Towards a Workers United Front
Counter Attack Editorial Committee
For us the absolutely privileged site of revolutionary intervention today is located internal to the wage relation. Entrism within cross-class social movements can only dissipate and degrade our already overwhelmingly weak political forces and will not allow for any gains beyond the recruitment of scattered sympathisers of dubious quality. As Trotsky noted long ago a prerequisite for effective hegemony over the petty bourgeois is the majority support of the working class. Today when working class organisation of any kind has been decisively defeated, orientation of communist forces to cross class social movements is desertion from the field of battle. We have nothing to discuss with those who prioritise such activity over the organisation of workers around their interests as workers.
On Thermidor and Centrism
Tibor Szamuely and Rizospastis
"Thermidor is a special form of counterrevolution carried out on the installment plan through several installments, and making use, in the first stage, of elements of the same ruling party-by regrouping them and counterposing some to others.”
Thermidor is not a coup d’etat, but an evolution. The French Thermidor indicated an evolutionary transition of authority from the hands of the Parisian proletariat into the hands of the bourgeoisie. The Thermidorian reaction is usually designated as the period from the 9th of Thermidor in Year II (July 27, 1794) to the 5th of Brumaire in the Year IV ( October 26, 1795), i.e from the moment of Robespierre’s overthrow to the breakup of the Convention and the formation of the Directory. Actually, the Thermidorian reaction began in Germinal of Year II (March, 1794), when Robespierre crushed the Paris Commune and the Cordeliers Club.
Research Group 626 Introduction
The following texts, further materials from the Deutschland-Russland-Komintern archival collection concerning the military policy of the KPD in 1924-32, an internal PCI assessment of armed struggle in Italy in 1919-22 and a brief report from the KPD military journal Vom Burgerkrieg on the rarely discussed Krakow uprising of November 6th, 1923 have not been selected arbitrarily. We intend with their publication to encourage debate on the concrete complexities of politico-military strategy for proletarian class organizations seeking to master the dynamics of crisis periods. The capacity to exercise such mastery is never spontaneously emergent during the crisis period itself. Rather it reflects the “conditioning” internalized by the organization through prior processes of politico-ideological and military-technical preparation and practice.
Dossier: Archival Materials on the Military Policy of the KPD 1924-32
Research Group 626
Therefore, we have attempted to outline a series of the most essential lessons of the German Party on the politico-military terrain in the present work. The previous M [military] work in Germany suffered primarily from too little mass character. The M-work which the Party has carried out up to the present day, did not act sufficiently within the Party and additionally among the workers. The awareness of its primary necessity did not sufficiently penetrate outside of the small circles who in part carried out or attempted to carry out very valuable work. The work must remain practically meaningless, because its closest possible unity with the total political work of the Party has not been understood. However, it is exactly this work that only has meaning when it is mass work.
If the slogans of the Party and Comintern: "struggle against the war danger" and "defence of the Soviet Union" are not to remain mere propaganda slogans, but should serve in the activation of the Party and broader worker strata the Party must take up all necessary work in a systematic way.
Notes on the Experience of the Military Formations in the Italian “Civil War” of 1919-22
Research Group 626
The masses tend towards insurrection. But, rich with youthful, enthusiastic elements and even practised in the elementary norms of war, they lack coordination. The socialist party did not think to form an organisation, which in that moment, with minimal effort would evaluate the problem and resolve it: control and study of efficiencies, the general and particular situation, armament and the norms applied by the armed forces of the state. The tactical and strategic values of centres, streets, regions and means of transport. The real effectiveness of men and arms; of the worker and peasant masses, of the army units into which it was possible to penetrate; arming of the proletariat. Organisation and leadership.
Armed Uprising in Krakow
Duarte Martinho
In its healthy class instinct, the proletariat recognised that its most vital interests were now at stake. When the trade unions and the PPS. (the Polish social-patriotic party) issued the general strike slogan on November 5, they were merely authorizing an already prevailing situation. The struggle had flared up without, indeed against, the official and recognized leaders.
The November events and the Krakow Uprising are a textbook example of proletarian class struggle. The government issued a ban on open-air meetings on November 4. On November 6, large crowds flocked to the Workers' House, located in the center of the city. The workers found the access road blocked off by strong police detachments. Behind the police was a company of infantry. The masses pushed into the police cordon, broke through it, and now disarmed the soldiers. The weapons used by the workers for this were, as the indictment states, sticks, bottles and heads of cabbages.
Marx and the Bolsheviks
Tibor Szamuely
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a word and a concept originating with Karl Marx and the choice of expressions alone designates that it does not concern eternal principles but a temporary condition, namely the stage of transition between capitalist and socialist society in which the proletariat has already conquered political power, but must first remove the rubble of the old society in order to clear the road for the new.
That in this stage it is not that democracy whose inalienable hallmark is universal suffrage which should have the final word, but rather that interests of the proletariat are alone decisive lies in the nature of the situation. Marx himself did not allow the slightest doubt on this.
We Are Not Democrats: The Marxist Doctrine of Dictatorship against “Modern Mythology”
Tibor Szamuely
Dictatorship of the Ruling Class: this first form of dictatorship is the normal state of every republic as a political mode of organisation of the class contradiction. This is the dictatorship of the ruling class over the subordinate classes subject either to exploitation or to liquidation (in the case of the dictatorship of the proletariat). Such a dictatorship may either mask its rule (bourgeois republics following the introduction of universal suffrage, bourgeois workers’ states following the defeat of the proletarian left) or organise it openly (the dictatorship of the proletariat and that of prior exploiting classes). This dictatorship is never actively exercised by the entire class but by a governing elite.
