Ten notes about the revolutionary perspective
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These notes are intended to respond to two historical needs through which revolutionary minorities have thought their tasks. On the one hand, communism is a real movement that abolishes the existing state of affairs. When we talk about revolution, class or party, we are talking about realities that arise from the contradictions of capital, from the very ground of capitalist society, from social antagonisms that develop, such as volcanic magma, from the constant accumulation of material and social contradictions. These contradictions provoke the conflict between classes, which takes place much earlier in the facts than in the heads of their protagonists. In other words, being precedes the conscience. On the other hand, revolutionary minorities have always tried to analyze and understand the historical period, in its global and international sense, in which they find themselves.
It is what we intend to do in this semi-elaborated material, in which we claim that we are entering a new period of rise of the class struggle, a period characterized by the resumption of the historical experience of the proletariat through an intensification of the class struggle
1) The revolution is a physical fact, of social ionization, of factual expression that constitutes the class in its fortification process as a party. This real process is the one that can connect it to its historical thread and allows it to reconnect to its communist program.
2) On the other hand, the revolution becoming communism, that is, universal human community, is the only realistic possibility that can avoid human and civilizational collapse to which capital wants to lead us.
3) It is important to place this possibility in the historical period of the class struggle. The revolution is not decreed by the simple desire or will of a party, but it is precisely the class that is constituted as such. In this regard, it is important to individualize the exceptional historical moments in which the social peace of capitalism, its commodity and democratic fetishism, its constitution in counterrevolutionary force is broken in a generalized and profound way.
These revolutionary periods (which cannot be separated from the counterrevolution that immediately capital´s forces prepare) were expressed in three revolutionary waves of the proletariat that tried to destroy class society, through its process of constitution in class and in party. A first wave from 1848 to 1851 that assaulted the entire European continent, and that lived its climax in the struggles of the Parisian proletariat of June 1848, which were so well analyzed by our party in texts such as The Class Struggle in France or The 18 Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte (there were also previous attempts such as those of the 1930s in France or the Luddite movement in the United Kingdom and many more); The second revolutionary wave of 1917-1923 that had previous moments in the mass strikes of 1904-5 in Belgium, Germany, Holland and especially Russia, or in the Revolution in Mexico of 1910; This second wave ended with the defeat of the proletariat in the barricades of May of 1937 in Barcelona; And finally, the third revolutionary wave that went through the sixties and seventies and that ended when the proletariat of the Polish region was defeated in 1980.
4) Locating these periods of generalization and extension of the proletarian struggle the process of class constitution, of rupture with mercantile and democratic fetishism, is very important. On the one hand it places us in real and factual processes, of physical constitution of the class, and, on the other hand, it help us to avoid the typical voluntarism of the capital’s left.
These are moments which atomization and citizen separation are broken, which the proletarians tend to unite and fight for their immediate and historical interests, which they begin to carry out the same practices and the same experiences that their class brothers and sisters did in other times and places. This is what can really allow us (and without any enlightened conception) to retake the programmatic thread of the past and deepen it. It is what allows us to understand the ungrateful task that the communists and revolutionary minorities carry out in times of counterrevolution, when we are against the current of our class. In the moments of class ascent, of constitution and fortification of the proletariat, there is an invertion of the praxis where millions of proletarians are protagonists of the communist program, understood as real positions and not as ideological principles.
5) It is important to situate the counterrevolutionary, physical and ideological defeat periods of the proletariat that seem to defeat it definitively and that caused undoubted consequences on it. However the revolution, as an expression of communism in the age of capital, returns and arises again and again like Prometheus. It is important to understand and to experience the irregular nature of the proletarian struggle, like the old mole that spends most of its time digging deep into the capital’s crust, so as not to fall into the recurring social-democratic ideologies that deny, in time of social peace, the possibility of revolution and the reality of the class… In short, the false eternity of capital.
6) We have to analyze the historical specificity of each historical period and its different phases. For example, speaking of the counterrevolutionary periods, the current moment is not the same as the forties and fifties of the twentieth century, which was the historical moment where our class was most unstructured from the material effects of different counterpositions and bourgeois dichotomies: fascism, Bolshevism / Stalinism, Western democracies, Third-Worldism, etc. In the 1960s there was a new revolutionary wave whose effects were seen throughout the seventies. In the 1980s, although with a lower intensity level, there were important elements of class struggle (for instance the struggles in the Spanish region from 1986-87 or the so called Caracazo in Venezuela) that declined in the nineties and that can also be noticed in the crisis or dissolution of many revolutionary minorities at that time. In any case, it is not a comparable phenomenon (despite the democratic cretinism of that time) to that of the forties or fifties.
In general, we can talk about concentrated periods of revolution and counterrevolution, such as those described so far, and less intense phases of class struggle and revolution. In the first case we can find the example of the time between 1864 and 1871, when the class tends to organize in party through the First International and that reaches its peak in 1871 with the Paris Commune. An example of counterrevolutionary relapse would be the entire period of the 90s of the twentieth century: although the class struggle was still alive, the proletariat was placed in a generally unfavorable situation. In summary, we have concentrated processes of revolutionary ascents, counterrevolutionary periods that arise from the physical and ideological defeat of the proletariat and transition periods (pivotal periods), in which self-activity and class struggle are recovered and that can prepare more intense revolutionary moments. In general, the revolution and counterrevolution are always more intense. And, above all, the revolution tends to synchronize more and more worldwide.
7) For us, the class has a double determination that we present separately for convenience. The proletariat is “suspended in the airflow”, because its reproduction is not guaranteed through material links with life, and the proletariat is a class that is constituted in the movement of opposition to this world. It is act and potency in an inseparable way. We are talking about the same movement, which social democracy separates in economics and politics, in class in itself and class for itself .His precarious, the fact of being suspended in the airflow if he fails to sell his labor force, implies an antagonism against capital, its categorical negation. There is, therefore, an antagonism between human needs and the categories of capital. This is what makes us strongly assert that the being of the proletariat affirming its human needs, negates capital´s categories to affirm the human community. That´s why communism is a real movement.
8) In this sense , it is important to fight the ideologies of defeat that express a counterrevolutionary role in our time, either through the denial of the proletariat existence and proposing an impossible subtraction of this world, either by reducing the class to a simple gear of capital – which fights against it but will never negate it -or reducing it to one more reality among others, so that the general struggle is thought of as a sum of specific and particular struggles: class struggles, feminist struggles, environmentalists, anti-racists, etc.
These ideologies tend to confuse the immediate phase with the historical process, and above all, reduce the revolution to an ideological fact, of pure conviction or individual choice, and not to a material and physical reality that arises from the irreversible contrast between human needs and capital.
The class constituted as a party is not born of a voluntary election or of a statistical and sociological aggregate, but of the material process of affirmation as a class, taking up the historical thread and the positions that fortify it to carry out this task.
9) We are in the historical moment of the exhaustion of capital as a social relation, because it is historically reaching its internal limits for its development. Capital, from its internal mechanisms, will doom more and more proletarians in the world to be superfluous humanity.
This stimulates and will intensify more and more intense class struggle processes. A falsely understood reality tries to make us believe that we live in a world without revolutions and revolts. It is enough to direct our look from Romania to Albania, from Algeria to Iraq, from Bolivia to Ecuador, from Argentina to Oaxaca to see the intensity of the revolts and revolutions that have traveled all over the planet in the last 25 years. Not to mention the intense class struggle process that took place in 2011 in the Arab world, precisely at the moment when many Social-democrats ruled and announced the end of the revolutions. Our old mole enjoys surprising these mediocre prophets.
Thus, based on these recent struggles that were expressed at the beginning of the millennium in the Latin American region and the most widespread of the 2008-2013 cycle (revolts of hunger, Greece, Arab world …), we maintain that a beginning of transition is breaking with the historically unfavorable period of the nineties.
The immediate future will therefore be an intense class struggle. It is something that has been observed for some months in regions such as China, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Haiti … And that more recently is also going through France -with the Gilets Jaunes movement- , Hungary or Tunisia. It is a class struggle cut and separated, for now, of the historical thread of its past, its perspective, and its program. That is the great drama of our time: the gap between the intensity of the struggle and the break with the previous historical thread. Something similar, even much stronger, was lived in the fifties, when the Stalinist counterrevolution seemed an endless doom. Nowadays, what we can see in general, is an absence of a communist perspective, a renunciation of the possibility of the universal human community. And yet, the old communist mole continues to dig its way. It even dug it by destroying all the capitalist states that in Eastern Europe had been leading protagonists of the counterrevolution.
Understanding this peculiar phase of the class struggle is essential. The proletariat despite the historical cut always restarts its historical experience. And it is that its constitution in class is not an enlightened invention, but is born from the soil of the capital society. We are experiencing a transition phase that is ending a moment of reflux of the proletarian struggle (after the wave of 2008-2013) and will resume the international cycle of struggles. This process is a fight; it is the fight for the constitution in class party. To crystallize that process as something already given, as an a priori defeat, is simply criminal, and that is what all the currents of social-democratic catastrophism always do.
Today we live in a sectarian phase as revolutionary minorities, an isolation similar to that that some comrades of the nineteenth century lived but with the ballast of the counter-revolutions of the twentieth century. We live an isolation of the class positions of the proletariat, a proletariat that struggles, but who suffers from the difficulty of deepening their immediate and historical needs, often diverted their struggles by the multitude of modern and postmodern ideologies.
Nonetheless, we are convinced that in the revolutionary waves that will reappear in a not very long time, the proletariat will need to fight together for its class perspective, to deepen it, to develop an invertion of the praxis where the struggle for its historical needs, to abolish the State and wage labour, will be increasingly in the foreground. And it is that the struggle for communism is not just simply a struggle among others, it is that which emerges from nature and from the deep being of the proletariat, a nature that is both revolutionary and exploited. And the only way the proletariat has to fight against its exploitation is its association, its solidarity, its self-activity, its constitution in class and in the party to abolish capital. That’s the way it’s been and it’s going to be back. The revolutionary minorities of the present are responsible for being a fully active part of our class in the decisive moments of confrontation that will take place, fighting uncompromisingly for our class to reappropriate and develop its program.
10) To sum up, we live in a hinge period in which the restart of the historical experience of the proletariat coexists, through the revolts and rebellions that range from 2011 to the current ones, with the counter-revolutions and defeats that represent a cut in the transmitted experience and a closing of the future horizon of expectation. The ongoing rebellions constitute the communicating vessels between the current experience and the processes of constitution of the proletariat in class and the revolutions of the future