How Livio Maitan Anticipated European Remilitarisation: "Organising the Defence at the Level of the Attack"
The European social question then and now, and the trap the left keeps walking into
TL;DR In February 1989, Livio Maitan published an analysis of the European single market that reads, in 2026, like a forensic account of everything that has since gone wrong. We are republishing it here. But it requires an introduction, because the debate Maitan was entering has not resolved itself. It has only deepened, and the terms have shifted in ways he would have recognised immediately.The threat Maitan identified, of a European social space hollowed out by capitalist logic, is now being compounded by a second logic: the remilitarisation of the continent. The two processes are not in competition. They are structurally connected, and the left that cannot hold both in view at once will be defeated by both.
There is a particular form of historical embarrassment available only to the left. It arrives when you excavate an old text and discover that the argument was already made, clearly, before the disaster it was predicting had fully announced itself. The embarrassment comes not from the prediction being wrong, but from its having been right, and ignored, and then forgotten, and then wrong again in the same way, requiring the same argument to be made again from scratch, as though the previous instance had never existed.
Livio Maitan wrote ‘The Search for a Strategy’ in early 1989. Bandiera Rossa published it in February of that year. The Berlin Wall fell in November. Maitan could not have known, as he wrote, that the specific institutional form his article addressed, the EEC moving toward 1992, would shortly be operating in a radically transformed geopolitical environment. What he did know, and what the article demonstrates with uncomfortable precision, was that the European left was strategically unprepared for what the integration process would demand of it.
He was right. And here we are.
The context: deepening of austerity
The article that follows is not a historical curiosity. Read it carefully and you find something more unsettling: a diagnostic framework for the present, assembled from the materials of a conjuncture that has since been formally superseded but not, in its underlying logic, resolved. The OECD figures Maitan cites have changed. The institutions have changed. The political parties have changed names and changed again. But the structural argument, what happens when you build a European economic space on capitalist terms without a corresponding social counterweight organised from below, that argument has not dated.
What has changed is that the capitalist logic Maitan was tracking has acquired a new instrument. He identified it clearly enough: the tendency toward “downward homogenisation” driven by market competition; the use of “flexibility” as a mechanism for transferring the costs of restructuring onto workers; the capture of European institutions by “large industrial and financial conglomerates, national and multinational alike.” In 1989, this logic was operating primarily through economic policy. The privatisation drives, the fiscal constraints, the managed assault on collective bargaining that would become the grammar of EU membership for the next three decades.
In 2026 it has acquired a second front: the military budget. No, worse than a second front. The military budget has become the alibi that makes the economic assault politically invisible.
Working-class control to stop imperialist warmongers
The mechanism is not complicated, and Maitan’s analytical framework makes it legible without difficulty. European governments, responding to the shock of Russian aggression in Ukraine and the unreliability of American guarantees under a MAGA administration, have substantially increased defence spending. Britain, Germany, France, Poland: the announcements arrived like dominoes through 2024 and 2025. The EU’s own instruments, the European Peace Facility, the defence industrial incentives, the pressure on member states to hit NATO spending targets, have reinforced the trajectory. This is being presented, across the mainstream political spectrum, as a straightforward response to objective threat.
The threat from Russian imperialism is real. We have said this clearly, and we say it again here: the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is an act of imperialist aggression against an occupied people, and revolutionary socialists must say so without equivocation. The right of the Ukrainian people to resist occupation does not depend on our approval of the Zelensky government’s labour policies, its anti-corruption record, or its relationship to NATO’s strategic priorities. These are separate questions. Collapsing them has been the campist left’s central ideological operation, and we refuse it.
But refusing campism is not the same as endorsing the specific institutional form that European rearmament is taking. And this is where Maitan’s framework from 1989 becomes indispensable.
The European social space Maitan was arguing for, the “common social space” of enforced upward harmonisation of wages, conditions, and workers’ rights, was precisely what the capitalist integration project refused to deliver. The EEC gave capital a single market and gave labour a set of aspirational declarations. The gap between them was not a failure of the project; it was the project. And the gap was maintained, year by year, through the structural power of the institutions that capital had captured, combined with the strategic failure of reformist leaderships that, as Maitan put it with some precision, “found themselves captured by the logic of capitalism and led to adopt solutions that are, in the strictly economic sense, more destructive.”
The rearmament debate is reproducing this structure with only minor variations. European governments are now arguing that the defence emergency requires additional public spending, to which the answer should obviously be: yes, and fund it through expropriation of the frozen Russian assets currently sitting primarily in Belgian accounts, through progressive wealth taxation, through windfall levies on defence contractors whose share prices have been rising since the morning of 24 February 2022 and have not come down. That is the socialist argument. It was available on day one. The mainstream European left, with honourable exceptions, has not made it. It has instead accepted the terms of the debate as given, occasionally appending a note about social guarantees, exactly as Maitan described the reformist leaderships doing in 1989 in relation to the single market.
The Danish Social Democrats, Maitan noted approvingly, had made a strategic pivot on European integration when they judged that Community-level outcomes would be more favourable than what was achievable nationally. The logic was sound. The problem was the same logic, applied without class analysis, led directly to accepting whatever the Community was actually prepared to offer, rather than fighting for the Community it should be. Mette Frederiksen’s government, in 2025, was arguing that Danes might need to work longer hours to fund the necessary rearmament. SF’s spokesperson called this “completely indecent” and proposed wealth taxes instead. That is the correct response. It is also, in its basic structure, the response Maitan was calling for in 1989: organise the defence at the level of the attack.
Our strategy is workers’ control of society
The phrase is his, and it is worth pausing on. “Organising the defence at the level of the attack.” Maitan used it to describe the challenge facing European labour in the face of 1992: capital was reorganising at the continental scale, and the labour movement was still primarily organised nationally. The task was not to refuse European integration, which was a secondary question, but to build the continental-scale workers’ organisations, coordinating bodies, inter-enterprise committees, common trade-union platforms that could contest the terms of integration rather than simply submit to them.
The same formulation applies precisely to the rearmament debate. The attack is operating at two levels simultaneously. The first is the obvious one: Russian imperialism is attacking Ukraine and threatening the security architecture of a broad swathe of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. The second is less often named: the military-industrial complex, in which BAE Systems and Rheinmetall and their equivalents across the continent are treating the invasion of Ukrainian territory as, in the most direct sense, a business opportunity. These are not the same attack. Responding effectively requires distinguishing between them.
The campist left, led in Britain by Stop the War and Counterfire and the Morning Star’s Stalinist editorial line, has done the easier thing: it has named the second attack while denying the first. This is not analysis. It is the substitution of geopolitical alignment for class analysis, which Maitan would have recognised instantly as a form of the same subordination to capitalist state logic that he was criticising in the European Commission’s social partners in 1989. The left that refuses to support Ukraine’s liberation because it objects to NATO’s strategic purposes has not escaped imperialist logic. It has accepted a different imperialism’s terms instead.
But the opposite error is equally available, and the pressure of the present conjuncture is pushing sections of the solidarity left directly toward it: treating every demand for democratic control of defence production, every insistence that rearmament be funded through expropriation rather than austerity, every call for workers’ control of military facilities and mandatory conversion planning, as somehow insufficiently committed to Ukraine’s cause. This is the logic of the wartime national union, and the Fourth International has seen where it leads. Solidarity with the occupied does not require surrendering the class analysis that is the only basis on which genuine, durable solidarity can be built.
Its sharpest form is conscription. Not whether an invaded people may be called to its own defence, which is not in question, but who is called and who buys their way out, who is rotated and who is left in the line, who commands the army the defence requires. That is an article of its own, and it is coming.
Strategic demands organise the working class
Maitan identified, in 1989, a “dismal balance sheet of the bureaucratic leaderships.” He did not write this as a sectarian provocation. He wrote it as a strategic assessment: the reformist organisations had accepted “the fundamental options of the bourgeoisie,” had hidden behind “the pretext of economic competitiveness,” had positioned themselves in practice as vehicles for what he called “a social offensive against workers” even when their stated intentions were different. The PCI, the PSI, the PS français: each could point to its formal commitment to workers’ rights, its stated opposition to the worst excesses of capital, its genuine base in the organised working class. None of this prevented the outcome he was describing.
The parallel is not hidden. The dominant European social democrats have, in 2025 and 2026, accepted the terms of the rearmament debate as given. They have argued, at best, for social side-conditions attached to increased defence spending, in exactly the spirit of the “social space” demands Maitan was analysing in 1989: genuine commitments, in some cases, but commitments that accept the primary logic of the project rather than contesting it. And the radical left, where it has not fallen into campism, has often been unable to articulate a coherent alternative beyond a vague hostility to military spending in general, which is neither principled nor strategically useful.
What Maitan was arguing for, and what the article being published here actually demonstrates rather than merely proposing, is something harder: a concrete set of “phase objectives” that could unite the broadest possible working-class forces while being in objective contradiction with the capitalist management of the project. Not the rejection of European integration. Not the rejection of Ukraine’s defence. The demand that integration serve workers, and that Ukraine’s defence be funded by those who have profited from the war rather than by those who have not.
Disarm the empires, not the oppressed
One word before the 1989 text reaches its own conclusion and calls for the arsenals destroyed, the member states disarmed, NATO abandoned, because set flat against Ukraine that can read as a contradiction. It is not. Maitan's disarmament is a demand on one's own ruling class and the imperialist bloc it serves, never a counsel of defencelessness for the nation under invasion. To strip the empire of its arsenal and to arm the people it would let be conquered are a single anti-imperialist politics: the first turned on the aggressor and the contractors who bank the war, the second on the survival of those who will die without the means to resist.
A 35-hour week at full pay rather than working longer hours to fund rearmament. Democratic control of arms production with mandatory conversion planning. Progressive wealth taxation and the expropriation of windfall profits. Immediate and unconditional cancellation of Ukraine’s external debt. Full rights for Ukrainian refugees. Workers’ control of facilities that produce weapons that will be used in the name of European workers’ security.
These are not Maitan’s exact demands, updated for 2026. They are, more precisely, the application of his method: identify the phase objectives that connect the immediate defensive struggle to the broader class interest; fight for them even in conditions of political retreat; refuse the binary choices that capitalism offers the left as the only available options.
Past defeats make strategic clarity essential today
There is one further point worth making before the translation speaks for itself. Maitan wrote this piece at a moment when the European left was in what he called a “drastic political and ideological battering.” He was clear-eyed about this. He did not pretend the situation was better than it was, and he did not indulge the illusion, common enough on the left, that a sudden recovery was imminent. “One should not harbour the illusion,” he wrote, “that this situation can be overcome quickly, through mere ‘immediate recoveries.’” What was needed was “a serious, deep-going transformation of the political situation.”
He was writing, he knew, into a long defeat. The piece was published in February 1989. By November the wall was down, and the political terms of European left debate were about to shift in ways that made his argument harder to hear, not easier. Within a decade the institutions he had been arguing needed to be captured from below had been captured from above more thoroughly than even the pessimistic reading of his article suggested. The social Europe he was arguing for was not built. The Darwinian homogenisation was.
We are, in 2026, in a comparable moment. The political and ideological battering of the left has been severe; the rearmament debate has arrived at the worst possible time, when the left is weakest and most prone to either capitulation or reflexive oppositionalism; and the window for the kind of strategic clarity Maitan was calling for is not wide.
But the argument was made. It can be made again. That is why we are republishing it.
The Search for a Strategy
by Livio Maitan Bandiera Rossa n. 2, February 1989
The 31 December 1992 deadline has become, in recent months, a genuine leitmotiv across the labour movement and trade unions. The British TUC congress, in a sharp break with its previous position, gave an enthusiastic reception to Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission — who made a point of arguing that it was necessary to “safeguard and improve levels of social protection for EEC members, not to hide behind social policy, to give workers and employees stronger guarantees and to introduce new European-level measures on collective contracts, workers’ rights and social services.” Until recently, British trade unionists had feared that their hard-won gains would be ground down in the European mill; now, after years of Thatcher’s battering, they are beginning to hope that Community-level outcomes will prove more favourable than what is achievable nationally. A parallel shift occurred at the Danish social-democratic congress, which had previously campaigned for a “no” in the Danish European referendum. In the run-up to the next European elections, the Danish social democrats are now campaigning for “yes to an open Europe” — one extending beyond current EEC membership, tackling unemployment, technological development, and the ECU as an alternative to dollar instability (Le Monde, 22 September 1988).
The 1992 deadline also dominated the German social-democratic congress, where the party leadership tabled a motion on the “restoration of a European social space” guaranteeing regional equilibrium and harmonisation of standards upward. Finally, at the Italian social-democratic congress, Prime Minister Craxi — probably the most ardently pro-European of Italian politicians — addressed the prospects and values of a European outlook toward 1992, with prominent figures from the French and other European parties endorsing his social-democratic vision of a “social Europe.”
These contradictions and difficulties will not be resolved quickly. Throughout the coming period the dominant tendency will be toward a deepening of economic unity and a further widening of the EEC — possibly to include some Eastern European countries, a prospect that now seems more likely than before. The debates and conflicts within the labour movement on these questions demonstrate, on the one hand, that a purely visceral anti-EEC position — one that never tackles the concrete substance of the problems — is no longer tenable; and on the other, that the real alternatives need to be faced with genuine seriousness.
Organising the Defence at the Level of the Attack
There is, in fact, every reason for concern. The new European debate is unfolding in an economic conjuncture radically different from the one that prevailed at the time of the Treaty of Rome. We face, simultaneously, a structural crisis and a vast pool of long-term unemployed workers. OECD figures — which no one can accuse of alarmism — show five million unemployed in the EEC in 1975, two million of them long-term; by 1986 the figure had risen to ten million, representing 11% of the active population.
Various studies project that “1992” will stimulate new growth and therefore new job creation (estimates range from 7.6 to 8.3 million). But these are the rosy forecasts of European integration’s most optimistic partisans. In their book Crisis, Krach, Boom, Michel Albert and Jean Boissonat devote an entire chapter to “1992: a Darwinian purge.” The Economist (12 March 1988) wrote that the single market would deliver a shock of “Darwinian” dimensions. The head of the French employers’ federation spoke openly of “a Darwinian struggle.” Le Monde (14 October 1988) noted that even the European Commission’s own Vice-President, Marin, acknowledged that many jobs would be lost in many sectors while being created in others — and that even if the overall balance proved positive in the medium term, the new jobs would not necessarily appear in the same sectors or regions as the old ones.
Several trends, not all of them new but sharply intensified in this decade, will carry still greater weight as the EEC integration process advances:
The relentless introduction of new technologies, and the attendant productivity gains, make it improbable that new general industrial growth — even if it materialises — will by itself generate substantial new employment, above all in heavy industry. This tendency toward homogenisation of economic conditions (upward within Europe, downward relative to the broader capitalist economy) will only intensify, and its effects will be felt acutely at the community level. The institutions supposedly governing this process will increasingly be captured by the large industrial and financial conglomerates, national and multinational alike.
New technologies and new forms of work organisation are penetrating the service sector; capital, pressing above all in the hospital and transport sectors, is using “flexibility” as a safety valve — imposing on workers the costs of restructuring and rationalisation, and shifting the terms of employment toward part-time and casual contracts in a manner that intensifies exploitation.
The decline of traditional sectors such as steel and shipbuilding will not, in all likelihood, be offset by the growth of new ones. For banks, railways, ferries, and prospectively the utilities, new technologies mean rationalisation and job losses.
Unforeseen and for the moment unpredictable structural shifts in economic orientation will compound these pressures: the agricultural labour force will face further reductions in most countries; governments burdened with the largest public deficits will seek to cut public service employment, whether through restructuring plans or blanket hiring freezes.
The introduction of flexibility, part-time work, and the general intensification of employers’ power to impose individual wage differentials within the same firm and occupational group is creating growing objective difficulties for the labour movement. The workers most exposed are those in the private sector — particularly those most vulnerable to unemployment through restructuring and mergers — compared to workers in the public sector, who are in general, though with important exceptions, relatively less exposed.
On the political terrain, greater integration implies handing effective decision-making to ever more remote centres. Already the elected institutions answer an increasingly diminished role relative to governments, and in all the various apparatuses of the state, all the technocracies — not only in the narrow economic sense — of the large industrial and financial groups, national and multinational, are becoming more powerful. This tendency will inevitably intensify, and its effects at the community level will be to place ever greater power in the hands of the bodies designated by governments — the technocrats, who already dispose of vast powers; the ideological-generalising wing, in particular the neoliberal, adopted by the various bourgeois trade union bureaucracies; and a “sovereignty” of the European Parliament that is pure illusion. In all these important cases, the action of this body will be conditioned by the choices imposed by the multinationals, the great financial conglomerates, the banks of the governmental bodies, and the technocrats of Brussels.
The bureaucracy of trade unions and parties operating in various forms within the labour movement, and their representation in the community institutions, will have even deeper illusions in the coming years. Here the illusions will be even more entrenched than at the national level.
The Dismal Balance Sheet of the Bureaucratic Leaderships
European labour organisations and trade unions are ill-equipped to tackle the problems posed by the 1992 deadline in the genuine interests of workers. This is not, in the first instance, a question of individual bad faith: it suffices to consider what they have actually delivered for workers in recent decades, at the level of both theoretical elaboration and practical strategy.
To begin with, almost all trade-union and political organisations have strategically accepted the fundamental options of the bourgeoisie, sheltering behind the pretext of economic competitiveness while laying the groundwork for a social offensive against workers. This is blatant in countries where parties claiming to represent workers are in government; but it is equally true of those in opposition, who are no less favourable to the EEC’s agenda, limiting themselves to calling for a few more social guarantees. This is clearest in debates over “social space” and in demands for a “parliamentarisation” through granting greater powers to the European Parliament — for example in Italy the PCI, the PSI and the PS français all take this line. The PCF remains something of an exception through its refusal of European unification, invoking “national independence” and the need to “produce French” — but without offering any real alternative perspective, and in a way that, on one side, locks the PCF squarely within the logic of the system, and on the other, subordinates its struggle line to the reformist and neo-reformist organisations, more so than other organisations that formally pronounce themselves in favour of the EEC.
These are the results that reformist leaderships have delivered for workers in this last decade. In the absence of any serious effort to outline a comprehensive alternative to bourgeois economic policy, they have found themselves — sometimes individually, with sincere intentions — captured by the logic of capitalism and led to adopt solutions that are on the whole more destructive in the strictly economic sense: outcomes of the so-called “market economy” founded on profit, which these leaderships have so enthusiastically embraced. The alternative in the strictly economic field must take account of the failure of bureaucratic management, of the experiments in “market socialism” in Yugoslavia, Hungary and China over the past decades. It is becoming ever more necessary — and objectively possible — to radically reduce the working day by eliminating superfluous and socially useless labour. Such a change, which would constitute a genuine shift in the “quality of life,” is effectively conceivable only on an international scale. New technologies and the cultural level of the working class permit, to a greater degree than ever before, radical transformations of the structure and functioning of enterprises. These transformations are only possible through the formation of political institutions and social bodies grounded in direct democracy. In this domain, the means of mass communication now available to us permit doing far more than at any previous moment in history.
In this sense, revolutionaries must give concrete form to the argument that what needs to be set against the European capitalism of the EEC is the prospect of a European socialist federation. The battles of the current period in the labour movement are conditioned by national specificities and conjunctural circumstances. But it is not possible to point in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary direction without a broader, more general framework — one that, even if it can only be conceived as transitional, must be grasped in its most general outlines.
Some exponents of the “reformed” wing already openly celebrate negotiations with employers as a virtue in themselves. Not only is the labour movement’s autonomy increasingly constrained politically and ideologically before these battles of retreat and retrenchment — in some cases, trade union organisations are openly associated with the political-ideological campaigns of governments and employers. For example in Italy, when the PCI launched the “historical compromise” policy supporting the DC government, some trade union bodies simultaneously abandoned strike action in transport and other services through a form of “co-management” (codeterminazione) that was entirely counter to the workers’ interests.
A Global Alternative and Phase Objectives
(...) One further essential point deserves emphasis: rarely in its entire history has the European labour movement endured so drastic a political and ideological battering. The dominant classes have scored spectacular successes — though not, it should be noted, on the socioeconomic plane, where they have generated problems of extraordinary gravity.
Nor should one harbour the illusion that this situation can be overcome quickly, through mere “immediate recoveries” — which, even in the best case, will be limited and temporary in character. What is needed is a serious, deep-going transformation of the political situation. Consider, on the other hand, the enormous defeats of the trade-union movement and the long period of working-class retreat. The European bourgeoisies, despite the economic crisis laying waste to the continent, dispose of enormous resources and were compelled — then even more than now — to take substantial social measures. Workers’ resistance has been far tougher, mass organisations and trade unions far more combative, than the dominant classes would have wished; and governments have generally preferred to hold back rather than push to the point where workers’ reactions could trigger genuine social explosions.
What conclusions follow? We believe it is necessary to begin from a concrete set of attainable “phase objectives” that revolutionary organisations must make their own and fight for even in conditions of political retreat:
1. A 35-hour week at full pay with no loss of jobs: the systematic resort to overtime cancels the employment effects of any hours reduction, and the rhetoric of “social flexibility” is in reality nothing more than a cover for building a growing low-wage, precarious labour force.
2. A radical increase in real wages: as a first element of the struggle against the “philosophy of flexibility” — not a refusal of improved training provisions or supplements, but an unconditional insistence that employment should not be founded on ever-cheaper and ever-more-precarious labour.
3. Exposing the anti-worker ideology of market competitiveness and shareholder primacy: the increasing complexity of productive processes and the greater vulnerability introduced by new technologies are compelling employers to involve workers in enterprise decisions. Where profits are rising, this must be seized as an opportunity to press for across-the-board wage increases; where profits are falling, workers are not responsible and should not bear the consequences — instead, the opportunity must be taken to advance genuine workers’ control over new technologies and the reorganisation of work.
4. Workers’ control, exercised by trade-union bodies elected by all workers, over all technological innovations and all reorganisation of work — not merely the narrowly defined questions of training and job familiarisation.
5. The right of veto over redundancies, and autonomous trade-union structures that guarantee: a minimum wage always above the poverty line; social benefits for the unemployed never below that minimum; employment for young people; a minimum guaranteed income for women that does not fall below the employment minimum; and permanent social services never subject to cuts.
6. The restoration of a sliding-scale mechanism for wages that at least partially compensates for the erosion of purchasing power by inflation, while simultaneously countering employers’ use of wage differentials as an instrument of division.
A “Social Europe”: Concrete Content
A common “social space” will not resolve the unemployment problem if treated as a matter of employment policy alone. The fight against the “philosophy of flexibility” is not a refusal of adaptability — it is a refusal to acquiesce in a system founded on a growing, low-wage, precarious workforce.
Partial solutions can be proposed in a given context — for example the French Socialists proposed the creation of 700,000 new jobs, specifying the sectors and the financing modalities needed. But it is clear that where such objectives are individually defined along similar bourgeois lines, they acquire a transitional character as demands, posing in concrete terms the problem of how to tackle the reallocation of resources in a way that workers find genuinely compelling. This question of the allocation and reallocation of resources is now the most pressing, since the European bourgeoisie’s promise of social benefits for workers within Europe itself implies a rearrangement question: one must fight to reverse course, making it a priority to attack privileged incomes and to reduce indirect taxes, which weigh above all on the lowest incomes.
The importance of a comprehensive alternative is further increased by the possibility of putting the environmental problem front and centre, driving an effective anti-capitalist campaign that confronts not only the devastation produced by the pursuit of profit, but also the need for new qualitative orientations and qualitatively new goods. Partial battles can be fought on this terrain too. The European framework constitutes the necessary common ground for coordinating environmental policies; any purely national initiative risks being limited in effect and open to exploitation as a pretext for bourgeois protectionism.
The “social space” question also means fighting for genuine equality for women in every domain: this requires, among other things, the right to abortion, guaranteed social services for childcare and elder care, the autonomous organisation of women, non-discriminatory criteria and positive action measures, and equal representation at every level of leadership. Campaigns must be organised across Europe against all forms of violence against women.
The most vocal partisans of European unification insist on building an autonomous European military power, while maintaining membership of NATO. No concession should be made to any such project. Revolutionaries must fight against their own ruling class, against the military bloc of European capitalism — whose nature would be no less imperialist than the present one. We must fight to demand the destruction of the arsenals, unilateral disarmament by the member states, and withdrawal from NATO.
The end of the twentieth century presents a peculiar paradox: at the very moment when European unification is advancing, national questions — in Ireland, the Basque Country, Scotland, Wales, Belgium and elsewhere — are reasserting themselves in more acute forms than in the recent past. Revolutionaries must fight for the right of self-determination up to and including separation for all national minorities; against every attack on regional autonomy; and for the elimination of the last remnants of colonialism (New Caledonia). In each specific case, revolutionary Marxists must take their position in the light of the concrete context — self-determination, regional autonomy, federation — as determined by the actual dynamic of the class struggle.
Instruments and Methods
(...) Whatever the concrete developments in the EEC framework, local committees and general bodies of European workers will always be at the centre of activity. We must always work with the aim of making our organisation effective at a European scale. A European campaign must be organised to make the CES an effective instrument of coordination — independent of union affiliation at the national level (as is the case for the CGT française and the Comisiones Obreras in the Spanish state), grounded in straightforward class analysis and the exchange of experience. It will be above all necessary to promote the development of instruments of inter-enterprise and inter-sector coordination, of common committees at the level of the workers in the multinationals.
The more that the heads of the labour movement formally commit to the European framework, the more they will be tempted to integrate further into the “compatibility” of the system — to become super-labourists in service of the market, accepting all its imperatives in homage to new waves of restructuring and rationalisation.
The bureaucrats of the movement have renounced any attempt to configure a comprehensive alternative to governments both bourgeois and paternalist, doing everything possible to forestall any unified movement of solidarity — in all situations in which we find ourselves, in all the adversary’s attacks; resorting to every expedient and manoeuvre to impede the democratic expression of workers’ will.
The conclusion is clear: those who genuinely want a rebuilding of united class action — which does not consist of hollow declarations, does not force itself to present a comprehensive political perspective, and which in any potential unification of struggles would not translate into attempts to recover or suppress the democratic structures of the movement — must, together with all other mass movements old and new, make this a condition indispensable for breaking the impasse and relaunching the workers’ movement and its struggles. This holds, evidently, at the national level as much as the European.
Translator’s note: The ellipses in the headings “A Global Alternative and Phase Objectives” and “Instruments and Methods” are present in the original, indicating that Bandiera Rossa was printing excerpts from a longer document.
Key translation decisions: “conjuncture” is retained throughout as a term of art in Marxist political economy. “Recomposition” has been replaced by “rebuilding” in the concluding passage where the sense is less technical. “Revendicate” has been replaced throughout by “demand.” “Concretise” has been replaced by “give concrete form to” or “advance.” “Eventual/eventuale” has been rendered as “potential” or “possible” throughout. “Affrontare” has been rendered as “tackle” or “address” rather than “confront.”