatal isolation, remaining faithful to the revolutionary
postulates of internationalism against the anti-fascist war and the destruction of the capitalist state and the
foundation of the proletarian dictatorship against the participation or influence of the state in anti-fascist
direction.

Parallel to the success of the manoeuvre that was to lead the capitalist state to tighten its tentacles on the
masses and their movements, we are witnessing the detachment between these movements and the
vanguard, if not the total absence of the latter. The events thus unequivocally confirm the thesis masterfully
developed by Lenin in "What is to be done?", that socialist consciousness cannot be the spontaneous result
of the masses and their movements, but is the product of the import into their wings of the class
consciousness elaborated by the Marxist vanguard. The fact that this vanguard does not find itself in the
position of influencing situations of great social tension in which imposing masses descend into the armed
struggle, as in Spain, does not alter in any way the Marxist doctrine which does not consider that the
proletariat class exists because a social and political constellation passes to the armed struggle against the
one in power, but speaks of the proletariat only if its objectives and its postulates are those of the social
agitation in development. In the case in which the masses come to fight for objectives that, not being theirs,
can only be those of the capitalist enemy, this social convulsion is only a moment of the confused and
antagonistic development of the capitalist historical cycle which - to use Marx's words - has not yet matured
the material conditions for its negation.

The Marxist analysis allows us to understand that if social-fascism was a tactic that inevitably had to facilitate
and flank Hitler's victory in January 1933, the tactic of anti-fascism was even more serious, as its goal went
far beyond and from a false alignment of the masses in the struggle that remained, however, always directed
against the capitalist state, we move, with the tactic of anti-fascism, to preconceive the framing of the masses
in the bosom of the capitalist anti-fascist state.

It is not strange that, in the face of such a powerful and formidable capitalist organisation that includes
democrats, social democrats, fascists and communist parties, the resistance of the Austrian proletariat in
February 1934, which takes on heroic aspects at times, is not, however, likely to lead the slightest crack to
an unfolding of world events that had been definitively consecrated by the violent involution that took place
in the Soviet state, which, under Stalin's leadership, became an effective instrument of the world counter-
revolution.

On February 12, when the proletarians of Vienna rebelled, it was the very Christian Dollfuss who pointed his
cannons at the working-class city of Vienna, the "Karl Marx" district, but behind these cannons stood the
Second and Third International. The first had constantly held back the proletarian reactions against Dollfuss'
corporatist organisation plan, the second, which previously excelled in the assembly of international
demonstrations, always on artificial bases, let the proletariat escape and was careful not to launch an appeal
to the proletarians of all countries to show their solidarity in favour of the Austrian proletariat.

In the early days the organs of the Belgian and French socialist parties tried to appropriate the heroism of
the Vienna insurgents, but a few days later the synchronisation was perfect.

Bauer and Deutsch, the leaders of the Schutzbund (Austrian social democracy defence organisation) in an
interview on 18 February with the Belgian social democracy organ, " Le Peuple ", say:

"For many months our companions had endured provocations of all kinds, always hoping that the
government would not push things to the extreme and that a final shock could be avoided. But the last
provocation, that of Linz, led to the heightening of the exasperation of our companions. It is known, in fact,
that the Heimwehren had threatened the governorate of Linz to resign from their duties and to behead all
the municipalities with a socialist majority. It is understandable that on Monday morning, when the
Heimwehren attacked the People's House in Linz with armed hands, our companions refused to allow
themselves to be disarmed and they defended themselves with energy. In consequence, the Central Party
Direction could only obey this sign of struggle. That is why it launched the order for a general strike and the
mobilisation of the "Schutzbund".

This bluntly proletarian explosion was not at all in the political line of Austrian and international social
democracy. These were perfectly in line with the diplomatic action of the left-wing French government,
whose foreign minister Paul Boncour wanted to make the Austrian workers' movement work to defend the
interests of the French state: this was to hinder Hitler's expansionism and even relied - at that moment - on
Mussolini who, in July 1934, when Dollfuss was assassinated by the Nazi politician Pianezza, made up for it
without consequences, with respect to Hitler, by sending the Italian divisions to the Brenner Pass.

A few days before the revolt in Vienna on February 6, 1934, Paris was the scene of important events. The
political scene had long been soiled by all the scandalous pornography surrounding the collusion between
financial adventurers, senior state officials and government personnel, particularly that of left-wing parties.
There would not even be any need to point this out: the so-called proletarian parties - the Socialist and
Communist Party - are throwing themselves into this scandalous fray and the proletarians will be uprooted
from the revolutionary fight against the capitalist regime, to be dragged into the fight against some financial
adventurers and mainly against Stavisky. The right wing of Maurras and Action Française takes the lead in a
struggle against the government presided over by the radical Chautemps who, on January 27th, gives way to
a more accentuated left wing government directed by Daladier and where Frot, who until recently had been
a member of the S.F.I.O., gives up his position. (French Socialist Party, French Section of the International
Workers), holds the post of Minister of the Interior. The Chiappe Police Prefect, also compromised in the
Stavisky scandal, was chosen by the Socialists and Communists as a scapegoat, was defenceless by the Police
Prefecture and transferred to the "Comédie Française". This is the opportunity chosen by the right for a
demonstration in front of Parliament where the resignation of the Daladier government will be demanded.

Daladier gave in, resigned, despite Leon Blum's advice to resist, and on 9 February two protest
demonstrations took place: the one organised by the Communist Party in the centre of Paris where the arrest
of Chiappe and the dissolution of the fascist leagues were demanded, the other organised by the Socialist
Party and taking place in Vincennes where the flag of the "defence of the republic threatened by the fascist
uprising" was raised. The memory of the struggle against "social-fascism" was not yet definitively
extinguished, but if there are two distinct demonstrations, there is, however, a single uniform: it is no longer
a matter of affirming the autonomous class positions of the masses, but of directing these towards that
modification of the form of the bourgeois State which will take place only two years later when, following
the elections of 1936, we will have the government of the Popular Front under the direction of the head of
the S.F.I.O., Leon Blum.
But immediately after these two distinct manifestations, another unitary manifestation takes place, that of
the G.C.C. with watchwords similar to those of the two parades that had preceded it. In fact, the general
strike will demand the rejection of " the factious, provocateurs of riots" because "the offensive that has been
launched a few months ago against political freedoms and democracy has broken out".

The Communist Party, which still maintained a dominant position in the industrial centre of Paris, did not use
it to direct the operations and rather left the initiative to the Socialists and the C.G.T. As for the C.G.T.U.,
which had long ceased to be a trade union organisation capable of structuring the masses for the defence of
their partial claims and had become an appendix of the Communist Party, it did not come out in an open
manner even when preparing for the general strike, which had complete success.

In the meantime, the social-communist grouping and an increasingly left-wing governmental development
have begun to take shape.

On 27 July 1934 a pact of unity was signed between the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, on the basis
of the following points:

(a) the defence of democratic institutions;

(b) the abandonment of strike movements in the fight against the full powers of the government;

(c) worker self-defence on a front that will also include the radical socialists.

***

And in the international camp the new orientation of the foreign policy of the Russian State is accentuated,
which enters triumphantly into the League of Nations.

This is what Ossinsky's theses of the First Congress of the Communist International in March 1919 say: The
proletarian revolutionaries of all the countries of the world must wage a relentless war against the idea of
Wilson's League of Nations and protest against the entry of their countries into this League of pillaging,
exploitation and counter-revolution.

15 years later, on 2-6-1934, the organ of the Russian Party, the "Pravda", wrote:

"The dialectic of the development of the imperialist contradictions led to the result that the old League of
Nations, which was to serve as an instrument for the imperialist subordination of the small independent
states and colonial countries, and for the preparation of the anti-Soviet intervention, appeared, in the process
of the struggle of the imperialist groups, as the arena where - Litvinov explained it at the recent session of
the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union - the current interested in the preservation of peace
seems to triumph. Perhaps this explains the profound changes that have taken place in the composition of
the League of Nations".

Lenin, when he spoke of the League of Nations as the "League of Robbers", had already taught us that this
institution was meant to maintain "in peace" the dominance of the victor states sanctioned at Versailles.

But Pravda's sentences were nothing but rhetoric. In fact Litvinov immediately and radically changes position.
From his support for the German and Italian theses on progressive disarmament, he moves on to the open
declaration that a guarantee of security cannot be found, and supports the French thesis which, by making
the realisation of disarmament dependent on security proclaimed impossible, sanctions the policy of
developing armaments.

At the same time another radical change of course occurs in the problem of the Sarre. The Communist Party,
which had previously fought with the slogan " Red Sarre in the heart of Soviet Germany ", advocates, on the
occasion of the plebiscite, the status quo, namely the maintenance of French control over this region.
Laval, the Foreign Minister of the Flandin Cabinet, devises the plan for Germany's isolation. He could not
claim this nationalist title at his trial where he was sentenced to death: but it is certain that he, a thousand
times more and better than his nationalist and chauvinistic cronies of the French Resistance, attempted the
realisation of the defence of the "French homeland" against Hitler. If France is definitively degraded to the
role of a vassal and second order power, this depends on the characteristics of current international
evolution, while the whole din made around the defence of the "land of freedom and revolution" could only
have one objective fully achieved in any case: that of massacring the French and international proletariat.
The Third French Democratic Republic, born under the baptism of the alliance with Bismarck and the
extermination of the 60,000 communards in Père la Chaise, finds its worthy and macabre epilogue in the
Popular Front firmly seated on the radical-socialist-communists trinomial.

The essential points of Laval's manoeuvre for isolating Germany are:

(1) The meeting with Mussolini in Rome on January 7, 1935.

(2) The meeting with Stalin in Moscow on 1 May 1935.

In the first, an attempt is made to resolve Italian claims in Abyssinia by way of compromise, which was then
to be accepted by the British Minister, Hoare.

In the second, Poincaré's gesture, which was to lead to the Franco-Russian alliance in the 1914-17 war, was
to be renewed, and on the occasion of the new Franco-Russian pact Stalin declared that he was fully aware
of the need for an arms policy for France's defence.

On July 14, 1935, at the demonstration of the Bastille to honor the birth of the bourgeois republic, the
communist leaders, next to Daladier and the socialist leaders, carried a tricolor scarf; the red flag was joined
with the tricolor, while against the "fascist danger" Giovanna D'Arco and Victor Hugo, Jules Guesde and
Vaillant were evoked and one reached the point of speaking of the "sun of Austerlitz" of the Napoleonic
victims. We have already said why all this chauvinist drunkenness was inconclusive and without scope since
France had to, like Italy, Spain and all the other ex-powers outside the present Big Three, assume the role of
a concession that is occupied now by some, now by others; we now add that when the war broke out in
September 1939 between France and Germany, the May 1935 pact was not applied by Russia.

But all these are secondary issues in the face of the essential that is the struggle between the classes on a
national and international scale. And on this classist front, the Bastille Manifestation, its precedents and the
events that resulted from it had a capital importance not only for the French proletariat but for the Spanish
and international proletariat.

When, in March 1935, Mussolini went on to attack the Negus, everything was ready to launch an
international campaign based on the application of sanctions against "fascist Italy". Simultaneous action
against Mussolini and the Negus was not even to be considered by the socialist and communist parties. Both
are competing in defence of the slave regime of the Negus: which is, at the same time, a magnificent defence
of Mussolini's own fascist regime. Indeed, they could not have found better food for the formation of an
atmosphere of national unity in favour of his campaign in Abyssinia than in the application of deliberately
harmless sanctions.

Leon Blum proposed to the League of Nations, the supreme bulwark "of peace and socialism", the arbitration
of the conflict and he wanted to commission Litvinov, who, at that moment, was President in office; after the
Laval-Hoare attempt at compromise failed, the League of Nations took sides, in its overwhelming majority,
against Mussolini. Needless to say, Italian "emigration" is in line with this action in defence of the Negus and
English imperialism: at the Congress of Brussels in September 1935, a motion was voted on, whose slovenly
and servile terms show to what extent - a year after the Spanish War and four after the World War - the
masses had already been welded to the bourgeois cart. Here is the text:
"To Mr. Benes, President of the League of Nations

The Congress of Italians which, in the current circumstances, has had to meet abroad to proclaim its
attachment to peace and freedom, bringing together in a common desire to fight against war hundreds of
delegates from the popular masses of Italy and Italian emigration, from Catholics to liberals, from
Republicans to Socialists and Communists, notes with the greatest satisfaction that the League of Nations
Council has clearly separated, for the condemnation of the aggressor, the responsibilities of the fascist
government from those of the Italian people; states that the war in Africa is the war of fascism and not that
of Italy, that it was unleashed against Europe and Ethiopia without any consultation of the country and in
violation not only of the solemn commitments made to the League of Nations and Abyssinia, but also in
violation of the feelings and true interests of the Italian people; sure to interpret the authentic thinking of
the Italian people, the Congress declares that it is the duty of the League of Nations, in the interests of both
Italy and Europe, to build a dam that is unbreakable for war, and commits itself to supporting the measures
that will be taken by the League of Nations and the workers' organisations to impose an immediate halt to
hostilities".

The Comintern disciplined to the decisions of the League of Nations here is a result of which Mussolini had
every reason to be proud.

In the meantime, the atmosphere was being prepared which was to lead to the dispersion of the formidable
strikes of France and Belgium and to the fall into the imperialist and anti-fascist war of the mighty uproar of
the Spanish proletariat in July 1936.

At the end of 1935, the French Parliament, in a session described as "historic" by Blum, unanimously noted
the defeat of fascism and the "reconciliation" of the French. At the same time, the Brest and Toulon strikes
are attributed, by the same united front of the "reconciled", to the action of "provocateurs"; and in January
1936 Sarraut - the same one who in 1927 had proclaimed "Communism, here is the enemy" - will benefit
from the fact that, for the first time, the communist parliamentary group abstained from the vote on the
ministerial declaration. The attack on Blum in March 1936 led the Communist Party to launch the formula of
fighting "against the Hitlerites of France", a formula that was then reproached after the signing of the Russo-
German Treaty in August 1939.

On March 7, 1936, Hitler denounced the Treaty of Locarno and re-militarised the Rhineland. As a
consequence, in the French Chamber, the chauvinistic frenzy is just as sensational as it is harmless in its
international repercussions.

Events force French capitalism to use the reaction to Hitler's fait accompli only in the field of internal politics
and the Communist Party excels in this action: Recalling the time when French legitimists fled France during
the revolution, it speaks of "the emigrants of Coblentz, of Valmy", it still evokes "Napoleon's Austerlitz sun"
and goes so far as to use the words of Göthe and Nietzsche on "Germany still submerged in the state of
barbarism", without hesitating to falsify Marx himself, whose phrase "the French cock who brought about
the revolution in Germany" was transferred from the social and class field of the French proletariat to the
national and nationalist field of France and its bourgeoisie.

Russian diplomacy strengthens the patriotic position of the French Communist Party at the same time as it
remains very cautious - as is also England - as to the reply to be given to Hitler's coup. Mr Litvinov merely
states that

"The U.S.S.R. would join the most effective measures against the violation of international commitments"
and explain that "this attitude of the Soviet Union is determined by the general policy of struggle for peace,
for the collective organisation of security and for the maintenance of one of the instruments of peace: the
League of Nations".

Molotov is even more cautious, and, in an interview with "Temps", he says:

"We know France's desire to maintain peace. If the German Government were also to come to bear witness
to its desire for peace and respect for the Treaties, particularly as regards the League of Nations, we would
consider that, on this basis of defending the interests of peace, a Franco-German rapprochement would be
desirable".

The leaders of the French Communist Party reasoned this way: Russia is in danger; to save it, we block it with
our capitalism.

And with the usual shameless demagogic spirit they did not hesitate to support this theory by recalling the
action of Lenin; of Lenin himself who in 1918, in order to save Russia from the attack of all the capitalist
powers, pushed the proletarians of each country against the capitalism of the respective country and into a
revolutionary attack aimed at its destruction. The opposition between the two positions is just as violent as
the opposition between revolution and counter-revolution.

It is in this atmosphere of national union, of reconciliation between all the French, of struggle against the "
Hitlerians of France " that the wave of strikes that begins on May 11 at the port of Le Havre and in the aviation
workshops of Toulouse. The victory of these first two movements is crossed with the immediate extension
of the strike to the Parisian region, Courbevoie and Renault (32,000 workers), on 14 May, to all Parisian
metallurgy on 29 and 30. The demands are: the increase in wages, the payment of strike days, workers'
holidays, collective bargaining. The strikes continued, extended to the mining north first and then to the
whole country, and took on a new aspect: the workers occupied the workshops despite the appeal of the
Confederation of Labour, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. We read in an appeal:

"Determined to maintain the movement within the framework of discipline and peace of mind, trade unions
declared themselves ready to put an end to the conflict wherever the just workers' demands were met".

But what a difference from the occupation of factories in Italy, in September 1920! In Paris, the red flag and
the tricolor flag wave together and in the workshops one only thinks of dancing: the atmosphere has nothing
of a revolutionary movement between the spirit of national unity that animates the strikers and the extreme
weapon of the occupation of the workshops there is a stark contrast. However, there is no possibility of
misunderstanding: both the Confederation of Labour, which had already reabsorbed the C.G.T.U., and the
Socialist and Communist Parties have no initiative in these grandiose strikes. They would have opposed this
if it had been possible, and it is only the fact that they have spread throughout the country that is forcing
them to make declarations of hypocritical sympathy for the strikers.

The fact that the owner is willing to accept the workers' demands does not determine the end of the
movements. A great twist is needed. The elections in May gave a majority to the left-wing parties, including
the Socialist Party.

Here we are at the Popular Front: well before the deadline set by parliamentary procedure, the Government
of Blum was formed on June 4. The Delegation of the Left, the parliamentary body of the Popular Front "notes
that the workers defend their bread in order and discipline and want to keep to their movement a vindictive
character from which they will not be able to detach the "Crosses of Fire" (fighting movement of Colonel La
Roque - Ed.) and other agents of the reaction ".

Humanité, for its part, is publishing in headlines that the 'order will ensure success' and that

"Those who get out of the law are the masters, Hitler's agents who do not want the reconciliation of the
French and push the workers to go on strike".

In the night from 7 to 8 June what will then be called the "Matignon Agreement" (the residence of Prime
Minister Blum) is signed and it consecrates:

(a) the collective agreement;

(b) recognition of the right to organise;

(c) the establishment of shop stewards in workshops;

(d) the increase in wages from 7 to 15% (which is 35% as the working week has been reduced from 48 to 40
hours);

(e) paid holidays. This agreement would have been signed even earlier if in some factories what were
described as "reactionary" had not stopped some directors.

On 14 June Thorez, the head of the French Communist Party, launched the formula that would make him
famous:

"You need to know how to end a strike once the essential demands have been met. It is also necessary to
reach a compromise in order not to lose any strength and above all not to facilitate the campaign of panic of
the reaction".

After two weeks, French capitalism manages to extinguish this powerful movement, powerful not for its class
significance, but for its extension, the importance of professional claims, the breadth and degree of means
employed by the workers to achieve success.

The pseudo-labour organisations that had no responsibility for triggering the movement are the same ones
that will take it upon themselves to put an end to it. The French Communist Party was supposed to play a
leading role in the suffocation of any revolutionary possibility that might arise and it succeeded in marvelling
at it by pointing to the contempt of the workers, and as "Hitlerians", the rare French workers who tried to
converge the occupation of the factories with a revolutionary approach to the struggle. And that was the
only tactical problem that the French Party had to solve.

Strikes are breaking out in Belgium almost at the same time. They begin in the port of Antwerp and then
spread throughout the country. The manifesto that immediately launches the Belgian Workers' Party is
significant:

"Workers of the port, do not commit suicide. There are people who are urging you to stop working. Why?
They require an increase in salary. We say nothing different about this at a time when the Belgian Union of
Transport Workers is discussing its policy of increasing wages. And we won't be surprised by people without
responsibility. We do not want to see the same disastrous consequences in Antwerp as in the wake of the
strike in Dunkirk. We have a regulation that must be respected. Those who encourage you to strike do not
care about the consequences. Port workers, listen to your executives. We know what your wishes are.
Forward to the union! no unreasonable strike. We will still discuss this today with the bosses".

Despite a similar appeal by the Trade Union Commission (the equivalent of the Confederation of Labour), on
14 June the Congress of Miners was forced to suffer the situation and give the order to strike. The day before,
the organ of the Socialist Party communicated its agreement with the government decisions to avoid the
occupation of the workshops.

On 22 June, in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Van Zeeland, who chairs a coalition with the participation of the
Socialists, an agreement is signed where it is established:

(a) 10 % wage increase;

(b) 40 hours a week in the case of unhealthy industries;
(c) six days of annual holidays.

The Belgian Communist Party puts its lack of influence among the masses to the advantage of a tactic similar
to that used by the French Party: it blocks with the Workers' Party and the Trade Union Commission, which
monopolise the direction of the movements. It has no initiative in the unleashing of strikes and all its activity
consists in demanding the intervention of the Government in favour of the strikers.
As for the results, they were much lower than those obtained by French workers. But, in the two countries,
these union successes, ephemeral on the one hand, far from meaning a resumption of the autonomous and
classist struggle of the proletariat, favour the development of the manoeuvre of the capitalist State which,
thanks to the arbitrage of the conflicts, is able to gain the trust of the masses and this trust will be used to
tighten the network of its hegemonic control over them.

The sanction of the state authority to the employment contract represents not a victory but the defeat of
the workers. In reality this contract is nothing more than an armistice in the class struggle and its application
depends on the power relations between the two classes. The mere fact that state intervention is accepted
radically reverses the terms of the problem, since the workers thus entrust their defence to the fundamental
institution of capitalist domination: the place of class unions is now occupied by the class collaboration union
interwoven with the officials of the Ministry of Labour who control the application of the law.

The French and Belgian strikes are just a month before the outbreak of social unrest in Spain and the opening
of the imperialist war in that country. We will talk about this in the last chapter.

6. The War of Spain, Preamble to the Second World Imperial War (1936-1940)
The phase of the progressive degeneration of the Soviet state and the communist parties was inevitably to
end with a front line participation in the imperialist massacre, first located in Spain (1936-39), then extended
to the whole world (1939-45). This degenerative process began, as we have seen, in 1926 with the
constitution of the Anglo-Russian Committee, and it was Bukharin who clearly expressed the substantial and
radical change that had occurred in programmatic terms in the politics of the Russian State and of the
International.

Between the united front and the Anglo-Russian Committee, the solution of continuity is unequivocal and
brutal. The first is framed in the classical terms of the capitalism-proletariat antagonism (the proletariat
acting through the class party and the revolutionary state), and the divergence between the French, Austrian,
German oppositions, but particularly between the Italian left and the direction of the International remains
in the frameworks of the problem of the tactics to be followed to favour the development of class action and
the Party. The second, the Anglo-Russian Committee, is part of the Bukharin formula, which states that its
justification lies in defending the diplomatic interests of the Russian state. Diplomatic, because this is not a
military battle limited to specific events, but a political process. The programmatic approach is no longer in
the framework of "capitalism-proletariat" antagonism, but in the framework "Soviet-state vs capitalist-State"
This new juxtaposition is clearly not, nor could it be, a simple modification of formulations that express,
however, a substance similar to the previous one. The very criteria of the definition of the capitalist state and
the proletarian state are no longer the Marxist ones, but others, positivist and rationalist, imposed by the
evolution of the situation.

Previously the notions of class and capitalist state were unitary, synthetic and derived from the analysis of
the relations of production. Starting from 1926, the Comintern proceeds to a dissociation of the notion of
the class and the problem does not consist anymore in an action tending to the destruction of the state that
dominates it, but of an action tending to support or to undermine a determined capitalist force (qualified
capitalism by antonomasia). And what capitalist force? The one that comes into conflict with the "diplomatic"
interests of the Soviet state at the particular moment of international evolution.

At the time of the Anglo-Russian Committee, the contours of this policy radically opposed to the previous
one are not yet well defined, but the problem is already clear: we have a divergence between the defence of
the interests of the English proletariat, engaged in a great class battle, and the interests of the Russian State,
which is relying on England to strengthen its weak positions in the antagonistic evolution of the states on the
international scene. If the endorsement given to the trades unionists, presented to the English proletarians
as the leaders of their strike and the defenders of their interests, is then resolved in a result opposite to that
expected, since the English Government passes to the fight against the Russian Government, this does not
alter in any way the fundamental alteration occurred in the policy of the Comintern and that is specified in
the period of "social-fascism" when we move to the fight against social democracy as a force in itself. It no
longer moves from the class objectives of the German proletariat to deduce a tactic of simultaneous struggle
against social democracy and fascism, but since the first is elevated to the rank of number one enemy, it slips
into a position of flanking Hitler's manoeuvre for the legalitarian dismantling of the positions held in the
German capitalist state by democrats and social democrats. In this case, the "diplomatic" benefits were not
lacking in the Russian state and the cruel defeat of the German proletariat was accompanied by a clear
improvement in economic relations between Russia and Germany.

After social-fascism, the Popular Front and the Spanish War first, the world war later. The process of reversal
suffered by the Communist parties and the Soviet state still goes beyond the limits reached with the tactics
of social-fascism, since it is now a question of reconnecting the workers with the apparatus of the capitalist
state, peacefully in France, with arms in Spain first, and then in all the countries.

The new policy does not present itself under the coherent aspect of the struggle against the capitalist political
force, the expression of the bourgeois class as a whole, but on the contradictory line that, at times, raises
social democracy or fascism to the rank of number one enemy, according to the needs of the evolution of
the Soviet state in certain international situations.

Modification at first, falsification and later inversion, are not limited to the characterisation of the capitalist
class but also invest that of the proletarian state in the new binomial, which we have hinted at, of the
capitalist state against proletarian state relation, and which, starting from 1926, substitutes that of capitalism
against proletariat. The proletarian state is no longer the one that identifies its fate with that of the world
proletariat, but the one in which the defence of the workers of all countries is personified. Until 1939, the
proletarians of each country saw their interests united with the diplomatic successes of the Russian state,
from 1939 to 1945 the proletarians gave their lives to the military successes of this state. As for the situation
of the Russian proletariat, it is just as tragic: first the intensive exploitation in the name of socialism, then
their massacre under the same flag. Ultimately, therefore, the balance of the events we have discussed must
rise to a much higher level than that limited to the tactics of the Communist parties, and must focus not on
the formal and organisational aspect of relations between the proletarian state and the class party, but on
the concrete type of these relations that history presented, for the first time, with the victory of October
1917 in Russia. The proletarian state and the class party are convergent instruments of the struggle of the
revolutionary proletariat and the hypothesis of their separation must be rejected as reactionary. It is only
necessary to draw lessons from Russia's formidable experience in order to establish their organic
convergence in view of the future revolution. This is the central problem to which we think our publication
will have to devote itself, starting from the policy followed by the Russian state even in the heroic period,
when Lenin was at its helm, since our enlightened admiration for the great revolutionary does not prevent
us from categorically affirming that the source of the degeneration and reversal of the Russian revolution lies
in the insufficient solution given to the problem of organic relations between the revolutionary state and the
class party, in other words, to the problem of the politics of the proletarian state on a national and
international scale, an insufficiency in turn ineluctably linked to the fact that the question arose for the first
time in October 1917.

***

In order to understand the events in Spain, it is necessary to refer first of all to the fundamental element of
the Marxist conception, to the vital point of what the French call "démarche" of thought. Remove the
essentials from the accessory.

Is it perhaps because in the republican and anti-fascist camp there is talk of socialism because hundreds of
thousands of proletarians are taking up arms in the name of socialism that we can affirm the existence of the
real conditions for this fight? In our introduction we have indicated that the struggle between the
fundamental classes, between capitalism and the proletariat, has taken place, since October 1917, on a
higher level than before, and requires the proletariat to use its revolutionary state: this is brought to
concentrate on the proletarian front the social movements that also take place outside its geographical
borders; but in the phase of its degeneration it can proceed to a similar concentration only thanks to a radical
modification that brings it back to its original position. Otherwise, it would become the centre of the counter-
revolution policy, as happened first in the anti-fascist area of Spain, then in democratic countries when the
partisan movement arose during the Second Imperialist War.

The essential role in the anti-fascist sector of Spain was played by the Russian state, not by the almost non-
existent Spanish Communist Party.

Our analysis of the events will show that only on the central fact imposed by the events - the war - it was
possible to proceed with class discrimination and determine the position of the revolutionary proletariat
accordingly, while this discrimination was impossible on the side of the accessory phenomena, such as the
elimination of the master from the factories, of the classical parties of the bourgeoisie from the government
and even, in the days of the most heated social turmoil, the elimination of the government itself.

If we briefly present the film of the Spanish events, with this we do not intend to admit the hypothesis that
a different tactic of the Communist Party or of any other political formation could have determined a
different outlet of the situations, but we do it only to demonstrate, in the first place, that all the "workers'
initiatives" were, in the final analysis, the only form through which the capitalist class could subsist - in those
determinate circumstances - (and it subsisted politically and historically even if physically absent in the
factories or skilfully disguised in the anti-fascist government, because it achieved its fundamental objective
of preventing the proletarian class from asserting itself on the problem of war and the state), secondly to
highlight the elements of an evolution which - albeit in less accentuated forms - spread to the other countries
after the Second World War and which expressed itself in the liquidation of the employers from the
nationalised industries, temporarily or definitively.

The fact that the Italian left is the only current left to survive after the cruel massacre that, after the general
trial of Spain in 1936-39, then spread to the whole world in 1939-45 is not due to fortuitous circumstances.
Socialist and communist parties could only play a fiercely counter-revolutionary role as situations reached
the end of their evolution. But Spain has also been the tomb of Trotskyism and the colourful schools of
anarchism and trade unionism.

Trotsky, the giant of "maneuverism", had even given a theoretical justification of the possibility for the
proletariat to wedge itself into the antagonism between democracy and fascism, stating that the historical
ineptitude of democracy to defend itself against fascism and the ever historical need to oppose it, could give
rise to the condition for an intervention of the proletariat, the only class capable of bringing to its
revolutionary conclusion the anti-fascist struggle. It was therefore inevitable that Trotsky would take the
front line in the defence and in the increase of the "revolutionary realisations", obtained in the factories and
in the fields or in the organisation of the fighting army.

The anarchists, for their part, if in the first days they could avoid compromising their "anti-State purity", had
to find in these events the land of choice for their experiments of "free municipalities", of "free cooperatives",
of "free army". All these "freedoms" ended in the other "freedom", the fundamental one: that of waging an
anti-fascist war.

The foundation of the Party in Italy was accompanied by a clear stance not only on the fundamental problems
of the time, but also on what arose as a reflection to the development of the fascist offensive: the dilemma
democracy or fascism - said the Party - falls within the framework of the bourgeois class and the opposition
of the proletarian class can only develop in function of its specific objectives. The fight for these objectives,
even in the moment of the legalitarian or extra-legal attack of fascism, imposes the simultaneous fight against
democracy and fascism. The firm position of our current was confirmed by all the developments of the
Spanish events which saw in the long and exhausting war of about three years the opposition of two armies
placed within their respective capitalist state apparatus: that of Franco leaning on the classical structure of
the bourgeois state, the other Madrid and Catalan whose daring peripheral initiatives in the economic and
social field could only embed in a counter-revolutionary evolution because at no time had the problem been
posed of the creation of a revolutionary dictatorship. There were many opportunities presented by Spanish
events to refute the positions defended by Trotsky: the same military battles won by the anti-fascist
government did not result in a situation conducive to the autonomous affirmation of the proletariat but a
condition to strengthen its ties to the anti-fascist capitalist state, since only the efficiency of this could be
guaranteed success against Franco, an irrefutable argument, since it admits participation in the war.

Confirmation of the Marxist position against all anarchist and trade unionist schools could not have been
brighter. In fact, especially in the first period of the events following the establishment of the military fronts,
from August 1936 to May 1937, the conditions were the most favourable for the realisation of the anarchist
postulates. Faced with the disintegration of the state apparatus, particularly in Catalonia, and the flight and
elimination of the masters, all spontaneous initiatives took place freely. And the majority of the anarchists
were at the head of the army, trade unions, agricultural and industrial cooperatives, and of the embryonic
state network of Barcelona itself. Failure cannot therefore be attributed to the incompleteness of objective
conditions, while the pretext always invoked to justify failure, namely the support given to Franco by
Mussolini and Hitler, cannot be invoked by anarchists, since they asked, in response to the fascist intervention
in Spain, not a struggle of the proletariat of other countries against their respective democratic governments,
but a pressure of these proletariat to determine the armed intervention of capitalist governments in favour
of the republican Spain or at least the sending of weapons for the success of the anti-fascist war.

As we have said, class discrimination could only take place in function of the central problem: that of war.
This made our current and when, in August 1936, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the P.O.U.M.
(The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) - party of the far left of Catalonia - our delegate, who was present
as an observer, expressed his opinion that the idea of the massacre of workers regimented by Franco should
not be propagated, but the opposite idea of fraternisation, the leaders of this "Marxist" organism
categorically affirmed that such propaganda deserved the death penalty.

How can we describe the anti-fascist war in Spain as imperialist, when it was not only impossible, but also
inconceivable, to determine imperialist interests in antagonism, since they were two armies from the same
country? It is indisputable that the Spanish events posed, as far as the characterisation of the war that
developed there was concerned, an unprecedented problem for the Marxists. But if relevant historical
precedents could not be found, the Marxist method of analysis nevertheless allowed to affirm that, although
it was true that contrasting specific and imperialistic interests could not be identified in the Franco-Popular
Front duel, the imperialist character of both Franco's war and that of the Popular Front resulted indisputably
from the fact that neither relied on the dictatorial and revolutionary organisation of the proletarian state.
The same thing happened with Catalonia in the autumn of 1936: the deterioration of the previous Catalan
state, not being overcome by the institution of the proletarian state, could only know a phase (transitory on
the one hand) during which the persistence of the bourgeois class in power was affirmed not physically and
directly, but thanks to the absence of a proletarian struggle aimed at the foundation of the proletarian state.

In the two cases, of the characterisation of the war and of the Catalan state, the imperialist nature of the
first, capitalist of the second, does not result from the external elements (the place of war, the apparatus of
constriction of the state), but from the substantial elements that are condensed in the absence of the
affirmation of the proletarian class, which in Spain is not able - not even through its sparse minority - to pose
the problem of power. It has already been said that the proletariat derives from the negation of the negation
of capitalism, from a negation that implicitly contains the affirmation of the opposite.

The Popular Front remains in the state of a simple negation of Franco and it was necessary to set the negation
of the Popular Front itself so that the proletarian class could assert itself. This process of negations is evidently
not imposed on the formal and formalist, rational and rationalist level, but results dialectically from the
theoretical and political precision of the proletarian class. Only the setting of the objectives of this class sets
the course of the revolutionary struggle against the state of Franco, against that of Barcelona and Madrid
and against world capitalism. The general strike that took place in response to Franco's attack also took place
on this level.

Let us now move on to a brief account of the most important facts.

***

In contrast to other countries, Spain does not know the bourgeois revolution. The feudal organisation of
Spanish society annexed itself to very important territories beyond the sea, thus providing the possibility for
the clergy and nobility to accumulate enormous wealth. The capitalist mode of production that establishes
itself in the mining and industrial centres of the country does not determine the fall of the dominant feudal
castes but - contrary to Russia where the Czarist state and the bourgeoisie are not confused and remain
distinct even if not in opposition - in Spain these castes and the state adapt to the needs of the industrialised
economy, localised only in some centres. Then, at the end of the last century, when the time came for the
old Spanish colonies to start industrialising, the ties broke and the empire fell apart.

On the other hand, unlike England, Spain did not proceed with an intense industrialisation of the country in
connection with the possibilities offered by the possession of colonies so that, when in Europe we have the
formation of powerful capitalist states, the Spanish bourgeoisie was deprived of any possibility of success in
the field of international competitions.

Nobility and clergy not only remained the owners of the land but also became owners of mining companies,
banks and industrial and commercial enterprises, while the sectors with the highest industrial development,
Catalonia and Asturias, passed largely under the control of foreign capital predominantly English.

These historical precedents determine a particular device of Spanish bourgeois society in which the
development of industrialisation is halted by the persistence of feudal ties. The workers' movement, in which
anarchists predominate both at the time of the First International and today, has been affected to the point
that the conditions for the formation of a party based on Marxist conceptions have not yet been met. The
social upheavals that have occurred there find in these objective conditions the premise for drawing on a
high climate of struggle, but the impossibility of a radical change in the archaic social structure of the
bourgeoisie condemns the proletariat to remain on this side of a specific affirmation of its class. As early as
1845 Marx noted that a revolution that would take three days in another European country would take nine
years in Spain. Trotsky, for his part, explained the intervention of the army in the social field as a result of the
fact that it - like the clergy and nobility - tended to conquer, without ever being able to reach it, a position of
social dominance alongside the other two existing castes. In a word, therefore, the absence of historical
conditions for bourgeois-feudalism struggle determines the historical absence of conditions for an
autonomous and specific struggle of the proletarian class and excludes the hypothesis that Spain can play
the role of epicentre of the international revolutionary upheavals.

In 1923, in relation to the disasters of the Moroccan countryside, Primo de Rivera took power and the regime
he established was erroneously described as fascist. No revolutionary threat justified the establishment of a
fascist dictatorship and, in fact, the corporatist framework involves the participation of the socialists in the
consultative bodies, in the equal commissions established for the settlement of labour conflicts, and Largo
Caballero, secretary of the General Union of Workers under socialist control, is even appointed Councillor of
State. Under De Rivera the Spanish bourgeoisie tried in vain to reorganise the state on a centralised basis
similar to that of the other bourgeois states. This attempt fails and, in the midst of the great global economic
crisis that erupted in 1929, capitalism finds itself facing a difficult and complex social situation. The state of
the De Rivera type no longer suits because the situation does not allow the arbitral solution of labour
conflicts, and powerful mass movements are inevitable. The conversion that then takes place and that
responds to the interests of domination of capitalism, is judged by all political formations, with the exception
of ours, as the advent of a new regime imposed by the revolutionary maturation of the masses.

In January 1930 De Rivera was liquidated. Another general, Bérenguer, takes his place to ensure the transition
to the new government. In S. Sebastiano, in August 1930, the pact between the successors was concluded
and, after the municipal elections that gave the majority to the Republicans in 46 of the 50 capitals, when
the first threat of a workers' movement appeared (the railway workers' strike), in February 1931, the war
monarchist took the initiative of organising the departure of King Alfonso XII.

It is, as we have said, a period of intense social conflict that is opening up. These conflicts are inevitable
because of the extreme weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie at the outbreak of the global economic crisis.
But the bourgeoisie, unable to avoid these conflicts, shows great wisdom in preventing their revolutionary
developments. The proclamation of a republic is not enough to prevent the immediate outbreak of a
telephone strike in Andalusia, Barcelona and Valencia. The peasant movement of Seville takes violent forms:
the left-wing government massacres thirty peasants and the reactionary Maura, Minister of the Interior,
congratulates the Socialists for the demeanour taken in defence of the order and the republic. Alongside the
U.G.T. (the trade union organisation controlled by the socialists), the C.N.T. (Confederazione Nazionale
Lavoratori controlled in monopolistic form by the anarchists) circumscribes these movements in the strictly
wage and demand field, which could not have found an outlet other than on the political level of the fight
against the republican state.

In June 1931 the elections gave an overwhelming majority to the left-wing parties and Zamora gave way to
Azaña, who excluded the right from the government. Parallel to an increase in social tension, on the one
hand, there is the increasingly left-wing movement of the Government, and on the other, an increase in the
repression of movements. On October 20, 1931, the Azaña-Caballero Ministry ruled that the young republic
was in danger and passed the law of defence which, in the chapter devoted to compulsory arbitration,
contained the outlawing of those unions that did not give two days' notice before proclaiming the strike. The
U.G.T., which is in government, takes an open position against "anti-Republican" strikes, the C.N.T. maintains
its agnosticism in the face of the violent and terrorist action of the Left Government and the two days
mentioned in the law are not enough for union leaders to prevent the outbreak of riots. The C.N.T., however,
manages to keep all the strikes under its control and limits itself to not assuming the paternity of those
coming out of the Republican Legality cadres.

After, at the beginning of 1932, the government with socialist participation obtained unanimous trust in the
Cortès for the way in which the strikes were fought, in August 1932 it witnessed the first grouping of right-
wing forces. But the moment is not yet right, the atmosphere is still too full of social explosives and Sanjurjo's
coup to seize power fails.

In September 1932, the agrarian reform was finally voted on. The conditions imposed on farmers who
become "owners" are such that they will have to wait 17 centuries before releasing themselves from the
commitments contained in the deed of purchase. In January 1933, the repressive action of the government
reached its peak: the striking workers were massacred in Malaga, Bilbao and Zaragoza. After these
enterprises, and when a certain tiredness manifested itself among the masses, the conditions for a new
change of government personnel presented themselves: on 8 September 1933 Azaña resigned, the new
elections of 19 November 1933 gave the majority to the right-wing parties, and the Lerroux-Gil Roblès
government was formed under the influence of the agricultural classes. When the Asturian uprising broke
out in October 1934, the right-wing government followed in the footsteps of its left-wing predecessors and
the movement was drowned in blood. The socialists had declined any responsibility for this "wild" form of
struggle and the anarchists themselves had ordered the resumption of work.

During the pause of social tension (tragically interrupted by the Asturian insurrection) which lasted from
September 1934 to February 1936, it was the right-wing governments at the helm of the bourgeois state that
were responsible for the repression, especially at the legal level: at the time of the elections of 16 February
1936, 30,000 were political prisoners.

In connection with the international atmosphere that the great movements of France and Belgium would
soon experience, a period of social tension in Spain began that was even higher than in 1931-33, and as a
result the Spanish bourgeoisie brought its left-wing servants to power. In this more red-hot social climate,
the anarchists themselves are in line with the needs of the new situation: yesterday's fierce abstentionists at
a rally in Zaragoza, after solemnly reaffirming the CNT's apolitical nature, leave their members free to vote,
while the Barcelona Regional Committee, two days before the elections, makes open propaganda in favour
of the lists of the Popular Front under the pretext that it advocates amnesty.

The elections of 16 February 1936 marked an overwhelming success for the Popular Front, which obtained
an absolute majority in the Cortès. It is composed of the Republican Left of Azaña, the radical dissidents of
Martinez Barrios, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Trade Union Party, Pestaña and the Marxist
Unity Party (the Poum, resulting from the merger of the old "worker and peasant" block of Barcelona directed
by Maurin, who had always occupied a right-wing position in the International, and the Trotskyist tendency
directed at that time by Andrea Nin). The electoral program contains: general amnesty, repeal of regressive
laws, reduction of taxes, policy of agricultural credits.

After the elections, the government of Azaña was formed with only representatives of the left. But in the
aforementioned situation of worsening social tension, the bourgeoisie cannot limit itself to concentration in
a single government; its other forces remain waiting and already in April 1936, on the occasion of the
commemoration of the foundation of the Republic, the right-wing parties organised a counter-
demonstration that was described as "revolt". At the Cortès sitting, Azaña declares:

"the government has taken a series of measures, removed or transferred the fascists who were in the
administration. The right wing is panicking, but they won't dare raise their heads anymore".

Less than three months have passed since the "insurrection of the factious Franco": the Communist Party,
enthusiastic about the declarations of Azaña, votes for trust in the Government.

In the first days of July 1936, the lieutenant Castillo, a member of the Popular Front, was assassinated and,
in retaliation, the monarchical leader, Sotelo, was killed. The Popular Front and all the parties that make it
up express a sacred disdain for the accusation made by the right of being responsible, the Prime Minister
Quiroga must resign because a phrase of his speech could be interpreted as encouragement to the
perpetrators of the murder.

Franco launched his offensive from Morocco, the initial objectives of which were Seville and Burgos: two
agricultural centres, the first of which, for having known the most violent but inconclusive peasant uprisings,
offered the best conditions for the success of the coup.

It is therefore within the very framework of a state apparatus under the complete control of the Popular
Front that Franco's enterprise can be meticulously organised, the preparations for which could not have
escaped the ministers of the left and the extreme left. What is more, the first reaction of these parties is
clearly conciliatory. The radical Barrios, who had already presided over the conversion of the government
from left to right in 1933, tried to repeat the operation in the opposite direction and if it did not succeed, it
was not because compromise was excluded in principle, but because the social atmosphere did not allow it.

In response to Franco's attack, a general strike was unleashed on 16th July, which was a complete success,
especially in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Asturias, while the two points of support of Franco, Seville and
Burgos were firmly held by the rebels.

One of our contradictors were not wrong to ask us: but finally, for you, all the events before and after the
general strike count for nothing, while the general strike itself would not have been anything but a
momentary infection of measles? In reality, as far as the proletarian movement is concerned, the general
strike represented only a meteoric explosion of the class conscience of the Spanish proletariat: only in those
few days we saw not an armed struggle between two bourgeois armies but a fraternisation of the strikers
with the proletarians enmeshed in the army, who, doing common cause with the insurgent proletarians,
disarmed immobilise or eliminate the governing body of the army itself.

Immediately the democratic and anti-fascist state resumes the situation: in Madrid the hierarchy is
established through the "Offices of enlistment" controlled by the state, in Barcelona in a less immediate way:
Companys (head of the Catalan left) declares, in agreement with the leaders of the C.N.T., that

"The state machine must not be touched because it can be of some use to the working class".

and immediately the two bodies destined to assure the first state control are created; in the military field,
the "Central Committee of the Militia", in the economic field, the "Central Council of the Economy". The C.C.
of the Militia includes 3 delegates of the C.N.T., 2 delegates of the F.A.I. (Iberian Anarchist Federation), 1
delegate of the Republican Left, 2 socialists, 1 delegate of the League of the "Rabasseres" (small tenants
under the control of the Catalan Left), 1 of the coalition of the Republican Parties, 1 of the Poum and 4
representatives of the Generalidad of Barcelona (the Defence Councillor, the General Commissioner of Public
Order and two delegates of the Generalidad without a fixed state mandate). All these political formations
ensure the continuity of the capitalist state in Catalonia from July 1936 to May 1937, and it goes without
saying that the overwhelming majority held by the workers' organisations is presented as a guarantee that
the bourgeois class will be subject to the demands of the proletarian movement.

In the meantime, from the beginning of events, Zaragoza fell into the hands of Franco and the proximity of
this military centre enabled Barcelona to present the need for military victory against "fascism" as the
supreme commandment of the hour, to which everything must therefore be subordinated.

The Spanish Communist Party, which takes a leading position in the anti-fascist war, cannot tolerate
misunderstandings, and it is in Moscow that its function as the counter-revolutionary leader is brutally
revealed. That's what the following infamous statement says:

"The Office of the Executive Committee of the USSR has rejected the appeal for pardon of those sentenced
to death on 24 August by the Military College of the USSR, in the trial of the unified trotskyist-zinovievist
centre. The verdict against the sixteen convicted prisoners has been executed".

In its 28-8-36 issue, Humanité comments:

"When the accused approved Viscinsky's indictment, asking to be shot, they only expressed their conviction
that they could no longer expect any mercy. They thought coldly: we wanted to murder you, you kill us: it's
right. These sixteen murderers therefore remained bitter enemies of the Communist Party, of the State and
of the Soviet people until the very last moment, and their death has purified the atmosphere of the country
of socialism, which they challenged by their presence".

For his part, Prosecutor Viscinsky concluded his indictment:

"I ask that these angry dogs be shot to the very end".

It is these same murderers of the Russian proletariat who are in the vanguard of the anti-fascist war and who
unleash the offensive to respond to the intervention of Hitler and Mussolini in favour of Franco with a similar
intervention of the other countries in favour of the "legal republican" government.

In the midst of Spanish events, when the general strike had not yet ended, and on the other hand the strike
was developing in France, the head of government of the French Popular Front, Leon Blum, considering that
the opening of the Pyrenean border may establish a dangerous contact between the strikers of the two
countries, decides to close it. In August 1936, it was Blum himself who took the initiative to set up the
"Committee of non-intervention in Spain", based in London and representing the governments of all the
countries, fascist and democratic, not excluding Russia itself.

The role of this "Committee of non-intervention" was to avoid international complications, while each "High
Contracting Party" industrialised the corpses of the proletariat who had fallen in Spain to make them serve
the success of the world counter-revolution: in Russia to massacre the authors of the October revolution, in
the fascist countries to prepare the climate for the world war, in France to divert the workers' movements
from their class objectives. It is well known that the central slogan launched by the Communist parties and
the socialist left was "airplanes for Spain".

Military events in Spain are alternating. Both the defeats and the military victories in the anti-fascist war are
used on the level of the progressive elimination of all the extra-legal initiatives and of the reconstruction of
the classical hierarchy of the anti-fascist state. The defeats because they were presented as deriving from
the lack of a strict military discipline around the executive centre, the victories because they were presented
as confirmation of the usefulness of a firm centralisation around the military staff.

As for the anarchists, they abandon their program, shred by shred. At the beginning, immediately after the
conclusion of the general strike of July 1936, they responded to the first attempts to incorporate the workers
in organic form in the Militias controlled by the Generalidad with the slogan "soldiers, no soldiers", but they
abandoned this position, in the face of the needs of the military struggle, to dislodge the fascists from
Zaragoza. They then renounced their opposition to the essential programme of the extreme left government
presided over by Caballero: the constitution of a single Command extended to the whole territory of the anti-
fascist sector with the capitals of Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. The demands of the military struggle fully
justified on a strategic level the necessity of centralisation in the single command, and the anarchists reached
the point of participation, through their representatives who had become ministers, in the Caballero
government. These - the words tolerate any insult - are presented as the Spanish Lenin: the same Caballero
remained in 1936-37 perfectly consistent with the position that had earned him the appointment as
Councillor of State under the De Rivera regime!

As we have said, in the period from the liquidation of the general strike of July 1936 until May 1937, while
the state of Madrid can afford to maintain even the previous police apparatus of the "Guardie Civili", in
Catalonia the classical state apparatus of the bourgeoisie knows a phase of "holiday" during which control
over the masses is established indirectly through the "Central Committee of the Militia" and the "Council of
the Economy". This transition phase is followed by the elimination of any element, even peripheral, that
disturbs the regular functioning of the anti-fascist capitalist state. In October 1936, Caballero launched the
decree for the militarisation of the militias and the C.N.T., in its deliberation of 14 October, prescribed that it
was not possible to demand the respect of working conditions either as regards working time, wages or
overtime, in all the industries connected directly or indirectly with the anti-fascist war, which practically
meant in all the industrial enterprises.

This is how it started in May 1937. On the 4th of this month, under pressure from the Comoros Stalinist chief
of the P.S.U.C. (Catalan Unification Socialist Party), the Generalidad of Barcelona decides to regain direct
control of the Telephone Company: it is the sign of a general action aimed at eliminating all management not
directly related to the anti-fascist state. A general strike breaks out spontaneously: all the political groups
proclaim their innocence of this "crime", and it is with lead and the machine gun that the movement is
repressed in blood. It is striking that Franco, although important groups of proletarians have abandoned the
front and descended to Barcelona, does not take the opportunity to unleash a military offensive: let his anti-
fascist companions do it because their success also depends on his. The operation succeeded in full: all the
peripheral initiatives were eliminated after the violent repression of the strike movement of May 1937. Then
the Negrin Government of the "jusqu'au bout" resistance was established, in which the last hopes of all the
sectors of anti-fascism were placed, and it was this Government which, after having abandoned Madrid and
after the intermediate stage of Valencia, moved first to Barcelona and then to Paris, leaving the socialist
Besteiro the task of dealing with Franco for the conclusion of the war during the spring of 1939.

It should be noted that, with his skill and his usual cynicism, the Spanish bourgeoisie, after the strike of May
1937, proceeded to the liquidation of some of the elements that had been in his service at the critical time
of July 1936. This is the case of Andrea Nin, Minister of Justice in the first anti-fascist government in
Barcelona. The latter, transferred to Madrid, is then taken from "irregular" elements (Stalinist laws) to be
murdered in circumstances that have never been clarified since. This is also the case of the anarchist Berneri,
arrested by the Barcelona police, who, following the technique of the fascist punitive expeditions, had
previously made a home visit to make sure that the victim was disarmed. Instead of being taken to prison,
Berneri is murdered; the anarchists protest but do not even dream of breaking the solidarity that binds them
to the anti-fascist government.

We talked about the International Committee of Non-Intervention. It had fully succeeded in avoiding both
the possible international complications deriving from the Spanish war and the possibility of an autonomous
intervention by the international and Spanish proletariat during these events. We would like to point out that
Russia, which left it up to the Communist parties to protest against the policy of the same committee in which
it participated, did not take an initiative of open armed intervention in Spain until after the fall of Irun on 1
September 1936 and its consequences (establishment of the centralised government chaired by the "Left"
Caballero) had given it the necessary guarantees. The decree on the militarisation of the militias and the
C.N.T.'s "trade union renditions" for the total and totalitarian discipline to the anti-fascist war are dated 14
October 1936, and it is on the same date that the Soviet ship "Zanianine" lands in Barcelona. Needless to say,
on the one hand all the measures to ensure the end of the subsequent strike of May 1937 were already in
place and, on the other, the open intervention of Russia in the Spanish war was even more interested than
that of Hitler and Mussolini, since all weapons had to be paid for in gold by the anti-fascist government of
Caballero first, then Negrin.

The Spanish tragedy ends in the spring of 1939 with the total victory of Franco. A few months later, on 3
September, the Second World Imperial War broke out. The events that precede it are:

the Munich compromise of September 1938;

the German-Russian Pact of August 1939.

After the re-militarisation of the western bank of the Rhine, which we discussed in Chapter 5, and the
absorption of Austria in the winter of 1938, Czechoslovakia was dismembered. Hitler takes the defence and
direction of the Sudeten irredentist movement that occupies the German area of Czechoslovakia. England
sends its own delegate, Runciman, to examine the matter and his report is in favour of the Sudeten's claims.
France, bound by a pact of mutual assistance with Czechoslovakia, first took a position hostile to the Sudeten
movement, but then resigned itself to participating in the Godesberg and Monaco Conferences, where the
four Greats of the time (Germany, Italy, France, England) ratified the compromise that satisfied Hitler.

Today, the controversy surrounding "Monaco" is not over yet. Russia, and with it the Communist parties,
claim that Munich was the end of the imperialist states' policy of isolating the "country of socialism". The
French and British political personalities taking part in the Munich, Daladier and Chamberlain agreements
argue, however, that this compromise made it possible to earn a year and thus prepare for the war against
Hitler. The latter, for his part, proclaims that the agreement was part of his policy of "peaceful" and not
warlike reparation for the injustices consecrated by the Treaty of Versailles.

If one takes into account the further events, it is indisputable that the thesis of a year's profit for the better
preparation of the Franco-English war does not stand up, since in 1940, when, after the Poland campaign,
Hitler launched the Blitz-Krieg against the West, no obstacle opposed its resounding victory. Similarly, the
thesis of Russia and the Communist parties is not confirmed, since the Munich compromise did not in any
way lead to the isolation of Russia. The latter maintained diplomatic relations with a view to a military alliance
with France and England until August 1939; in this same August it was she who broke these negotiations on
her own initiative and, when the Allied delegates were still in Moscow, established the economic and military
agreement with Germany. In June 1941 the military alliance with France, England and America was formed,
which remained in force until the end of military operations in July 1945.

The Munich compromise must be explained by considerations other than those of imperialism, which were
then to move on to the unleashing of war. At the European level, it is certain that it meets the requirements
of Germany's inevitable dominance in the crossing of the two industrial and agricultural basins (the Germanic,
the Balkan) which in turn correspond to the connection of the two main river routes of the Rhine and the
Danube. As far as the possible construction of the European economy is concerned, the Munich compromise
represents a rational solution that capitalism tends to give to the natural needs of the structure of this
continent. On the level of the antagonistic development of the bourgeois states of Europe and its
repercussions on the international chessboard, the compromise had to face insurmountable obstacles
because neither Russia could adapt to being definitively eliminated by Europe, nor the United States could
tolerate the institution of a German hegemony which could have threatened its positions not only in Europe
but also in the other continents.

After implementing the solution to the Danube problem in Munich, Germany is moving towards a similar
solution to the Polish problem. Meanwhile, France and England are sending their military missions to Russia
with a view to concluding a military alliance. As we have said, these missions are still in Moscow when the
bomb of the Russian-German Treaty explodes.

Until now, on 23 August 1939, Russia had advocated in the diplomatic field punitive measures against "the
aggressor" and it was Litvinov who defined the aggressor as those who, in violation of contractual
commitments, invaded another country. The attacker - Litvinov specifies - must benefit from the automatic
economic and military support of the League of Nations. And it is clear that Hitler, with his attack on Poland,
was in the specific conditions contemplated by Soviet diplomacy.

But, suddenly, the doctrine of the aggressor is completely abandoned, Russia undertakes not to provide any
support to Poland, which will be invaded a few days later, and in return receives not only part of Poland,
which will rush to occupy at the end of September, but also the Baltic States and Bessarabia.

The German-Russian agreement has the same fate as the Munich compromise. About two years later, on 21
June 1941, it was torn apart by the events: Hitler invades Russia. Once again, to explain this event, the
interpretations of the contenders are not enough. Not that the Russians earned two years to prepare for the
war, as Blitz-Krieg was as violent and rapid in Russia as it had been in May-June 1940 in the western campaign,
and on the other hand it would have been better to face Germany in 1939 when the Franco-English threat
still existed and Poland had not yet been eliminated. Nor does the German argument hold water because it
was obvious - and current events confirm this - that if a compromise was possible with France and England
for an overflow of German power towards the East, this compromise was absolutely impossible with Russia
because of its secular interests in Eastern Europe.

On another level the Russian-German treaty has its full effects: in the Axis countries, in Germany and in Italy,
it strengthens the front of fascist deception for the war against the international plutocracy, in democratic
countries and especially in France it determines the political fracture that had to facilitate first the German
military victories, then the establishment of the military occupation regime.

The French Communist Party, which until September 1938 had blocked with the government the defence of
the homeland in the name of the fight against hitlerism and fascism, which had then passed to a violent
opposition against the compromise of Monaco presented as the "prize to the aggressor", radically changes
its tone, highlights the imperialist objectives of France and England, but does not speak either of the equally
imperialist objectives of Germany and Italy, or of the imperialist meaning of the war that is developing in the
meantime.

The head of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, is disintegrating and can reach Russia thanks to
the support of the German authorities, which are facilitating his passage, and the French and Belgian
Communist Parties are asking the German occupying authorities for permission to publish their newspapers.
Events are precipitating, Hitler is invading Russia on 21 June 1941 and there is therefore a new radical change
in the policy of the Communist parties. These now pass to the organisation of the movements of the
Resistance and of partisanism.

***

The Italian bourgeoisie gave fascism to the proletariat in compensation for its renunciation of the
revolutionary struggle during the First World War. This same bourgeoisie, in return for the frantic
participation of the workers in the second imperialist conflict, has given the Italian proletariat a regime that
aggravates the conditions of exploitation imposed by Fascism itself.

The open betrayal of the communist parties, which took part in the anti-fascist war, can today take advantage
of the support of one of the most powerful imperialist states in the world to hinder the rebirth of the
proletarian movement, but this betrayal has not been able to eliminate the antagonisms on which capitalist
society is based. These antagonisms not only exist but tend to get worse and the Italian Left can look back
peacefully on its past of fighting against capitalism and opportunism: it was the first to raise its voice against
the deviations of the International, it followed all the storm of events without ever deflecting, it takes up the
flag of internationalism and class struggle to continue its struggle, whatever the difficulties to be overcome
and the path that will have to be traversed to achieve the final victory.