Europe and the world economic crisis, class autonomy and the essential need for a revolutionary party
The fact that Europe – this bourgeois and petit-bourgeois myth that has filled the post-war period – is fast falling to pieces is clear to everyone. Real or threatened centrifugal tendencies are growing in number; the manu militari breaks (Ukraine) remain open wounds; every other day war and the “overwhelming” role of Germany are on the agenda (as in the recent “declarations” of UK’s Prime Minister Cameron and the ex-Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson); social disintegration with all its disastrous effects on the community and on the individual, which has started to affect large portions of the half-classes, too, is on the increase and with it chauvinist and populist rancours, violence and abuses; barriers are put up and borders re-established, the “Schengen” area is suspended for months; and the so-called “migrants’ crisis” with its daily dramas and the constant, obscene buck-passing of responsibility, is used and exploited to widen gaps and aggravate opposing positions, accusations and blackmail…
This is not surprising. Since the end of the second, imperialist world bloodbath, we have spoken of Europe as a “jungle of nationalisms” [1], and as such incapable of assuming any unified and centralized order. Indeed, a common market and currency are not sufficient to hide the reality of a capitalism which, as it spreads across the whole of the globe (through that very “globalization” that is not recent history but has been with it every since its beginnings), maintains a national basis and this, in times of crisis, makes its weight felt all-powerfully in the complex and merciless game being played in the competition of all against all.
Moreover, this situation is part and parcel of the more general crisis of the capitalist system and regards not only Europe, which is a pot of clay amongst pots of steel: China is experiencing an ongoing “slowdown”, the term tactfully used by the international press to avoid referring to “recession”; India and Japan are doing no better; Africa is increasingly becoming the terrain for conquest and destruction by international capital; the Middle East is paying for its geo-political, strategic and economic position with its own blood; and what about those “beacons of XXI-century socialism”, in the words of our many, home-grown idiots? In Brazil the usual, pitiful democratic waltz of scandals and mini-scandals is unable to hide the reality of a profound economic and social crisis, whilst in Venezuela plain hunger is on the increase, as staple goods continue to disappear one after the other…
However, in this disintegrating Europe that torments the nightmares of the bourgeoisie and the half-classes, the first, interesting symptoms of social fault lines are to be seen. In France action against the “Loi Travail” has been (and continues to be, as we write at the end of May 2016) ample and determined, with tough and widespread demonstrations, accompanied (of course!) by the same old complaints about casseurs, about “recourse to violence”, about the demonstrators’ “non-democratic methods”… Other demonstrations (over the same issues: the attack on the working class, licence to licence, precariousness and flexibility, deteriorating living and working conditions) have taken place in Belgium and in particular in Brussels, despite the city being in the grip of military forces since the bloody attacks by so-called “Islamic terrorism”. These are encouraging signs, which we communists observe and welcome enthusiastically, attempting, as far as we can, to be present at least as a factor that may clarify and provide orientation, though not yet organize or direct. In this regard, with reference to the struggles in these “National” sectors of the European (and hopefully tomorrow worldwide) proletariat, it is worth highlighting a dynamic process that reoccurs and should be kept carefully in mind. The media have given ample coverage to the so-called Nuits Debout, or “Standing Nights”: i.e. the entry onto the field of a multiform, petit-bourgeois aggregate which, partly modelled on the American “Occupy” and partly on the Spanish “Indignados”, has filled the night-time squares in many French cities with its usual, faint-hearted rituals. This evident reaction to the progressive crumbling of the half-classes comes parallel to the rise on the thermometer of the social situation and tends to superimpose itself onto the reaction of the proletariat, swallowing it, blunting it and finally suffocating its edge and determination. These are the same dynamics, though on a far smaller scale (since the “welfare state” still acts as the prime buffer), that the Tunisian and Egyptian proletarian movements suffered from in past years, being rapidly swallowed up and distorted by the “Arab Springs”.
The class avant-gardes must take this trend into serious consideration, implicit as it is in the social dynamics developing in response to the profound crisis of the capitalist system: they must work to define class autonomy and defend it from the mortal embrace of the undifferentiated, popular and populist, democratic and pacifist and substantially anti-proletarian magma, typical of the moribund half-classes, opposing all this through an increasingly necessary internationalist and class perspective: the enemy is at home, but “our home” is the world! This, and only this, is the sense of our internationalism!
Faced with the obscene ruthlessness of the “migrants’ crisis” and the inconceivable, daily suffering of enormous masses of uprooted, wounded, lost human beings and with the reappearance of scenes of brave fighting, yet still fragile in terms of organization and of limited range, comes a new and urgent need for real international solidarity with the struggles of any sector of a “national” proletariat that has at last taken the destiny of its own conditions into its own hands – not just the solidarity of words, the usual proclamations and declarations, but of practice, in the harsh but passionate and all-involving class battle: support in the form of strike action, fund collecting, picket lines, halts in production, goods and transport, in the clear awareness that the attack to one is an attack to us all.
But to defend, spread and consolidate this class autonomy in a class and international perspective, what is increasingly needed is the presence of the revolutionary party, an active and operational force founded on theory and practice, the essential factor for organization and direction. It is impossible to work on this autonomy without making efforts to reach this objective methodically and constantly, with determination and patience. Whoever tries to avoid, delay or conceal the problem of reinforcing and establishing world roots for the revolutionary party takes up a position on the other side of the barricades.
June 2016
[1] See also, amongst others, “Europa, giungla di nazionalismi”, il programma comunista, n.2/1958; and “Il mito dell’Europa unita”, il programma comunista, nn. 11, 12/1962.
International Communist Party