Theses on Building of Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe

I. The Change in the Objective and Subjective Conditions for Building Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe Since 1967

Since 1967, the conditions in which revolutionary Marxists go about carrying out their central strategic task —the building of Leninist parties capable of leading the proletariat toward the victorious socialist revolution- have greatly changed in capitalist Europe. These changes, which are in part the product of upheavals in other parts of the world, in the final analysis reflect the deepening of the basic crisis of bourgeois society in Europe. This crisis manifests itself at all levels of society.

1. The Deepening Crisis of Capitalism

The crisis of the international capitalist system underwent a new deepening with the end of the long period of accelerated economic expansion carrying forward the "Korean war boom" that came at the end of the postwar revolutionary crisis in Western Europe. The West German recession in 1966-67 was quickly followed by a recession in Italy and Japan (1970-71), a new, minor recession in West Germany (1971-72), and a general slowing of economic growth in all the imperialist countries. For the first time since the second world war, attempts to reduce these crises of overproduction through stepped-up inflation ran into obstacles; inflation went hand in hand with economic stagnation in a number of imperialist countries. The stepped-up inflation of the dollar finally precipitated the collapse of the international monetary system created at Bretton Woods and opened a profound worldwide monetary crisis that threatens to undermine international credit and, as a result, the expansion of world trade. The reversal of the general economic climate is the result not only of conjunctural factors but also of profound structural factors. The main stimuli of the rapid expansion of the postwar years are fading away one after the other. The de cline of the old industrial branches - such as the coal industry, textiles, copper, shipbuilding, and no doubt also steel — is irreversible. At the same time, the pace-setting industries that "carried" the postwar growth have one by one been hit by an excess capacity and as a result have been forced to cut back their investment. This is already the case in the electrical appliance industry, the automobile industry, and petrochemicals; it will also soon be the case in the electrical machine industry and in electronics itself. The declining rate of profit is showing up more and more clearly, choking off rapid growth. This effect is reinforced by the steady shrinking of the market in proportion to the enormous expansion of productive capacity.

The still limited buying power of the bureaucratized workers states, including China, on the world market does not enable them to provide an important supplementary outlet capable of absorbing the excess capacity of imperialist industry as a whole. In certain branches (steel pipes, equipment for automobile and petrochemical factories), however, it has been possible to stave off sharp crises in the imperialist countries by filling orders from the workers states — orders prompted, moreover, by specific temporary scarcities in the Eastern countries (cereals, for example).

The slowdown of growth in the international capitalist economy strongly accentuates interimperialist contradictions, including competition in East-West trade (this is one of the reasons for Nixon's overture both to Peking and to Moscow). This declining growth rate comes, in fact, in the wake of a period during which the relationship of forces among the imperialist countries underwent a major shift. American imperialism has progressively lost the absolute superiority it enjoyed within the imperialist camp during the immediate postwar period. Its share of the world market (the capital market as well as the commodity market, even if there is a lag of several years between the trends in the two) is continuing to shrink to the advantage of the West German and Japanese imperialists, and some other imperialist countries in the European Economic Community (EEC). The weakening of British imperialism has been especially pronounced during the last fifteen years.

This modification of the interimperialist relationship of forces has resulted in particular in a growing penetration of European and Japanese goods into the domestic U. S. market, which is what prompted the (essentially protectionist) countermove announced by Nixon's speech on August 15, 1971. Far from reducing interimperialist competition or the general crisis of the system, these defensive measures on the part of American imperialism can only serve to exacerbate them. While stimulating the formation of the Common Market of capitalist Europe, competition between the capitalist powers has impeded its transformation into a real supranational state, which would correspond to the needs of the growing process of interpenetration of capital. Recently there have been many setbacks in the field of monetary and political unification of capitalist Europe. A generalized recession will put the process of unification on a European scale to the decisive test. There will be either an acceleration of the integration process or a dismantling of the Common Market and the rebirth of protectionist practices. In the latter case, American imperialism, which even today holds an evident superiority in the political and military spheres, will regain an indisputable economic dominance. 2. The Crisis of Social Relations

The end of the long period of rapid expansion brought with it a sharpening of social contradictions in capitalist Eu-rope that, since May 1968, has taken the form of a general social crisis in several European countries (France, Italy, Spain, Great Britain). Any spectacular new recurrence of this crisis could drag in all the rest of capitalist Europe. The socialist revolution is once again on the agenda in Europe, not just in a broad historical perspective (in that sense, it has been on the agenda since 1914), but even from a conjunctural point of view.

The most profound source of this social crisis lies in the fact that the basic contradiction of the system — the contradiction between the level of development attained by the productive forces and the maintenance of capitalist relations of production—has been considerably aggravated by the postwar phase of growth of the productive forces. Even more than the phase of stagnation from 1914 to 1939, this growth has objectively undermined capitalist relations of production. We are increasingly approaching the upper limits of the adaptability of these relations of production, not only as regards the functioning of the market economy, the profit drive of the private trusts, the financing of long-term productive investments, and the development of the material and intellectual infrastructure of production, but also as regards their ability to satisfy — if only in an elementary way — the new needs generated in the working population by the growth of the productive forces themselves. A good part of these new needs, keenly felt especially by the youth, clearly cannot be met within the context of bourgeois society. In this category must be placed requirements of high-quality social consumption, met according to the "satisfaction of needs" principle (health, education, culture, information, retirement, etc.), as well as the need for creative activity radically breaking from alienated labor.

This general crisis in social relations had begun to manifest itself even before the turn in the world economic situation; the turn itself has obviously made it worse. As growth slows, interimperialist competition is intensified, and the crisis of the international monetary system spreads, the European bourgeoisie is less able to grant new concessions to the working masses and finds itself even forced to call into question a series of gains (considered by the proletariat to be given) that were granted during the course of the preceding phase. The attempt to make the workers pay the price of inflation, and the general reappearance of unemployment (during the winters of 1970-71 and 1971-72, there were about five million unemployed in capitalist Europe), are two aspects of the same basic orientation of big capital, which is trying to restore the rate of profit by intensifying its exploitation of the working class. The scope and importance of the upsurge in workers struggles since May 1968 reflects the fact that the working class is becoming increasingly conscious of these problems and is attempting to respond to them through direct struggles, and the fact that they are putting up enormous resistance to the attempt to substantially raise the rate of surplus value. As a result, these struggles are not directly determined by the economic conjuncture and therefore often last for extended periods of time. A central aspect of this upsurge of struggles is the fact that the tendencies outlined here apply to capitalist Europe as a whole.

Of course, these struggles do not occur in every country in the same forms, with the same intensity, and above all, at the same time. This unevenness has contradictory results: It moderates the explosive character of a deepening crisis in one country when this crisis coincides with relative stability in the other countries. But at the same time, it prolongs the period of instability and the potential for a crisis on a European scale. New countries enter into a phase of acute crisis in the class struggle while others are going through a period of partial downturn. These crises fuel each other and make it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to reestablish equilibrium in individual countries.

In the context of this rise of the workers struggles on a European scale, the immigrant workers too have appeared on the front lines of the anticapitalist struggle. The wave of industrialization following the second world war induced several million workers to emigrate to the main countries in capitalist Europe. This immigration was one of the factors that made it possible, despite the expansion of industrial production, to systematically rebuild an industrial reserve army, whose function is to hold back wage increases. However, the way these immigrants have been incorporated into the economy (grinding jobs, low wages, lack of social amenities, etc.) and into society (housing conditions, various kinds of discrimination, racism, etc.), as well as the upsurge of struggles both in their countries of origin (Spain, Italy) and in the countries where they have immigrated, will intensify those major struggles that have developed in a portentous way in recent years (occupations of immigrant hostels in France and Great Britain; strikes by semiskilled workers in the Renault plant in France, the Ford plant in Germany, the textile mills in Britain, and the metalworking and construction industries in Switzerland; antiracist mobilizations, etc.). Faced with these explosions, the bourgeoisie has strengthened its legislative measures designed to control the flow of immigrant labor, to introduce criteria of eligibility for immigration in accordance with a more precise determination of levels of skill, and to establish strict police supervision aimed at repressing political activists and worker militants among the immigrants (Fontanet decree in France, Immigrant Act in Great Britain, various laws in Switzerland, etc.).

The leadership of the trade unions and of the traditional workers parties accept in fact the division engineered by the bourgeoisie between immigrant workers and native-born workers; they support, either openly or by their silence the various measures of control over immigration. Under these conditions, the immigrant workers tend to fill the vacuum left by the bureaucratized workers organizations by developing their own organs of defense: in France, the MTA

[Arab Workers Move ment] and UGTSF [General Union of

Senegalese Workers in France]; in Switzer-land, the CLI. Especially in countries in the first phases of a rise in class struggle, the immigrant workers' struggles often have a powerful impact and an exemplary character. Nevertheless, the separation between immigrant and native-born work ers remains a serious handicap, particularly during periods of recession. As a result of this division, the combative layers of the immigrant workers may be come isolated at times unless everything possible is done to unite them with the indigenous workers vanguard.

The upsurge of the class struggle in Europe in the last five years has taken on various forms, sometimes in combination, as follows: a. Explosions on a national scale that bring about a revolutionary or prerevolutionary situation (May 1968 in France). b. Massive and prolonged mobilizations of the working class and of various social strata — with strikes in decisive industrial sectors (metalworkers, chemical and petrochemical workers, etc.) and regional and national strikes — leading to an acute social and political crisis or even to a prerevolutionary situation

(Italy, 1968-73). c. Tests of strength that take place on, or move toward, a national scale (miners' strike in Great Britain in 1972, general strike in Denmark in 1973). d. Militant mobilizations of decisive sectors of the working class or of pace-setting sectors in the social and political sense (Spain; France Italy; German metalworkers in December 1971; and Belgium, on a much lower level). e. Pilot experiences that are limited but potentially involve the characteristic elements of the period (Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, West Germany). On the basis of the experiences of thepost-1968 upsurge, the thrust of these struggles can be summarized as follows: a. Wage demands, whose major importance lies in the rejection of incomes policies. b. Struggle against the rising cost of living and demands directed against the effects of inflation on the workers. c. Demands for defending jobs, struggles against factory shutdowns, layoffs, and industrial and regional restructuring. d. Demands championing the principle of equality and aiming at reducing wage differentiations within the working class and between factory and office workers. e. Demands for reduction of hours with no cut in pay, and longer paid vacations. f. Defense of collective bargaining, the right to strike, and other trade-union rights and prerogatives.

In addition to these general objectives there has been the development of objectives that have a profound importance because they are directed, at least in embryonic form, against the capitalist relations of production themselves: — Revolts against speedup and piece work, against the subdivision of job categories, against layoffs, etc., which in the dynamics of the upsurge can lead to partial experiences of workers control directly challenging the principle of profit as the goal of production. — Attempts to considerably enlarge the scope and quality of public services (right to free, quality health care and education, right to housing, retirement at sixty at 75 percent pay, etc.); demands for the quantitative and qualitative expansion of child care and free services, allowing the socialization of domestic duties. These mobilizations and the goals they set themselves are dealing hard blows to the bosses' strategy, which is to increase the rate of surplus value, above all through increasing the rate of exploitation, so as to counteract the decline in the average rate of profit.

This general crisis of class relations had already begun to manifest itself be fore the turning point in the world economic situation, but this turn has deepened it considerably. This social and political crisis, which began in 1968, continues, and on the whole will continue, to deepen. Increasingly this confrontation will tend to take place directly between the two fundamental classes. Now more than ever, the bourgeoisie is forced to mount an attack on the working class in order to control the trend of wages and cut employment.

But today it must pursue this objective in the framework of a relationship of forces that has changed in favor of the working class on a world scale and specifically in the European capitalist countries. It faces a European proletariat that through the entire preceding period has not suffered any very serious or lasting defeats, and that entered this phase, as a consequence of a fifteen-year decline in the industrial reserve army, with its forces intact, with a higher level of unionization, and with an increased confidence in its own forces.

The crisis in capitalist relations of production has become a crisis of bourgeois relationships as a whole. At the beginning, it was expressed with increasing acuteness by the student youth (college student and high-school revolts); then it grew into a crisis of all social relations (education, mass media, church, etc.) and of the patriarchal institutions and values that make up the bourgeois order (crisis of the family, radicalization of women in response to their oppression). As it penetrated into the working class, through the intermediary in particular of young workers and apprentices, this crisis in bourgeois social relationships in turn aggravated the crisis in the capitalist relations of production.

Under these conditions, a rapid and crushing defeat of the working class is practically excluded. We must therefore be prepared for years of intense social struggles, with ups and downs but with continuing possibilities for revolutionary upsurges, depending on the advances scored in raising class consciousness and strengthening the revolutionary Marxist organization.

3. The Political Crisis of the Bourgeoisie

Confronted with a worsening of the economic situation and social contradictions, the bourgeois political system has been, and is continuing to be, shaken by a crisis no less deep — crises in the bourgeois leadership teams; crises of political alternatives; crises of the bourgeois political parties; crises of the entire governmental system of the bourgeois state. The most striking signs of this crisis have been the spectacular fall of de Gaulle, the semiparalysis of successive governments in Italy and Great Britain, and the persistent tension in West Germany — long the most stable and the most de-politicized country of postwar capitalist Europe. The increasingly pronounced crisis of the Franco regime fits into this same context.

The basic choice with which the bourgeoisies in capitalist Europe have been confronted is between a "co-opting" reformism (which tries to break down the combativity of the workers through concessions that strengthen the mechanisms of conciliation and class collaboration) and an intensification of repression (involving a frontal attack on working-class freedoms, especially on the right to strike and on free collective bargaining). Both variants, moreover, accentuate the decadence of classic bourgeois parliamentary democracy, continue shifting the bourgeois state's center of gravity toward an executive that increasingly stands outside of any control, thus highlighting the inherent tendency of monopoly capitalism toward setting up a strong state, and reflect the bourgeoisie's desire to hamstring the trade-union movement.

Nonetheless, neither this reinforcement of the executive nor the variant of frontally attacking some working-class rights should be confused with a new rise of fascism. The main characteristics that distinguish fascism from other forms of bourgeois government are on the one hand the total destruction of all workers organizations (including the reformist organizations), and on the other hand a mass mobilization of frenzied and pauperized petty bourgeois, greatly extending the striking power of the classical repressive apparatus. Today the objective conditions for a new rise of fascism have not yet come about in capitalist Europe. The workers movement, especially in Ger-many, has paid too dearly for confusion in evaluating different forms of rule by capital to accept any loose talk about a "creeping fascization" of the regime. It would be wrong, however, to underestimate the increased strength of fascist-like organizations that can serve as the foot soldiers of the classic right wing. The slowdown in economic growth, and especially the stepping up of interimperialist competition, have undermined the preconditions for implementing a "reformist" policy. What the bourgeoisie has in fact been able to offer in the form of "joint worker-boss management," "profit sharing," "payment in stocks," and other reforms has been too meager to make a serious dent in the proletariat's fighting spirit. The failure of bourgeois "reformism" is clearest in Italy: Reforms that are more urgent than ever, even from the standpoint of rationalizing the operation of the capitalist economy, could not be implemented during an entire decade under the aegis of the "center left." Nor will they be achieved in the present stage despite the renewed liberalizing gestures of a very large sector of the bourgeoisie and the heightened desire for collaboration on the part of the PCI [Italian Communist party] and the unions, as well as the PSI [Italian Socialist party]. In Great Britain, the pronounced decline of imperialist economic strength obliges the bourgeoisie to call into question even some of the main reforms granted during the two preceding decades, and even some of the conquests of a preceding epoch. But at the same time, the relationship of forces between the classes remains such that an overall repressive assault has practically no chance of succeeding. The forces of the workers movement, which for the most part remain intact, would respond to such an overall assault on a scale that the bourgeoisie takes well into account and that it correctly fears. As a result of this fear, for the moment it rejects as too dangerous any attempt to set up an openly dictatorial regime on the Greek model.

In these circumstances, the most probable political perspective remains a prolonged period of instability, with successive bourgeois teams wearing themselves out in "center right" or "center left" governmental formulas, but without either of the two contending camps being able to firmly impose its will. The proletariat is still being hamstrung by its crisis of leadership, by the paralyzing role of the traditional leaderships. At the same time, the bourgeoisie remains too weak to impose a radical solution. In France and Italy, where the rise of workers struggles reached a peak in 1968 and 1969, the bourgeoisie has been able temporarily to resume the initiative, without, however, being able to impose its fundamental solutions. The fighting potential of the proletariat in these countries remains intact. To be sure, such an unstable equilibrium cannot go on indefinitely. In the absence of a victorious counteroffensive by the bourgeoisie, the very continuation of the social crisis contributes toward solving the crisis of leadership in the proletariat. On the other hand, the continuation of this crisis of leadership, resulting in successive waves of struggles that fail to change anything in the area of state power, ends up tiring out the working masses and lowering their capacity for mobilization, and thus could create favorable conditions for a bourgeois initiative to inflict a severe defeat on the proletariat.

Such a severe defeat could take different forms according to the country involved, ranging from the establishment of military dictatorships to a radical modification of the relationship of forces between classes such as to exclude, for an entire period, any new upsurge in the objectively anticapitalist struggles of the 1968-73 type while not formally abolishing the bourgeois democracy or forcing underground the mass organizations of the workers movement. The important point is to understand that the bourgeois "solution" to the current sociopolitical crisis would have to measure up to the crisis itself; it could not be limited to a gradual imperceptible modification of the political atmosphere, but would have to involve a radical change in the relationship of forces between classes. This does not necessarily imply the establishment of a dictatorial regime along with destruction of the organized workers movement, but it does imply, of course, a qualitative reinforcement of the bourgeoisie's apparatus and capacity of repression, and a radical drop in worker combativity.

The proletariat will not necessarily benefit from a prolonging of the present crisis and of the relative equilibrium of opposing forces. If a decisive revolutionary breakthrough does not occur, the bourgeoisie will finally impose its solution. But the fact that we are only at the beginning of the deepening social crisis, that neither the extent of unemployment nor the political level of the workers struggles yet confronts the bourgeoisie with an immediate question of life or death, allows us to envisage a period spread out over several years before the decisive battles are fought. However, in some countries the development of a serious political crisis in these conditions could precipitate tests of strength with important repercussions on a continental scale. A specific manifestation of the crisis of European bourgeois leadership can be seen in their political attitude toward the European question. The extension and interpenetration of capitalist enterprises throughout the area (a tendency which the entrance of Great Britain, Denmark, and Ireland into the EEC can only reinforce), and the need to compete with American and Japanese imperialism, would tend to favor a strengthening of European supranational structures of a pre-state nature — European currency, common industrial policy, common executive, autonomous European nuclear striking force, etc. But since each concrete step in this direction involves sacrifices for this or that "national" bourgeoisie, and since the room for maneuver on an international and national scale is dwindling as a result of intensifying interimperialist contradictions and social contradictions, the hesitations and political divisions within the European bourgeoisie grow as the hour of decision approaches.

The inability of the Spanish bourgeoisie to "liberalize" its political structures, however slightly — its feeling that it must perpetuate Francoism even without Francois a sign of the explosive character of social contradictions in the Iberian peninsula. And at the same time it is a re flection of the political crisis within the European bourgeoisie: It deprives the bourgeoisie any means of averting the development of a revolutionary situation in the southwest of the continent — a situation whose subjective repercussions, reinforced by the presence of large numbers of emigre Spanish workers in other countries, could cause it to spread rapidly throughout Europe as a whole.

The resumption of the centuries-old struggle of the Irish people for unity and independence coincides with a sharpened crisis of British imperialism and in turn accentuates this crisis. The tendency has been to move rapidly toward higher forms of struggle as well as mobilizing and organizing the vanguard of the masses, above all in Northern Ireland, where dual power existed de facto for several months, forcing the imperialists to resort to massive repression.

In Greece, the mass movements of 1973, marked by the emergence of new vanguards, shook the military dictatorship established in 1967. They revealed the ephemeral character of any supposed "liberalization" maneuver and the bour geoisie's incapacity to extricate itself from its crisis. This crisis, far from lessening, has tended to deepen on the political and social levels as well as the economic level. It is significant that even if these movements were essentially supported by the students, they were characterized at the same time by the participation of increasing sectors of the workers vanguard.

4. The Crisis of the Traditional Organizations of the Working Class

Alongside the political crisis of the bourgeoisie, the traditional workers movement has also gone through a deep crisis in the course of the past few years. In part, this has the same roots as the crisis of the instruments of capitalist domination: the aggravation of the social contradictions that undermine the credibility of the reformist orientations of the Socialist parties and the neoreformist orientations of the Communist parties; the new rise in workers struggles, which are beginning to get out of the control of the traditional leaderships of the workers movement; and the general crisis of bourgeois socal re lations (especially capitalist relations of production), which has freed powerful anticapitalist energies expressed above all in the rise of the new vanguards. At the same time the crisis of the traditional workers organizations interlocks with the crisis of Stalinism, which—after the ebbs and flows following the twentieth congress of the CPSU, the crushing of the Hungarian revolution, the eruption of the Sino-Soviet conflict, and the fall of Khrushchev — has undergone a new important leap with the Czechoslovak crisis, the revolt of the Polish workers, and the political crisis that the Chinese leadership is going through. The new rise of workers struggles and the radicalization of a sizable vanguard of the working class are coming more clearly into conflict with two phenomena, whose significance must be analyzed without underestimating their limitations —the increasing integration of the Social Democracy into the bourgeois state apparatus on the one hand, and a process of Social Democratization of the Communist parties on the other.

During the past decade, an important shift has taken place within the Social Democratic parties in the relative weight of the representatives of the bureaucracy of the workers organizations as such, in respect to the representatives of the bureaucracy of the bourgeois state. The latter have gained considerably in strength in relation to the former. We have even witnessed high Social Democratic state functionaries beginning to slide into leading positions in private capitalist trusts. These processes have unquestionably promoted the eruption of conflicts between Social Democratic leaders trying to express the "general interest" (that is, the interest of the bourgeoisie) and the unions, including the trade-union bureaucrats, who have traditionally been the most solid props of the Social Democracy.

The CPs have in general increased their drift to the right, adopting strategies and tactics that align them with the trade-union bureaucracy (or its "left" wing) in countries where the Social Democracy has hegemony and orient them completely to ward an electoralist and neoreformist strategy in the countries where they themselves have hegemony. Whatever the complex and contradictory pressures from the ranks for such a turn, when the leaderships of these CPs "dissociated" themselves from the Kremlin at the time of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Soviet bureaucracy, they did so under pressure from the Social Democrats, ushering in a new stage in this process of Social Democratization.

Still, the conclusion to be drawn from these two phenomena is not that the Social Democratic parties have become bourgeois parties or that the CPs have be come Social Democratic parties. The Social Democracy remains dependent — in certain countries like West Germany and Belgium, more than ever dependent —upon its working-class electoral base. This is an electoral base that, unlike that of the Democratic party in the United States, expresses an elementary class reflex through its vote, that is, the determination to vote for a working-class party instead of voting for a bourgeois party. The class nature of these parties is also reflected in their links with the trade-union movement. The counterrevolutionary and procapitalist nature of the policy of the leaders of these countries (a policy that dates from neither today nor yesterday, but that has been a constant phenomenon for almost sixty years) changes nothing in this objective fact, any more than the objective neo-reformism of the CPs allows them to definitively cut the cord that ties them to Moscow.

The crisis in the traditional organizations of the workers movement is not developing in a straight line. If it is sometimes marked by not unimportant splits (e.g., the Manifesto group in Italy), it can also be expressed through the reappearance of broader centrist tendencies within the traditional parties (the Jusos in West Germany). It can be accompanied both by a temporary sag in the electoral strength of these parties (Belgium and Great Britain, 1970, for the Social Democracy) and by a new electoral thrust-especially when these parties appear to newly politicized layers to be a "lesser evil" in comparison with the corrupt and bankrupt bourgeois parties. But the main characteristics of this crisis remain no less salient in all the countries where the re sumption of workers struggles and the youth radicalization have assumed sufficient scope: a. The traditional reformist policy is increasingly losing credibility despite the attempts to present reformist operations as the beginning of "the transition to socialism." b. The common ground in the orientation of the Social Democrats and the CPs —namely the electoralist and parliamentary road — is being increasingly challenged objectively by broad masses, who are rediscovering direct, extraparliamentary action as the main instrument for defending their interests, even if they continue to vote for the traditional parties. c. The traditional leaderships are no longer successful in winning over very large sectors of the young workers to their policy and concepts, nor in exercising a dominant role in the student movement, which is largely dominated in most cases by far-left organizations and groups. d. The fact that the traditional political organizations become compromised by accepting anti-working-class and antiunion measures (which they are inclined to make especially when they are in the government, but also when they are in the opposition; note the hardening of the French Communist party's apparatus against the militant strikes in France), together with the absence of mass revolutionary parties, creates a political vacuum to the left of the traditionally dominant working-class political formations (the CP in France, Italy, and Spain; the Social Democracy in other countries of capitalist Europe). A section of the trade-union movement has tended to fill this vacuum, at least temporarily, by offering an alternative channel for the most radicalized sector of the working class. This was especially true of the trade-union "left" in Great Britain in 1970-71, of the Italian unions in 1969-71, partially true of the left wing of the Belgian unions, of the CFDT in France, and of the Dutch unions. Thus, the identification between the unions and the traditional workers parties is beginning to blur. A certain room for independent maneuver on the part of the unions is reappearing. And we are seeing the beginning of a recomposition of the organized workers movement as a whole. This process can even go so far as to impel a wing of the unions to assume clearly political tasks, as for example in Great Britain with the struggle against the antistrike legislation first of Wilson and then of Heath, or the "struggle for reforms" in Italy in 1970-71.

We must not lose sight of the conjunctural nature of this evolution. We must especially not deduce from it that we are witnessing a full, so to speak spontaneous, confluence of the economic struggles and the political struggles of the proletariat. The unions' room for independent maneuver remains limited by the bureaucratic nature of their leadership, including the left wing of this leadership, which has little inclination to undertake a general struggle against the capitalist regime. The nature of the period not only imparts an objectively political thrust to mass struggles but also carries with it an urgent need to raise the question of political power — a question that the unions are loath to raise. Still less now than in the past can unionism, including the syndicalist variety, substitute for building a revolutionary party. On the other hand, it is clear that the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies cannot remain passive in the face of this be ginning recomposition of the organized workers movement, which threatens to undermine their hegemony over the proletariat— the basis for all their maneuvers and all their privileges. Therefore, the possibility remains for abrupt adaptations to the radicalization of large sections of the proletariat in an attempt to regain control where it has been lost and to channel the mass movement toward goals that are compatible with the fundamentally reformist strategy of these parties.

5. The Appearance of a New Vanguard

The result of all the above changes is a shift in the objective and subjective situation for building revolutionary parties in capitalist Europe that is of decisive and immediate importance for revolutionists. A new vanguard of mass proportions has appeared, by and large eluding the control of the bureaucratic leaderships of the traditional workers organizations. This development marks the beginning of a change in the historical relationship of forces between the bureaucracies of the traditional organizations and the revolutionary vanguard that resulted from the defeats of the world revolution during the 1920s and 1930s and from the bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR and the Communist International. The development of a new vanguard has occurred on a scale quantitatively and qualitatively different from everything that happened in the decades following the crisis of 1918- 23. It usually arose on the basis of solidarity and identification with the colonial revolution (Cuba, Vietnam), under the influence of the heightened worldwide crisis of imperialism and Stalinism. That is why it developed on an especially broad scale among the radicalized youth (university students, high-school students, apprentices). But as the domestic social crisis of the capitalist countries of Europe has worsened — beginning especially with the May 1968 revolutionary crisis in France—the workers component has be come predominant within the new vanguard, reorienting it toward workers struggles.

Even after the bureaucratic degeneration of the Communist parties, all those who wanted to engage in a radical fight against capitalism continued to gravitate politically around the bureaucratic mass parties of the workers movement. The main characteristic of the new situation is the fact that a growing number of these anticapitalist militants are no longer oriented primarily by these parties, are ready to act outside the control of the leaders of these parties, and are capable of engaging in mass actions, without necessarily adhering to the full revolutionary Marxist program or the revolutionary Marxist organization.

The new rise of workers struggles and the scope assumed by the clearly anticapitalist demands these have raised, as well as the growing differentiation within the union movement that is impelling layers of the working class out of the control of the bureaucratic apparatuses (as for instance in the wildcat strikes and hard-fought local strikes that are taking place despite the excommunications of the bureaucratic leadership), are becoming the decisive factors in determining the orientation of the new vanguard. And, progressively, they are bringing about a change in its composition (although this process is still only on a very modest scale in countries like West Germany, the Scandinavian states, the Netherlands, etc.). What chiefly distinguishes this new vanguard from the one we have known throughout the preceding decades is its ability to intervene in the class struggle in its own right, to take political initiatives, and here and there to take the leadership of mass workers struggles.

Within the proletariat, the broad vanguard is not identical with the totality of the militant workers who stand in the front line of the struggles but have either not yet understood the need for challenging the capitalist system as a whole, or are not yet ready to act politically outside the control of the traditional bureaucratic leaderships of the workers movement. As the struggles spread and the working masses radicalize, a growing number of militant workers tend to act as an integral part of the new mass vanguard, which is far from being a stable and fixed phenomenon. It must be emphasized, furthermore, that the radicalization process of this worker component of the mass vanguard does not imply in any way a lessening of the specific weight of the union structures.

Finally, the mass vanguard is not limited to the far-left political groups, even though these groups largely recruit from it.

The existence and growth of these groups testifies to the scope of this phenomenon of the mass vanguard. We should consider them in part as the transitional political expression of the mass vanguard's confused break with the politics of the traditional bureaucratic leaderships. In order to define more clearly the nature and limitations of this new mass vanguard, we must combat two illusions. The first illusion is that this new vanguard, as a whole, is revolutionary. The second is that the appearance of this vanguard means a fundamental change in the relationship of forces in the workers movement and the working class.

Because of its very origins, the new mass vanguard harbors within it numerous elements with a petty-bourgeois consciousness and ideology who, depending on the circumstances and the relationship of forces with the revolutionary Marxist organization, can at best play a secondary role in the unfolding of the struggles, or at worst profoundly distort and pervert the forms and the results of these struggles. This vanguard, after all, was born out of a movement of spontaneous revolt against capitalist society and against the adaptation of the bureaucratic leaderships of the workers movement to this society. This spontaneous revolt can appear in extremely varied spheres. The milieu's own struggles play an important but not exclusive role: Even within the working class, the crisis in the bourgeois relationships in general constitutes a powerful factor of radicalization and differentiation of the vanguard. The diversity of the forms taken by these ruptures with the practice of the bureaucratic leaderships makes any overall political characterization of the mass vanguard one-sided. Spontaneously, as a consequence of its social composition as well as the very structures of the workers movement, it oscillates between ultraleftism and centrism.

However, the road from spontaneous revolt to effective struggle for socialist revolution can be a long one. Some of the participants in this vanguard, who re main prisoners of spontaneism, sectarianism, ultraleftist infantilism, apolitical workerism, or primitive syndicalism, will never travel this distance. Others will go it only on the condition that the revolutionary Marxist organization acquires a decisive political weight within the vanguard, remaining always equal to the tasks confronting it.

While this vanguard has attained a mass character and is for the first time in a long period becoming capable of effective action, it is no less true that it still remains very much a minority within the mass movement, and even more so within the organized workers movement. The essential task of the vanguard is not to constantly measure its strength against the masses still following the traditional leaderships but to change the relationship of forces in the mass movement through its ability to impel masses much broader than those consistently associated with it into action that overflows the channels of bureaucratic control.

Unless it goes through the necessary apprenticeship in learning the tactics for exploiting this capacity, even a vanguard of 50,000 or 100,000 individuals can become isolated and disoriented in a mass movement of millions of workers. It can be bypassed by events, be buffeted about by partial and temporary setbacks, and vacillate impressionistically between an opportunistic adaptation to the leaders of the traditional workers movement and sectarian abstentionism and defeatism.

6. The Central Task

From these five changes in the objective and subjective conditions for building revolutionary parties in capitalist Eu-rope, we have drawn, and continue to draw, the conclusion that the central task for revolutionary Marxists in thestagethat opened in 1967-68 is to win hegemony within the new mass vanguard-putting emphasis on strengthening ourselves within the workers component of this van guard—in order to build qualitatively stronger revolutionary organizations than in the preceding stage, to make the transition from revolutionary propaganda groups to revolutionary political organizations beginning to sink roots into the proletariat.

Political hegemony implies that the revolutionary Marxist organization, through its propaganda, its campaigns, and its initiatives, appears as a pole of reference for this broad vanguard, even if a large part of it is not yet directly organized by our movement.

It is illusory, in fact, to think that propaganda groups can transform themselves in one leap into revolutionary parties already possessing decisive political influence over a section of the proletariat-at least in countries like those of capitalist Europe, where there is a long-established workers movement with a bureaucratic apparatus exerting tremendous weight among the working masses. The masses do not take their orientation in the first instance from programs, platforms, or ideas. Their orientation is determined by their immediate needs and the tools for waging effective struggles that are available to meet these needs.

Only when the revolutionary organizations have demonstrated not only the lucidity and correctness of their program but also their effectiveness in action (if only on a limited scale) will the defeats brought on by the opportunism of the traditional leaderships and the antibureaucratic revolts inspired in turn by these setbacks result in a massive influx into our organizations. The stage that leads from the essentially propagandistic group to the revolutionary party, in the scientific sense of the term, is therefore one in which a revolutionary organization begins to sink roots in the class, that is, to achieve through its intervention in the class struggle a relationship of forces enabling it to project itself as a credible alternate leadership for the workers movement, begin ning with a vanguard sector of the working class.

Setting our main goal as winning political hegemony within the mass vanguard follows from the overall analysis of the present stage of the class struggle in capitalist Europe: a. Unless the revolutionary left achieves such hegemony, there is a danger that the strength of the mass vanguard will be dissipated. b. Unless this mass vanguard is crystallized into a serious and powerful revolutionary Marxist organization, its potential for influencing broader masses is in danger of being neutralized and lost. c. Unless this potential of the vanguard to influence greater masses makes itself felt with increasing forcefulness, the upsurge in workers struggles will arrive at a dead end, which in the long run will facilitate a counteroffensive by the bourgeoisie. It is no easy task for revolutionary Marxists to win hegemony within this new mass vanguard. Such an objective can be achieved neither by adapting opportunistically to the lowest common denominator of this politically disparate vanguard, nor by an attempt (in the final analysis, no less opportunistic) to make a "synthesis" out of the various currents running through it.

Achieving this objective requires:

1. Continuing education of the vanguard by means of a polemic with the various far-left groups on revolutionary strategy, the Transitional Program, the unity of the working class, class alliances, and the construction of the revolutionary party. Not one of these questions is as yet clearly understood by this broad vanguard as a whole.

2. A capacity on the part of the revolutionary Marxist organizations to take political initiatives outflanking the course of the reformists. These initiatives are aimed at mobilizing not only this broad vanguard but along with it a part of the worker activists and even a part of the masses. These initiatives allow the broad vanguard to be educated in the perspective of a generalized confrontation with the bourgeois state. And they serve to free the militant activists from the grip of re formism.

3. A capacity on the part of the revolutionary Marxist organizations to offer this broad, workers vanguard a framework for continuing mass work that will enable it both to demonstrate real strength on a national scale vis-a-vis the reformists through central campaigns, such as support for workers struggles, anti-imperialist mobilizations (Indochina, Chile), antimilitarist mobilizations, etc., and to challenge the dominance of the reformists over the economic struggles in the plants through continuing trade-union work designed to build a class-struggle trade-union tendency and through an ability to mobilize some independent actions within the plants. This takes account of the new forms of organization within the plants, whose character varies according to their specific objectives and also the extent of trade-union organization and the greater or lesser dominance of the reformists over the trade-union apparatus.

In all cases, however, our aim is:

1. To bring about the emergence, during periods of heightened struggle, of genuine structures of workers democracy (general assemblies with full power, elected strike committees, shop stewards). 2. To advance toward establishing permanent class-struggle tendencies in the trade unions but in no way whatever to build permanent struggle committees, or small, sectarian red trade unions, or centrist political trade-union groups. 3. To build party sympathizer groups in the plants with the goal of bringing the best militants into the revolutionary Marxist organization.

4. To develop the capacity to master the dialectic of sectors of intervention, which depends on the growth oftherevolutionary Marxist far left and on the relationship of forces between it and the traditional parties, and also on the size of the broad workers vanguard, particularly in relation to the youth vanguard. That is to say, to master the dialectical connections and the allocation of forces — between central political actions and diversified local political actions; — between work in the youth sector and in the worker sector; — between the periphery and the heart of the workers movement; between community work and plant work.

The problem is thus posed differently depending on the particular country and on the particular stage achieved in building the organization.

5. This activity as a whole is aimed at transforming this vanguard into an adequate instrument for restructuring the organized workers movement. It thus assumes a specific, unity tactic toward the traditional workers parties. While in fact our organizations are as a rule still too small to be able to apply the united-front tactic as a central tactic, through the initiatives and campaigns we propose this broad vanguard can be mobilized and, with it, a section of the militant workers. Thanks to the relationship of forces thus established, the traditional workers parties can be forced to accept unity in action. Through such conjunctural unity in action, we aim to draw in the masses and wherever possible to outflank the reformist apparatus. In the course of this process of "initiatives - unity in action —outflanking," we aim to educate the broad vanguard as to the strategic necessity of working-class unity and of rejecting every sectarian deviation and to wrest militant workers from the reformist hegemony -if not to win them permanently to revolutionary Marxism, at least to lead them to a lasting political break with reformism. This unity tactic toward the workers movement must be complemented by a specific tactic toward the organizations of the far left designed both to achieve the basis for mass initiatives by uniting the far-left organizations on certain questions and to combat in practice, in forms of action, slogans, etc., their sectarian deviations, particularly those of an ultraleft character.

Here again, this unity tactic toward the other far-left organizations varies according to the relationship of forces between the revolutionary Marxist organization and the other far-left organizations, be tween the far left and the workers parties, between the far left and the broad vanguard. It thus necessarily differs from country to country and depends on the stages of the construction of the revolutionary Marxist organization.

The upheavals of 1967-68 provided an exceptional opportunity for a breakthrough by a new revolutionary leadership of the European proletariat—the biggest opportunity since 1917-23. But it will not last indefinitely. Within a finite period of time we must assemble all the conditions necessary for a qualitative strengthening of the revolutionary Marxist organizations, or else this historic opportunity will be lost.

We reject any spontaneist illusion to the effect that the scope of the present crisis of capitalism and Stalinism — which is, in fact, unprecedented - could, through the pressure of the masses, force the leaders of the trade-union bureaucracy, the leaders of the SPs and the CPs, to lead a socialist revolution in Europe to a successful conclusion. If a new revolutionary leadership is not built in the time remaining to us, after successive waves of mass struggles (some of which will certainly surpass even May '68 in France), the European proletariat will experience new and terrible defeats of historic scope. Intercontinental Press

### II. Concrete Forms and Content of the Revolutionary Perspectives in Capitalist Europe

7. Revolutionary Upsurge and Dual Power

The experiences of more than a half century, as well as our economic, social, and political analysis of contemporary Europeem capitalism, make it possible for us to define clearly the revolutionary perspectives of our work. The perspectives can be summed up essentially in two categories of problems: the problems relating to the revolutionary upsurge; and the perspective for the revolutionary struggle for power. Aside from exceptional cases where bourgeols armies have collapsed as the result of defeat in an imperialist war (e.g., Ger-many 1918-19), or bourgeois states have completely collapsed owing to defeat and occupation in an imperialist war (Yugoslavia and Greece 1941-44), the upsurges of exceptional mass struggles by the European proletariat during the past half century have exhibited a great number of common features. These characteristics were present equally in the struggles in Germany 1920-23, Italy 1919-21, Great Britain 1925-26, Spain 1931-37, Belgium 1932-35, and France 1934-36 as well as the more recent examples of Italy 1945- 48, Belgium 1960-61, Greece 1963-65, France 1968, Italy 1968-69, and Spain at the present moment. They can be listed as follows: a. Through mass strikes and general strikes, mass struggles on an exceptional scale can completely paralyze not only the economy but even most of the activities of the bourgeois state apparatus. They thus objectively pose the question of state power even when the masses themselves are not conscious of it and are not in fact setting out to overthrow the bourgeois state. Such struggles are manifestations of the crisis of capitalism's decline and agony, of the workers' instinctive attempt to take the leadership of society and rebuild it along the lines of their socialist program. b. The ripening of the historical conditions for socialist revolution is also revealed by the fact that during these explosions of mass struggle, numerous intermediary petty-bourgeois layers £ireInstinctively drawn by the proletarian struggle, rally around the struggling proletariat, and participate in varying degrees in its struggle. c. Although these explosions often occur suddenly and unexpectedly, they always take place as the culmination of a phase of radicalizing struggles, marked by the appearance of more militant forms of combat, by violent skirmishes between part of the working class and its vanguard, on the one hand, and bourgeois society, on the other- that is, the expression of not only a structural but also a conjunctural crisis of bourgeois society. d. The immediate detonator of these explosions can vary greatly: economic demands (1919-20, 1925-26); acute economic crisis (1923); abrupt change in the economic situation (1960-61); reaction to a violent move by the far right (Spain 1936, Greece 1963); hope for a fundamental political change (June 1936 in France); student revolt (May 1968); monetary crisis; colonial war; defense of rights the workers movement has won (right to strike, trade-union freedom), and so forth. It would be futile to attempt to set up a possible catalog in advance. But what should be emphasized is the fact that the detonator, whatever it is, can only play its role after a whole molecular process has taken place in which the proletariat has radicalized, grown in self-confidence, and lost some of its electoralist illusions, while the social and political "fever temperature" has risen. Unless such a trend has affected a considerable part of the proletariat, no limited explosion, no matter how major, will touch off struggles embracing millions of workers. e. In the imperialist countries like those of Europe, even a weakened bourgeoisie, even one facing a sharp social and political crisis, normally has many resources it can fall back on to absorb objectively revolutionary explosions as long as the proletariat's level of class consciousness and the breadth (as well as the political ability) of its revolutionary vanguard are not sufficient to prevent it. Such resorts include electoral maneuvers (turning over the government to left coalitions or parties); immediate economic concessions; selective repression, that is, repression concentrated against the vanguard alone or the forces spearheading the mass struggle; or a combination of some or all of these methods. Save for exceptional times of Imperialist war and occupation, or an exceptional economic crisis like the one that struck Germany in 1930-33, we have to rule out any notion that the imperialist bourgeoisie will prove incapable of maneuvering or making immediate concessions to the masses. This is an essential difference between the situation in the imperialist countries and that in the colonial and semicolonial countries.

Furthermore, the vast political experience of the European bourgeoisie has taught it that as long as it retains state power and control over the main means of production and exchange. It can rapidly take back any concession granted during a time of acute revolutionary crisis. The main thing is to preserve these two basic instruments of domination intact, that is, to see that the mass movement recedes and breaks up. The rest will flow automatically from this. f. For these same reasons, any tumultuous upsurge of the mass movement is always limited in time. If victory is not achieved. If at least a point of no return— a break with the bourgeois state and capitalist relations of production-is not reached (that is, if a situation of dual power does not arise), the mass movement is condemned to go into an ebb, which in such cases is synonymous with a return to the "normal" functioning of capitalism.

What distinguishes a situation of dual power is the fact that it constitutes a state of affairs that cannot be absorbed into the normal functioning of bourgeois institutions. As long as this dual power persists, a "return to normal" is impossible. Even in the event of some partial defeats of the mass movement, an overall test of strength between the classes remains inevitable within a more or less short period of time.

It flows from this that the main task of revolutionists in case of an explosion of tumultuous mass struggles consists in preparing for and ensuring the appearance of organs of dual power that can prevent the rapid absorption of the upsurge by bourgeois state and economic relations, and, as a result, give the class struggle the form of a series of general confrontations, thereby creating the best conditions for a rapid growth of class consciousness and for a rapid strengthening of the revolutionary party.

The organs of dual power do not necessarily have to grow out of strike committees and take the form of soviet-type councils from the very start- although that remains the most probable variant. They can grow out of spreading experience of workers control or - as during the Spanish civil war-an experience of large-scale arming of the workers. The essential thing is that such bodies be oriented toward forming a centralized structure that would begin to assume real state-type powers.

8. Dual Power and Revolutionary Victory

In the industrialized capitalist countries, the main conditions for transforming a revolutionary situation, where organs of dual power have sprung up, into a revolutionary victory are the following: a. A continuing mobilization—with spontaneous forms and initiatives impossible to specify in advance-of the great majority of the proletariat and working masses around organs of dual power arising to meet the need for solidifying their ranks, for democratically centralized organization, and for protecting the masses and defending them politically, economically, and by force of arms against bourgeois repression. b. The weakening and increasing paralysis of the organs of power belonging to the bourgeoisie, whose economic and financial means are more and more cut off by the successes of the struggle of the masses in the factories, the banks, the communications media, etc., and whose subordinate and middle-level personnel feel themselves more and more attracted by the revolutionary thrust of the proletariat, or at least neutralized in the decisive test of strength that is building up. c. The receding and rapid disappearance of all the masses' illusions about halfway solutions, which, under the guise of maintaining dual power or putting together hybrid forms of power, prevent the destruction of the centers of bourgeois power and thus pave the way for the liquidation of the organs of workers power. d. The existence of a revolutionary leadership capable of projecting and organizing the most daring initiatives on a wide scale, of closely watching the progress the proletariat makes on the way to political maturity, of assembling the technical preconditions for the insurrection as soon as the majority of the workers are firmly won to the idea of taking power, and of creating psychological and political conditions such as to reduce to a minimum the adversary's will and capacity for resistance. Contrary to what occurs in the less developed capitalist countries, the economic striking force of the proletariat in the industrialized countries is so great, and the social base of the bourgeoisie's power so narrow, that in the event of a revolutionary upsurge involving the great majority of the workers, the repressive apparatus can be partially paralyzed at the outset. This has been confirmed in all the important revolutionary upsurges in capitalist Europe since 1919. It is only by taking advantage of lack of determination, hesitation, and an absence of clear goals on the part of the proletariat that bourgeois reaction can launch a counterattack once the first storm has passed.

The revolutionary Marxist organization's revolutionary education of its own cadres and activists, its revolutionary propaganda in the vanguard, and its occasional exemplary agitation among broader masses must aim to prevent any such pause from arising -after the mass movement reaches its first peak and surprises and paralyzes the adversary - that would give the enemy camp time to regroup its forces and prepare its countermove. Formation of organs of dual power, which are compelled to arm for the purposes of self-defense, and the seizure by the masses and their representative bodies of as much decisive material "security" as possible (means of communication, infrastructure, banks, industrial plants) constitute the most effective means of limiting the cost of the revolutionary victory, in both material and in human terms. The idea spread by technocrats of the right as well as the "left" (and sometimes even the far left) to the effect that the technical complexity of economic and social life makes a proletarian revolution in this epoch if not impossible, at least much more difficult, is theoretically false and has in practice been contradicted by the initial experience of most of the revolutionary upsurges in the West in our century. The more complex the economic mechanisms are, the more vulnerable they are to a widespread mass movement. The more the intricate machinery of the state apparatus has been technologically modernized, the more easily it can be paralyzed by mass action. The nerve centers of this machinery -power plants, banks and postal checking offices, tele communication relay stations, radio and television transmitters, telephone and tele graph exchanges — can be taken over by the workers within minutes and used to advance the revolution. For capitalist re action to regain them from the workers, or to substitute parallel centers, in order to use them to its own advantage, the bourgeoisie requires political unity and determination, a reserve of fresh forces to be sent in that is unaffected by the revolutionary process, and a readiness to risk a general confrontation with millions of persons — factors nearly al ways absent at the outset of a mass revolutionary explosion.

Experience has also shown that where intellectual labor is more thoroughly integrated into the productive process by the third technological revolution currently in progress, the greater is the number of highly skilled scholars, engineers, and technicians who will pass over into the camp of the proletariat as soon as the revolution gets under way and make sure that the bourgeois side holds no "monopoly of knowledge" that can prevent the workers from running the productive apparatus and infrastructure in the interest of the popular masses.

Also completely contradicted by re cent experience is the idea that the imperialist bourgeoisie and the reformist and Stalinist bureaucratic apparatuses have drawn the main lessons from the revolutionary explosions of the past, thereby making impossible-or at least more and more difficult- any repeat of these kinds of explosions. Underlying this idea is the view that such explosions are attributable to some "error" committed by the rulers and their servants on the eve of the blowup— too much rigidity and harshness, according to some; too much cowardice and a tendency to retreat and grant concessions, according to others.

In reality, the explosion of generalized mass struggles has deep objective roots in the social and political crisis confronting the regime. "Errors" by the rulers can contribute toward touching off such ex plosions only in the sense of determining the precise moment and occasion, not in the sense of actually having caused them, whereas they could have been avoided indefinitely. On the contrary, the preparatory phase of such explosions has in general been characterized by the rulers' successive— or combined —use of every possible variant in policy-the repressive as well as the "reformist" variant. One of the factors precisely determining when the explosion will occur is the exhaustion of all these variants and the unconcealable impasse of bourgeois policy that results. The question therefore boils down to this: Is the objective scope of the crisis in capitalist social relations such that in spite of all the lessons the bourgeoisie and the re formist apparatuses within the workers movement have learned from thepast, similar impasses have to periodically reappear? Our answer to this question is an unequivocal Yes. It is based on the main lesson of European history since 1914 and arises from the very nature of the epoch - the epoch of the crisis and decline of the capitalist system.

9. The Inadequacies of the Subjective Factor

The failure up to now either to direct the explosions of mass struggles in capitalist Europe into culminating in situations of dual power, or to bring about a revolutionary victory in cases where dual power was achieved (especially Spain 1936-37, and in part Germany

1923 and Italy 1919-20), is not the result, in the final analysis, either of the inherent strength of capitalism or of insufficient combativity on the part of the masses. It is essentially the consequence of subjective deficiencies - an insufficient level of class consciousness on the part of the Intercontinental Press proletariat and its revolutionary leadership. In the perspective in which revolutionary Marxists in capitalist Europe are presently working, their main task remains to overcome these deficiencies. The concrete character of these subjective deficiencies during the present stage can be described precisely. In spite of the fact that the working class is beginning, in action, to go beyond its bureaucratic apparatuses, it is still having a great deal of difficulty developing forms of struggle and bodies for leading struggles that truly unite its forces and function inde pendently (elected strike committees, general strike assemblies, federation and centralization of strike committees, etc.). It is still only beginning to break loose from the grip of an electoralist and parliamentarist conception of governmental and state power (this is the result both of prevailing bourgeois ideology and of three-quarters of a century of opportunist practices and miseducation by most of the mass workers organizations). During its initial phase, the radicalization of the proletariat results in fragmented struggles and an even more pronounced separation between those minority layers that are ready to engage in "tough" action, and the majority who continue to follow the established apparatus. The working masses, and even part of the vanguard, have not yet made a clear distinction between the objectives of reformist struggles (which can be co-opted and assimilated within the framework of the capitalist system) and truly transitional and anticapitalist objectives (which lead to the creation of organs of dual power). For the great majority of workers, the question of arming the proletariat and of disarming the official and semiofficial repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie remains an abstract and theoretical problem. They do not really see it as an indispensable necessity on the road to taking power. This gap in the workers' consciousness has been strongly reinforced by the reformist parties abandoning of all antimilitarist propaganda and all education on the need for arming the proletariat.

We reject the two parallel illusions that up to now have derailed or stifled so many revolutionary plans throughout the history of the imperialist countries: the spontaneist, opportunist, and tail-ending illusion, on the one hand; and the sectarian, propagandistic, and ultimatistic illusion on the other.

The spontaneists have the illusion that by the very logic of their struggles the working masses will come to remove these subjective deficiencies that in the past have blocked the victory of every revolutionary upsurge in the industrialized capitalist countries. The broadening and the expansion of workers struggles create the precondition for a rapid rise in their class consciousness; but they do not automatically ensure it. There is no reason to suppose that the masses, educated for decades in the spirit of respect for bourgeois parliamentarianism and the "electoral road to socialism," will be transformed, as if by magic, into adepts of the Lenin ist theory of the state simply because they have unleashed a general strike. It is even more improbable that just by occupying factories masses deprived for decades of all class-oriented political education will gain the capacity to put together a coherent program of transitional demands and to wage a successful fight for this program against the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and the reformist apparatuses. On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that simply by increasing its numbers and expanding the circulation of its press a revolutionary vanguard organization can succeed through education and propaganda in raising the level of class consciousness among entire layers-let alone the majority - of the proletariat. Only individuals can absorb ideas through reading or study. The masses absorb ideas only through their experience in struggle. Any revolutionary propaganda divorced from the real experiences of proletarian struggle-on the pretext, say, that these experiences are too elementary, reformist, "purely" economic, and so on — is condemned in advance to remain without effect on the course of history. By defining the obstacle, it is easier to see how to overcome it. What makes the progressive elimination of the subjective deficiencies of the proletariat objectively possible is the opening of a period of struggles taking on broader and broader dimensions, raising more and more social problems of various kinds, able little by little to politicize wider layers of the proletariat and the working masses — struggles that are unfolding under the conditions of a progressive recomposition of the labor movement (that is, of a shift in the relationship of forces between the vanguard and the traditional leaderships, both within the mass movement and within the traditional organizations themselves). This progressive recomposition need not necessarily coincide, by the way, with a reorganization of the workers movement, although it will inevitably result in touching off at least a partial restructuration.

What makes a solution to the crisis of the subjective factor subjectively attainable is for the revolutionary Marxist organization to have a correct overall orientation (programmatically, strategically, and tactically), for it to increase its strength organizationally and politically (that is, to sink roots increasingly in the class), and for its propaganda and agitation to gain increasing credibility by making a general political impact and scoring some initial successes here and there.

There is therefore a dialectical interrelationship between the radicalization and the politicization of workers struggles, the growth of the mass vanguard, the strengthening of the influence of revolutionary Marxists in these struggles, their increasing participation in workers struggles, and the response to their general revolutionary propaganda and to the practical steps they take to multiply experiences of the workers assuming the leadership of their own struggles and to orient them toward transitional demands. It is this dynamic that will smash the barriers on the road to socialism one after the other. This dialectical interrelationship is one of active intervention and programmatic steadfastness, of initiatives in action and mass education; it is one in which revolutionary propaganda leads to action.

10. Conditions of Revolutionary Victory

In the light of all these lessons of his tory, it becomes evident that a prior phase of dual power is of decisive importance to the victory of the proletarian revolution, in order to overcome the double inadequacy of the subjective factor: the insufficient class consciousness of the proletariat and the weakness of its revolutionary leadership. For it is precisely by virtue of the experience of dual power that the majority of the masses in capitalist Europe, still under the domination of reformist traditions and leaderships, can liberate themselves from these bonds and begin to follow a revolutionary Marxist leadership. This clearly presupposes that:

1. This leadership has to a large extent already passed the threshold of primitive accumulation of cadres, of implantation in the working class, of ability to intervene in the class struggle and of credibility within the broad vanguard, even before the opening of the phase of dual power. 2. It has prepared its cadres to confront the problems of the struggle to win the majority of the workers and the problems of the conquest of power, and it has carried out systematic propaganda within the broader vanguard in favor of the revolutionary conquest of power and against all reformist, gradualist, electoralist, and putschist illusions.

3. It audaciously applies those parts of the Transitional Program especially suited to wresting control over the majority of the masses from the bureaucratic leaderships of the workers movement — particularly, agitation for the united front. 4. It audaciously broadens its sphere of predominant influence within those social layers that are potentially allies of the proletariat— the working peasantry, salaried technical personnel, etc. — by means of agitation on appropriate transitional de mands.

5. It thoroughly understands the decisive role of centralized revolutionary initiative in carrying through the armed insurrection, supported by the majority of the laboring masses.

It is highly unlikely that the stage of agitation and of action on these tasks will be reached before the emergence of organs of dual power, that is, before the emergence of a revolutionary situation in the strict sense of the term. In countries where the organized workers movement has very deep traditions and roots in the proletariat, it is excluded that a majority of the proletariat can go over to the revolutionary organization except by passing through such a phase. The belief that, in the absence of an extremely acute revolutionary crisis manifested precisely in the birth of organs of dual power, a new experience with a reformist or "labor" government would suffice to suddenly propel the masses by the hundreds of thousands toward still small revolutionary groups, is a gradualist illusion that must be resolutely rejected.

11. Our Central Political Tasks

The main political tasks that the revolutionary Marxist organizations must accomplish during the present stage flow from the whole preceding analysis. The following are the tasks whose achievement will stimulate the dynamic of mass struggles and the growth of class consciousness outlined under point 9—tasks that center on intervention in the working class. a. Systematically intervene in all agitation among workers, in all strikes and campaigns around limited demands, striving to link up these actions to the general approach outlined in the Transitional Program: to propagandize for a series of demands (essentially around the axis of the demand for workers control) that are increasingly central today and that objectively lead the workers to challenge the authority of the bosses and of the bourgeois state and to create organs of dual power - and to conduct propaganda and agitation around the tasks of workers self-defense. b. Support the day-to-day struggles of the masses around all immediate demands, even the most modest ones, inasmuch as these struggles lead the workers to seek solutions through direct action and mass initiative, and push them in the direction of broadening and extending their struggles. c. Popularize and spread so-called qualitative demands that arise out of mass struggles themselves and that either undermine the very foundations of capitalist market economy or serve as a powerful stimulus for solidarity and unity among all layers of the proletariat—i.e., equal wage raises for everybody; no speedup; free, high-quality public services, etc. d. Press for, spur on, broaden, and - as soon as possible-extend incidences of the workers organizing struggles on their own initiative (democratically elected strike committees, general assemblies of strikers, shop stewards democratically elected and recallable at any time, councils of shop stewards, etc.); these are a great school preparing the workers for the soviet-type bodies that will spring up. In some circumstances, where the proportion of union members is very high and there is real rank-and-file democracy, it is not excluded that such bodies can coincide with rank-and-file union structures. e. Conduct a systematic propaganda campaign in the organized workers movement around transitional demands and help in the recomposition of this move ment by getting these demands —especially the demands for workers control and workers self-defense — adopted by radicalizing sectors in the trade-union movement and in the traditional workers organizations. f. Organize propaganda and agitation on the theme of working-class unity, and conduct a systematic struggle for all political and trade-union rights and for the same political and trade-union rights for all who work in the same country, incorporating this struggle into the framework of the working class's overall battle against layoffs, unemployment, etc.; organize solidarity with immigrant workers in struggles against the forms of exploitation and discrimination that specifically affect them; combat in a thoroughgoing way all forms of racism and xeno phobia—weapons of divisiveness in the hands of the employers. While it is necessary to support movements of self-organization by immigrant workers and super-exploited communities (living in the ghettos where the bourgeoisie has thrown them) as an expression of a first step in defense against racist attacks and the many kinds of discrimination, it is essential to seek to unite them as rapidly as possible with the labor movement as a whole, in order to avoid incidents conducive to deepening the division within the working class. g. Organize international propaganda around the themes of solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles on the "underdeveloped" continents, solidarity with struggles in other European countries, and solidarity with the antibureaucratic struggles of workers, students, and intellectuals of the bureaucratized workers states. h. Develop systematic activity opposing all discrimination against women (even in our own ranks and in the workers organizations). Participate in struggles against the oppression of women in such a way as to help expose class cleavages; to advance the development of a clear anticapitalist consciousness on the part of these women, by taking as the starting point the same themes that awakened them politically; and to emphasize self-organization, direct action, and working-class unity, while seeking to make clear through these struggles the bankruptcy and inadequacies of the reformist and Stalinist leaderships. i. Educate the workers vanguard and broader layers of workers systematically in a nonelectoralist and nonparliamentarian view of the question of power. Use propaganda for the slogan of a workers government— including, as its concrete form, government by the workers organizations, which may be appropriate during particular moments of the political conjuncture — to project primarily the idea of a government resulting from mass struggles and action. The use of this slogan in election campaigns must be strictly limited to specific circumstances depending on particular conjunctures. Otherwise it threatens to run counter to one of the essential goals - the systematic destruction of electoralist illusions and reformist ideology. j. Take credible steps to initiate unity of action: steps toward immediate unity of the entire vanguard in action around goals for which this unity of action is objectively necessary and possible, despite the various political and ideological differences that run through the vanguard (e.g., the funeral for Pierre Overney in France); propaganda for a united front with the traditional organizations once a threshold in the relationship of forces within the workers movement has been crossed; propaganda for a united front of the traditional organizations when the objective necessity presents itself (struggle against the fascist threat or the threat of a Bonapartist dictatorship; defense of the right to strike and working-class freedoms, defense of major strikes that the bourgeoisie is trying to crush, etc.). k. Through general propaganda, but also and especially by pointing to actions, incidents, and concrete events that have an obvious pedagogical value, systematically educate the workers vanguard and broader working-class layers on the need for armed self-defense against the violence of big capital, both in its extralegal variety (fascist gangs, private armed forces of the capitalists, secret police forces, strikebreakers) and its "legal" variety (police, riot squads, and armies). Undertake a campaign of antimilitarist propaganda, even in the bourgeois army itself.

Advocate within the mass organizations the need for workers combat detachments and workers militias.

Instigate vigorous antimilitarist activity, including constant propaganda within the working class and the civilian youth against the bourgeois army, and diffusion of revolutionary propaganda and organization of communist work within the army itself, especially in countries where there is compulsory military service. l. Systematically popularize our "socialist model"- our conception of socialist democracy, of a state based on workers councils (councils of the working people), of democratically centralized (planned) self-management, of consciously organizing the withering away of the market categories by both gradual means and abrupt leaps forward, and of the conscious struggle after the seizure of power for the radical transformation of human relations in all spheres of everyday life, particularly the struggle against the persistence of patriarchal values and institutions. This model can inspire political activity in several ways. It can mobilize people against capitalism, strengthen the vanguard vis-a-vis the reformist and Stalinist apparatuses, and help to preserve the future soviet state against bureaucratic deviations.

These central political tasks make up a coherent plan. The aim is to make sure, when the next explosion of mass struggle occurs-whether it takes the form of a mass political strike or a general strike involving an occupation of the factories; whatever the occasion and whatever sets it off— that there will be a sufficient number of revolutionary worker cadres in the factories, with enough influence and prestige, and that the revolutionary Marxist organization will be established in enough places and the broadest layers of workers will have acquired enough experience in struggle so as to guarantee that organs of dual power will spring up in the main factories and regions of the country, that they will quickly federate into a single system of dual power (a system of the soviet type, even though its name and its origins might vary considerably), and that the logic of a revolutionary situation can thereby fully unfold on all levels. In other words, we are working in the conviction that every success today in sinking revolutionary Marxist roots in the class, in carrying out propaganda for transitional demands, and in recomposing the workers movement will result a few years from now in a cumulative and qualitative improvement in the conditions that are required for the spread of a system of organs of dual power.

### III. The Central Problems in Building Sections of the Fourth International in Europe at the Present Stage

12. Three Predominant Orientations in the Building of the Party

The form of party building that is appropriate to the central tasks of the present stage-that of winning hegemony within the mass vanguard and transforming our sections from propaganda groups into organizations on the way to becoming rooted in the proletariat-is specific to this stage. It is neither that of entryism, nor that of growth through the immediate recruitment of broad masses, which can become appropriate at a later stage. These three different major orientations in party building - viewed in every case in a nonmechanical way, that is, in combination with various transitional forms, such as fractions inside mass organizations, groups for sympathizers and contacts, and so forth — correspond in a fundamental sense to three objective perspectives on the predominant form of radicalization. The entryist tactic for building a revolutionary party proceeded from the hypothesis that the process of radicalization - of forming a new mass vanguard - was taking place for the most part within the traditional mass organizations. Such a hypothesis was shown to be correct in capitalist Eu-rope in the period that extended from the early 1950s until the beginning of the 1960s (e.g., Bevanite left, followed by the Cousins tendency, in the British Labour party; Communist Youth and Ingrao tendency in the Italian CP; opposition tendencies and the UEC within the French CP, and Social Democratic left within the SFIO, giving rise to the PSA and the PSU; Re-nard tendency in the Belgian workers movement; trade-union left and Communist opposition giving rise in Denmark to the SF; and so forth).

An approach to building the revolutionary party based on expectations of immediately recruiting broad masses assumes that this party already represents in itself a pole of attraction for radicalized workers and intellectuals directly through its propaganda, its agitation, and its activity (including its united-front initiatives), with whole currents breaking away from the traditional organizations to join it. Such a situation, which is by and large the kind in which the Western European Communist parties found themselves at the beginning of the 1920s, around 1934-35, and again following the second world war, does not yet exist for any revolutionary organization on this continent today. The tactic for building the revolutionary party that underlies our present orientation in capitalist Europe is based on the fact that the process of radicalization is already for the most part unfolding outside the traditional organizations but is not yet taking place around the established pole of a revolutionary Marxist party, and that it also is having important repercussions — which could even be come decisive in a quantitative sense during a later stage-inside the traditional organizations. But the initiatives and general activity of the revolutionary Marxist organizations are already, at the present stage, decisive for the overall success of the process of radicalization at work both outside and inside the traditional organizations.

This tactic is based on a dialectical analysis of the relationship — at first glance, an intricate and even contradictory one — between the vanguard's need for ideological clarification and a regrouping and strengthening of its forces on the one hand, and the rate of progress of that section of the masses who are still largely following the traditional organizations, on the other. We have already emphasized the fundamental fact that today the former process in the long run determines the outcome of the latter as well. There will not be an extensive and decisive split in the traditional organizations without the appearance of credible enough and strong enough poles outside these organizations around which such splits can crystallize.

An important factor must be added here that makes it possible to lessen, and within the not too distant future to resolve, the contradictory nature of the tasks required by the present stage — namely, the fact that in addition to the gradual change in the relationship of forces between the traditional bureaucratic apparatuses and the vanguard, a change is also taking place in the relationship between the traditional parties and the masses who continue to follow them. Today these relationships are far more complex than they were during the postwar period. The bitter experiences of the past have not been erased from the workers' memory. After the experience of four Labour governments since the war, those British workers who are still convinced that Wilson and Company want to introduce socialism by parliamentary means have dwindled to a very small number.

As for the Italian and the French workers, their doubts about achieving socialism by the parliamentary road extend not only to the SPs but, for growing numbers of workers, to the CPs.

For every capitalist country in Europe a more precise analysis is needed of the specific relationship between the proletarian masses and the traditional workers parties. Such an analysis would, in any case, show that while the gap between the consciousness of the vanguard and the broader masses is still large, it is nonetheless smaller than that indicated by election results, which reflect traditional loyalties and lesser-evil reflexes. There is less of a difference between the ability of the vanguard, on the one hand, and of the broader masses on the other to outflank the reformists and the Khrushchevite neo-reformists in action than there is between the levels of consciousness of these two groups. The tactic for building revolutionary parties suited to the present stage of working-class radicalization must be based on an analysis of these concrete processes.

13. The Uneven Development of the Radicalization

Just as we must attach a prime importance to the dialectical relationship between the "radicalization of the vanguard and that of the broader masses," so too the dialectical relationship between the radicalization of different layers of the population ready for revolutionary action takes on a great importance for building our organizations. This dialectical relationship, reflected in the dialectic of sectors of intervention, comprises the following elements: a. During the initial phase of the present social crisis, the most extensive political radicalization developed within the university and high-school student milieu. Independently of the ups and downs in the university and high-school student movement proper — that is, the movement around the social and material problems specific to this element— a broad and highly politicized vanguard has crystallized among the student youth, oriented toward general political problems, primarily problems of solidarity with the colonial revolution and anti-imperialist movements throughout the world.

After May 1968 and, more generally, after the revival of workers struggles throughout Europe, a fundamental turn has taken place in this milieu everywhere in the world. Today what primarily determines the orientation of university and high-school students is intervening in workers struggles and the perspectives of these struggles. Given the aggravation of the overall crisis in society and in university institutions, it remains both possible and necessary to politicize new generations of student youth through anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and antibureaucratic propaganda and actions. Demands that have to do with the specific problems of university and high-school students continue to provide a ferment of agitation and organization that can radicalize the less politicized layers. But the capacity of revolutionary Marxists to bring these strata to a general understanding of revolutionary program and to the revolutionary party depends on the overall activity of the revolutionary Marxist organization and its political initiatives, as well as the extent and effectiveness of its intervention in the working class.

In the present situation of recomposition of the workers movement, expansion of the vanguard, and growing politicization, it is becoming easier and easier to move from struggle against the higher-education policy of the government to advancing the revolutionary Marxist program in its entirety. b. The most important phenomenon is the radicalization of the working class. However, it is developing unevenly. The growing militancy of the class has not been accompanied by a corresponding politicization. Indeed, it is necessary to put in a separate category those militant workers who are able, in times of struggle, to outflank the reformist apparatuses but who, for the most part, are not involved in the revolutionary, anticapitalist struggle in a continuous way. A large number of these militant workers remain under the influence of the reformist apparatuses. A small number, often composed of recently proletarianized young workers, express a powerful sentiment of revolt more than the development of an anticapitalist class consciousness. Only a minority, through struggle, cross over in a lasting way to the new, broad vanguard. The broad workers vanguard itself is, for reasons already mentioned, highly differentiated, breaking down as follows: (1) Trade-union cadres, leaders of mass struggles recognized as such in the plant, who in action escape from the hold of the bureaucratic leaderships, but who have been strongly marked by the decades of reformist hegemony and betrayal and who will not at the present stage readily get involved in building the revolutionary Marxist party.

(2) Natural leaders who have been thrown up by the past five years of rising workers struggles —younger militants who are beginning to force their way forward in the plants as an alternative leadership challenging the hegemony of the trade-union bureaucrats and fighting them for leadership of the class struggle. (3) Finally, young workers and apprentices whose consciousness develops primarily in response to the total social crisis and who are attracted by the far-left groups, by radical forms of action, and by action around such issues as sexual re pression, women's liberation, the military, and the educational system.

At the present stage in building our organizations it is primarily the last two categories of militant workers that we can count on organizing in and around the party. In order to accomplish this, we must be able through our political campaigns to do justice to the various anti-imperialist and anticapitalist issues that have the potential of mobilizing, primarily but not exclusively, the mass vanguard, and be able by our intervention in the plants to respond to those needs of the class struggle that are not met by the traditional leaderships (democratic organizational forms of struggle, defense against anti-trade-union repressive measures, solidarity with exemplary struggles, etc.). c. A deep and massive social change has occurred on the periphery of the working class— the proletarianization of formerly independent middle strata (peasants, shopkeepers, and some intellectual workers and workers in the so-called liberal professions). This transition tends to end-although with some delay-in an ideological alteration of these strata, who in social upheavals become increasingly conscious of the identity of their interests with the historical interests of the proletariat. A similar but more precipitous alteration has occurred among the strata that long since have been condemned to sell their labor power but still outside the sphere of production in the strict sense, and that today, throughout capitalist Europe, are ever more rapidly being unionized and subjectively integrated into the workers movement: teachers, salaried employees, civil servants, etc. The ideological change experienced by these layers does not occur without a temporary strengthening of reformism, centrism, and ultraleftism. Without shifting its principal focuses of activity, the revolutionary Marxist organization must attentively follow the radicalization in these milieus, responding to their immediate concerns, linking their struggles to the general struggle of the proletariat for transitional, anticapitalist demands, offering them the perspective of its socialist "model," which answers to their fundamental concerns, and seeking to draw the most advanced elements into its own ranks.

14. Decline of the Centrist Organizations and the Restructuring of the Workers Movement

This restructuring of the European far left coincides with two phenomena that determine its limits and prefigure its dynamic: the rapid decline of the centrist formations that emerged at the beginning of the 1960s (disappearance of the PSIUP, the breakup of the PSU in France and the VS in Denmark, the decline of the PSP in the Netherlands and the SF in Norway) and a reviving influence of the traditional organizations in a not inconsiderable sector of the vanguard (the CP in Great Britain and Italy, and Social Democracy in West Germany and to some extent in Sweden).

The revolutionary Marxists struggling for political hegemony within the new vanguard cannot reject all of this organized far left as simply "ultraleftist." They continue to advocate unity in action by revolutionists for precise objectives and at precise moments (e.g., the funeral of Pierre Overney in France), when these objectives coincide with the real interest of the working class and its vanguard. The revolutionary Marxists are striving, as the political differentiation develops, to become the principal pole of regroupment for the far left on the basis of their political analyses (China, the USSR, permanent revolution, the bureaucratic structure of workers organizations, their attitude toward the unions, transitional demands, the organization of workers struggles, workers democracy, their "model" of socialism, etc.) — which have been confirmed by events— and on the basis of their growing foothold in the working class.

At the same time, the revolutionary Marxists are deliberately trying to bridge the gap that developed in the preceding period between the new far left and the organized workers movement. In this they have a dual objective: to reduce the risks of the far left finding itself isolated in the face of repression by the bourgeois state— which in these circumstances would be largely successful — and to bring the weight of the far left to bear in order to radicalize the organized workers move ment that is in the process of recomposition. In this regard, specific united campaigns involving important sections of the organized workers movement and the new far left play a vital role. This aim is best served by campaigns such as those in defense of the Vietnamese revolution, in defense of the victims of repression, in defense of the unions' right to strike and freedom of collective bargaining, and more generally, in defense of democratic rights that have been undermined or openly attacked by the bourgeoisie.

The role of pivot that the revolutionary Marxists are seeking to play between the new far left and the organized workers movement by no means represents a centrist scheme to gain a position in electoral combinations or interbureaucratic agreements, as the PSU and PSIUP have done. To the contrary, it represents a profound understanding of the dialectical interrelationship that dominates the whole present phase: the interaction through manifold intermediary stages between a mass vanguard forming and going into action, and radicalization in the traditional organizations (a classical example in this regard is what has been happening in Great Britain since the start of the struggle against the Tories' antistrike bill). We are convinced that the Social Democratic, Stalinist, and trade-union bureaucracies remain an essential roadblock on the path to the socialist revolution, a roadblock that must be shattered, as the workers' struggles broaden and radicalize, by the pressure of rising class consciousness and the strengthening of the revolutionary Marxist organizations. But we are equally convinced that no mass revolutionary party will see the light of day, that no generalized system of dual-power bodies can arise from these struggles, unless mass currents break off from the traditional organizations on the basis of their own experience. The precise tactic the revolutionary Marxists adopt toward the organized workers movement, which they try to bring broader sections of the new far-left vanguard to accept as the correct tactic, has the objective of stimulating, of facilitating, and of politically orienting this polarization and splitting-off process.

In the period that began in May 1968 — with differences from country to country— the masses have been tending periodically to unleash vast struggles that have overflowed the channels of the traditional organizations, and initiatives by these organizations are no longer indispensable for the spread of such battles. On the other hand, the masses are still not capable of projecting general political solutions, and thus of posing the question of political power, independently of these traditional organizations. Our orientation of "initiatives for unity in action plus outflanking the bureaucrats" takes into account these two sides of the reality, thereby avoiding the twin traps of opportunist tail-ending on the Lambertist model, and of sectarian isolation.

### IV. The Type of Organization Most Suited to the Present Capabilities of Revolutionists in Capitalist Europe

15. The Renewal of the European Sections of the Fourth International

In the present stage, starting in 1967- 68, the Fourth International began a turn toward independent activity aimed at winning political hegemony in the new vanguard, although some sections generally went about making the shift too slowly and too inflexibly. The turn was carried out under the best circumstances where-ever there was a youth organization led by revolutionary Marxists existing independently that could "skirt" the problem of a section identified in the eyes of the vanguard with an entryist orientation. On the other hand, there was a real danger that youth organizations lacking a sufficient number of experienced Trotskyist cadres would let themselves be caught up in a sectarian (or spontaneist) inclination to underestimate and misjudge the organized workers movement and transmit into the Fourth International itself the pressures coming from a petty-bourgeois social origin that were typical of a large part of the new far left in the initial phase. This danger subsists, moreover, in those countries where this evolution has occurred, or is in the process of occurring, several years behind those where the mass vanguard is the most extensive (France, Italy, Great Britain, Spain).

For these two reasons, the Fourth International opted for a rather rapid fusion between the hybrid youth organizations, which in reality were substituting themselves for the revolutionary Marxist organizations that did not function within the new far left, and the old sections, which had kept a varying —but in most cases appreciable -number of experienced Trotskyist cadres rooted in the organized workers movement. This pragmatic solution has paid off in all cases where it has been applied. It has permitted a considerable increase in our numerical forces, as well as a broadening of our following in the mass vanguard, without the loss of positions or prestige in the organized workers movement-in fact quite to the contrary. It has enabled us to avoid grave political errors —minor ones of course have been inevitable — as a result of a sudden expansion of our forces and our tasks.

The position adopted thus opposes building or long maintaining hybrid revolutionary youth organizations, which, in certain contexts and in view of the relationship of forces, would continue to function as substitutes for adult revolutionary organizations and bear many of the failings typical of the radical student milieu. But this position is by no means opposed in principle to building genuine youth organizations that would confine themselves to the specific tasks of youth work on the basis of the sphere of activity, base, and influence already achieved by adult revolutionary organizations. The possibility for taking a turn to form such a youth organization thus depends strictly on the relationship of forces, that is, the influence that the adult organization has already acquired in the vanguard, its base in the working class, and the number of cadres that can be put at the disposal of the youth organization. As long as it has not reached the critical threshold of forces and roots in the working class necessary for attempting such a project, the adult revolutionary organization will strive to organize sympathizer groupings specifically adapted to the youth, such as were mentioned above.

A special problem is raised by increasing opportunities for members or sympathizers of revolutionary Marxist organizations to win positions of leadership in mass youth organizations that are not specifically revolutionary (trade-union youth groups, high-school and university student organizations, etc.). In each concrete case, it will be necessary to assess these opportunities for investing forces by weighing the gains that could be made (especially in winning a base in the unions and the plants, achieving mass influence on specific issues, and taking part in recomposing the organized workers move ment) against the gaps such a deployment threatens to create elsewhere (notably in reducing the number of cadres of leadership ability ready to assume the tasks of leading the organization of directing its open external activities).

16. Three Priorities in Employing Our Forces

Every small revolutionary organization faces a multiplying number of tasks that overstrain its strength and grow as it grows. The essential job of any leadership worthy of the name is to set an order of priorities based on general analyses and perspectives and resist temptations to depart from it in an impressionistic way, under the pressure of new opportunities turning up in this or that sector.

Of course, this order of priorities must be periodically reviewed and revised critically in the light of an assessment of the results achieved and possible changes in the objective situation (conditions in the organized workers movement also being an element of the objective situation from the standpoint of the revolutionary Marxist organizations). Adhering to these priorities must also be combined with the necessary tactical flexibility so as to take advantage of abrupt turns and major opportunities that suddenly open up. But such flexibility must play the same role as utilizing reserves in military strategy. It cannot substitute for the strategy itself. Otherwise, the basic orientation, the order of priorities, is lost, making way for impressionistic leaps from one "opening" to another.

From all the preceding analysis, there flow three priorities for employing our forces, which, moreover, are closely linked together: — primitive accumulation of forces, to make it possible to reach the takeoff point of effective political intervention on a national scale, without which winning hegemony within the mass vanguard is absolutely unachievable. — making a central political breakthrough that would transform our numerically increased forces into a revolutionary political striking force, and at the same time keeping them from being worn away in disjointed actions or those confined to isolated sectors, which would threaten to result in their being caught up in workerist, tail-ending, spontaneist, and other deviations. —winning a growing base in the workers and trade-union movement that would enable us to transform the numerically and politically strengthened revolutionary organizations into a permanent factor in raising the level of consciousness and organization of the most militant layers of the workers, into a driving force in preparing the way for future explosions of mass struggles culminating in a system of dual power.

From these combined priorities -which are not the same as the ones in the preceding period and are not yet those of a struggle to win the control of the broad masses away from the traditional parties — flow the conclusions about the type of organization needed in the present stage, the deployment of our forces, and the way of operating and intervening, etc. These questions are eminently concrete and take on a special character for every section, depending on the point reached in the primitive accumulation of forces, in acquiring the capacity for making a central political breakthrough, in winning a base in the working class. Nonetheless, a certain number of general rules can already be discerned from the experiences of the last four years: a. In the present stage, in view of the very nature of the mass vanguard and the new far left, no serious progress can be accomplished by means of febrile activism and superficial, primitive agitation. What is absolutely essential is to demonstrate the superiority of our analyses, to defend and illustrate our full program, to stand out as the main center of living Marxism in our time. Anything that is not won on this basis, especially in the student and intellectual milieu, will not be definitively won. From this logically flows the importance of the education of cadres and theoretical and political elaboration on a high level. b. The vanguard does not recognize, has never recognized, and will never recognize self-proclaimed "new revolutionary leaderships." This status must be won by the overall activity of the organization. In this regard, it is vital not to let ourselves be deceived, and to distinguish carefully between the influence and prestige that can be won by revolutionary Marxist militants in a specific milieu in the mass movement on the basis of their individual talents and leadership abilities, and the influence of the revolutionary Marxist organization as such on sections of the working class on the basis of the organization's full program. This second kind of influence is by no means the result of the former, although, among other factors, the respect won by individuals is an essential element in winning general political influence. The most striking example of this distinction is presented by the Communist party of Great Britain. During the last twenty years, this party has seen thousands of its members win dominant positions in the lower echelons of the trade unions (enabling them to lead major struggles in the last three years), while its political influence on the British working class is without doubt at the lowest point since 1940.

Revolutionary Marxist organizations the size of the present sections of the Fourth International cannot hope to win a general political following in the working class as a whole in one fell swoop. But they can, after reaching a certain threshold, win a political following among a layer of young vanguard workers by means of two tools that must be used as much as possible in the present stage: (1) Organizing national political campaigns on carefully chosen issues that correspond to the concerns of the vanguard, that find an echo in mass struggles by expressing the objective needs of these struggles, and that offer a chance for demonstrating a capacity for effective initiative, even if still modest, by our sections; (2) our sections' ability to centralize their forces on a regional and national level in order to break the wall of silence and indifference surrounding certain exemplary workers struggles, wildcat actions, and to start off effective solidarity movements. c. The presence within the working class, in the plants and in the unions, of thousands of elements that have an oppositionist attitude toward the traditional organizations and can be drawn into important struggles is confirmed by all the experience of recent years. But these workers are scattered, isolated from one another, often disillusioned by their experiences in new organizations into which they have let themselves be drawn unthinkingly, almost always under the pressure of the threat of repression from the bosses and the trade-union bureaucracy. It is illusory to think that we can absorb these people into our sections in one stroke. Individual cases aside, they will only become a social base for revolutionary Marxist organizations to the extent that these organizations demonstrate their political and organizational seriousness. And such seriousness involves, in addition to the tasks mentioned above, regular, persistent, long-term intervention in the plants and unions regardless of the immediate results and regardless of the ups and downs in the class struggle.

17. Centralized Leadership and Autonomy of Activity

The priorities that flow from the whole preceding analysis imply a certain type of revolutionary organization, not just as regards the hierarchy of tasks but as regards the structure of the organization itself.

More than ever the political and organizational strength, the stability and continuity, of the leadership are decisive in successfully carrying out the tasks of the present stage. Without this type of leadership, neither a choice of priorities, nor a correct analysis of the objective situation and its tendencies of evolution, nor a correct deployment of our forces can be achieved. Without the presence of such a central leadership, a sudden numerical growth, the influx of a large number of young militants, would rapidly lead to the development of regionalist and localist tendencies, which would result in grave political errors arising out of incorrect generalizations from particular situations or tendencies. This would also lead to grave political crises, since the need for high-level centralized political elaboration would be felt by all revolutionary militants in connection with the objective tasks of the present stage themselves. Creating and strengthening such leaderships, for all our sections, therefore takes a top priority, preceding all others. What needs to be stressed is not a purely administrative centralization but political centralization of the Leninist type, which would make it possible to unify the experience of the entire organization, to test the correctness of its analysis in the light of practical experience nationally and internationally. This in turn would make it possible to concentrate forces at the right time in the most opportune sector, that is, where the effectiveness of a given number of activists would be multiplied. Even the individual effectiveness of these activists, moreover, would be greatly reduced by the absence of a centralized leadership and discipline.

Such a central political leadership needs a minimum national apparatus in order to play its role both within the organization and in the working masses. It must reach out through a chain of regional and local relays, through secondary leaderships already formed or in formation. It must have a central press with a minimum readership and material and financial base (a central print shop and regional apparatuses) that would make it possible to intervene rapidly into strikes and various mass movements and support in practice the national campaigns of the organization.

On the other hand, with the growth of the organization, the multiplication of its tasks, and the previously mentioned priorities of the leading bodies, we must aim for more and more independent activity on the part of the cells, the local and regional leaderships, working committees, and fractions in specific milieus and in specific struggles that do not have national ramifications. The absence of such autonomy threatens to create continual bottlenecks at the level of leading bodies and would tend to interfere with or even overshadow their main role, which is general political elaboration and setting priorities. To the contrary, by encouraging such independent analysis and activity at the lower levels, the revolutionary Marxist organization will be transformed into a permanent school for leaders, which is, moreover, indispensable if it is to become the nucleus of a mass revolutionary party.

The national leadership cannot promote such a selecting out of secondary cadres by constantly substituting itself for regional and local leaderships, or by intervening constantly in work commissions and trade-union tendencies. In this regard, it must concentrate on the above-mentioned tasks of political centralization and conceive of its job with respect to the intermediary cadres as one of training and selection, which involves, of course, making critical balance sheets periodically. Expanding the central committees of the sections, getting these bodies to function as collective instruments of high-level political elaboration and education, calling periodic national conferences on special subjects, and organizing leadership schools will help solve the problem of training intermediate cadres. The problem of the press is similar. For a whole period the priority task may be to create or strengthen national weeklies- the organizations' principal national instrument of political intervention. But at the same time, meeting the organizational priorities mentioned above creates an imperious necessity at certain stages of growth for a network of regularly appearing plant papers, complemented by local organs in regions or localities where a stronger base exists. In the same way, there may be such a need for a theoretical journal in some sections, where the milieu the organization is working in and the nature of its ongoing propaganda organ make it essential to present supplementary political and theoretical analysis of a higher level to a broader public. Coherent structuring of this whole press system depends on the strength of the organization and should remain under the control of the leadership, subject to critical examination at regular intervals.

Similar considerations apply also to problems of finances and the material base of the organization. Solving the central financial problems of the organization (assuring adequate functioning of the national leadership, publication of the central political organ of the section, a minimum of full-timers and technical apparatus) takes top priority. But above a certain threshold the regional and local bodies must maintain their own financial resources and a minimum technical apparatus at this level-and in a later stage, regional and local full-timers — as an essential precondition for realizing the benefits of the influence that has been won and for continued progress by the organization. In this area also the national leadership must follow a flexible system of priorities, subject to periodic review, so as to prevent choices being made in a routine way, under the impact of pressures from the outside, or without taking account of the interests of the organization as a whole.

18. The Fight Against Repression

The perspective unfolding is one of rather rapid progressive growth of the revolutionary Marxist organizations, in a climate favoring radicalization of the proletariat and the gradual infusion of the revolutionary program into an increasingly broad vanguard. The bourgeoisie is also aware of this perspective, just as it realizes the grave risks involved for the survival of its system and its state. It would, of course, be illusory to think that the bourgeoisie is going to sit by passively and watch the developing and strengthening of the revolutionary Marxist organizations. The two principal dangers threatening the revolutionary Marxist organizations in this regard are the following: a. A selective state repression aimed essentially at the far left, possibly going as far as outlawing it (the way would be paved by a campaign of stigmatizing the far left as "criminals," like the campaigns unleashed in France at the time of the vote on the "antiwrecker law," in Italy around the Valpreda and Feltrinelli affairs, and in West Germany under the cover of the Baader-Meinhof affair). This danger arises at the exact conjuncture in which the bourgeoisie considers the relationship of forces still unfavorable for unleashing a massive repression against the entire labor movement but seeks to prepare for this by a repression against the far left alone. The foundations for the counterattack must be laid now by creating a climate of general solidarity against repression, of defending all the democratic rights of the workers movement, and of de facto recognition that the far-left organizations are part of the organized workers move ment. Our fundamental line for blocking this first danger is to prevent the far left from becoming isolated from the mass workers organizations. b. The danger of extralegal repression at the hands of hired gangsters acting as supplementary police, of private se curity forces of employers, and of armed semifascists. This weapon, already used extensively by the Brazilian, Uruguayan, Argentine, and Mexican bourgeoisies, has been imported to Europe via Francoist Spain and the Greece of the colonels, and its use is spreading today in France and Italy. The danger of this method of terror being introduced into most European capitalist countries cannot be underestimated.

The most effective response to this danger is to revive the reflexes of self-defense and to lay the basis for workers militias arising out of worker and student strike pickets. But it has already proved indispensable in

Spain and

France for the revolutionary organizations themselves to take initiatives in self-defense. This may be the case tomorrow in other European countries. Such initiatives must be conceived and executed in such a way that they will be understood and endorsed by a broader vanguard, link up with the workers organizations' tradition of self-defense against the fascists, and serve as exemplary strongpoints to encourage more massive forms of self-defense on the part of the working class.

The existence of these dangers, as well as the very logic of an objective situation that can shift rapidly toward prerevolutionary or even revolutionary conditions, obliges the sections of the Fourth International to give special attention to the problems of security and to systematically prepare an apparatus that can enable the organization to continue functioning with the maximum efficiency possible when the imperialist repression seeks to drive it underground. The more effective these responses and preparations are, the more the bourgeoisie will hesitate to go further down the road of repression or of using semifascist gangs. The spirit in which our sections will have to educate the entire mass vanguard, moreover, is this: to show the bourgeoisie in practice that the price it will have to pay for any attempt to establish an open dictatorship will be a civil war in which both camps will use arms. History has shown that from any point of view such an eventuality is preferable to an institutionalized civil war in the form of a bloodthirsty dictatorship where the bourgeois camp murders and tortures at will, while the proletariat and the worker militants, disarmed and disoriented, stand by helplessly and watch the massacre of their own.

19. Build the International Simultaneously With the National Organizations

Building revolutionary Marxist organizations in capitalist Europe is inseparably linked to building the Fourth International as an international organization. The two tasks interpenetrate, both from the standpoint of the objective needs of the class struggle and of the specific job of strengthening the Trotskyist current within the mass vanguard.

The internationalization of workers struggles is an inevitable trend produced by the growing internationalization of capital. The existence of the Common Market, the international interpenetration of capital, the weight of multinational corporations owning factories in many European countries, the trends to more advanced economic and monetary integration in capitalist Europe— all these factors bring international collective bargaining and contracts, international wage actions, and Europe-wide strikes more and more onto the agenda.

The revolutionary Marxists who years ago foresaw and predicted this evolution must not limit themselves to supporting or encouraging trade-union initiatives that go in this direction. They must give the indispensable push to move this internationalization of the class struggle beyond the stage of being confined to a purely economistic level and to specific sections and sectors of workers. The propaganda of the revolutionary Marxists for a socialist united states of Europe and for solidarity not only with economic strikes abroad but with the political struggles of the Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, and Irish proletariats with the anti-imperialist fighters of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and with the antibureaucratic fighters of the bureaucratized workers states must lead to organizational results. It must lead on the one hand to broad international solidarity fronts, and on the other to training the first revolutionary Marxist cadres, forming the first Trotskyist nuclei, and reinforcing the sections of the Fourth International in a number of countries. Likewise the revolutionary Marxists must take concrete initiatives in those sectors where multinational firms have a decisive weight.

A powerful revival of the workers' re flexes of international solidarity, more over, is playing a major role in the development of the class struggle in Europe in the present period in the following ways: a. Neutralizing the negative effects of the internationalization of capital on the efficacy of national strikes, effects that will become more and more important in the years to come. b. Accelerating the integration of the immigrant workers into the phalanx of the workers movement and blocking attempts by the bourgeoisie to utilize racism and xenophobia aimed at these workers as a weapon for dividing the proletariat, attempts which also are going to increase. c. Preparing the European proletariat to oppose en masse any attempt at international counterrevolutionary intervention against a socialist revolution winning victory first in a single country of capitalist Europe; such preparation must be under-taken in advance and in a systematic way as the proletariat returns to its internationalist traditions.

In the broad framework of their general tasks of solidarity toward the struggles of all oppressed peoples, the European sections of the Fourth International bear a special responsibility to: a. Defend the Vietnamese revolution by maintaining a high degree of mobilization of the vanguard in support of victory to this revolution so as to neutralize to some extent the pressures of the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies on the Vietnamese leadership to seek a compromise with Washington. b. Defend the Irish struggle against the attempts of British imperialism to isolate it politically from the British and European proletariat and crush it militarily. These internationalist political tasks, moreover, impose specific organizational tasks on the revolutionary Marxists of capitalist Europe; closer coordination in the day-to-day work of the European sections of the Fourth International (on special problems, such as the immigrant workers and anti-imperialist and antibureaucratic solidarity; through special campaigns on the occasion of strikes with international ramifications, and so forth). Such coordination calls for creating ad hoc bodies under the control of the international leadership.

Closer coordination of the day-to-daywork of the European sections of the Fourth International will have the goal notably of transforming the still very uneven development of these sections into combined development. Every success in a given sector, every specific breakthrough by one of its sections, can become a reference point, a training ground, and a point of departure for similar successes by other sections. This effort must go hand in hand with a systematic effort to give an international amplification to the most advanced forms of working-class struggle and organization achieved by the advanced strata of the proletariat in one or another European country.

Of all the currents of the new mass vanguard, of all the currents of the organized-workers movement, the Trotskyist current alone proclaims the necessity of build ing an international organization simultaneously with the construction of national revolutionary organizations; it alone rejects as a reactionary utopia in our time the concept of building strong national revolutionary parties first in order to arrive later-by a sudden transformation whose secret has never been revealed - at a politically homogeneous international. The eminently international character of the economy, of politics, of society, and of the class struggle in our time is no "Trotskyist fixation" but a concrete and tangible reality constantly impressed on the vanguard and the conscious workers by the facts. Internationalism — not platonic and literary, but practical and organizational—is one of the distinguishing marks of the Trotskyists in the mass vanguard; it is thus an argument that already pleads in favor of our movement and will do so more and more powerfully as a result of the lesson of events. Every increase in the strength of the Fourth International, every success in transforming any of our sections from a propaganda group into a revolutionary organization capable of taking the initiative politically and beginning to win a base in the work ing class, will have favorable repercussions on the construction and growth of all the other sections. In this sense also, building the sections and building the International interpenetrate and form a single organic process, not simply the sum total of national successes or failures.