Capitalist Europe is again in crisis. The revolutionary upsurge in France in May 1968 was the clearest expression of this, but other unmistakable signs show that new explosions are inevitable.
In Italy one strike wave after another leads to increasingly sharp confrontations with the repressive forces of the bourgeois state, with parliamentary "democracy" near paralysis, and with the university and high-school students on the march.
In Spain the harsh repression employed by the decaying Franco regime no longer blocks the workers, students and oppressed nationalities from adopting increasingly radical forms of struggle, but even stirs them up.
In France neither concessions nor repressive measures have been able to break the militancy of the radical youth, while the economic policy of the Gaullist regime is paving the way for a new upsurge of workers' struggles.
In Britain the contradictions between capital and labor are becoming sharper and sharper. They are expressed in the growing opposition to the various antiunion projects of the Wilson government, the growing antagonism between the unions and the leadership of the Labour party, and an increasing tendency to raise new demands such as workers control and to resort to new forms of struggle (large militant mass demonstrations) which threaten the very basis of traditional and reformist policies in the country where traditional parliamentarism was born.
Even in West Germany, the most stable of the big capitalist countries in Europe, the radicalization of the students and the economic recession of 1966-67 have engendered social unrest.
Effect of the Social Crisis on Class Relations
This crisis of capitalist Europe must be viewed in historical perspective and in the framework of world developments. It is but a new manifestation of the decline of the world capitalist system that set in with the first world war and that has led three times to large-scale revolutionary upsurges on this continent: in 1918-23, 1932-37, and 1944-48.
Capitalist property and the bourgeois national state increasingly hamper the development of the productive forces, leading periodically to wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions. The historical crisis of European capitalism was exacerbated by the victory of the October 1917 Revolution, by the victory of the Yugoslav Revolution in 1945, by the elimination of capitalism through bureaucratic-military means in Eastern Europe after World War II, by the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, by the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and by the tendency of the colonial revolution to become converted into a permanent revolution, breaking with capitalism and thus reducing the role once played by the colonial and semicolonial countries in assuring vast markets for the products of European capitalism.
The delay in the European socialist revolution does not offset the historical crisis of capitalism. The responsibility for this delay lies with the traditional leaderships of the working class that failed to seize the opportunities for a victorious socialist revolution. In 1918-23, it was the Social Democracy; in 1932-37, 1944-48, and recently in France, it was Stalinism aided and abetted by the Social Democracy.
In the industrially advanced countries there are no hopeless economic situations for the monopolistic bourgeoisie. Even the most acute crisis, whether it be social (as in Germany in 1923) or economic (as in the big depression of 1929-33), can be followed by a new upsurge in the economy, even a new large-scale development of the productive forces (as in the past fifteen years), if the working class does not utilize these opportunities to overthrow the system.
But each of these periods of economic revival have carried more and more contradictions that have engendered new and sharper class conflicts, because of the general downward trend of world capitalism.
The crisis of European capitalism -- like that of the crisis of the world capitalist system as a whole -- is an overall social crisis. It is a crisis in the fundamental relations of production between capital and labor, and not only, or merely, an economic crisis of overproduction in the narrowest sense of the term. Both the long-range and more immediate general tendencies of the capitalist economic system unquestionably influence the behavior of all social classes in a profound way, beginning with the bourgeoisie and the working class. The new crisis that has appeared in capitalist Europe today is unquestionably linked to the slowdown in economic growth of the past few years, to the increase in productive capacity; the rise in structural unemployment, particularly among the youth; to the crisis in the world monetary system; and to the pressure which all these factors exercise on the capitalists in all countries, leading them to resort to deflationary policies and to antiunion legislation in order to counteract the falling rate of profit and the decline in their share of exports on the world market.
But it is to be noted that the present deepening crisis of European capitalism does not coincide with a severe slump of the 1929-33 type, nor even with a generalized recession, although one may well break out in the coming years.
However, far from testifying to any greater stability of the system, the absence of a severe crisis of overproduction and unemployment on a pre-World War II scale only underlines the incapacity of the system to resolve its basic contradictions. For the fact is that even under such relatively "favorable" conditions of economic development, the elements of social crisis and social revolution have come to the surface; and the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, the contradiction arising out of private property and wage labor, has been posed with a sharpness beyond anything previously seen in the West.
The current crisis is appearing precisely as an overall crisis of the decaying social system, and not just a struggle between the capitalists and workers over division of the national income. More is involved than the growing revolt of the working class against the way capitalism mismanages the economy, squanders wealth, diverts resources, maintains poverty and unemployment, increases inequality and exploitation, while the tremendous advances of science and technology have created all the material requisites for eliminating these social evils. What is involved in this crisis is a growing revolt of the workers against the basic nature of capitalism -- against the right of capital to command the machines and the men in the factories and in the economy, against the class structure of society as such. That is why the crisis is spreading inexorably in all fields of social activity.
The state and its repressive forces, the manipulation of the mass media by big business, the class nature of law and justice, the subjection of science and education to the needs of the capitalists, and the commercialization of art -- all are being brought under question.
All over Europe today, radical working-class and student youth are challenging every one of these aspects of bourgeois class rule and bourgeois society. Nothing expresses more clearly the historical crisis of European capitalism than the fact that the bourgeoisie has been cut off from the majority of the youth, including a considerable sector of its own youth as well.
The Crisis of European Capitalist "Unification"
In this context, the crisis of "European unification," of the trend towards economic integration of capitalist Europe, takes on a highly symbolic meaning. The betrayal of the post-World War II revolutionary possibilities by the Stalinist and Social Democratic leaderships, plus the massive help from American imperialism, assured the capitalist class in the fifties and early sixties of a period of more rapid economic growth and a temporary decline in the political militancy of the working class.
Capitalism then set in motion a process of capitalist unification of Europe designed to overcome at least the sharpest contradictions between the operations of big business and the anachronistic existence of the bourgeois national state. Following the experiment with the European Coal and Steel Community [ECSC], this process gained momentum, leading to the signing of the Rome Treaty, which aimed at creating a West European Common Market after a transition period of ten years. Reacting strongly against nationalism after 1945, European youth pinned many hopes on the unification of Europe in the absence of the perspective of an immediate socialist victory.
This transition period is now over and the Common Market is a reality. But the momentum of the capitalist unification of Europe has definitely declined if not disappeared. The bourgeois states are showing no intention of setting up a "European government" with real powers, political authority and a common currency. And this despite the fact that a more effective competitive setup against U.S. imperialism and a more effective policy against economic crises and cycles make this common authority and common currency an urgent need -- something understood by many of the big monopolies.
The extension of the Common Market to include Britain and other capitalist powers that want to join is for the time being out of the question. One of the "communities" created in the fifties, the ECSC, is bankrupt, completely unable to meet the structural crisis which first hit the coal and then the steel industry. Another one, "Euratom," is now moribund. Where, ten years ago, there were high hopes and great expectations among bourgeois and petty-bourgeois circles for a "United Europe," the prevailing mood today is one of disillusionment, frustration, and cynicism.
The fundamental cause of this change lies in the growing social crisis and the slowing down of economic growth. When international competition becomes more severe, when social tensions increase in each major imperialist country, when the margin of concessions and negotiations becomes much smaller -- then the possibility for the different capitalist classes of Western Europe to forego the advantages of separate monetary maneuvers and periodic use of protectionist measures declines precipitously.
The political aspect of the crisis at present shaking European capitalism is particularly marked. It is above all a crisis of leadership, and it is notable that this crisis affects the bourgeois camp as strongly as it does the camp of the labor movement.
The traditional bourgeois leaderships in many countries of capitalist Europe are being eroded, becoming caught up in the throes of fierce factional struggles that threaten them with disintegration. But at the same time, the lack of alternative leaderships is so pronounced that even when the existing political setup is worn out and no longer enjoys the confidence of influential sectors of big business -- as is, for example, the case with de Gaulle in France, Franco in Spain, and partially with the Conservatives in Britain -- they remain in place for want of anything better.
This tends more and more to give each successive government crisis the character of a crisis of the regime -- as is obvious in Italy and Belgium -- which begins to call into question the existence of the parliamentary system itself, including in Britain. In the last analysis, what deters the ruling class from attempting a coup like the one in Greece in several other European countries is only the relationship of forces between the workers and the capitalists, and the opinion in big business circles that an attempt to set up a "strong state" would be met by a massive countermove from the working class.
The Old Working-Class Leaderships Lose Control of the Youth
The crisis of the traditional leadership of the working class is most graphically expressed in the nearly complete loss, by both the traditional Social Democratic and Communist parties, of their hold on the working-class and student youth. Among the adult workers, the bureaucracies of the Labour party in Britain and the CP-CGT [Confédération Générale du Travail -- General Confederation of Labor -- the CP-led union federation] in France were able to play a strikingly treacherous role last year, deliberately propping up decaying capitalism in Britain, and the Gaullist regime and decaying bourgeois class rule in France.
But the loss of control of these bureaucracies over the youth is shown in the small membership of their youth organizations and in the large-scale youth mobilizations which have occurred several times outside these traditional organizations. Besides this loss of control over large sectors of the youth, the bankruptcy of the reformism and neoreformism of the Communist parties, especially in a period of growing crisis of the capitalist system, deepens the inner contradictions of the bureaucratized working-class organizations, as is shown in the crisis between the unions and the Labour party in Britain and between the CGT and the CGIL [Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavore -- Italian General Confederation of Labor] leaderships in France and Italy and a growing sector of a more militant working class which rejects the bureaucracy's stranglehold on the mass movement.
All these developments indicate the ripening of objective and subjective conditions for a new revolutionary upsurge throughout Europe. Between this new upsurge, the colonial revolution, and the slow maturing of conditions building up to a political revolution against the bureaucratic dictatorship in Eastern Europe and the USSR, there is a growing interaction, each of the three sectors of the world revolution following its own internal logic but also increasingly affecting the consciousness of the vanguard forces in the other sectors.
This growing interaction is to be seen in the way the colonial revolution has helped the new youth vanguard to emerge in the imperialist countries, the profound influence of the May 1968 revolution in France in bringing to maturity the youth vanguard of the coming political revolution in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as its influence on the resurgence of revolutionary student forces in semicolonial countries like Mexico.
A Socialist United States of Europe -- the Only Alternative
The basic message that revolutionary Marxists must tirelessly proclaim and translate into a program of action understandable to the broadest layers of the working people is that a fundamental solution to the crisis gripping capitalist Europe can be found only through a socialist revolution on a continental scale. A Socialist United States of Europe is not only a historic possibility. It is the only realistic alternative to all the attempts at solving the crisis of European capitalism without overthrowing the capitalist mode of production.
Realism does not call for new exercises in gradualism; for adding a few more nationalized industries to the "public sector" of the economy; for increasing the scope of capitalist "economic programing"; for speeding up the process of integrating capitalist Europe economically; for a more vigorous answer to the American "challenge" today and the Japanese challenge tomorrow. Unless the framework of the profit-oriented capitalist economy and the bourgeois state is broken, all these reforms will only deepen and exacerbate the existing contradictions, and big business will try all the harder to shift the burden of the reforms onto the working class itself.
Realism demands a radical break with the old decaying system of private property in the means of production, of investments guided by the aims of the monopolies, of priorities dictated by the needs of capital instead of the satisfaction of human needs. Realism demands a radical break with the bourgeois state, as both an oppressive and a narrowly national mechanism in Europe. The program calling for a Socialist United States of Europe embodies these truly realistic alternatives to capitalist crisis.
The Real Perspective of a Socialist Europe
It is still necessary today to point out to an already broad vanguard as well as to the broadest masses what a socialist Europe would be like. Under conditions of profound social unrest and an overall social crisis, the "maximum" program acquires an agitational value such as it never had in the past. It is especially important to do this in view of the fact that while the trend toward political revolution in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic greatly stimulated interest and sympathy for a socialist revolution in Western Europe, the brutal and oppressive military intervention of the Soviet bureaucracy again aroused skepticism and doubt concerning socialism in many circles of the advanced workers and the youth.
Socialism in the advanced industrial countries of Western Europe will have a completely different physiognomy from that of the rule of a parasitic and privileged bureaucracy such as exists at present in the Soviet Union. It will entail social planning on a continental scale, thereby permitting rapid growth of the productive forces through the elimination of large-scale duplication and waste. Social planning above all will mean full use of existing resources, the end of unemployment of men and underemployment of equipment, the rapid dissemination of technological progress and scientific knowledge throughout the whole economy.
It will also mean that priorities in utilizing resources and orienting investments, which are determined in the West by the profit aims of a small group of monopolists and the blind forces of the market, and in the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe by the arbitrary choices, preferences, and narrow interests of the ruling bureaucracy, will be democratically determined by the mass of workers organized in democratically elected self-management workers councils in the plants and on a local, regional, national, and international level.
It will mean that a democratically elected congress of workers councils will be the highest organ of orientation of the economy, and that the alternative to capitalist waste will not be sought in bureaucratic planning, any more than the alternative to bureaucratic overcentralization will be sought in a return to the market.
A socialist revolution in Western Europe will mean that top priority will be given to the three key processes in the emancipation of labor: a rapid reduction of the work week; a radical transformation of the structure of the enterprise; and a radical modification of the structure of consumption and the mode of distribution.
Only a rapid reduction of the work week, together with a rapid increase in the level of skill and knowledge, will enable the mass of workers to participate in a real way -- and not just formally -- in the administration of the economy and the state, thereby destroying the main objective root of bureaucracy.
Only a radical transformation of the structure of the enterprise and the very nature of work can reintroduce freedom and creative activity in the main realm of human life up to now, that of production.
Only a radical modification of the structure of consumption and the mode of distribution -- the rapid growth of the sector of goods and services distributed without exchange or money, on the basis of full satisfaction of rational needs -- can make the social revolution penetrate into the consciousness of the broad masses and give birth to socialist man, something that subjective, educational, and voluntarist efforts, whatever their value and necessity, can never achieve by themselves.
In other words, the program of a Socialist United States of Europe is the program of socialism for broadening the realm of human freedom, not only for the workers as a class but for everyone who works, far beyond anything achieved by bourgeois democracy in its heyday.
Precisely in a period when the trend towards authoritarianism and a technocratic outlook becomes more and more pronounced in bourgeois society, it is all the more necessary to stress these basic aspects of the socialist revolution in the advanced industrial countries. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat must once again be interpreted in the sense of Marx and Lenin (see State and Revolution) as a dictatorship only against the overthrown ruling class, the harshness of which will depend exclusively on the degree and form of the resistance offered by the former rulers, but also, simultaneously, as the widest possible extension of all the basic democratic freedoms for the mass of workers.
Full power to elected representative bodies where the working-class parties and tendencies can struggle for leadership by political means but not by violence or repression. The right to organize any party which the laboring masses care to within the framework of the socialist constitution. Freedom in all the workers' parties to organize tendencies. Independence of the trade unions from the state and the parties. Full freedom for scientific research and cultural and artistic creation without restrictions by the state. Full equality between men and women. That is the image of socialism which revolutionary Marxists must uphold ceaselessly.
Take Advantage of Every Favorable Situation
The slogan of a Socialist United States of Europe does not at all imply that it is impossible for the working class to begin by overthrowing capitalist domination in a single country at first. On the contrary, we urge all the militants of the vanguard to prepare themselves and to educate the masses in the idea that they must utilize any favorable situation like the one created in May 1968 in France to carry out a victorious socialist revolution in their country.
But we are convinced that owing to the growing interpenetration of capital and of labor in Western Europe, such a victory will be rapidly converted into a test of strength between capital and labor in several European countries, and that the spread of the revolution, whether in defense of the revolutionary country against counterrevolutionary intervention from the outside or through the workers in other countries following the revolutionary example, will be much quicker than in the past.
Is it possible to bring socialist democracy, as described, to full flower in Western Europe notwithstanding all the enemies that will threaten it internationally? It would be irresponsible to promise the workers and students of Europe that they will be left in peace to build their socialist society without interference from either U.S. imperialism or from the Soviet bureaucracy, the world's two main military powers. And it would be still more irresponsible to advocate a policy of "nonintervention" in the rest of the world in order to buy "peace" at the expense of the exploited and oppressed in the rest of the world.
In any case, the alternative to a socialist Europe is not peaceful evolution and peaceful coexistence but the triumph of reaction which could lead eventually to fascism and new wars.
It will be impossible to build a Socialist United States of Europe without projecting on a world scale a struggle for the same objectives which the toiling masses of Europe would be beginning to realize on their continent. The victory of a socialist revolution in Western Europe would greatly stimulate both the struggle for socialism in North America and the struggle for socialist democracy in the USSR and Eastern Europe. A victorious socialist revolution in Europe would extend the greatest fraternal help, politically, economically, and technically, to the freedom struggle of the oppressed peoples of the colonial and semicolonial countries, towards whom the European workers owe a debt inasmuch as part of the standard of living which they enjoy is a result of the superexploitation to which two-thirds of mankind outside the continent has been subjected by European imperialism.
In the course of the general acceleration of the world revolution which the creation of a Socialist United States of Europe would stimulate, confrontations, including armed ones, would be unavoidable with the imperialist rulers in the rest of the world. But the political impact of the victory of socialism in Europe would be of such order as to greatly weaken the capacity of U.S. imperialism for military struggle, including nuclear destruction.
If two small and backward countries, Cuba and Vietnam, could successfully withstand the intervention of U.S. imperialism, and if this intervention triggered massive opposition within the USA, how much greater would be the capacity of Western Europe to resist, a continent whose productive capacity would quickly catch up with that of the USA and surpass it! How much greater would be the resistance of the American working masses to their rulers' attempts to prevent the people of Europe from freely choosing the kind of social regime they want!
A Socialist United States of Europe -- an Early Concrete Perspective
We appeal to the vanguard militants and organizations to boldly project in their propaganda and agitation the socialist alternative to the present capitalist crisis in Europe -- a Socialist United States of Europe, the creation of a Federation of Socialist Republics with genuinely equal rights, open to all the nations of Europe, including those of Central and Eastern Europe, the only means capable of reuniting Germany.
We appeal to them to stress the frankly anticapitalist aim of all their struggles, whether it concerns struggles for immediate economic demands, for the defense of the civil liberties of the labor movement, for transitional demands in the economic or educational systems, or whether it involves anti-imperialist struggles.
We stress the fact that defense of the workers' standard of living against the mounting assault of the employers through the mechanism of alternating inflation and deflation, through rising prices and increased taxes; the defense of trade-union rights against the growing tendency of the capitalists to limit or eliminate free bargaining over wages; the struggle for key transitional demands like the sliding scale of wages, workers control over production, investments, and employment; nationalization without compensation of the banks, insurance companies, and key monopolies, and placing them under workers control; the introduction of comprehensive planning under workers control; the struggle against the bourgeois universities and high schools and for "student power"; the struggle against imperialist wars and crimes in Vietnam, Rhodesia, South Africa, the Arab countries, etc., and for the support of the just armed struggle of the oppressed peoples in Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Palestine -- this whole series of actions and movements, good in themselves and worthy of full support by all revolutionists, do not gain their full progressive significance until they become coordinated in a vast and variegated mass movement for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the Socialist United States of Europe.
The growing internationalization of capital also calls for increased contacts, collaboration, and coordination of struggles among the workers of the different European countries working for the same international companies, in the same branches of industry, and in the economy as a whole.
But this trend, which the French workers initiated spontaneously in May 1968, cannot yield all that is possible until the struggle is raised to the level of challenging and overthrowing capitalism as a system. Otherwise, the growing internationalization of capital will, for a whole period, proceed in advance of the spontaneous, groping cooperation on a trade-union level among the workers on an international scale, and the relationship of forces will shift to the advantage of capitalism at the expense of the workers.
To project the socialist revolution and a Socialist United States of Europe concretely as a short-term perspective is all the more necessary in view of the fact that the present state of crisis and increasing social and political tension cannot continue for a long period in Europe. If the repeated mobilizations of the workers and students do not lead to victory, owing to the lack of consciousness, organization, or leadership, the balance will tilt the other way. Growing disillusionment, demoralization, and apathy will again arise among the working masses and the newly politicized youth. The monopolists will then try to resolve the crisis in their way by installing a "strong state" and dealing violent blows to the workers movement.
We revolutionary Marxists are convinced that the strikes, demonstrations, and movements for immediate and transitional demands, now carried on by the workers, students, intellectuals, and progressive artists, cannot be combined into a powerful mobilization for the overthrow of capitalism without building revolutionary parties and a revolutionary international to provide the necessary coordination and centralization of the workers in opposition to the intensified centralization of the capitalist economy and state machine.
Such a party will enable the masses to develop their understanding and accumulate cadres in each successive wave of struggle. Without such a revolutionary party, the understanding and the activity of the masses are doomed to remain tied to the ups and downs of the mobilizations themselves, starting each time from the same level.
But we do not counterpose the need to build a revolutionary party against the struggles which the vanguard workers and students are conducting today all over Europe. We attempt, on the contrary, to participate in these struggles as the best militants in order to convince the vanguard through their own experience of the need to bring together the most militant and most conscious forces into such a party.
Forward to a Socialist United States of Europe!
Down with capitalism and imperialism!
Long live the socialist world revolution!