Theses

By World Communist Group ()

Theses of the World Communist Group. This appears to be a rather rough translation from French. From http://groupe-communiste-mondial.org/en/publications/publications3.html.

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  1. In the modern conditions of the capitalist production through which the class-struggle will re-appear, as a product first, then, as a factor of the catastrophic crisis of the capital, the tactics of the communist party denounce as reactionary as far as the programme is concerned and defeatist as far as the praxis is concerned, any claim organizing itself politically speaking (Party) or economically and socially speaking (trade-union), for the broadening (or even the upholding) of the political freedoms, the defence or the realization of the economic equality and of the social fraternity; both when such claims are stated as the aims of the action (social-democratism, Stalinism) as well as means of it (diverse leftisms).

  2. Formally speaking, such claims demand the impossible return to an economically liberal and politically reformist phase, historically worn-out, definitively gone by of the economic and political cycle of the capitalist domination, inexorably evolving as it is endlessly developing not towards a softening (the prospect of which Bernstein’s revisionist system pretended to be founded), but towards an exacerbation of those contradictions. These ones showing:

    1. an ever rising contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production,

    2. a judicial depersonalization of the capital (disappearance of the superfluous bourgeoisie) parallel to its economic concentration,

    3. an intensification and a generalization of the dictatorship of the capital (founded on the political repressions and the imperialist wars during the phases of the crisis of the capital; on the scientific continuity of the process of the capitalist production during the phases of prosperity) to all the demonstrations of social life,

    4. an emphasizing of the state’s despotism, the technical and ideological improvement of its coercive and repressive instruments,

    5. the economically increased, militarily widened domination of imperialism accumulating on a world-wide scale, poverty on one side, wealth on the other,

    6. the extolling of the antagonism between rival economic powers,

    7. the division of the world into spheres of influence and oppression,

    8. the total, irreversible and growing dehumanization of man,

    9. the growing destitution of the proletarian, producing the capital’s wealth and its own poverty, its impoverishment rising as the share of the necessary work decreases and the surplus-labour increases, the exhaustion of his physical and intellectual faculties,

    10. the repetition, on an ever larger scale, of the catastrophes and cataclysms (economic crisis, imperialist wars) which, while reviving the capitalist production, provoke the organization of the working-class for the violent overthrow of the capital

    11. the purification of the capitalist relations implicating a mass of beings, an ever more numerous one, in the immediate dependence of the capital (relative and sometimes total decreasing of the productive workers, relative increasing of the new improductive middle-strata),

    12. an ever more universal organization of the proletariat, the ever more obvious intransigence of its programme, and finally-the ever more elaborate production of the economic and intellectual conditions or the negation of wages and of the communist society.

  3. All the petty cogitations on liberty, equality, fraternity are nonsense on the genuine origin of man’s misery: they stand as eternal, that is to say natural, as the present historical and transient forms of production, carrying over and transposing in their bourgeois vision of socialism the economic categories (wages, currency, market) and the social and political ones (state, classes), the intellectual mutilations and psychological prejudices of today’s Christian and democratic capitalist society.

  4. Such claims constitute the programmatic substance of all the parties of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and working democracy we fight against. They result in:

    1. the moral disarming of the working-class which, through the organs of the bourgeois state and of the working reformism (parliament, trade-union) should expect from a system based on his exploitation (extortion of surplus-value) a progressive evolution aiming at the negation of that exploitation (programme of the classical revisionism) for the overthrow of which the working class no longer identifies its hope for emancipation; it gives it up actually for the precarious satisfaction of immediate advantages giving, in fact to the capital new and still larger basis for its domination,

    2. besides, such claims set the working class into the power of the rival capitalist groups inside the everlasting election pendulum between bourgeois rights and lefts,

    3. relegate the proletarians tagging behind the servile petit-bourgeoisie (the election contribution of which they become) and all that talkative and helpless middle-strata people,

    4. prepare to the capital the best ideological and technical conditions of mobilization for the imperialist wars as bourgeois solutions of the economic crisis of capital.

  5. As far as their content is concerned, such claims that were formerly useful when, preparing the best conditions of the fundamental revolutionary action, they enabled the speeding up of the progressive development of the capitalist form, the parallel growing up and organization of the working socialist movement (this phase historically ending after 1914 from which the era of imperialist wars and of proletarian revolutions proper to the phase of the capital’s real domination starts) put actually, into practice the bourgeois ideals, so that they carry out the programme of the capitalist domination, beyond an historical limit where it has become socially conservative and politically counter-revolutionary. Marx has perfectly individualized and denounced that conservative bourgeois socialism:

For all that, there are some socialists to take up these nonsense especially in France. They want to depict socialism as the realization of the ideas of the bourgeois society articulated by the french revolution. They claim, among other things, that exchange, value and so on… are originally (in their adequate form) the reign of universal freedom and equality, but that they have been perverted by money, capital, etc… History has so far failed to implement those ideas, in accordance with their genuine essence discovered by Proudhon, as Jacob for instance: the wrong history of these ideas can now give room to the true one. They must be answered: the exchange value, or even better, the money system are in fact, the foundation of equality and freedom, the disturbances occurred in the modern evolution are merely troubles inherent in this system, in other words, the realization of equality and freedom brings about inequality and despotism. - Marx, Grundrisse.

  1. Any class combines two modes of being: an economic one and a political one. The class in itself (object) defines the function it holds inside a specific mode of production; the class for itself (subject) defines the nature of its state, of its political fights and organizations; the historically mode of production, of exchange that its action is historically aiming at instituting, preserving or destroying.

  2. The social class constitutes the permanent and homogeneous reunion of human groups scattered to the different points of the productive apparatus, holding, in the face of it a similar situation and action whose tends to lead, thanks to fights through decades and centuries, with a political and social revolution, to the establishment of a new mode of production and of a new state. A new social and political structure substitutes itself to the old one for the destruction of which practical forces have organized themselves, and elements of critique of doctrine, inferred from the concrete activity of the class struggling for its emancipation, gathered into an original programme.

  3. In the sound Marxist conception, we can talk about a working class only when, within the Proletariat, can be noted a tendency to give to itself

    1. a programme, the theoretical summary of its practical experiences, setting up a voluntary, rational and stable relation between the aim, immanent in its fights, and their means and movement, between that movement (organization) and the historical and non contingent succession of situations, and able to foresee and organize a unitary action for the progressive and conscious carrying out of its aim;

    2. a method of action which, integrating the initial motives of immediate and contingent interests determined by the immediate economic situation, tends to set objectives that, in order to be common to the whole class, come at the end of its fights for the supreme goals; that is to say, inasmuch as the class tends to constitute itself into a distinct political party, opposed to all the parties and independent from all immediate kinds of organization that may engender, at its different moments, the action of the class.

  4. The object of the tactics of the communist party consists, not in creating the revolution (which springs from objectively matured historical watersheds, independent from the willingness of the classes and parties) but in foreseeing and directing its fights

    1. by integrating every elementary upsurge for their unification and their shifting from the partial fight for contingent interests towards the final fight for the historical interests of the class.

    2. by individualizing the epicentre of the revolutionary movement and foreseeing its potential shifting.

    3. by safeguarding permanent dialectical links between the final goal and each partial action.

    4. by preserving the organizational and doctrinal independence of the revolutionary party.

    5. by foreseeing the potential shifting of the situations, in order to exercise the entire level of influence that can be displayed.

    6. by maintaining the centralism of the action, the continuity of the organization.

  5. In the conditions, described by Marx of an ever growing form of production until its catastrophic fall, regenerated by its historical crisis, resolving into destructive convulsions, by means of which the capital starts afresh, carries on and generalizes its process enlarged worldwide; having reached the most complete development of its productive forces that its relations of production are wide enough to contain; having brought out from its bosom the material and intellectual living conditions of the superior relations of production intended to violently substitute themselves for the previous ones, the sole fight with a revolutionary content is the immediate fight for socialism; that is to say the dictatorship of the Proletariat. All the historically necessary mediations for this result have not been suppressed; they have been carried out by the upholding of the capitalist domination based on the counter-revolution.

  6. Once the counter-revolution has been achieved, wrecking and distorting the revolutionary movement of the beaten working class, the class struggle is historically wiped off the capitalist mode of production, the proletariat politically annihilated, confined to its mere productive function. Until the next economic explosion, the working-class is subjected to the domination of the system as passively as a law of nature but that no force ever can at any time change it, invert the fatal course of its evolution or overcome it, but only at the end of a distant and difficult revolutionary resumption, conditioned by the accomplishment of the counter-revolution and the economic crisis on one hand, and on the other hand the programmatic and organizational restoration of the Party of class, abolishing it by opposing to its historical crisis an organic system of communist claims proper to break the link of economic interests that enslave the working men to the capital that create both the conditions of the realization and the need for superior relations of production and exchanges.

  7. Until that phase, for the bourgeois counter-revolutionary violence, brought to a climax during the revolutionary phenomenon, a violence substitutes itself which is no longer political (set on the obvious protection of the armies and the police forces) but economic, that is to say, based on the anonymous, invisible and silent constraint of the scientific continuity of the process of the capitalist production, on the move of its constant accumulation. A new violence, a potential one, substitutes itself for the previous kinetic violence of the class-struggles. It makes impossible or paralyses anytime it is likely to spontaneously express itself – because of the permanent contradictions proper to the capitalist system – any non-reformist, non closely economic action of the working-class. Anticipating a whole phase of the economic development, Marx has described that phenomenon he places as the consequence of an advanced cycle of the life of the capital, the phase of real domination about which Marx scientifically set what is bound to become.

The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labour, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital’s valorization requirements. The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left on the natural laws of production, i.e., it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them. It is otherwise during the historical genesis of capitalist production. The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state and uses it to regulate wages, i.e., to force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation. - Marx, Capital, volume one.

  1. As Lenin explains it in The State and the Revolution, in total agreement with the Marx-Engels’ analysis of the counter-revolutions, after any beaten revolution, the bourgeois dictatorship renews and the tools of its oppression by improving them. After 1945, a qualitatively new and improved dictatorship substitutes itself for the previous one: the dictatorship of the capital takes the place of the bourgeois, dated one. Only a new movement of the working-class, potential if it’s not inescapable result of the catastrophic crisis of the mode of the capitalist production, is able to restore the struggle of classes which are temporarily invisible, because only economically describable in their integration into the movement of the capital.

  2. There is a Marxist theory of the crisis, which the irresponsible people who idly speechify upon revolutions, lost sight of. The crisis is an indispensable moment of the life of the capital. Marx explains that it reinstates a balance formerly progressively broken by the development itself of the capitalist production. The economic crisis puts, at last, on the agenda the destructions of capital necessary to the continuity of the process of the capitalist production. Marx describes here the catastrophic crisis of the capital.

“The last form of servitude assumed by human activity, that of wage labour on one side, capital on the other, is thereby cast off like a skin: this casting-off itself is the result of the mode of production corresponding to capital. The material and mental conditions of the negation of wage labour and of capital, themselves already the negation of earlier forms of unfree social production, are themselves results of its production process. The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms. The violent destructions of capital, not caused by external conditions but rather by those of it own preservation, this is the most striking form of warning which it is given to give room to a superior mode of production and to disappear.

… the capital will moreover attempt to reduce the allotment made to necessary labour and still more to expand the quantity of surplus labour with regard to the whole capital employed. Hence, the highest development of productive power together, with the greatest expansion of existing wealth will coincide with depreciation of capital, degradation of the worker, and a growing exhaustion of his vital powers.

These contradictions will lead to explosions, cataclysms and crises, in which momentous suspensions of labour and annihilation of a great portion of capital the latter is violently reduced to the point where it can go on. These contradictions lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide.

Yet, these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow.” - Marx, Grundrisse.

  1. The tactics of the communist party grasp the proletarian, not as an object of that society but as its actual dissolution, as an historical subject concretely working at the realization of its mission noted on its programme of class. The first clash, the first break, once the normal cycle of the capitalist accumulation has been broken, is the loss of the job (legitimate object of the terror of the dominating classes and of the tender hearted people, fervent for civil peace and for salaried slavery, as far as, however, it does not unchain the liberating subversive content it conceals) expels the working man from the production process. While, until the first fundamental act of the revolution: the revolutionary conquest of the state power, the capitalist system upholds most of its powers, summarized in the state, over the producer it expels from its process to achieve its economic rationalization, it seems constrained to unveil them (the potential violence becomes a kinetic one) as soon as social peace is questioned by the economic distress of the unemployed, as well as by the reactions aroused by the increased exploitation of the still operating labour force. But that expulsion of the producer out of the production process implies another consequence: to obviously show what the producer, the proletarian essentially already was: an absolute pauper, a destitute. The producer is no longer the hostage of whatever firm to which (forgetting in time of prosperity his proletarian condition) he identified (up to take over from the boss – thanks to the claim for self-management – for a better productive efficiency and rationality, which mean in the system of capitalist production: exploitation of labour force, reduction of the share of necessary work, increase of over-work, increased power of the objectivized labour over human labour, of the fixed capital that enthrals the producer). As an unemployed, his relation to the capital changes; it is extirpated of its singularity it was maintained in by the subordination to whatever capitalist, restricting the proletarian’s horizon to the aggressive borders of his firm, antagonistic to the other firms within the framework of the anarchic capitalist web. His transformed relation universalizes itself to the production mode, because it mediatizes itself to the latter, by means of the capital’s confrontation to the state – economic operator in charge of: first, intervening in order that, the economic crisis, quickly becoming a social crisis, should not turn into a political and general crisis of the capitalist system, second, preparing the necessary conditions to the capitalist solution of the crisis: the imperialist war. Such a result, created by the very conditions of the capitalist production, enables the formation of the working-class into party, because as the crisis is increasing (unleashing violence, generalizing the crisis), it is no longer such proletarian or even such category of proletarians who confront such capitalist, but the proletariat who faces the state. The proletariat can see in it the dialectically overthrown image of his own class power he will have to appropriate to win, on the battlefield, his historical right for emancipation.

  2. In the conditions of the real domination of the capital, to which corresponds its fascist and imperialist phase, the tactics of the communist party consider the production of the revolutionary proletariat not as a moment or a component of the capitalist accumulation – which characterizes the history of the working movement before 1914 – but as the result of its catastrophic crisis. It ensues that the practical and theoretical modes of the emergence of such a movement are utterly different from the slow, progressive and gradual production of the working movement before 1914, within which the parties of the 1919 Communist International were born from splittings, scissions and so on … Major differences will individualize the revolutionary movement to come of the working-class from the previous one: inescapable differences at least as much meaningful as the inescapable similarities. Their unity must be claimed on the programmatic plane, their difference must be defined on the organisational plane.

  3. Thus, the new revolutionary movement will not re-form a new International, but a worldwide party, because it will not federate several national organizations born in different conditions and times and for different historical actions, but will be the resultant of the forces of a single universal movement, born from universal conditions of the world market. The ancient working movement destroyed firstly by social-democracy (1919), secondly by Stalinism (1926), thirdly by fascism (1933), fourthly by democracy

    1. – the new revolutionary movement will not re-form itself from a selection of the previous movement whose organizations have become not only opportunist and revisionist, but also bourgeois socially speaking and counter-revolutionary politically speaking. The new revolutionary movement of the working-class will be the product of the fusion of the revolutionary spontaneity with the communist programme.
  4. That the class could not exist without the party does not result that the party could exist without the class. Four conditions for its birth, stated below, must be fulfilled at the same time:

    1. the sufficient maturity of the relation of production, the work of capitalism,

    2. a critical doctrine and a method of action,

    3. a situation of an historical crisis of the capitalist system,

    4. the setting-up of genuinely communist prediction, strategy, and tactics.

  5. With the crisis of the capital, an economic discontinuity occurs, for a fraction of the working-class – and also for other social strata, especially the middle ones linked to the movement of the capital – with the capitalist Gemeinwesen, as a result of the dissolution of its foundation: the enslavement of the labour-force, necessary to the extortion of surplus value. Only a small minority of proletarians can, therefore, join the class historical programme – that records, not what such and such proletarian or even the proletariat in its whole can imagine as its goal at a certain point, but that it will historically be compelled to do in accordance with its being, what is in advance shown to him from the present capitalist order (Marx) – by rejoining the communist Gemeinwesen foreshadowed by the party in the process of its formation. To accede to it, the political confrontation to the capitalist State is necessary. The party stands, both as the product and the factor of such a conflict: THE CREATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OPENS THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA OF THE REVOLUTION.

  6. The State, threatened by the proletarian’s instinct of self-preservation who struggles for his individual survival, mobilizes then its repressive machinery (political, military, economic, ideological ones) in order to safeguard its class interests. But much more than the first consequences of the crisis, individually felt, demobilizing as they are demoralizing, which isolate such and such proletarian from such other one, such and such fraction of proletarians, reduced to unemployment from such other one still enslaved to production, the very reactionary violence of the bourgeois State produces the revolutionary reaction, favours the collective and unifying action against the oppressive capital and its political embodiment: the State. THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION WILL ONLY START AFTER THE NEW INESCAPABLE JANUARY 1905 WHICH WILL FLOOD IN THE BLOOD THE DEMOCRATIC ILLUSIONS.

  7. Social-fascism, fascism, democratic parties, irregular forces, civic leagues and all the military forms of the anti-proletarian repression supplement and achieve the capitalist function of the State, which stands as the defence committee of the capitalist class, a fraction of it, at last, the unifying organ of its different components.

  8. Though inner to – economic – or outer to – political – the firm, the first revolutionary moments are but intimately full of the immediate and polymorphous object of the struggles in which they stay, by means of which they get organized and intensified, though these very fights only state a purely negative negation of the epiphenomenon consequences alone that the economic crisis glorifies at the end of its blind logic – the conscience of the failure linked to any non concerted and non specifically communist action – arises from any confrontation – (whenever it is a violent one). The production of this conscience will become all the more actual since through the struggles, the return between what the engaged action aims at achieving and what it actually achieves will prove to be more and more minus for the working-class. Correlatively, a collective will to get organized to defeat will take shape in the class, all the more conscious since the aims of limited action, first pursued, will appear – as the fights will re-occur and become widespread – as the true origin of each partial defeat; this will inexorably be linked to any economic action and claim, that is to say to any movement unable, because of its means and its ends, to break the links of bourgeois interests that submit them to the capital. Likewise, with the lack, or the inadequacy of organization, the apparent and formal causes of these defeats will symmetrically be explained.

  9. The great 1919-1923 revolutionary demonstrations of the developed capitalist countries (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy) have taught that the capitalist class, educated by a thousand and fifty year domination, and though economically weakened by the economic crisis, uses to restore and to reconstitute its strength, proven methods of action with a double aim: 1) To concentrate its strength on the points of bigger resistance of the proletarian enemies (direct tactics), 2) to try to lead away the working struggles (indirect tactics), by means of 1) The State that unifies the capital’s strength, 2) The social democracy in each firm that scatters the proletarian strength. Moreover, based on contingent divergences of interests, the capital aims at opposing the workers kept subordinated to it to the workers expelled from the economic process; the former being shown the unemployment as a punishment to their rebellion, the latter being promised work as a price for their submission.

  10. Any trade-union action, any economic claim institute the division between the proletarians, favour the competition within the class. As temporary and illusory as the eventually satisfied claims may be, they can be obtained in the framework of the upholding capitalist production only if, in one hand, they do not upset such a framework, in the other hand, if they can entail an increased exploitation of the still functioning labour force: increased extortion of surplus-value; extension of the day’s work, speeding-up of the rates, decrease of the real wages and all the forms which have as an immediate result to increase the capitalist despotism over the worker. In the other hand, such claims hamper the natural unification of the class, for, as they don’t show objectives set beyond the slave system of wages, they cannot mobilize the workers already out of the process of production and thus directly confronted to the political actions, because in total, no longer partial, opposition with the mode of capitalist production.

  11. Because any revolutionary movement progressively resumes its course up to where the previous one had stopped, the struggle for the unification of the economic fight to the political fight will be continued towards its completion. Such a movement will not unilaterally repeat political struggle and economic struggle (whose division was based on the maximum programme/minimum programme distinction) but will achieve not an union (which institutionalizes two distinct organizations keeping their division) but a fusion meaning that the attributions traditionally allotted to the trade-union (that is to say the economic action) are from now on moved to the class party because of the very transformation of those attributions historically eliminating any reality apart from the politic, any defensive function. Their integration to the class-party will make them offensive moments of the revolutionary evolution, and give them the nature of proletarian and communist solutions to the historical crisis of the capital. Their organic identification to the political struggle, that is to say to the class struggle, will turn them into revolutionary factors of the delivery of the material conditions and of the social forms of the socialist transformation of society.

  12. To denounce as conformist, that is to say anti-revolutionary, the trade-union action for its economic content – after this one has successively been anti-formist before 1914, reformist after 1914 – does not amount to denying their reality to the present economic claims concerning the workers’ daily life (unsatisfied even in a time of capitalist prosperity), neither to not getting organized in order to satisfy them, but to basing the tactics from the prospect of the economic chaos, of the catastrophic social consequences the crisis of the capital bears inside itself, with the recession it entails, the resulting misery for all the destitute. It is not also fulfilling whatever ethical or mystical extremism, exclusively concerned, like the anarchists, to achieve a moral ideal. It is asserting the doctrine of the working-class, confirmed by the historical experience of the proletarian revolutions that: with the actuality of the crisis, as legitimate and urgent as the social and economic claims relating to one category of workers may be, they cannot effectively be satisfied because they clash not the subjective resistance of opposing forces, but to the objective abilities of the system, all the more reduced as the revolutionary movements have more disrupted the production. The communist party will, thus, propose a system of measures which, organically linked to the effective developments of real struggles, will favour the revolutionary transformation of the present capitalist system of production, will prepare the despotic intervention of the communist party in the capitalist process of production and circulation and will prefigure the new economic politics that the dictatorship of the proletariat will instaure.

  13. Within the context of the achieved capitalist domination, having developed the basis of socialism, such economic movements are reactionary and illusory. Reactionary, because of the system itself and its development, illusory, because of the very crisis of the system opening the revolutionary way of its historical liquidation.

  14. As the economic signs of the crisis of the capital, which will explode at the critical point of their accumulation, are showing, the parties of the democracy and the economic organizations of the working class request from the capital the petit-bourgeois and reactionary measures that may reverse the wheel of history and may avoid the crisis. Among these measures, the raise of salaries, proper to increase the working classes consumption. These are old recipes of the traditional reformism by which no salary has ever been increased nor any crisis avoided. Illusory in their effects, the petit-bourgeois solutions are all the less real in their results. They spare the Bourgeois State that actively caters for the preparation of the conditions for the capitalist resolution of the economic crisis: the imperialist war. Marx had already denounced, in The Capital, the counter-revolutionary traps of reformism.

It is sheer tautology to say that crises are causes by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system does not know any other modes of consumption than effective one, except that of sub forma pauperis or of the swindler. That commodities are unsaleable means only that no effective purchasers have been found for them, i.e., consumers (since commodities are bought in the final analysis for productive or individual consumption). But if one were to attempt to five this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification by saying that the working-class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption. From the point of view of these advocates of sound and simple (!) common sense, such a period should rather remove the crisis. It appears, then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily and that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis. - Marx, Capital, volume two.

  1. With today’s reform of the firm, the capital develops the legal framework of the limits within which it intends to quell the revolutionary action, confining the confrontations to disputes about technical abilities proper to each firm. That way, the capital sets as many obstacles to a generalization of the economic movements that will break up in purely structural disputes proper to each firm or group of firms. Thus the capital tries to first check the class-struggles, sterilizing the process of its production, secondly lead astray the confrontations towards the economic ground, third prepare this very ground by atomizing it that is to say, by artificially creating as many individual cases as firms, fourth pervert the revolutionary awareness presenting the crisis as a result of a bad management rather than the historical ending of a production mode.

  2. On the other hand, the reform of the firm establishes an already practice existing (effective in Germany as soon as 1918) of the trade-union’s integration to the demands of the capitalist development. But it more directly aims at the actualization of this integration to the crisis conditions (negotiations of redundancies, of lowering the wages, of closing the firms, of increasing the rates, and so on…) by materializing the general subservience of the trade-union to the capital, to the contingent and local reality of each firm on its own. The reform, thus, plans to institute formal relations of dependence between the economic evolution of the firm; and the defensive action of the trade-union; linking the latter to the destinies of the former. The trade-unions of the developed capitalist industrial countries (United States of America, England, Germany) whose existence denied the class-struggle, only show, in this respect, to the trade-unions of the less developed countries the pictures of their own future. The social democracy has, thus, realized fascism since it has turned the 19th and the early 20th century class-trade-unions, ancient war schools of the proletarian action, into factors of the accumulation of the capital.

  3. The revolutionary action of the working-class – from which the communist party will re-emerge – once its historical programme will have been regained by it, presupposes that, as it’s developing, makes clear by its own praxis, the counter revolutionary nature (or aspect) of both the trade-unions and any economic association. However, the bourgeois content of such a nature will only appear in a fooled form in the action takes place on the economic field, that is to say, that of a competition with the trade-union, setting against it, for instance, a greater effectiveness of protest. Although such effectiveness won’t failed to be demonstrated – the trade-unions betraying both the class and immediate interests of the proletariat – and though, in another hand, the inevitableness of such purely negative experiences (linking the revolutionary recovery to the development of economic associations) is the tribute of a 50 year-interruption of class-struggle and election stifling – that will bring the practical working movement below a stage beyond which it had partially gone during the first quarter of the 20th century struggles – the process of the production of the revolutionary proletariat will be that of its progressive autonomisation from the social democracy within which the capital intends to confine the revolutionary struggles and shut in the future of the productive forces that aim to communism and therefore safeguard its power embodied in the state.