the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Dec 8, 2024
The following is a translation of large parts of the concluding wrap-up at the 54th Congress of Lutte Ouvriére. A written text appeared in the December 2024 issue of Lutte de Classe, #244, the political journal of Lutte Ouvriére.
The times ahead will be tough. Tough for our class, the proletariat. Tough for society. Tough for humanity. Tough, of course, for us militants. They have already been hard for ten years for those living in eastern Ukraine, directly involved in an active war. It couldn’t be worse in Gaza, nine-tenths of which have already been destroyed. It’s been hard for those living in Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East. As for militants, it has been hard, in varying degrees, and especially for our comrades in Haiti and the Ivory Coast. Times are hard in other regions far beyond the two areas currently involved in high-intensity warfare that attracts the attention of the Western media. From Ethiopia to Sudan, etc., wars, which not many people talk about, have claimed more victims, deaths and destruction than Ukraine and the Middle East. It’s also hard on the countless victims of famine in poor countries, whether caused by the economic crisis or wars and sanctions.
Add the climate catastrophe to the list of catastrophes for which imperialism is responsible. In our editorial a month ago, we noted the reaction of the population of Valencia against the Spanish King and Prime Minister. The cries of “assassins” were justified by their inability to immediately mobilize the army to search for those drowned in the underground parking garages. All the radio and TV stations were forced to bear witness to the population’s anger, both at the King and at the very democratically elected Prime Minister, because Spain is located in Europe, and this could happen—and has already happened—in Germany, France and Belgium. These are rich European countries, great imperialist powers, which are quick to mobilize their armies when it comes to keeping their former colonies on a tight leash.
While governments—ours included, back when we had one—are engaged in hypocritical campaigns calling for a change in individual behavior, such as turning off the lights on the way out, they pass over the responsibility of big business, i.e., the thirst for profit of its capitalist owners, who could care less about climate change unless they can save money on the measures to be taken.
The economic crisis and wars are increasingly merging to form a single entity over which no one has control, least of all the big bourgeoisie that claims to manage the world.
In the three or four years since the economic crisis was coupled with the spread of armed conflicts, the situation has been worsening from one year to the next—and everyone can see it. For the moment, we haven’t seen the worst of it, and we can only observe the incapacity of those who run the world in the name of the bourgeoisie, who know nothing other than how to manage their impotence and make the exploited and oppressed classes pay for it.
It’s pointless to speculate on how war will generalize, at what pace, starting at which moment when local wars will expand into regional wars, and how all these wars will coalesce into World War III. In many ways, World War III has already begun. Not with the same intensity as in Gaza, Lebanon or parts of Ukraine. But we know it. Just by looking at how things have evolved over the last three years, we see war growing and intensifying.
As for the economic crisis, the increased production of all kinds of weapons and the construction of bunkers in Germany isn’t enough to make the crisis go away. We shouldn’t forget that the current crisis has not yet seen a financial collapse that would give it a completely different dimension.
What is clear is that the proletariat is not prepared to oppose war, let alone prevent it. In one of his last texts, “Bonapartism, Fascism and War,” dictated on August 20, 1940, just hours before he was assassinated by Stalin, Trotsky returned to the previous war to assert: “We were caught unprepared in 1914.
“During the last war, not only the proletariat in general, but also its vanguard and, in a certain sense, the vanguard of that vanguard was caught unprepared. The elaboration of the principles of revolutionary policy toward the war began at a time when the war was already in full blaze, and the military machine exercised unchallenged command. One year after the outbreak of the war, the small revolutionary minority was still compelled to adapt itself to a centrist majority at the Zimmerwald Conference. Prior to the February Revolution and even afterwards, the revolutionary elements did not see themselves as contenders for power, but only the extreme left opposition. Even Lenin relegated socialist revolution to a more or less distant future. [...]
“In 1915, Lenin in his writings referred to the revolutionary war that the victorious proletariat would have to wage. But this was a question of an indefinite historical perspective, not of tomorrow’s task. The revolutionary wing’s attention was centered on the question of defending the capitalist homeland. Naturally, revolutionaries answered this question in the negative. This was entirely correct. But this purely negative answer served as a basis for propaganda and for training the cadres. But it could not win over the masses, who did not want a foreign conqueror.
“In Russia prior to the war, the Bolsheviks constituted four-fifths of the proletarian vanguard, that is, of the workers participating in political life (newspapers, elections, etc.). After the February Revolution, unlimited rule passed into the hands of the partisans of national defense, the Mensheviks and the S.R.s.
“True enough, the Bolsheviks in the space of eight months won the overwhelming majority of workers. But the decisive role in this conquest was played not by the refusal to defend the bourgeois homeland, but by the slogan: “All power to the Soviets.” And only by this revolutionary slogan!
“The criticism of imperialism, its militarism, the refusal to defend bourgeois democracy, and so on, could never have won the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks.”
Since a previous congress, when we quoted the following lines, written by Rosa Luxemburg on the 20th anniversary of Marx’s death, our outlook has not changed.
“If we had to sum up in a few words what Marx has done for the workers’ movement today, we could say that Marx discovered the modern working class as a historical category, i.e., as a class subject to specific conditions of existence and whose place in history responds to precise laws. Before Marx, there undoubtedly existed a mass of wage workers in capitalist countries who, driven to solidarity by the similarity of their existences within bourgeois society, groped for a way out of their situation, and sometimes for a bridge to the promised land of socialism. Marx only elevated them to the rank of a class by linking them to a particular historical task, the task of conquering political power in order to bring about a socialist transformation of society....
“It was only Marx who succeeded in placing working-class politics on the terrain of conscious class struggle, and thus forging it into a lethal weapon against the existing social order. The basis of today’s social-democratic [today we would say revolutionary communist] working-class politics is the materialist conception of history in general, and Marx’s theory of capitalist development in particular. Only those for whom the essence of social-democratic politics and the essence of Marxism are an equal mystery can conceive of social-democracy, and more generally of conscious working-class politics, outside Marx’s doctrine.”
In one of his last programmatic texts, the Alarm Manifesto of the 4th International, written in May 1940, five months before his assassination, Trotsky asserted: “The length of the document is determined by the need to restate our entire program in relation to the war. The party cannot preserve its tradition without periodically repeating the general ideas of our program.”
If we don’t find an equivalent formulation in Lenin, we need only read all his basic political works to be aware that he’s always banging on the same nail. So, if we quote Rosa Luxemburg’s phrases once again, it’s because they encapsulate what is essential in Marxism, i.e., what is fundamental to Marxism. But there are also things they don’t say, but which are as eloquent as what they do say. It’s not just the fundamental idea of the Communist Manifesto: “The history of every society up to the present day has been the history of class struggles.” This observation underpins the founding idea of scientific socialism. Until now, “philosophers have simply interpreted the world in different ways. What matters is to transform it” (Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”). In other words, there is not only the scientific observation, the scientific analysis of how capitalist society works, but above all the role of the proletariat.
Yes, what distinguishes revolutionary communists is that they are not commentators, nor journalists, nor chatterboxes who pose as intellectuals, interpreting the world and describing all its ills, but never designating the social class which is capable of transforming the world and which is the only one able to do so, beyond its current state of mind, beyond the evils from which society suffers at any given moment.
Being a revolutionary communist means more than simply recognizing that the history of humanity is the history of class struggle. It means designating the proletariat as the only class whose struggle, pushed to the limit, i.e., to the point of seizing power, will destroy capitalism.
But in saying what the foundation of Marxism is, Rosa Luxemburg also said what it is not. To take just one example: even the most honest ecologists—and there are a few of them, not among the politicians who stand for ecology or ecologism, but among the scientists who are looking for solutions to the many consequences of capitalism in relation to ecology (global warming, species extinction, etc.). Even these scientists pose the problems without ever, or rarely, calling into question the capitalist organization of society, and even less often do they designate the social class that has the historical role and capacity to destroy capitalism.
Let’s weigh each of Rosa Luxemburg’s phrases when she notes: “Before Marx, there undoubtedly existed in capitalist countries a mass of wage-earners who, driven to solidarity by the similarity of their existences within bourgeois society, groped for a way out of their situation and sometimes a bridge to the promised land of socialism.” That mass of workers didn’t need the science provided by Marx to fight and defend their conditions of existence. But Marx’s contribution, that is, Marxism, was to elevate the proletariat “to the rank of a class by linking them to a particular historical task: the task of conquering political power with the aim of bringing about the socialist transformation of society.”
This junction of the workers’ movement, or more precisely its avant-garde, with Marxism, i.e., the scientific analysis of capitalism and its functioning, was a fundamental discovery, both for the workers’ movement and, by the same token, for humanity and its future.
It was a fundamental discovery that first social-democratic reformism, then Stalinism, have destroyed and completely forgotten. But how? Through what defeats and betrayals? We won’t be returning to it this year. We devoted a large part of last year’s congress to it. Episodes from the history of the workers’ movement are, and must be, part of our collective political culture. They are its foundation. We need to acquire and pass on knowledge and understanding of its successes, as well as its (far more numerous) defeats, so that they inform all our politics.
That’s who we are. It is our reason for existing. Today, we are perhaps the only ones who wish to transmit all of this. Not because of the wealth of our own experience, which is very limited, but because Marxist ideas and above all their connection with the workers’ movement, complemented by Lenin, who proved it in practice, are part of the heritage we have received from the workers’ movement of the past.
Class struggle as the driving force of history was thought of by others before Marx (Michelet). But Marx was the first to establish the link between the scientific analysis of the functioning of capitalism and the path to its overthrow. For us today, there is no question of revising Marxism. Because of this, we are accused of sectarianism. Sectarian, we are not. In May–June 1968, we had a united policy vis-à-vis the other organizations of the Trotskyist movement. What characterizes us is our faithfulness to Marxist reasoning, which we are the only ones to defend. But even more than this, we are characterized by our awareness that the political capital bequeathed to us by our predecessors was the pinnacle of revolutionary science, elaborated in extreme situations where class struggle was exacerbated to a maximum point.
Yes, to be a Marxist is to fight for the conquest of political power by the working class! That’s where Marxism begins, and as long as you don’t identify with that task, as long as you don’t see the evolution of society and all the current upheavals through those eyes, with that perspective and, to be more concrete, with that goal in mind, you’re not a Marxist. To be a Marxist does not mean to sympathize with the plight of workers, nor to help them retire at 60 rather than 62. To be a Marxist means to aim for the destruction of capitalist society in the only way possible: by wresting political power from the bourgeoisie. It means campaigning for the working class to seize political power, expropriate the bourgeoisie and replace capitalist organization by taking over the management of the whole of society.
We don’t see the working class only as an exploited social class, oppressed, a social class that is to be pitied, but the social class that is potentially capable of fighting and pushing the struggle to its ultimate conclusion, the destruction of the bourgeois class as the exploiting class. Everything else follows from this. To be a revolutionary communist is not to be a reformist, even if we must also fight for the slightest reforms. Internationalism is not solidarity, even if it’s in the proletariat’s interest to be in solidarity with a multitude of oppressed social categories, and even to contest with nationalists, feminists and others for the leadership of their struggles. More broadly, all the demands put forward at an elementary level in strikes or in major class confrontations are meaningless if they are not carried out with the aim of achieving the destruction of capitalism.
The revolutionary character of the Transitional Program does not lie in this or that particular demand. Each can be transformed into a bland reformist brew, such as the sliding scale translated into a cost-of-living formula. The revolutionary character of the Transitional Program lies in the fact that, following the dynamic of workers’ struggles, it aims to advance workers’ consciousness toward the need to take power. Even the best and most accurate phrases are only phrases. What changes society are social forces, i.e., social classes. When you forget this, you can’t understand anything, and at best you could ask for a membership card in one of the organizations that call themselves the 4th International, but which have nothing revolutionary left in them. The most radical demands of the Transitional Program have no meaning and no virtue if they do not lead step to the following step, i.e., to the will to destroy bourgeois power in order to replace it with workers’ power.
An article from Inprecor (a magazine of information and analysis, published under the responsibility of the executive board of the 4th International, although it states that the articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors), from May 2024, entitled “World Crisis, Conflicts and Wars: Which Internationalism for the 21st Century?,” is an interview with Pierre Rousset. At the bottom of the page, there is a note describing him as “a long-standing leader of the 4th International, and a militant of the New Anti-Capitalist Party. He helped found and directed the 4th International Institute for Research and Training (IIRE-IIRF) in Amsterdam and Paris.” It’s worth pointing out that this interview represents the policy of a group that claims to be Trotskyist! Well, in this programmatic article, there’s not a word about the division of society into classes, not a word about class struggle, not a word about Marxism, Bolshevism or Trotskyism.
Readers will learn a few new expressions, such as “multidimensional global crisis” and “polycrisis.” They will also learn that the word “internationalism” can just as easily be replaced by “solidarity.” He could just as easily have added the expression “Let’s love one another,” 2000 years late, with the signature “Jesus Christ”!
If, for example, there were a rise in extreme right-wing ideas, and we had to distribute our newsletters in companies where extreme right-wing militants were present—we’ve seen such situations—we’d obviously have to defend our distribution. The danger to our distribution could impact outside militants and perhaps even those inside.
The very nature of economic crises is that they are likely to set in motion social categories that are threatened, or feel threatened. What are these categories? In what order do they fight? To what extent can the bourgeoisie and its servants set them against each other?
The near future will turn around such issues. Some form of mobilization of farmers is already underway.
And, to give just one figure, the number of SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) bankruptcies recorded by the Banque de France over the past twelve months exceeds 5,300. In other words, over the past year, more than 5,300 SMEs have had to close up shop. The previous record dates back to the period following the 2008 subprime crisis, when there were around 4,800 bankruptcies. When you look at the bankruptcy curve, it’s been rising steadily for the past two years. And there’s no sign of it abating.
Behind the rising figures for small and medium-sized business bankruptcies, there are whole sections of the petty bourgeoisie driven to anger. Anger against whom? Against the big bourgeoisie, against the bankers who are pushing them into bankruptcy, or against the working class? Or against any of its components (“immigrants invading us,” “civil servants too well paid for what they do,” “the unemployed who are unemployed can’t cross the street to find work,” etc.)? In this area, we have a little experience of the past when the adversaries we had to fight against were the Stalinists, but today they no longer have the necessary clout to try and keep us out.
Let’s not forget that workplace bulletins, invented in the context of the situation in France at a certain time (that of small groups of a few militants for whom it was a form of expression that could be assured even under difficult conditions), proved to be useful instruments in situations as varied as those in Martinique and Guadeloupe, and in the United States, and later also in Ivory Coast and even Haiti. If we had militant comrades in the Ukraine, there’s no reason why, despite the war, we couldn’t continue to circulate bulletins, and not just by internal distribution, but perhaps, at least from time to time, by external distribution.
For the time being, although there are occasional reactions among workers, to take the recent example of Michelin, we can feel the atmosphere charged with electricity in the face of the bosses’ attacks, and for good reason! When a management announces plans for layoffs at a company, we should go ahead, sending not only retired comrades from the company but also the outside comrades around them. We have to be attentive, but above all we have to be reactive. Don’t be afraid to jump ahead. Propose today what people will be ready to do tomorrow. You need to be in a position to sense the climate, gauge anger and propose actions that will enable you to gauge the state of mind.
What to do and how? We obviously can’t provide a “little red book” or a “militant breviary,” in the style of the pamphlets that flourished in the May ’68 period, giving advice on what to do when confronted by the police, and so on. Obviously, that’s not how things work. A struggle, all struggles require a policy that we can’t discuss in general terms, except to say that we must do everything we can to be part of it, and that we must have as our objective that, during the mobilization, the workers in the company choose the leadership of their struggle through a democratic strike committee. Without talking about a “militant’s breviary,” we must all keep in mind our program, the Transitional Program, written at a time different from our own, but not so remote for all that. Of course, we don’t know how the crisis will evolve, and therefore we can’t know which slogans to put forward, nor in which order. At one of our congresses a few years ago, we had the opportunity to discuss the speed with which inflation, and the extent of it, brought the objective of a sliding wage scale to the fore.
To conclude, let’s insist that our identity, our reason for existing is to militate for the international communist revolution, which can be triggered, as Lenin said in Left Wing Communism, by “a circumstance as ‘unforeseen’ and as ‘insignificant’ as one of those thousand and one dishonest tricks of reactionary militarism (the Dreyfus affair) to bring people within a hair’s breadth of civil war,” but which should end with the proletariat seizing power. How and where will this happen? We don’t know. But our fundamental objective is there. The issue of solidarity may have given rise to various discussions among our comrades. But no matter how important a goal solidarity may seem at a given moment, it has a limited place in the history of humanity and for its future.
These are our fundamental ideas and commitments. But this commitment can be realized only if there are women and men—activists willing to devote their lives to it. As Marxists, we are convinced that capitalism cannot be the future of humanity. Marxism—that is, Leninism, Trotskyism—remains the best guide so that social revolution ceases to be a dream and becomes a fighting objective for the fight of future generations of workers. We said that the times ahead will be hard. But the hardest times don’t stop history. In many ways, the opposite is true. Hard times are indispensable, so to speak, to push women, men and above all young people into militant activity. It is indispensable for selecting them, for teaching them how to be inventive, how to resist repression and difficult conditions. Our comrades in Africa and, above all, Haiti, give us an idea of this.
While we are wary of predictions, there is a far greater chance that the present generation here will regress to Haitian conditions, than the opposite, that the comrades of Haiti will experience the privileged conditions we have here. We need to have the courage and, above all, the political capacity to resist by finding the appropriate means to do so! The parties to be built, the International, will be the spokespersons for a historic necessity and the architects of its fulfillment. In rejecting, in our text on the international situation, the statement made by the American historian Francis Fukuyama on The End of History in 1992, we wrote that “The laws of historical development, that is, the lives and actions of the eight billion or so human beings who inhabit the planet, are infinitely more powerful than the ramblings of an individual or even the disorderly agitation of all the world’s decision-makers.”
Let’s add, to paraphrase Engels in The Origin of the Family, that it is here, in the victorious struggle to establish communism, that true history will begin. Humanity will finally emerge from barbarism, from class society, and begin the conscious part of its civilized history. But this history can only begin once the power of the bourgeoisie has been overthrown by the victory of the proletarian revolution!