(The following is an editorial scheduled for publication in a forthcoming issue of Quatrième Internationale. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The fall of 1969 has been marked by a powerful wave of strikes sweeping capitalist Europe. In turn, the principal imperialist countries on this continent - France, Italy, West Germany, and Great Britain - have been caught up in the tide. This strike wave has carried forward and broadened the upsurge in working-class militancy that was expressed in an objectively revolutionary way in France in May 1968.
Prerevolutionary tensions persist in France. A prerevolutionary situation has developed in Italy and may spread in the coming months to various other capitalist countries in Europe. The other driving forces of this process must be shown, its origins and distinctive dynamics explained, and its perspectives ascertained in order to better arm revolutionary activists and organizations for carrying on work within it for the international socialist revolution.
I. The Workers' Demands and the Economic Cycle
The fact that these explosions of workers struggle have occurred simultaneously must not lead us to forget that, at least in part, they are governed by immediate concerns, that they correspond to particular social and economic conditions in each country, and that therefore they come to focus, at least partially, on diverse material demands reflecting these specific preoccupations.
Thus, after the 1966-67 recession in West Germany and the 1964 recession in Italy, the bourgeoisies of these two countries succeeded to a considerable extent in blocking the rise of wages. This greatly increased the capitalist competitive capacity of these two coun tries and brought a substantial increase in profits.
The wildcat strikes in West Germany this fall and the widening strikes in Italy reflect the fundamental desire of the workers to "restore the balance" and to make up for the lag in wage increases over the past years. Added to this is a less conscious but no less real desire to retaliate in kind for the humiliations which the workers were subjected to by the bosses for a whole period.
In Italy, to the purely conjunctural motivations of the strike wave must be added a desire to overcome the most harmful effects on the workers of the present boom-that is, the increased cost of living, higher rents, the housing shortage, etc. In Germany the desire of the workers to eliminate wage inequities among regions and plants played a role in touching off the wildcat strikes.
On the other hand, in France the most immediate conjunctural impulse rousing the workers to struggle has been the attempt of the capitalists, through raising prices, public service fees, and taxes, to wipe out the gains they were forced to grant the workers in order to stop the May 1968 general strike.
In Great Britain it is rather the capitalist "rationalization" poliey and the "Labour" deflation, as well as the threat to employment represented by the pressure of half a million jobless, that explain some of the most determined reactions by the workers, especially the actions of the steel workers in Port Talbot, the stevedores, and the miners.
The desire of the more badly paid strata to catch up with the average wage level accounts for the outbreak of strikes like that of the London dustmen [sanitation workers] and by the miners, who demanded substantial increases for surface workers, the worstpaid category.
Above and beyond these differences in the cyclical situation in each of the big capitalist countries in Europe, there is a more general immediate economic cause common to the wave of strikes in these countries.
Since 1966, the rate of growth of the European capitalist economy has slowed, and interimperialist competition has become much fiercer. In this economic climate, the need felt by big business to defend profits inevitably takes precedence over the desire to defend "social peace" at any cost.
The bosses are no longer ready to ine posses are no longer ready to drop much ballast in negotiations. They no longer give concessions except when constrained and forced to do so under the threat of much worse defeats, as at the time of the Grenelle Agreements in France in May-June 1968. And even in this case, the bosses hastily began an attempt to wipe out these concessions afterward, even though this course created a climate of agitation and social effervescence in the country.
In this tense situation, capitalist "rationalization" is imposing a continual speedup, that is, superexploitation of labor which the workers are rebelling against nearly everywhere in Europe. And this gives special importance to the demands for a shorter workweek.
2. The Prerevolutionary Social Climate and the Upsurge
However, as important as these immediate impulses of the workers struggles are in understanding the mechanism involved in setting off the strikes in each individual country, they are not sufficient to account for their general drive or their astonishing simultaneity over a large part of capitalist Europe. Other more profound and less immediately visible factors enter in here.
There is no doubt whatever that the thunderbolt of the revolutionary struggles of May 1968 in France changed something fundamental in the relationship of class forces throughout capitalist Europe.
Nearly everywhere in Europe, workers, even if they did not act immediately, or fully grasp the exemplary importance of the revolutionary struggle of the French workers and students, instinctively recognized that May 1968 had abruptly revealed the underlying weakness of the capitalist system, which had been declared "definitively stabilized" and capable of "resolving all its contradictions."
May 1968 restored the confidence of the European proletariat, its confidence in its own strength and for struggle up and down the line agains capitalist society. The current strike wave is, essentially, the result of this revelation.
The clearest case is that of Italy. In Italy it is difficult to depict the Almost uninterrupted succession of succession workers struggles, which have been continually widening for a year, as a simple succession of "labor conflicts" over higher wages. The insurrectionary explosions in southern Italy, in Avola and Battipaglia, despite their sometimes ambiguous character, were already a harbinger.
The way in which the wildcat strikes have developed; the widening clashes between strike pickets and the guardians of bourgeois order in Turin, Milan, Bergamo, and elsewhere; the broadening of the struggles beyond the limits of the plants, drawing into the fight the working populations of the big proletarian cities; the powerful workers demonstrations in Milan, Turin, and Naples- all of this, occurring in a climate of intense politicalization and anti-imperialist and anticapitalist consciousness reaching into the broad masses, come into focus as a continually mounting prerevolutionary situation. The only positive outcome of this development in the near future would be the creation of organs of dual power and the opening of a struggle for political power.
Obviously, things have not yet reached this point in Great Britain, to say nothing of West Germany. In France, however, the overall political and social situation continues to be marked by very great instability and uncertainty on the part of the bourgeoisie and by a combativity as yet intact, on the side of the workers.
And this combativity has been expressed in a flareup of staggered strikes, in which the workers have not hesitated to take radical measures (e.g., a sit-in strike and seizure of the manager at Cholet, and the occupation of several other factories in the provinces). The growing resistance among the workers to the bureaucratic halter of purely token "pressure strikes" reflects this undiminished combativity.
In the case of Great Britain, it would be premature to speak of a prerevo- ¿tionary climate. I is, however, evident that the mechanisms and shockabsorbers by which the bourgeoisie has traditionally been able to keep December 15, 1969
the class struggle in "tolerable" limits are fast wearing out. Now, after the Labour party bureaucracy, it is the turn of the trade-union bureaucracy to be outdistanced by certain categories of workers.
After the political strike of 150,000 workers against the proposed antistrike law in October, there was the strike of 120,000 miners in direct opposition to the "left" bureaucracy of their union. The narrowing of the margin for maneuver (which an American recession might accelerate dramatically) in any case heralds increasingly severe tensions in the relations among the classes as well as extensive struggles by the workers.
The fact that an abrupt recovery of self-confidence by the proletariat of West Europe is the underlying reason for the present rise of strikes makes understandable the extremely important international repercussions of this upsurge, in which each major wildcat, or extensive, strike in one country spurs the militancy and readiness for combat of the most radicalized elements of the proletariat (above all, the working youth) in a neighboring country. The international transference of radical forms of struggle (militant demonstrations, factory occupations, etc.) is a contributing factor.
The change in the relationship of class forces in capitalist Europe is also shown in the acute crisis of political leadership that the bourgeoisie is suffering in several key European countries. The elimination of de Gaulle has left nothing in France but a bonapartist regime without a Bonaparte.
The ouster from power of the Christian Democrats in West Germany for the first time in twenty years; the profound crisis the Christian Democracy is undergoing in Italy; the obvious lack of enthusiasm for Heath's Tory team in Great Britain are all expressions of the same basic phenomenon.
The pronounced weakening of the Social Democracy in countries like France and Italy and the repercussions of the international crisis of Stalinism are reducing the possibilities for the bourgeoisie to channel the present upsurge into the classical avenues of reformism, although such possibilities obviously persist to some extent.
3. Demands that Challenge the Very Relations of Capitalist Production
It is only when we approach the current strike wave in Europe from the vantage point of the revolutionary upsurge, which began in May 1968 and which is still only in its initial phase, that we can understand why and how the new demands, going far beyond immediate economic questions, have arisen in struggles nearly everywhere in Europe. These demands amount in effect to an allout embracing challenge to the very relations of capitalist production.
Thus, in response to a threat by the bosses to fire 3,000 workers, the shop stewards in the General Electric plants in Liverpool, backed up by the trades council of this large city, representing tens of thousands of workers, launched an appeal for the occupation of these factories, opening the books, and workers control.
So, too, in the much less politicalized and much more conformist climate of the West German working class, the slogan of opening the books emerged spontaneously in at least two plants in the course of wildcat strikes: the Howaldt shipyards in Kiel and a smaller factory in the Ruhr.
So in Italy, demands challenging the capitalist organization of work, the speedup, the system of job evaluation, and piecework appeared nearly everywhere.
The appearance of these demands shows the dovetailing of the propaganda of the "leftist" revolutionary vanguard with the experience of the more conscious and seasoned workers in the plants themselves.
In a phase of accelerated technological innovation and rapid economic growth, like the one extending from 1950 to 1965, everything involving the organization of work necessarily assumes greater importance for workers used to relatively full employment.
The whole climate of "antiauthoritarian confrontation" created by the revolutionary student movement has made the authority of the boss seem all the more odious as the level of education of the working class has progressively risen (especially as a result of the introduction of increasingly complicated machinery demanding more and more skilled manpower).
Every change in the economic cycle, however moderate, every reappearance of unemployment, every increase in the arbitrariness of the bosses must, in these conditions, provoke a counterattack by the most combative workers against the very nature of capitalist relationships, that is, the right of capital to command men and machines.
Sensing instinctively that a broader test of strength with capital was looming up, the workers everywhere sought to achieve cohesion in their own ranks by advancing demands that would increase the unity of the worker masses.
For this reason a considerable importance must be attached to the slogan of "An Equal Wage Increase for All," (i.e., increases not distributed according to a hierarchy) which sprang up spontaneously in the wildcat strikes in West Germany, Italy, and France.
This demand constituted an entirely justified response on the part of the proletariat to fifteen years of maneuvers dividing and atomizing the workers in the plants by multiplying "wage categories," bonus systems, and techniques of job-classification pay differentials.
4. Worker Militancy and the Traditional Bureaucracies
The "wildcat" character of the German and British strikes, the no less "wildcat" beginning of the fall strikes in Italy, and certain "wildcat" aspects in the recent strikes in France clearly indicate that a growing distrust and hostility toward the bureaucratic union apparatuses is playing an indisputable role in the present wave of worker indignation. However, this does not imply a rejection of unions as such.
These feelings are accounted for primarily by the fact that for a year these apparatuses have endeavored to stifle the militancy of the workers and divert it into the traditional paths of electoralism, parliamentary negotiations, and rotten compromises.
In Great Britain the number of strikes - most of which were wildcat strikes - went from an average of 780 semiannually in the period 1960-67 to 1,000 semiannually in 1968; 1,300 for the first half of 1969; and will 1122
doubtless reach 1,500 in the second half of 1969.
These feelings of mistrust and resentment toward the union bureaucracies, however, express something more profound. The workers feel "alienated" from the mass organizations of their class (from the traditional Social Democratic and Stalinist parties still more than from the unions). They feel that they have lost all control over these organizations. The workers feel that from instruments for defending the interests of the mass of working people, these bodies have been transformed into instruments exclusively for the defense of the bureaucratic apparatuses themselves.
Their recent experiences could only strengthen this conviction in the minds of the vanguard workers. Let us mention only the most striking examples —the way the CGT [Confédé- ration Générale du Travail— General Confederation of Labor, the CP-dominated union] stifled the desire of the French working class in May 1968 for more far-reaching aims than mere ephemeral wage increases; the British Labour government's proposal of an antistrike law, from which it retreated only in exchange for a promise from the union apparatuses that they themselves would "police wildcat strikes"; the negotiation of a new wage contract for millions of West German metal workers by a handful of bureaucrats without any consultation of the ranks or any chance for the rank and file to express their views.
However, the bureaucratic union apcannot fail to be alert to paratuses this development which involves numerous dangers for them. The union bureaucrats are not servants of capitalism out of conviction or idealism. In order to defend their privileges and the positions they hold within the "democratic" bourgeois state, they must have leeway to blackmail the capitalists, which is the function of the power of their organizations and their ability to canalize their militancy of important working-class forces. When the union bureaucrats lose this power and ability, their usefulness in the eyes of the capitalists vanishes and concurrently their privileges are threatened.
Consequently, it was inevitable that the bureaucratic apparatuses themselves would be stirred to action by the flare-up of wildcat strikes. That the ultimate goal of their response was to regain control of a movement which threatened to slip out of their hands is unquestionable.
But it is equally indisputable, atter the Italian example, that the proj cess of regaining control necessarily involves a phase in which the apparatuses no longer systematically suppress or fragment strive to all struggles but to the contrary adapt to the combative spirit of the workers.
In Italy we saw the bureaucratic apparatuses go so far as to co-opt the lists of demands that rank-andfile groups had drawn up independently of them and in opposition to them and make these demands the "official" union program in the metal workers' contract negotiations.
Thus, a new dialectical relation between a spontaneous or autonomous mass movement and the mass organizations under bureaucratic leadership is opening up. In its dynamics, this development is more favorable to the outbreak and widening of struggles than to the pure and simple bureaucratic suppression that prevailed before. This should, above all, enable the vanguard worker militants to drive wedges of union democracy into the bureaucratic phalanx.
The outcome of this new process depends primarily on the development of an alternative workers leadership, its its building a mass base, and capacity to unite broadening struggles around transitional demands that increasingly undermine the very foundations of the capitalist system.
5. Independent Organization and the Struggle for Transitional Demands
One of the surest signs of the profoundly revolutionary significance of the current strike wave in Europe is the reappearance in the class struggle of forms of collective organization by the workers that have not been seen on any broad scale in Western Europe since 1923 (with the exception of certain cases in the Spanish revolution).
Of course, these are no more than first beginnings. But the appearance of these incipient organizational formswhich were so cruelly lacking in May 1968 in France-indicates that th mass movement is getting ready in the next stage to surpass the level of maturity attained in the May 1968 general strike in France.
In a few big factories in West Germany where wildcat strikes have occurred (and, let us repeat, in spite of a politicalization and radicalization jon the part of these strikers unquestionably lower than in the three other big imperialist countries of Europe, strike leaderships were democratically elected in mass assemblies of the strikers. In the Kloeckuer ironworks in Bremen, an oppositionist factory council, elected counter to the tradeunion bureaucracy in May 1969, played an analogous role.
In several big Italian factories, following the example set by FIAT, shop delegates have been elected. Regular general assemblies with full powers to establish the demands to be made to the bosses have been held, as at Montedison in Porto Maghera. Interunion committees functioning under the supervision of the mass of workers were set up.
A shopsteward action committee was established in the electrical construction industry in Liverpool. The wildcat strike of the British miners was conducted by local union committees.
All these facts, in themselves isolated, are indicative of the turn the movement might take in its next stage toward strikers organizing themselves through democratic general assemblies, through the election of strike committees, and the federation of these committees by industries and at a local, regional, and national level.
However, the thesis advocated by a certain number of revolutionary groups or tendencies in Europe, above all in Italy, that the independence of the mass movement is itself the best— if not the only -guarantee that it will not be reintegrated into bourgeois society must be rejected by revolutionary Marxists.
Any economic movement, even the most democratic, with the greatest rank-and-file initiative, the most independent of the traditional apparatuses, which limits itself to demanding only "higher wages and shorter hours," will ultimately be absorbed. As May 1968 showed once again, when their power is itself directly threatened, capitalists are ready to meet any immediate demand, knowing full well that they will be able to take back with one hand what they have given with the other, as long December 15, 1969
as they retain control of their state and economic power.
Moreover, forms of independent organization in the plants are strictly dependent on the ups and downs of the mass mobilizations and are condemned to be reduced to bare bones or to disappear in a period of temporary retreat.
The only guarantee against the bourgeoisie being able to ride out the current wave of strikes, therefore, is represented by transitional demands, which, by nature, are inassimilable by the capitalist system. Such demands cannot be absorbed by capitalism because they prevent the "normal" functioning of the profit economy, because they challenge capitalist relations of production. From this standpoint, the demand for workers control morethan ever assumes an exceptional importance. It is par excellence the transitional demand for the present phase.
A practical application of propaganda for workers control flows from the current phase of the strike struggle in Europe. Cases are multiplying in which bosses are responding to wildcat strikes or "guerrilla strikes" by lockouts or temporary layoffs. This has occurred, for example, at FIAT and Pirelli in Italy, at the Le Mans Renault plant in France, and at Vauxhall in Great Britain, etc. The struggle for veto power by the workers over layoffs and plant shutdowns thus assumes a special timeliness, which can rapidly make workers control operative. The lightning response of the Le Mans Renault workers to the management's lockout by occupying their plant and thus forcing the bosses to retreat is a step in that direction.
The struggle for workers control has, moreover, the secondary effect of serving as an excellent school of selforganization for the workers. What is still only sporadic in times of strikes becomes, by means of this struggle, a more and more systematic reflex on the part of the workers — collective organization right on the job. The struggle for workers control thus leads to transforming general assemblies and strike committees into real organs of dual power, opening up a revolutionary period in the country involved.
6. Building a New Revolutionary Leadership of the Proletariat
The emergence of a new young vanguard on a scale unseen in Europe since 1923 was the main feature of the May 1968 revolutionary upsurge in France. This same characteristic is being repeated today in Italy, and, on a more modest scale in other countries in capitalist Europe.
In all these cases, groups of young students or revolutionary groupings have been able to break out of their isolation from the working class, to establish contacts with plants, to participate in forming revolutionary groups or cells in the factories, and to exert an influence in the wildcat strikes of this fall.
In these conditions the debate over Marcuse's theories about "the inevitable integration" of the working class into neocapitalism is definitively outmoded. But the debate over spontanéism, which dropped off sharply in France after the events of May 1968, has been revived.
The revolutionary Marxists neither wish to "tame" spontaneous struggles nor believe they could do so with a movement that represents both an instinctive revolt of the workers against bourgeois society and an attempt to free themselves from all bureaucratic encumbrances blocking their desire for emancipation.
The revolutionary Marxists participate in all the strikes and demonstrations of their class as activists whose main concern is guiding these struggles to victory. They never subordinate the general welfare of the movement to the petty interests of a group or sect.
But at the same time, the revolutionary Marxists are convinced that any inclination to want to limit the explosion of the workers' anger to a mere "festival" of self-expression would lead the present upsurge to certain defeat.
It is completely illusory to think that a class enemy, who has at his disposal a highly centralized state apparatus and a wealth of historical experience in maneuvering, will step aside at once or gradually withdraw without being beaten in a full-scale battle. Behind the pseudo revolutionary verbiage of some, we thus find the old reformist illusions about a gradual conquest of "the public power."
This all-out battle cannot be conceived solely as the culmination of coordinating and centralizing strikes. It is a revolutionary political battle.
Its objectives are to throw the enemy off balance, to dissipate his material, moral, and repressive resources, to mobilize all the exploited strata of the nation around the proletariat, to defeat the capitalists ideologically and morally before defeating them economically and politically. Its aim is to win the minds of the popular masses to the struggle for socialism.