1. The Belgian strikes of December 1960 - January 1961 are a total confirmation of the analysis contained in the Theses of the XXIInd Plenum of the International Executive Committee concerning the prospects of the workers' movement in Western Europe.1 These theses took as their starting-point the idea that we are at the beginning of a capitalist offensive against the living standards and liberties of the working class in Western Europe, as a result of the trend towards a slow-down in economic growth and an exacerbated competition among capitalists on a world scale, especially within the Common Market. They indicated as a general prospect that, faced by this offensive, the European working class had everywhere (except in France) kept its fighting potential intact, that it would not "let itself be done in," that it would make a vigorous answer, and even, by the wide extent of its spontaneous reaction, overcome the present braking action which its traditional leaderships apply even in defensive struggles. The theses on European prospects concluded therefrom that if objective conditions do not at present permit foreseeing in Western Europe revolutionary struggles on the 1918-1921 or 1944-1947 pattern (i e, struggles developing into crises of collapse of the capitalist economy and state), they nevertheless render perfectly possible broad struggles, objectively revolutionary, for transitional demands, such as the 1936 struggles in France and Belgium. It added that every vigorous defense against the capitalist offensive would broaden out into struggles of that kind. That is exactly what happened in Belgium.
2. The Belgian general strike was a spontaneous answer of the Belgian proletariat to the "Loi Unique," that is to say, against the bourgeois attempts to load on to the laboring masses the cost of an economic and financial "rehabilitation," an operation similar to the Rueff-Pinay devaluation in France. It was prepared and made possible by means of a slow radicalization and ripening process among a broad workers' vanguard, a process which steadily developed, from the 1957 strike of the metal-workers through tendency struggles inside the mass organizations (F G T B [General Federation of Belgian Workers] and the P S B [Belgian Socialist Party]), the Borinage strikes, and the 24-hour general strike of 29 January 1960. It was aided by the fact that these mass organizations adopted an action programme called "of structural reforms," which in itself is ambiguous and contradictory and may be interpreted either as a programme for patching up capitalism or as a programme of transitional demands opening the way to a period of dual power in the country. The adoption of this programme has been accompanied by propaganda which got firmly into the heads of vanguard Belgian workers the idea that Belgian capitalism has failed, that it is unable to secure a better economic future for the country, and that it must be replaced by a new social system, based on socialist transformations. The decline of Belgian imperialism initiated by the accession of the Congo to political independence; the worldwide weakening of the capitalist system; the successes won by the U S S R and the workers' states in the economic and technological fields — these have contributed to discrediting Belgian capitalism in the eyes of the workers of this country, and opened up, at least for a broad vanguard, the prospect of a decisive struggle against the forces of capital.
3. Owing to the drive of this vanguard, the forces it could spontaneously mobilize, the organizational forms it adopted (local strike committees, locally or regionally coördinated strike pickets), and the means of struggle it used, this strike — which was in any case the most powerful in all Belgian history and one of the most extensive ever seen in Europe — tied up again with the most advanced traditions of the past and partly went beyond them. It has completely refuted all the nonsensical talk about how the working class has been rendered so bourgeois by high wages that it would no longer be capable of engaging in revolutionary struggles. As a matter of fact, these struggles have been characterized by a level of consciousness and methods of action which are objectively more revolutionary than all that the Belgian proletariat was able to achieve in the years of deep destitution or deep depression before the First or Second World War. Conclusions must be drawn from these events concerning the revolutionary potential, which remains enormous, regarding the future struggles not only of the Belgian working class but also of the whole European working class. The Belgian experience thus follows the lines of the experiences in Poland and Hungary in 1956, and in Italy in 1960 — all of which show at different levels that any new explosion by the workers in Europe, far from having to start from zero, will start from the highest level previously reached.
4. A general strike may be victorious only if it spreads at lightning speed and ends up in a rapid capitulation of the government and / or the employers. As soon as the bourgeoisie has had time to organize the repression and the counter-offensive, the general strike can be victorious only as armed insurrection. A treacherous or inadequate leadership prevented the Belgian strike from triumphing in either one way or the other.
As the Belgian proletariat is more or less equally divided into Christian trade-union (C S C) members and Socialist trade-union (F G T B) members, the strike spontaneously set going by hundreds of thousands of vanguard workers of the F G T B could become a general strike only if it drew the Christian workers into the struggle. In such a case, it would have put on the agenda the creation of a P S B - F G T B - C S C government, that is to say, a workers' government. But the rightist reformist leadership of the F G T B (Major wing) deliberately refused to utilize the most appropriate moment to swing the Christian workers into the strike. As soon as the Cardinal had delivered his Christmas message condemning the strike, as soon as the repression was organized and the backward strata were intimidated by this combination of the sabre and the aspergillum, this apropriate moment was gone. Hence the leadership of the C S C could play a fink role: the majority of the Flemish workers did not participate in the strike, which thus did not succeed in paralyzing the whole economic life of the country and was a general strike only in the Walloon part of the country.
Nevertheless it could still have been a smashing success if the workers had thwarted the government's policy of repression and had mobilized their enormous fighting potential in the direction of goals of centralized action (occupation of the factories, formation of defense militia, march on Brussels, etc). By so acting they would have prevented the government from breaking the strike bit by bit, beginning with the weakest sectors. This would have required a strike leadership capable of leading the fight to the finish, one equal to the emergency. Such a leadership did not exist in the Belgian strike.
Faced by the contemptible abdication of the right-wing reformist leadership of the F G T B (Major wing), it was the F G T B left, centrist, wing, the Renard wing, which took over the official leadership of the strike. For the huge majority of the workers, it was identified with the strike and was considered as validly representing the vanguard of the Belgian proletariat. But if Renard differs favorably from the more rightist currents by an undeniable combativity and an absence of parliamentary or electoral cretinism, he has many a time in the past confirmed his centrist nature by refusing to engage in decisive fights or refusing to lead to their end struggles already begun. This was once more the case. Refusing to adopt goals of action of sufficient value to mobilize all the forces engaged in the strike, he replaced them by adventuristic forms of action, e g, calling off the job the final security squads — which in addition were finally not applied — or opportunist ones (Walloon nationalism), which had a demobilizing effect and could not prevent the strike from ebbing. The workers finally went back to work, but with an iron morale and the firm decision to "start it all over again" at the next opportunity.
5. There was no possibility at all, during the strike itself, to replace the Renard leadership by an alternative one. This would have required the previous existence of elements of such a new leadership on a wide scale to allow them to get themselves accepted within a period of just a few days; it is indeed impossible to improvize a revolutionary leadership, and it is well known that prior to the strike, only a small, even though admittedly valuable, nucleus of such a leadership existed, much too small to be able to lead the strike. Besides, it was only during the strike that the official right-wing leadership was replaced by the Renard centrist one. A few weeks of strike were not sufficient to allow the masses to learn from their experience with this new leadership. And, lastly, though very clear tendencies for the masses to go over the heads of the trade-union apparatus appeared during the strike, these tendencies were rather rapidly reabsorbed in the areas where the "Renardists" controlled the apparatus; only the most rightist fractions of the apparatus remained isolated from the masses. Therefore strike commitees that were really autonomous from the apparatus existed only in a minority of areas (in part of the Charleroi district, partly in Antwerp and Brussels); everywhere else the strike committees were, in fact, under the control of the Renard tendency. Though these strike committees were actually in an embryonic way organisms of dual power, it was impossible to get them to play this part in practice on the national scale, to federate nationally, or to become conscious of this role during the strike itself.
As an offset, thanks to the strike and during the strike, a new stratum of rank-and-file militants has been forged, true natural leaders of their class, composed partly of old experienced militants, partly of young elements aroused for the first time from the "anonymous" rank and file, who are beginning to assimilate the lessons of the strike and who represent valuable elements for forming a replacement workers' leadership, around the existing revolutionary Marxist nuclei. To educate and regroup these elements, and to help them to feel revolutionary consciousness, is the most important task of the Belgian revolutionary Marxists.
6. Even when the sharply marked national peculiarities are taken into account, the Belgian events allow us to predict that, when confronted by capitalist offensives — absolutely unavoidable in a quite near future — the workers of a series of countries in Western Europe (above all Great Britain and Italy, but probably also West Germany and even France) would react in the same way and in the same general direction as the Belgian workers did. It is urgent that all vanguard militants, and especially the revolutionary Marxists, in all these countries study the experience of the Belgian strikes, the mechanism of interaction that exists between spontaneous explosions and the evolution of tendencies within the workers' movement, and the conditions for the rise and reënforcement of a new vanguard. They must be deeply convinced that this prospect is by far the most likely and that the Belgian example in itself will help the Western European proletariat to set out along the same road.
THE INTERNATIONAL SECRETARIAT OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
1 February 1961
1 Published in our Winter 1959-60 issue, q v.