This issue of the International Review brings together four documents that express our present concerns regarding the world situation and our role as revolutionaries within it.
First a new statement about Catalonia. We have already taken take position on these events, as readers of our publications, above all the website will have noticed. In October 2017 we distributed the leaflet “Confrontations in Catalonia: Democracy and the Nation are the reactionary past, the proletariat is the future”, translated into different languages. A number of other articles have appeared, in particular on our Spanish-language page, but these events will require a close following in the period ahead and the latest statement will certainly not be the last.
The independence movement in Catalonia is in direct contradiction with the “rational” management of the capitalist state and economy at the levels of Catalonia, Spain and the European Union. The only ones in the ranks of the bourgeoisie who could profit from a further deepening of this process would be the likes of Putin, the rivals of a strong EU in the world wide inter-imperialist competition. But the aspect that must concern us most of all is the impact of these events on the proletariat. The nationalist fever around Catalonia’s “independence” is a heavy blow against the working class not only in this area, but internationally, given the global importance of the class struggle in Spain.
We are seeing many of those who took part in the “Indignados” revolt in 2001, a movement which strove towards internationalism, towards proletarian principles, abandoning any idea of a fight against capitalism to join the demonstrations for or against independence. Proletarian families are torn apart between those who support Puigdemont or other fractions of the Catalonian cause and the Españolistas who think that Spain should remain one country. And where are the internationalists? They are currently a beleaguered minority, but the need for them to speak out is greater than ever.
The second article ‘The United States at the heart of the growing world disorder’ is about the life of the bourgeoisie of the strongest economic and military power. It is part of an analysis of the ruling class in the main Western countries. The complete article has been published online. The article highlights the great difficulties of the ruling class in the US after almost one year of Trump as president. An important chapter is dedicated to the relationship between the two former bloc leaders, to the role Russia plays today in America’s strategic options.
These assessments should be seen as a continuation of the orientation decided at the 21st international congress in 2015 to critically analyse the international situation, not excluding a self-critical reflection on possible mistakes we committed at this level in the past (cf. "40 years after the foundation of the ICC” in International Review 156").
The third text in the present review is our Manifesto on the October revolution, Russia 1917, one century after the first successful proletarian revolution. We published it online in October and organised a series of public meetings on the issue. First, we have to defend the internationalist character of the October revolution as part of a world class movement against capitalism. Without this reference point, together with a fearless examination of all the errors committed and the weaknesses encountered, a successful new attempt in the future will not be possible. The Russian revolution is part of our history, part of the proletarian story, despite its degeneration and the atrocities committed in its name afterwards. The Manifesto not only answers the present bourgeois campaigns but also draws the lessons and tries to give indications for the perspective of communism today. Although the revolution did not spread to the whole world and the process remained isolated and thus without a real perspective to overcome capitalism, “the October insurrection is to this day the highest point achieved by the proletarian class struggle – an expression of its ability to become organised on a mass scale, conscious of its goals, confident of taking the reins of social life. It was the anticipation of what Marx called ‘the end of prehistory’, of all conditions in which humanity is at the mercy of unconscious social forces; the anticipation of a future in which, for the first time, humanity will make its own history according to its own needs and purposes.”
The last text in this review is the Resolution on the international class struggle, a document of the last international congress of the ICC in spring 2017.
With this global analysis of the situation we start the reporting of the results of our congress which traditionally has the fundamental task of deciding the general orientations for our activities in the period ahead. The analysis of the world situation is a crucial element in this.
The resolution is focussed on the social situation, the balance of forces between the two main classes of present capitalist society – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Almost three decades after the collapse of the old bloc system and the onset of what we call the period of decomposition we are still trying to get a better understanding of the challenges facing revolutionaries today, to sharpen our concepts of the historic course and of decomposition: "The class movements that erupted in the advanced countries after 1968 marked the end of the counter-revolution, and the continuing resistance of the working class constituted an obstacle to the bourgeoisie’s ‘solution’ to the economic crisis: world war. It was possible to define this period as a ‘course towards massive class confrontations’, and to insist that a course towards war could not be opened up without a head-on defeat of an insurgent working class. In the new phase, the disintegration of both imperialist blocs took world war off the agenda independently of the level of class struggle. But this meant that the question of the historic course could no longer be posed in the same terms. The inability of capitalism to overcome its contradictions still means that it can only offer humanity a future of barbarism, whose contours can already be glimpsed in a hellish combination of local and regional wars, ecological devastation, pogromism and fratricidal social violence. But unlike world war, which requires a direct physical as well as ideological defeat of the working class, this ‘new’ descent into barbarism operates in a slower, more insidious manner which can gradually engulf the working class and render it incapable of reconstituting itself as a class. The criterion for measuring the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes can no longer be that the proletariat holding back world war, and has in general become more difficult to gage." (Resolution point 11)
Which criteria do we need today for an appropriate assessment of the balance of class forces?
We do not think that the point of no return has been crossed, that the class in the established centres of world capitalism, along with the enormous proletariat of China, has been defeated. We still see a potential for the development of what we call the political-moral dimension of the proletarian struggle: the emerging of a deep seated rejection of the existing way of life on the part of wider sectors of the class (point 24).
This difficult situation also affects our tasks as a minority of the class. The revolutionary minorities are a product of the class and have a specific role – in the present period to be an organisational bridge from the past revolutionary struggles to those of the future, even if a huge distance has to be travelled.
November 2017
Catalonia, and Barcelona in particular, is one of those places inscribed in the memory of the Spanish and world proletariat. The struggles, the victories and defeats of the working class in this region have left their mark in the history of our class. Therefore, in the present situation, the ICC, through this article and others which have appeared in our territorial press, aims to alert our class to the danger of the proletariat being dragged into the unfolding nationalist squabble, which can only damage it.
From the hope generated by the Indignados movement in 2011…
In the same place, only a few years apart, two social scenarios that are not just different, but completely opposed to each other.
Barcelona, a few days after 15 May 2011: during the movement of the Indignados, Catalonia Square is a nub of meetings and assemblies. More than 40 different commissions are looking into questions from the environmental catastrophe to solidarity with the struggles in Greece against the cuts in social benefits. There are no flags, but there are improvised libraries brought along by anonymous participants and available to all, with the aim of widening the vision of the movement, which is essentially an expression of indignation about the ravages of the capitalist crisis, of concern about the sombre future which the survival of this system implies for the whole of humanity. Places like this in Barcelona or elsewhere in Spain, in a movement initiated at the Puerta de Sol in Madrid, are seeing people of all ages, all languages, different conditions, coming together and debating with a sense of respect and a desire to listen. Day after day workers’ demonstrations converge on the assemblies, demonstrations against the cuts in health benefits, delegations from neighbourhoods looking for solidarity in their fight against evictions and so on. The assemblies function as a collective brain which tries to link together the different expressions of the struggle into a common, unifying cause. “We are against the system because the system is inhuman”, this is what is proudly proclaimed. The movement is subjected to ruthless repression[1]. This violent attack is denounced, but the movement also raises the slogan “violence is also being paid 600 euros a month”.
…to the backward step into nationalism in 2017
And today, in the same streets, hundreds of thousands are demonstrating “for the independence of Catalonia”, but in this they can only be manipulated, can only operate as a mass to be manoeuvred, can only follow actions called by shadowy forces, actions which follow a script written by others. This is what happened to those who suffered the blows of police truncheons when they defended the ballot boxes during the October 1st referendum, those who saw how, in the days that followed the referendum, the organisations behind it relativised its significance and reduced it to a purely “symbolic” act. It’s what happened to those who got caught up in the euphoria of “we are already a republic” after the pantomime of the proclamation of the Catalan republic on 27 October. As the independence leaders later insisted, this was a virtual, “symbolic” action. In complete contrast to 15th May movement 15M in 2011, when you join in with nationalist actions, the slightest critical spirit can only be an obstacle. All you need is to learn by heart the national “narrative”. This is true of all nationalism, but in the case of Catalonia and other countries which don’t have their own state, this narrative is real mess where everything is mixed up and where no critical voices can be heard. So there are demands for a lost Arcadia , for a Catalan fatherland that never existed. In this process an enemy is needed and this can only be the central state with its “fascist” vestiges. And a scapegoat: the “Spanish” in general and everything which goes with them, presented as the cause of all the suffering of this society. And then you are ready to respond to the calls on social media and march, head down, eyes closed, alongside Catalan exploiters, corrupt Catalan politicians, the Catalan police, the Catalanist “ultras” dedicated to pointing the finger at and intimidating anyone who’s not fervent enough in their anti-Spanish feelings. And it’s the same ignoble schema we see again in the demonstrations which, a few days later, in the same streets, march “against the independence of Catalonia”. This time the lost paradise is the “peaceful co-existence of all Spaniards”. This time, the scapegoats, those to blame for poverty or uncertainty about the future are those who “defy the law” or “those who want to break up Spain”. And again, you march with a cohort of corrupt and repressive exploiters, and with another set of ultras who follow the same path of more or less open violence and intimidation[2].
Two diametrically opposed options for the future of society
Between the Indignados movement in 2011 and the recent orgies of Catalan or Spanish patriotism, there is a class frontier, a gulf in perspectives. The first, despite the undeniable difficulties this movement had, was the expression of a class – the proletariat – which carries within itself the possibility of social transformation on a planetary scale, a class which needs to find a coherent explanation for all the problems facing the world, a class whose struggle creates the basis for a real unification of humanity, overcoming divisions of class, race, culture etc. A movement based on the quest for a revolutionary solution for humanity, for a future free from the chains of exploitation. These patriotic orgies, by contrast, are based on an atavistic yearning for a mythified past. Not only that: marching under nationalist flags justifies and deepens the separation between class brothers and sisters. Their perspective is not one of a revolutionary step forward, but of a reactionary step backwards to a past full of fear and distrust. It is fuelled not by a search for a new social organisation aimed at satisfying the needs of all, but by the decomposition of the old social order whose watchword is “every man for himself”.
How did it come to this?
Various circumstantial and local explanations are put forward. According to the Catalan nationalists, we are seeing the resurgence of the Francoist vestiges which remained in Spain after the transition to democracy. According to the Spanish nationalists, the movement for independence is a way of diverting attention from the corrupt practises which have characterised Catalan administrations for decades. The main refutation of these apologetics is the behaviour of the main actors in this process. For decades, the main party of the Generalitat (the autonomous Catalan administration), formerly known as CiU and now the PDECat[3], based its hegemony on a corrupt, client-centred regime. But this didn’t stop successive Spanish governments of right and left from handing out succulent subsidies to this party from the coffers of the central state. And for their part, the Catalan nationalists have never had any qualms about working with the “residues of Francoism” in the Spanish state they talk about so much, making agreements with the Popular Party on the right[4] and then with the Socialist Zapatero[5] on the left (the tripartite governments of ERC and Iniciativa[6], who are now part of the supporters of the Mayor of Barcelona). When the PDECat came back to the Generalitat in 2010, Artur Mas[7] – the successor anointed by Pujol himself[8] – didn’t hesitate to count on the PP to carry out a programme of implacable austerity against living standards which would later inspire Mariano Rajoy[9] himself.
This is why we can say that the explanation for the separatist drive in Catalonia can’t be found in the specific historical evolution of Catalonia or Spain but in world historic conditions, in the fact that world capitalism as a whole has entered into its final phase, its phase of social decomposition.
The historic causes
This is why we can say that the explanation for the separatist movement in Catalonia doesn’t have its origins in the specific elements of historical evolution in Catalonia or Spain, but in world historic conditions, in the entry of global capitalism into its final phase, the phase of social decomposition.
Marxism has never denied the existence of particular factors in the evolution of capitalism in each country. In particular, in the case of the different separatist movements in Spain, which function as a supplementary and reactionary barrier to the capacity of the proletariat to recognise itself as an indivisible class, it recognises the weight of the uneven development between those zones more open to commerce and industry, and others more caught up in isolation and unable to catch up with the rest[10]. But marxism also explains how the evolution of these local conflicts and contradictions is conditioned by the course of capitalism on world scale. This is especially obvious in the case of nationalism. While in the 18th and 19th centuries the formation of certain new nations could represent a decisive advance in the demolition of feudal structures and the development of the productive forces, once capitalism had reached the end of its ascendant phase at the beginning of the 20th century, “national liberation” became a clearly reactionary myth used to dragoon the population, and the revolutionary class in particular, in and for imperialist war[11] This is why genuine revolutionaries have always denounced the anti-proletarian character of separatism in Spain, as a means to defend exploitation, as an enemy of the working class. The proletariat in Catalonia, one of the oldest in the world workers’ movement, has been obliged on a number of occasions to recognise this.
The history of the proletariat in Catalonia and the grip of nationalism
It’s not by chance that Barcelona was the theatre for the first general strike on Spanish territory, in 1855, or that this city was the seat of the Congress of the Workers of the Spanish Region, which in 1870 formed the basis of the First International in Spain[12]. It was equally no coincidence that, faced with the most advanced expressions of the class struggle, such as the “La Canadiense” strike in Barcelona in 1919, the Catalan bourgeoisie, in 1920-22, made use of the bosses’ “pistolero” gangs against strikes and the militants of anarcho-syndicalist organisations[13]. It’s not by chance that Catalan nationalism (under the leadership of Francisco Cambó), along with the most backward sectors of the Spanish army, was the main promoter of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship of 1923-30. And it was again not by chance that it was the Catalan Generalitat (Companys supported by the Stalinists and with the complicity of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT itself) that became the bastion of the Republican state, diverting the workers – through both mystifications and force of arms - from their class terrain, from the fight against exploitation, towards the military fronts and the conflict between the fascist and democratic camps which prefigured the camp that lined up in the second world imperialist butchery. It was not fortuitous that it was the Catalan Generalitat which was charged with the criminal mission to put down in fire and blood the rising of the proletariat of Barcelona in May 1937, the last attempt of the proletariat to fight on its own terrain against the exploiters of all camps and all fatherlands[14].
Neither was it an accident that it was the workers of Catalonia, who had sometimes come from the most backward regions in the country, who in 1970 transformed their struggles (Bajo Llobregat in 1973, SEAT in 1975) into real beacons for the struggles of the whole working class in Spain. The working class in Catalonia, through its own development and its accumulated experience, is a central link in the chain of the associated production of social wealth, a process embodied in the international proletariat which comes up against the private, national appropriation of this wealth. In the region of Barcelona you will find workers from more than 60 nationalities, from trainee American engineers to immigrant workers from Sub-Saharan Africa. All of them are an integral and fundamental part of the same world working class, even if capitalist ideology, above all through its forces on the extreme left, constantly seeks to confer a “national” identity on the proletariat, which can only serve to undermine its class unity.[15]
What’s at stake for the proletariat of Catalonia and for the proletariat of the world
Today, it’s the whole potential accumulated over decades of workers’ struggles which is threatened by the advance of capitalist social decomposition. This is not a social situation in which the workers are prepared to submit, like cannon fodder, to the quarrels between different factions of the exploiting class. That would mean the complete victory of the bourgeois solution to the historic crisis of capitalism. This is illustrated by the current situation in Catalonia, by the fact that the workers are not following with any great enthusiasm the calls for a general strike in favour of “independence”. But neither does it mean that the workers are aware that they represent an alternative for the future of humanity, a future which can banish forever the war of each against all which decomposing capitalism carries in its entrails.
Particularly dangerous to the consciousness of the working class are the alternatives which claim that there is a “rational” solution to these tensions within the exploiting class, when capitalist decomposition is throwing up increasingly irrational “populist” answers, such as the call to leave the European Union (proposed for example by the CUP or parts of Podemos[16]), or the total acceptance of the Spanish state, as put forward by the “constitutionalist” parties. Nationalism can only end in violence. The illusion of a “revolution of smiles” peddled by Catalan separatism, or the dream of a “return to normal” by the supporters of Spanish unity, is a mystifying fiction. As we already stressed in our 1990 article (International Review 62), “The East: nationalist barbarism [2]” , “all expressions of nationalism, big or small, necessarily and fatally lead into the march of aggression, of war, of each against all’, of exclusivism and discrimination”.
The alternative of the world proletariat is a completely different perspective for humanity. As we underline in this article on nationalist barbarism:
“The struggle of the proletariat contains the seed for overcoming national, ethnic, religious and linguistic divisions with which capitalism continuing the work of the oppressors of the previous modes of production has tortured humanity. In the common body of the united struggle for class interests these divisions will naturally and logically disappear. The common bases are the conditions of exploitation, which everywhere will tend to worsen with the world crisis, the common interest is the affirmation of their necessities as human beings against the inhuman necessities, each time more despotic, of the commodity and the national interest”.
What’s at stake in the situation of the fraction of the world proletariat in Catalonia is the necessity for the revolutionary class to defend the interests of humanity as a whole, to advocate international class solidarity against the social disintegration which decadent capitalism is bringing about.
Faced with the search for a refuge in false local identities, with the notion of “every man for himself” to the detriment of everyone else, with growing social pessimism and national divisions, the proletariat must have confidence in its own forms of association. It must understand that the barbarism of the present world is the result of submitting the planet to the capitalist laws of profit and competition. And above all, it is the duty of those groups who aim to stand in the forefront of the class struggle to denounce all the traps which divide our class and, above all, those elements who try to justify their support for one or another faction of the ruling class because they claim that they are “less repressive” or more favourable to the interests of the proletarian struggle. If the world-wide revolutionary alternative of the proletariat fails, the perspective can only be a war of each against all, in which it will be difficult to say which faction is the most cruel or the most inhuman in its attempt to ensure its survival at the expense of the rest of the human race.
When the police tried to tear down the camps of the 15M movement in Barcelona 2011, the cry went up: “we are all Barcelona”. It was raised in all the squares and all the demonstrations, and nowhere more loudly than at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. The upsurge of nationalism in Catalonia is a blow to the head not only to the proletariat of Barcelona, but to the proletariat in the whole of Spain, since throughout the country proletarians have been pulled into mobilisations for or against the unity of the Spanish state. This poison has also affected the many immigrants from Spain now working in other European countries, where there have been small but significant demonstrations around the same theme. And a blow against the proletariat of Spain, precisely because of the depth of its revolutionary traditions, is a blow against the entire world proletariat. As ever, solidarity with the workers of Spain can only lie in the development of the international class struggle.
Valerio, 5 December 2017
[1] On 27 May 2011 the Catalan police carried out a brutal attack on the orders of the Catalan nationalist government, working closely with the Spanish interior minister, and aiming to “clear” Catalonia Square. More than 100 people were injured.
[2] This climate of seeking the source of all society’s ills in the other half of the population was also encouraged in the demonstrations against the terrorist attacks of 17 August. See Acción Proletaria: September 2017 ‘Atentados terroristas en Cataluña: la barbarie imperialista del capitalismo en descomposición [3]’
[3] Convergence and Union (CiU) was a right-wing Catalan coalition which governed the region since the transition (1978) with a few intervals where the left ran the show. It had two components: one more nationalist and the other more autonomist, but both in favour of a pact with the central power and above all solidly united behind the cronyism which made the CiU one of the corrupt parties in Spain. The coalition disappeared and the more nationalist wing, who are now separatists, set up the European democratic Party of Catalonia (PDECat), led by Puigdemont.
[4] The PP is the party of Rajoy which governs Spain today. It’s another champion in corruption.
[5] Zapatero was the head of the Spanish socialist government between 2004 and 2011. After minimising the economic crisis of 2008, he brought in anti-working class measures which paved the way to their brutal acceleration by the Rajoy government.
[6] The Catalan government of 2003-2010 formed by the “left”: SP, ERC (Republican Left of Catalonia) and a coalition, Iniciativa, made up of the CP plus the Greens
[7] A Mas was president of the Generalitat between 2010 and 2016. After drawing the right wing towards a pro-independence policy, he organised the referendum for independence. He was succeeded by Carles Puigdemont
[8] Pujol was the leader of the party Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya [4] (CDC) from 1974 to 2003, and President [5] of Catalonia Generalitat from 1980 to 2003.
[9] Rajoy is the right-wing head of the Spanish government. He put in place article 155 of the Constitution in order to take direct charge of the Catalan Generalitat, sacking its ministers and putting some of them in jail. President Puigdemont took refuges in Belgium.
[10] This in turn was, as Marx pointed out, the result of the exceptional conditions behind the development of capitalism in Spain, which for centuries had a whole world in which to invest its capital without having any need to embark upon a generalised modification of its feudal structures and to industrialise the “mother country”. We have summarised this analysis of separatism in Spain in a recent online article ‘The Catalan quagmire shows the deepening decomposition of capitalism [6]’.
[11] See our pamphlet Nation or Class, and also our articles denouncing the reactionary character of the demand for “the right of peoples to self-determination” in International Review 34, 37 and 42.
[12] The name of the territory given to the Congress (“the Spanish region” and absolutely not “the Catalan nation”) is an indication of the internationalist climate which reigned during these first steps of the workers’ movement, which saw each region as one that would be inhabited by a liberated world humanity.
[13] Which provokes all the more indignation when we see people claiming to be the heirs of the “Rosa de Foc” (the Fiery Rose, the name the anarchists gave to Barcelona in the 1920s and 30s, because it was the centre of so many social conflagrations) while bowing down to those who proclaim the fight against “the national oppression of Catalonia”
[14] We encourage readers to refer to the texts of the Italian communist left on this question, republished in International Review 4, 6 and 7.
[15] The current campaign being led by the extreme left of capital, such as the CUP and Podemos, which tries to identify social interests with national interests is the heir – with an even more aberrant tone, if that is possible – of the campaign of the 70s and 80s led by the Stalinists, aimed at subordinating the class struggle to the demands of “democratic freedoms” or an “autonomous status” for Catalonia.
[16] On Podemos, see our online article, ‘Podemos, new clothes at the service of the capitalist emperor [7]’, April 2016. This is a national Spanish party with regional “franchises”. The one in Catalonia, along with its allies such as the mayor of Barcelona, isn’t really sure which national garb to dance in. But it has been in favour of a referendum agreed to with the central power.
Last year, the ruling “elites” of world capitalism were shocked by the outcome of the referendum in the United Kingdom about British membership in the European Union (“Brexit”), and by the result of the presidential elections in the United States (President Trump). In both cases, the results obtained did not correspond to the intentions or the interests of leading factions of the bourgeois class. We are therefore embarking on a series of interconnected pieces which will aim at making an initial balance sheet of the political situation in the United States and Britain in the aftermath of these events[1]. To widen the scope of our examination, we will also develop an analysis of the politics of the ruling class in the two main countries of continental Europe, France and Germany. In France, presidential and parliamentary elections took place in the early summer of this year. In Germany, the general elections to the Bundestag took place in September. The bourgeoisie of both countries is obliged to react to what has taken place in Britain and the USA – and they have reacted.
In choosing to concentrate on these four countries, these pieces will not attempt an analysis of the political life of the bourgeoisie in two countries – Russia and China – which play a key role in the capitalist, imperialist power constellation today. A study of the situation there remains to be done. Having said this, we should point out that both Russia and China play an extremely prominent role in our analysis of the political situation of the four old central “western” capitalist countries to be examined in these pieces. We will also concentrate on the political life of the ruling class, without entering into that of the proletariat. Here again, it is clear that the present situation poses a series of questions and challenges to the working class which revolutionary organisations have to take up and help clarify, and which we will attempt to do in future articles. For the moment, we recommend readers to consult the resolution on the international class struggle [9] from our last international congress, published in this issue of the International Review.
The historical background to these political developments is provided by a deeper process: the accelerating decomposition of the capitalist social order. We highly recommend that the reading of this and following articles be supplemented by a reading or re-reading of our “Theses on Decomposition [10]”, available on our site. For us, the present situation is a strong confirmation of what we outlined in that text, written over a quarter of a century ago. In particular, the concrete examination of the present situation confirms that it is indeed the ruling class itself which is first and foremost affected by this decomposition of its system, and that (except in face of a proletarian menace) the bourgeoisie has increasing difficulties to maintain its political unity and coherence.
[1] These pieces, which are intended to be read as a unity, were first written in the summer of 2017 after the general elections in Britain and the presidential elections and those to the National Assembly in France, but before the Bundestag elections in Germany. For various reasons this work could not be published at the time. Some updating and editing has been done, but we have chosen not to alter the section in Germany where the situation even after the elections remains extremely uncertain. For an analysis of the elections in Germany, see our article on IKS website [11]. It was also written before the latest crisis in the relations between the United States and North Korea and between the United States and Iran about the atomic and rocket programmes of what Washington calls “rogue states”. For the North Korea crisis, see our article "Threat of war between North Korea and the US: it is capitalism which is irrational [12]".
In reaction to the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, the media in the rest of the world, and the spokespersons of “liberalism” in America itself, painted a grim picture of a planet soon to be plunged by Trump into the throes of a protectionist catastrophe such as already happened after 1929. The assumption was that protectionism is the programme of political “populism” in general, and of Donald Trump in particular. Already at that time, in our articles about populism and about the election of Trump, we argued that a particular economic programme (protectionist or otherwise) is not a major characteristic of right wing populism. On the contrary, what characterises this kind of populism, at the economic level, is the lack of any such coherent programme. Either these parties have little or nothing to say on economic questions, or – as in the case of Trump – they demand one thing one day and its opposite the next. Although Trump in power has already proven his penchant for “unilateralism” by threatening or beginning the withdrawal of the United States from two of the most important trade agreements: that of NAFTA (with North America) and TPP (with Asia without China). In the first case, this remains a threat and one that will be opposed by many important US companies. In the second, the actual agreement has never been signed so a formal withdrawal by the US is not necessary. At the same time Trump has suspended the TTIP negotiations with the European Union – his intentions in so doing remain unclear. According to his own claims his goal is to impose a “better deal” for America. Throwing in the whole weight of the United States to pressurise the others, Trump is gambling with high stakes, as we predicted he would. The outcome remains unpredictable. What is clear however is that, at the level of economic policy, the ruling classes of the other countries have profited from the protectionist rhetoric of Trump in order to one-sidedly blame the USA for something which is first and foremost a product of global capitalism. What we have witnessed recently is nothing less than a qualitatively new stage in the economic life or death struggle between the leading capitalist powers - something which had already started before Trump became president. And at the same time as the other governments issue loud statements in “defence of free trade” against Trump, in reality they have all begun to adopt his rhetoric against dumping and for “free but also fair trade”. Once a slogan of NGO's, “fair trade” is today the war cry of the bourgeois economic struggle. Protectionism is neither new nor the monopoly of the USA. It is part of capitalist competition, practised by all countries.
Formal market protectionism however is only one of the forms which this conflict takes. Another one is the weapon of sanctions. The economic sanctions against Moscow promoted above all by the United States are aimed against the European economy almost as much as against the Russian. In particular the recent American renewal and sharpening of these sanctions (imposed by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, against the will of the president), openly put into question new oil and pipeline deals by western Europe with Russia, and have provoked a storm of protest, above all in Germany. Already under Obama, the American bourgeoisie had also begun to legally prosecute German companies operating in the United States such as the Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen. It would not be an exaggeration to speak of an offensive American trade war against Germany, first and foremost against its car industry. We do not doubt for a moment that the likes of VW or Mercedes are guilty of all the dirty tricks they are being accused of (centred round the falsification of pollution controls). But this is not the main reason they are being prosecuted, and the proof is that other “culprits” are hardly being affected by the legal procedures.
Although Trump, unlike his predecessor, has for the moment not taken such measures, he continues to massively threaten, not so much Europe, but above all China. From his point of view, he has good reason to do so. Already at the economic level, China is presently mounting two gigantic threats to the interests of the United States. The first of them is the so-called new Silk Road, a massive infrastructure programme aimed at linking southern Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe to China through a vast system of modern railways, highways, harbours and airports by land and by sea. Peking has already pledged a thousand billion dollars to this, the most ambitious such infrastructure programme in history to date. The second threat is that China (but also Japan) have started to withdraw capital from the United States and the dollar zone, and to establish bilateral agreements with other governments (the so-called BRICS states, but also Japan or South Korea) to accept payment in each other's currencies instead of paying with dollars. Although there are of course objective limits to how far China and Japan can go in this without harming themselves, these moves represent a serious threat to the United States: “Sooner or later, the currency markets will mirror the relation of forces in international trade – meaning a multi-polar order with three centres of power. In the foreseeable future the Dollar will have to share its leading role with the Euro and the Chinese Yuan” (...) That will affect not only the economy and the social sector but also the military armament of the world power”[1]. This would indeed risk undermining, in the long term, the overwhelming military superiority of the United States, since it presently finances its gigantic military machine, and its state debt, to a considerable extent thanks to the role of the dollar as the currency of world trade.
Although both the United States and the European Union are threatening China with custom duties in response to what they call Chinese dumping, what they above all want to achieve is that Peking is stripped of its status, in the international economic institutions, of a “developing country” (which gives China many legal possibilities to protect its own markets). The element in the economic programme of Trump, however, which has most impressed the ruling class, not only in the United States, is his planned “tax reform”. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany declared that it would constitute – should it ever be realised – nothing less than a “tax revolution[2]”. Its main idea is not new in itself, but goes in the same direction as similar “reforms” in the “neo-liberal” era: that of taxing consumption rather than production as much as possible. Since everybody pays consumer tax, all such shifts constitute a kind of tax cut for the owners of the means of production. Convinced that the United States is the only major country where such a tax system could be imposed in a really radical manner, Trump hopes, by making production in the United States virtually tax free, to bring American companies, their headquarters now in places like Dublin or Amsterdam, but also some of their overseas production, “back home” - and to become more attractive for foreign investors and producers. This above all seems to be the counter-offensive which Donald Trump has in mind in the present stage of the economic war.
At the economic level, Trump is anything but the opponent of “neo-liberalism” which he sometimes claims to be. If anything, the goal of his government of billionaires is more like the “completion” of the “neo-liberal revolution”. Behind the rhetoric of his former adviser, Steve Bannon, about the “destruction of the state” there lurks the neo-liberal state, a particularly brutal and powerful form of state capitalism. But the problem of the Trump administration today is not only that its economic programme is self-contradictory. It is also that those elements of his programme which could be of most use to the American bourgeoisie are very unsure of ever being put into operation. The reason for this is the chaos in the political apparatus of the leading ruling class in the world
[1]Josef Braml: Trump's Amerika. Page 211. Braml works for the German Society for Foreign Policy (DGAP)
[2]Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02.04.2017. The FAZ newspaper is one of the leading mouthpieces of the German bourgeoisie.
Today, there is a president in the Oval Office who wants to run the country like a capitalist business, and who appears to have no understanding of things like the state and statesmanship, or diplomacy. This in itself is a clear sign of political crisis in a country like the US. Since 2010, the political life of the bourgeoisie in the United States has been characterised by a tendency for the main protagonists to reciprocally block each other. Radical Republicans held up the budgetary planning of the Obama Presidency, for instance, to such an extent that, at critical moments the state was on the brink of being unable to even pay the wages of its employees. The mutual obstruction between the president and the Congress, between the Republicans and the Democrats, and within each of the two parties (in particular within the former) has reached a scale where it has begun to seriously hamper the capacity of the USA to fulfil it role of maintaining a minimum of global capitalist order. An example of this the reform of the structures of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which became necessary in response to the growing weight in particular of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in the world economy. President Obama recognised that, if US-inspired and led international economic institutions were to continue to perform their function of providing certain “rules of the game” of the world economy, there was no way of avoiding giving the “emerging countries” more rights and votes within them. But this restructuring was blocked by the US congress for no less than five years. As a result, China took the initiative in creating the so-called Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Worse still: Germany, Britain and France decided to participate in the AIIB (March 2015). A major step had been taken in the creation of an alternative, Chinese-led institutional architecture for the world economy. Nor did the opposition within America even succeed in preventing the “reform” of the IMF.
Donald Trump wanted to put an end to this tendency towards a creeping paralysis in the American system of power by breaking the power of the “establishment”, of the established “elites”, in particular within the political parties themselves. Needless to say, this establishment has no intention of surrendering its power. The result of the Trump presidency, at least to date, has transformed this tendency towards blockage into a full scale crisis of the US political apparatus. A furious power struggle has opened up between the Trumpists and their opponents, between the president and the judiciary system, between the White House and the political parties, within the Republican Party itself – which Trump more or less kidnapped as part of his presidential bid – and even within the entourage of the president himself. A power struggle which is also being fought out in the media: CNN and the East Coast press versus Breitbart and Fox News. The courts and the municipalities are blocking Trumps immigration policy. His “health reform” to replace Obamacare lacks the support of his “own” Republican Party. The funds to build his wall against Mexico have not been granted. Even his foreign policy is openly contested, in particular his intention of making a “great deal” with Russia. The frustrated, hot headed, twittering president has been firing one prominent member of his own team after the other. Meantime, step by step, the opposition against him is constructing a fire-wall around him, composed of media campaigns, investigations and the threat of prosecution and even impeachment. His capability to rule the country, and even his mental sanity, are being questioned in public. This development is not specific to the United States. The past two years, for instance, have witnessed a series of mass demonstrations against corruption, whether in Latin America (for example Brazil), Europe (Rumania) or in Asia (South Korea). These are protests, not against the bourgeois state, but against the idea that the bourgeois state is doing its job properly (and of course they are protests against certain factions –often to the advantage of another faction). In reality, so-called corruption is but a symptom of deeper-lying problems. The permanent managing, not only of the economy, but of the whole of bourgeois society by the state, is a product of the decadence of capitalism, the global epoch inaugurated by World War I. The decline of the system necessitates a permanent control by the state with an increasingly totalitarian tendency: state capitalism. In its present form, the existing state capitalist apparatus, including the administration, the decision-making process and the political parties, are a product of the 1930s and/or of the post-World War II period. In other words, they have been in existence for decades. In the course of time, their innate tendency towards inertia, inefficiency, self-interest and self-perpetuation become more and more marked. This also goes for the “political class”, with an increasing tendency for politicians and political parties and other institutions to pursue their own vested interests to the detriment of those of the national capital as a whole. “Neo-liberalism” developed partly in response to this problem. It tried to make bureaucracies more efficient by introducing elements of direct economic competition into their mode of functioning. But in many ways the “neo-lib” system has worsened the illness it wanted to cure. The “economisation” of the functioning of the state has given rise to a gigantic new apparatus of what is known as lobbyism. Out of this lobby system has developed in turn the sponsoring, by private individual or groups, of what in the United States are called Political Action Committees (PAC): “think tanks”, political institutes and so-called grass root movements. In March 2010, the US Court of Appeals granted unlimited funding rights to such bodies. Since then, powerful private groups have increasingly been assuming a direct influence on national politics. One example is the “Grover Norquist Initiative” which succeeded in getting a large majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives to take a public oath never again the vote for tax increases. Another example is the Cato Institute and the Tea Party Movement sponsored by the Koch brothers (oil tycoons). Perhaps the most relevant example, in the present context, is Robert Mercer, apparently a brilliant mathematician, who used his mathematical skills to become one of the leading hedge fund billionaires (a kind of right wing equivalent of the “liberal” George Soros) and to create a powerful instrument for the investigation and manipulation of political opinions called Cambridge Analytica. The latter, along with his white supremacist news network Breitbart, were probably decisive in winning the presidency for Donald Trump, and have also been implicated in manipulating opinion for a pro-Brexit result in the UK referendum[1].
The clearest indication that the mutual obstruction within the US ruling class have reached a new quality – that of a full scale political crisis - is the fact that, much more than in the recent past, the imperialist orientation, the military strategy of the super-power has itself become the principle bone of contention and object of obstruction.
[1] For a more detailed analysis of the contradictions between the policies of Trump and the interests of the main fractions of the American bourgeoisie, see our article on the Trump election [17], which also develops on the context of the global decline of the United States and the still growing cancer of militarism which weighs on its economy.
One of the peculiarities of the 2016 US presidential elections was that (like in the proverbial “banana republics”) neither of the two candidates would accept their defeat. Trump already announced this before Election Day, but without saying what he would do in the case of his defeat. As for Hillary Clinton, instead of blaming someone else for her defeat (for instance herself)[1], she decided to blame it on Vladimir Putin. In the meantime, a large part of the US political establishment has taken up this theme, so that “Russia-Gate” has become the principle instrument of opposition to the Trump administration within the American ruling class. As the world now knows, Trump's connections with Russia go back all the way to the year 1987, when Moscow was still the capital of the USSR and the “Empire of Evil” in the eyes of the USA. According to a recent documentary film shown on ZDF, the second state TV channel in Germany[2], it was Trump's Russian connection, not least his business links to the Russian underworld, which (possibly several times) rescued Trump from going bankrupt. At all events, the main idea of the investigations against Trump about Russia is that someone has become president of the United States who is dependent on the Kremlin, and is perhaps even being blackmailed by it. What is certainly true is that the new president has business and other connections there. Not only Trump, but many from the inner circle of power he gathered round him when he entered the White House, including Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus and Jeff Sessions. What is true above all is that the Trumpists wanted and still want to radically change the Russia policy of the United States, to make a “great deal” with Putin.
Here it is necessary to briefly recall the history of American-Russian relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the heady days of the US “victory” in the Cold War, there was a strong feeling in the American ruling class that its former superpower rival could become a kind of subordinate state and above all a source of abundant profits, The first Russian president Boris Yeltsin relied on American (“neo-lib”) advisers in the process of converting the existing Stalinist system into a “market economy”. What resulted was an economic disaster. As for the US “expert” advisers, their main concern was to as much as possible get the fabulous raw material wealth of Russia under American control. The Yeltsin presidency (1991-1999) a mafia type government, was more or less ready to sell out the resources of the country to the highest bidder. The administration which succeeded it, that of Vladimir Putin, although it has excellent connections to the Russian underworld, soon proved to be a regime of a very different kind, run by secret service officers determined to defend the independence of mother Russia, and to keep its wealth for themselves. It was Putin therefore who prevented the planned American takeover of the Russian economy. This serious loss corresponded to a more global decline in US authority, in which most of its former allies and even a number of secondary, dependent powers began to challenge the hegemony of the world’s only remaining superpower.
Ever since Putin’s ascendancy, the so-called Neo-Cons, the “conservative” and openly belligerent institutes and think-tanks in the United States, have been publically advocating “regime change” in Moscow. Once again, Russia under Putin became a kind of “Empire of Evil” for the war propaganda of US imperialism. Despite the abrupt change in the US policy of Russia under Putin, the American policy towards Russia remained, until 2014, basically the same. Its main axis was the military encirclement of the Russian Federation, first and foremost through the deployment of NATO ever closer to the heartlands of Russia. Through the integration of the former Baltic states of the USSR into NATO, the US military machine found itself surrounding the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, almost within marching distance of the suburbs of St Petersburg, the second city of Russia. However, when Washington offered NATO membership to two other former components of the Soviet Union – the Ukraine and Georgia - this was prevented by other NATO “partners”, in particular Germany, who realised that this step was likely to provoke some kind of military reaction by Moscow.
Instead, the western “partners” agreed on a more subtle procedure: the European Union offered the Ukraine a “free trade” agreement. But since the Ukraine already had a similar agreement with the Russian Federation, the consequence of the deal between Brussels and Kiev would be that European goods, via the Ukraine, could gain free access to Russia. Brussels however had deliberately excluded Moscow from its negotiations with Kiev. The reaction of Moscow to the deal between Brussels and Kiev therefore came promptly: the Ukraine would have to choose between a shared market with the EU, or one with Russia. A situation arose which led to an open confrontation between “pro-western” and “pro-Russian” forces in the Ukraine. In the wake of the massacre on the Maiden Square in Kiev (20.02.2014), president Viktor Janukovich was toppled and fled to Russia. At the time, the Grand Old Master of US diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, told CNN that regime change in Kiev was a kind of dress rehearsal for what would happen in Moscow[3]. But then something happened which nobody in Washington seems to have been expecting: a Russian military counter-offensive. Its three main components were the Moscow- backed separatist movement in the eastern Ukraine, the annexation of the Crimean peninsula on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast, and the military intervention of Russia in Syria. A new situation had arisen, in which the coherence and unity of the US policy towards Russia began to crumble.
Agreement could still be reached in Washington about the economic strangulation of Russia, seen as an adequate response to the counter-offensive of Moscow. The three pillars of this policy – still in place – are economic sanctions; hurting the Russian energy sector by keeping the price of oil and gas on the world market as low as possible; and the stepping up of the arms race with a Russia economically unable to keep the pace. But from 2014 on there was growing dissent about how America should respond to Russia at the military level. A hard line faction emerged, which was to give its support to Hillary Clinton at the 2016 presidential election. One of its representatives was the commander of NATO forces in Europe, Philip Breedlove. In November 2014 and again in March 2015 Breedlove spread what turned out to be the fake news that the Russian army had invaded the east of the Ukraine. It looked like an attempt to create a pretext for a NATO intervention in the Ukraine. The German government was so alarmed that both Chancellor Merkel and foreign minister Steinmeier condemned in public what they called the “dangerous propaganda” of the NATO commander[4]. Breedlove, evidently, was not breeding love, but war. According to the German review Cicero ((04.03.16) Breedlove also proposed to the US Congress to attack Kaliningrad, the Russian Port on the Baltic Sea, as an adequate response to Russian aggression further south. He was not the only one in such a mood. Associated Press reported that the Pentagon was considering the use of atomic weapons against Russia. And at a conference of the US Army Association in October 2016, American generals argued that a war with Russia, and even China, was “almost unavoidable”.[5]These pronouncements have been extreme, but they do show the ingrained strength of the “anti-Russian” position within US military circles.
Alarmed by this escalation, the last head of state of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, wrote a contribution for Time Magazine (27.01.17) entitled “It looks as if the world is preparing for war”, where he warned of the danger of a nuclear catastrophe in Europe. Gorbachev was reacting not least to an idea increasingly put forward by conservative think- tanks in the United States: that the risks imposed by a nuclear conflict with Russia have become calculable and can be “minimised” - at least for the United States. According to this “school of thought” such a conflict would not be declared, but would develop out of the present “hybrid war” (Breedlove) with Russia, where the distinctions between armed clashes, conventional warfare and nuclear war become blurred. It was in response to such “thinking aloud” in Washington that the Kremlin “assured” the world that the Russian nuclear second strike capacity was such, that not only Berlin but also Washington would be “razed to the ground” if NATO attacked Russia.[6]
In the face of this growing consideration of the military option against Russia, opposition developed not only within NATO, but also within the US ruling class. The NATO summit of September 2014 in Wales rejected proposals to intervene militarily in the Ukraine, and abandoned, at least for the moment, the idea of Kiev becoming a NATO member. And from that moment on, Barak Obama, as long as he was in office, while contributing to the modernisation of the Ukrainian armed forces, always rejected a direct American military engagement there. But the politically most important reaction within the US bourgeoisie to the situation with Russia was that of Donald Trump.
To understand how, in this context, a new position on policy towards Russia came to be formulated within the American bourgeoisie, it is important to keep in mind that Russia does not have the same significance for the United States as it had a quarter of a century ago, during the “honeymoon phase” between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin. At that time, the main goal of America's Russia policy was Russia itself, the control of its resources. Today American control of Russia would be more a means to a new end: the military encirclement of the new enemy No. 1, which is China. In this changed context, Donald Trump poses a very simple question to the rest of his class: If China is now our main enemy, why can't we try to win over Moscow for an alliance against China? Russia is neither the natural friend of China, nor the natural enemy of the United States.
The question which is of more interest to the “mainstream” of the US bourgeoisie (in particular the supporters of Hillary Clinton) at the moment, however, is a different one: did the Kremlin influence the outcome of the last US presidential elections? The answer to this question is in fact not difficult. Not only did Putin influence the election, he even helped to create the group within the US bourgeoisie open to making deals with Moscow. The principal means he used to this end was the most legitimate one possible in bourgeois society: the proposal of business deals. For example, the deal offered to Exxon Oil and its president Rex Tillerson – now US secretary of state (foreign minister) - is said to have been worth 500 billion dollars. We can thus understand how, after all the bourgeois talk in recent decades about fossil energy sources belonging to the past, there is a government in Washington today with a strong over-representation of the oil and even the coal industry: they are the part of the US economy to which Russia can offer the most.
Although Trump has apparently succeeded in convincing Henry Kissinger of his proposal (Kissinger has become an adviser of Trump and an advocate of “detente” with Russia) he is very far from having convinced the majority of his top brass opponents. One of the reasons for this is that what Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech as president of the United States (17.02.1961) called the “military-industrial complex” feels threatened in its existence by a possible deal with Russia. This is because Russia, for the moment, continues to be the main justification for the maintenance of such a gigantic apparatus. Unlike Russia, China, at least for the moment, although it is an atomic power, has no comparable array of intercontinental nuclear rockets directly targeting the major cities of the United States.
[1] Her husband, ex- president Bill Clinton, was allegedly hopping mad about how incompetently her campaign had been managed
[2]ZDF Zoom: Gefährliche Verbindungen – Trump und seine Geschäftspartner (“Dangerous Connections – Trump and his Business Partners“) by Johannes Hano and Alexander Sarovic.
[3]Youtube 17.08.2015.
[4]Der Spiegel, 07.03.2015. “NATO Oberbefehlshaber Breedlove irritiert die Allierten”. (NATO Commander in Chief Irritates the Allies)
[5]Wolfgang Bittner: Die Eroberung Europas durch die USA (The Conquest of Europe by the USA), Page 151.
[6]YouTube 05.02.2015
In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May had called early elections for June 2017, with the goal of winning a larger majority for her Conservative Party before entering negotiations about the conditions under which the country would leave the European Union. Instead, she lost the majority she had, making herself dependent on the support of the Ulster (North of Ireland) protestant Unionists from the DUP. The only success of the Prime Minister at these elections was that the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP, the hard liner Brexiteers to the right of the Conservative Party) are no longer represented in the House of Commons. Despite this, , the latest electoral debacle for the Conservatives made it clear that the fundamental problem remains unresolved –the problem which, a year ago, made it possible that the referendum about British membership of the European Union produced a result –the “Brexit”- which a majority of the political elites had not wanted. This problem is the deep division within the Conservatives –one of the two main state parties in Britain. Already when Britain joined what was then the “European Community” in the early 1970s, the Tories were divided over this issue. A strong resentment against “Europe” was never overcome within the Tory ranks. In recent years, these inner party tensions developed into open power struggles, which have increasingly hampered the capacity of the party to govern. In 2014, the Tory Prime Minister David Cameron managed to checkmate the Scottish Nationalists by calling a referendum about Scottish independence, and winning a majority for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom. Emboldened by this success, Cameron attempted to silence the opponents of British membership of the European Union in a similar manner. But this time, he had seriously miscalculated the risks. The referendum resulted in a narrow majority to leave, whereas Cameron had campaigned to stay in. A year later, the Tories are as divided on this question as ever. Only that today, the conflict is no longer about membership or not in the EU, but about whether the government should adopt a “hard” or a “soft” attitude in negotiating the conditions under which Britain will leave. Of course, these divisions within the political parties are emanations of deeper lying tendencies within capitalist society, the weakening of its national unity and cohesion in the phase of its decomposition.
To understand why the ruling class in Britain is so divided on such issues, it is important to recall that, not so long ago, London was the proud ruler of the largest and most far flung Empire in human history. It is thanks to this golden past that the British high society is still today the richest ruling class in western Europe.[1] And whereas an average German bourgeois engages himself or herself traditionally in an industrial company, an average British counterpart is likely to own a mine in Africa, a farm in New Zealand, a ranch in Australia, and/or a forest in Canada (not to mention real estate and shareholding in the United States) as part of a family inheritance. Although the British Empire, and even the British Commonwealth, are things of the past, they enjoy a very tangible “life after death”. The “White Dominions” (no longer so-called) Canada, Australia and New Zealand, still share with Britain the same monarch as formal head of state. They also share, for instance (along with the former crown colony: the USA) a privileged cooperation of their secret services. Many among the ruling class of these countries feel as if they still belong, if not to the same nation, than to the same family. Indeed they are often interconnected by marriage, by shares in the same property and by business interests. When Britain, in 1973, under the Tory Prime Minister Heath, joined what was then the European “Common Market”, it was a shock and even a humiliation for parts of the British ruling class that their country was obliged to reduce or even sever its privileged relations with its former “crown colonies”. All the resentment accumulated over decades about the loss of the British Empire began, from this time on, to vent itself against “Brussels”. A resentment which was soon to be augmented by the neo-liberal current (very important in Britain from the Thatcher days onwards) to whom the monstrous “Brussels bureaucracy” was anathema. A resentment shared by the ruling classes in the former dominions such as Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media billionaire, today one of the most fanatical Brexiteers. But quite apart from the weight of these old links, it was humiliating enough that a Britain which once “ruled the waves” had the same voting rights in Europe as Luxemburg, or that the tradition of Roman law held sway in the continental European institutions rather than the old Saxon one.
But all of this does not mean that the “Brexiteers” have or ever had a coherent programme for leaving the European Union. The resurrection of the Empire, or even of the Commonwealth in its original form, is clearly impossible. The motive of many of the leading Brexiteers, apart from resentment and even a certain loss of reality, is careerism. Boris Johnson, for instance, the leader of the “Leave” fraction of the Tories last year, seemed even more amazed and dismayed than his opponent, the party leader Cameron, when he heard the result of the referendum. His goal did not seem to be Brexit, in fact, but replacing Cameron at the head of the party.
The fact that it is the Conservatives, more than the Labour Party, which are so divided over this issue is equally a product of history. Capitalism in Britain triumphed, not through the elimination, but through the bourgeoisification of the aristocracy: the big land owners themselves became capitalists. But their traditions directed their interest in capitalism more towards the ownership of land, real estate and raw materials than towards industry. Since they already owned more or less the whole of their own country, their appetite for capitalist profits became one of the main motors of British overseas expansion. The larger the Empire became, the more this land- and real estate owning- layer could get the upper hand over the industrial bourgeoisie (that part which had originally pioneered the first capitalist “industrial revolution” in history). And whereas the Labour Party, through its intimate links to the trade unions, is traditionally closer to industrial capital, the big land and real estate owners tend to assemble within the ranks of the Tories. Of course, under modern capitalism, the old distinctions between industrial, land owning, merchant and finance capital tend to become dissipated by the concentration of capital and the domination of the state over the economy. Nonetheless, the different traditions, as well as the different interests they partly still express, still lead a life of their own.
Today there is a risk of a partial paralysis of the government. Both wings of the Conservative Party (who at the moment present themselves as the proponents of a “hard” versus a “soft” Brexit), are more or less poised to topple Prime Minister May. But at least at present, neither side seems to dare to strike the first blow, so great is the fear of widening the rift within the party. Should the party prove unable to resolve this problem soon, important fractions of the British bourgeoisie may start to think about the alternative of a Labour government. Immediately after the Brexit referendum, Labour presented itself, if anything, in an even worse state than the Conservatives. The “moderate” parliamentary fraction was disgruntled about the left rhetoric of its party leader Jeremy Corbyn, which they felt was putting off voters, and about his refusal to engage himself in favour of Britain remaining in the EU. They also seemed poised to topple their leader. In the meantime, Corbyn has impressed them with his capacity to mobilise young voters at the recent elections. Indeed, if the tragic Grenfell Tower fire (for which the population holds the Conservative government responsible) had taken place before instead of just after the elections, it is not unthinkable that Corbyn would now be Prime Minister instead of May. As it is, Corbyn has already begun to prepare himself for government by ditching some of his more “extreme” demands such as the abolition of the Trident nuclear armed submarines presently being modernised.
[1] Magazines such as Fortune publish annual figures about the world’s wealthiest banks, companies, families and individuals.
In France, Emmanuel Macron and his new movement “La République En Marche” (LREM) spectacularly won the summer 2017 presidential and legislative (parliament) elections. This victory of the best possible candidate to defeat populism in France was the product of its ability to garner broad support around this goal among the French bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of the European Union and influential political figures such as Angela Merkel. The Front National (FN), the main “populist” party in the country, had no chance in the second round of the presidential elections against Macron. Weighed down by the backwardness of its origins, in particular by the domination of the Le Pen clan, the double electoral defeat of the FN has plunged it into open crisis. In a front page editorial about the situation there, under the title “France is Falling Apart at the Seams”, the often astute Swiss daily, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote that “the French party system is falling apart”. This analysis was published February 4th 2017, long before the victory of Macron could draw attention away from the crumbling of the established parties. If, as we have seen, the Republican Party in the United States has been hijacked by Donald Trump, and the Conservative Party in Britain is divided, in France both of the main established state parties are presently floundering. The conservative “Les Républicains” (LR) won only 22% of the votes, whereas the Socialist Party (PS) did even worse, gaining only 5,6% at the legislative elections. Beforehand, neither of the candidates of these two parties succeeded in qualifying for the second round of the presidential elections (where the two candidates with the most votes in the first round fight it out). Instead the spectacularly incompetent populist candidate Marine Le Pen lost against the new shooting star Macron, who did not even have a party behind him.
At the beginning of the presidential campaign, most pundits had expected a fight between the president in office at the time, Francois Hollande from the PS, and Alain Juppé from LR, a “moderniser” much favoured by important currents within the French bourgeoisie. Five years previously, Hollande had become president after being nominated by the Parti Socialiste in a highly media-promoted “primary” - a voting procedure of the presidential candidate on the American model. Les Republicans, thinking that what worked for the Socialists could not fail for them too, decided to hold their own “primary”. In so doing, they lost control of the nomination process. Instead of Juppé or another, more or less solid candidate, Francois Fillon was nominated. Although the favourite of the Catholic vote and of parts of the High Society, it was clear to an important part of the French bourgeoisie that Fillon would in no way be assured of victory against Marine Le Pen if he did qualify for the second round. But if political judgement was not a particular quality of the candidate Fillon, stubbornness was. Despite the scandals directed against him, Fillon refused to resign, and LR were stuck with their “lame duck” candidate. On the side of the Socialists, the president in office Hollande renounced a second candidature in view of the absence of electoral or party internal support for him. As for the Prime Minister under Hollande, Manuel Valls, he failed at the party primary, where, out of protest against the leadership, the base nominated instead the hardly known candidate Hamon.
The loss of control by the established parties was the opportunity for Emmanuel Macron. The latter had already tried his hand as an economic and political reformer when he served as an adviser to the first PS led government under president Hollande, and then as member of the second government led by Valls. At that time, his goal seems to have been to start an economic modernisation process in France something along the lines of the “Agenda 2010” of Gerhard Schröder in Germany. But Macron did not stay long in this government, soon realising that, unlike the SPD in Germany, the Parti Socialiste was not strong, disciplined and united enough to put through such a programme.
By the beginning of the year 2017, a very dangerous situation had arisen for French capitalism. In face of the incompetence of the main established parties, the danger of an electoral victory of the Front National could no longer be ruled out. Its ideas about taking France out of the Euro Zone and even out of the European Union were in flagrant contradiction with the interests of the leading fractions of French capital. In face of this danger, it was Macron who rescued the situation. He did so, to an important extent, by using the methods of populism against the populists.
First,Macron succeeded in stealing from the populists one of their favourite current themes: that the traditional right and the traditional left have both failed historically because they have been too busy opposing each other ideologically and in their power struggles to properly serve the “cause of the nation”. But Macron did not only adopt this language, he put it into practise by deliberately recruiting support and supporters both from the left and from the right for his new movement “En Marche”. His claim to serve “neither the left nor the right, but France alone” helped him to politically disarm Marine Le Pen. He was even able to present the FN as itself belonging to the “establishment”, as a longer standing right wing party.
Secondly, Macron responded to the growing general disgust towards the existing parties by putting forward, not a party, but a movement, and above all by putting forward… himself. In doing so, he took into consideration a growing mood within parts of bourgeois society: a longing for the authority of a strong leader. If an “irresponsible” politician like Trump could be successful with such a tactic, why not Macron (who sees himself as a highly responsible one). Instead of hijacking one of the two main established parties, Macron instead incited, from the outside, a kind of partial mutiny and defection from within both of them. As such, he contributed seriously to damaging these parties. According to a theory of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), “charismatic leadership” is one of the three forms of bourgeois rule. In post-World War II in France, it has a tradition: That of General De Gaulle (1890-1970) who, in 1958 “saved” a nation in the throes of the war in Algeria. In doing so, De Gaulle altered the constitutional and party political structure of France in a manner which, in the longer term, proved not to be particularly efficient and stable.
But Macron does not only stand in the tradition of De Gaulle. He is also the expression of a new trend within the bourgeoisie in response to the rise of “populism”. At the spring elections of this year in the Netherlands, the Prime Minister in office, Mark Rutte, described the electoral win of the “pro Euro and pro EU” parties over the enfant terrible of right wing populism, Geert Wilders, as the victory of “good” over “bad” populism. In Austria, in an attempt to counter the populist FPÖ, the conservative ÖVP, for the first time, went into the electoral campaign, not under its own, once prestigious name, but as the “electoral list Sebastian Kurz–ÖVP”. In other words, the party decided to hide itself behind the name of a hoped for “charisma” of the young vice chancellor and foreign minister who recently threatened to mobilise tanks on the frontier to Italy against refugees.
Thirdly, Macron followed the example of the German chancellor Angela Merkel in openly defending the “European Project”. Whereas the established parties undermined their own credibility by adopting the anti-European rhetoric of the NF, while in reality continuing to uphold French membership of the European Union, the Euro-Zone and the Schengen- Zone. This clear stance helped to remind a bourgeois society in disorder that French capital is one of the main beneficiaries of these European institutions.
Like De Gaulle in the 1940s and 1950s, Macron is a stroke of good luck for the French bourgeoisie today. It is mainly thanks to him that France has been able to avoid landing in a similar political dead end to that in which its American and British counterparts presently find themselves. But the longer term success of this rescue operation is anything but guaranteed. In particular, if anything happens to Macron, or if his political reputation becomes seriously damaged, his République En Marche risks falling apart. This is the characteristic liability of “charismatic leadership”. The same goes for the new political star of the French left opposition, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who succeeded in responding to the demise of the traditional bourgeois left (Socialist and Communist Parties, Trotskyism) by creating a left movement around himself, in a manner strikingly resembling that of Macron himself. Mélenchon has lost no time taking up his role of canalising proletarian discontent in face of the coming economic attacks into bourgeois dead ends. Overnight, the division of labour between the two M's, Macron and Mélenchon, has become one of the axes of the politics of the French state. But here again, the movement around Mélenchon remains unstable for the moment, liable to fall apart if its leader falters.
General elections in Germany are scheduled for mid-September. Germany also has seen the rise of a right wing populist protest party, the “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD). But although this party seems likely to enter the national parliament, the Bundestag, for the first time, it has little chance, for the moment, of upsetting the plans of the main fractions of the politically and economically still relatively stable German bourgeoisie. The present electoral campaign of Chancellor Merkel reveals a lot about the situation of German capitalism. Her slogan is: stability. Without using the same words, her approach seems to be inspired by that of her post war predecessor, the Christian Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who once campaigned under the motto:“no experiments”. Under the present circumstances, “no experiments” expresses the self-understanding of Germany as being more or less the only haven of political stability among the major powers of the western world at present. But behind this fixation on stability, there is also a growing alarm. The main source of the consternation of the German ruling class is the United States. We have already mentioned Trump's protectionist threats. There is also his unilateral withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, and in particular the American offensive against the German car industry started under the Obama administration. But the threat to the interests of German imperialism does not limit itself to economic or environmental issues. It concerns first and foremost the military and so-called security questions. A brief historical recapitulation is necessary here.
Under the Social Democratic led “Red-Green” coalition of Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005), Germany had moved closer to Putin's Russia, pioneering joint energy projects, and joining Moscow (and Paris) in refusing to support George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Schröder’s successor Merkel, like many politicians from the former East Germany (GDR) a staunch “Atlanticist”, changed this orientation, reaffirming the “partnership” with America as the cornerstone of German foreign policy. Under Obama, Washington offered Berlin the role of junior partner of the United States in Europe. Germany was called on to assume a greater share of the work of NATO in Europe, allowing America to concentrate more on the Far East and its main challenger China. In return for this enhanced status, Merkel had to abandon the “special relationship” with Moscow inaugurated by Schröder. But at the same time, Washington reassured Berlin that it was not “abandoning Europe to its fate” by modernising the US military presence in Germany, including at the military level. But under the surface, already during Obama's second term in office, tensions mounted between Berlin and Washington. One moment when this became visible was during the “refugee crisis” of summer 2015. The calls of the German bourgeoisie for US support went almost demonstratively unheeded. What Berlin was asking for was not that the USA take Syrian or other refugees, but that it should intervene politically and even militarily in some way to stabilise the situations in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin. But Washington did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, Obama affirmed repeatedly that the “refugee crisis is the problem of Europe alone”.
But it was above all concerning the policy toward Russia that the relations between Berlin and Washington became increasingly conflictual. Germany under Merkel supported and supports the NATO policy of encirclement of Russia, and hopes as America's junior partner to be one of its main beneficiaries. But it opposed and opposes the American strategy (championed by Hillary Clinton much more than by Barak Obama) of replacing the Putin government in Moscow. Indeed, on this question, the opposition within the European bourgeoisie is growing, even if it does not always express itself openly.[1] After the fall of Schröder's Red-Green coalition, the fraction of the German bourgeoisie with close links to Russia neither disappeared nor became inactive. In particular, with the formation of the Grand Coalition government between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats four years ago, the “friends of Putin” within the SPD returned to power. One can speak of a certain division of labour between the Merkel and Schröder fractions, and it is probably more astute and favourable for German interests, if the friends of Schröder only play the role of junior partner in the government (as is presently the case). But there have also been behind the scenes activities of this fraction. According to the first results of the public investigations about Trump's Russia connections in the United States, the Deutsche Bank played a central role in promoting business and other transactions between Trump and the “Russian Oligarchy”. They prefer to see Putin propped up rather than brought down by “the west”. It is also known that parts of German industry made generous financial contributions to Trump's electoral campaign. And it is an open secret that one of the strongholds of the Schröder-Gabriel[2] fraction in Germany is the province of Lower Saxony and the Volkswagen company which that provincial state partly owns and runs. In this light we can better understand that the court cases against Volkswagen and the Deutsche Bank in the United States are motivated not only economically but above all politically, and why, seven weeks before the national general elections, a power struggle has broken out in Lower Saxony (and in Volkswagen), bringing down the Red-Green coalition in Hanover. Although she does not necessarily share their orientation, Chancellor Merkel has, to a certain extent, tolerated the activities of this other fraction and tried to benefit from their links both to Putin and to Trump. Today however, the anti-Russian hawks in Washington are mounting their pressure not only on the Trump, but also on the Merkel government. Merkel's response to this has been typically two faced. On the one hand, she maintains her contacts with the Trumpists. On the other hand, she maintains a demonstrative distance from the new US leadership in public. There is hardly a country in western Europe where the criticism of the new administration in Washington has been so open and severe, and so much shared by almost the whole political class in Germany. Alongside Erdogan, Trump has eclipsed Putin as the favourite “bad guy” of the German media. We are entitled to conclude that the German bourgeoisie has taken advantage of the political and other bad manners of the Trump people in order to politically distance itself from the United States to a degree which, under other circumstances, would probably have provoked an international scandal. Under these circumstances, the pressure from Washington (augmented by Trump) for the European NATO “partners” - in particular Germany – to increase their military budgets, is in reality more than welcome (even if many of their politicians affirm the opposite in public). Berlin has already begun this augmentation. The plan is to raise military spending from the present 1.2% of German GNP to 2% by 2024 – almost double the present rate. If it were to conform to Trumps's demand of 3% of GNP, Germany would have the biggest military budget of any state in Europe (at least 70 billion Euros annually). Moreover, Germany has recently officially changed its “defence doctrine”. After the end of the Cold War, it was officially declared that Germany and western Europe no longer stand under any direct military threat. Today this doctrine has been revised, stating that “territorial defence” is once again the main goal of the Bundeswehr. With this new doctrine, the German state reacts not only to the recent military counter-offensive of Russia in the Ukraine and Syria, but also to growing fears about the political stability of Russia, and about the chaos which might develop there. Germany is also profiting from “Brexit” in order to increase the militarisation of the structures of the European Union and a certain independence from NATO (something Britain was able to prevent as long as it was an active EU member). Under the slogans of the “war against terrorism” and the “war against the smuggling of immigrants”, the EU has been declared to be no longer only an economic or political, but also (and even “above all” according to Merkel and Macron) a “security union”.
[1]For instance, at a symposium in Berlin this summer organised by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, it was put forward that the main danger to the stability of Europe is not the Putin regime, but the possible collapse of the Putin regime.
[2]Schröder is officially on the pay roll of the German pipeline project with the Russian Gazprom. Gabriel, who recently came out in favour of a “federal solution“ to the Ukraine conflict not unlike that propagated by Moscow, is Germany's new foreign minister.
The German bourgeoisie was among the very first to recognize the political talent and potential of Emmanuel Macron. From an early stage in the French electoral campaign, most of the political class in Germany and almost the whole of the media strongly supported his candidature. Of course, the German bourgeoisie has only limited means of directly influencing a French election. The general public in France follow neither the German media nor what politicians there say. But the French “political elite” necessarily takes note of what is being said and done on the other side of the Rhine. Through their clear stance in his favour, the German bourgeoisie helped to convince the powers that be in France that Macron is a serious and capable politician. This German support for Macron was motivated not only by the will to stop Marine Le Pen and save the European Union. Macron was also the only presidential candidate to make the renewal of the French-German tandem one of the central points of his electoral programme.
Macron takes this Paris-Berlin axis very seriously. According to him France is not yet able to assume its role in such an “alliance”, because it has not yet resolved its economic problems. Only an economically revitalised France, he says, could be anything like an equal partner of Germany. He sees its relative loss of economic competitiveness as the main threat to the stature of France as a global player on an international scale. For this reason, Macron poses the acceptance of his economic programme as the precondition for the constitution of a solid axis with Germany. By posing things in such terms, he has formulated a programme of action which can appear as being at once desirable and realistic to the ruling class of his own country. He presents his “reforms” as the condition for the maintenance of the imperial glory of France, and at the same time as something attainable – because it will be supported by Germany. But by the same token, he has formulated a goal both desirable and attainable to the German ruling class. Whether towards Russia or towards the United States, Berlin needs the backing of Paris. To obtain it, Berlin will have to support the economic “modernisation” of France.
The insistence of Macron on his economic programme as the precondition for everything else does not mean that he has a narrow economic view of the problems facing France. According to an old analysis of one of his predecessors as French president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the main economic problem of France is not its industrial and agricultural apparatus, which produces for the most part efficiently at a high level, but its backward political apparatus, and the rigid, bureaucratic nexus which links politics to its economy (the existing “systeme étatique” in France, which Helmut Schmidt and other German leaders have been criticising for decades). Macron wants to confront this problem today. Not unlike Trump in the United States, he wants to “shake” up the old elites. But he also has to overcome possible resistance from the French working class. Whether or not Macron is able to impose his attacks on the living and working conditions of the French proletariat may well decide whether or not the experiment of En Marche and the Macron presidency ends in success or failure.
Whenever Macron speaks of the French-German tandem, while he always mentions these economic and political dimensions, he insists that it should be first and foremost seen as a military (a “security”) question. In reality, the axis Macron, and Merkel, are speaking of, is not a stable imperialist alliance such as was still possible under the conditions of the Cold War. It is more like a deal based on a greater determination to defend a bigger common policy of certain countries of the EU – expressed by the reaction to the Brexit - and to loosen dependencies on the US in reaction to the "positions" of Trump. The association between Germany andFrance in a leading tandem of the EU is made possible by the complementarity between these two countries. France is the leading military power in Europe, on a par with Britain and really stronger than Germany, and not only because of its possession of the nuclear weapon. The co-leadership with France could benefit to Germany by conferring on it a higher political and diplomatic credibility. On the other hand, France could expect positive spinoffs from an alliance with the economic leader of Europe, mainly a countertrend to the economic / political decline it suffers. And more. The existence of such a co-leadership presents the advantage that it arouses less fear from other EU partners as a Germany assuming the leadership on its own.
The first French-German governmental consultations after the election of Macron decided, among other things: the development of a joint jet fighter to replace both Eurofighter and Rafale; enforcement of “Frontex” against refugees, and the establishment of a joint EU entrance and exit register; under German leadership, the development, along with Italy and Spain, of a European military drone; new investments in modern tanks, patrol boots and space technology. The EU “foreign minister” Mogherini joined Merkel and Macron to declare a European “Alliance for the Sahel Zone”. Germany declared its willingness “in principle” to increase its public and private investments in Europe, and to give financial support to the present French military missions in Africa. All of this under the slogan of “protecting Europe”.
The centre of the cyclone of decomposing capitalism is today the central country of the bourgeois system: the United States. The electoral triumph of a president who embodies the populist wave has already demonstrated how much this upsurge is antagonistic to the “rational” interests of the national capital and those factions of the bourgeoisie (security, military, diplomatic and political) who have the strongest sense of the “needs of state”.The tendency there at present is clearly one towards an intensification of tensions and even an authentic impasse within the ruling class,. But precisely because the USA is so central to world capitalism, the pressure is daily increasing on the American bourgeoisie to try to resolve their present predicament. But how? Just at the moment it does not look as if the Trump Administration will be able to impose its politics – the resistance to this within the ruling class appears to be too strong. Another possibility is that the Trumpists give in and tacitly adopt the politics of their opponents (or at least show more readiness to compromise). Although there are signs in this direction, there are signals in the opposite direction too. The option most under discussion in public at present is that of the impeachment of the president. The drawback of this method of removing Trump from the Oval Office is that it threatens to become a protracted and complicated legal and political procedure. Other options, promising a more rapid resolution of the problem, are undoubtedly on the table too, even if they are not so freely discussed: one of them is to have president declared insane. It is also possible that Trump (or someone else) will try to break out of the existing deadlock through military adventures abroad. One of the advantages of the “war against terrorism” led by George W. Bush was that it enabled his government, at least temporarily, to unite the ruling class behind him, and to impose large parts of their “neo-conservative” programme. Today, countries such as North Korea or Iran offer tempting targets for such operations, since they are closely linked not only to Russia but also to China. If there is one thing the US bourgeoisie still agrees on, it is that Peking is its main challenger today.
Steinklopfer. First written 23.08.2017 but subsequently updated
1. The election of Donald Trump as president of the USA, which closely followed the unexpected result of the EU referendum in the UK, has created a wave of unease, fear, but also questioning across the world. How could our rulers, those who are supposedly in charge of the present world order, allow such things to happen – turns of events that seem to go against the “rational” interests of the capitalist class? How did it come about that a chancer, a narcissist thug and hustler is now at the head of the world’s most powerful state? And more important: what does this tell us about where the entire world is headed.
2. In our view, the real condition of human society can only be understood by looking it at from the point of view of the class struggle, of the exploited class of this society, the proletariat, which has no interest in hiding the truth and whose struggle oblige it to see through all the mystifications of capitalism in pursuit of the goal of overthrowing it. Equally, it is only possible to understand current, immediate or localised events by locating them in a world-historic framework. This is the essence of the marxist method. It is for this reason, and not simply because 2017 marks the centenary of the revolution in Russia, that we begin by going back a century or more to understand the historic epoch within which the most recent developments in the world situation are taking place: that of the decline or decadence of the capitalist mode of production.
The revolution in Russia was the response of the working class in Russia to the horrors of the first imperialist world war. As affirmed by the Communist International in 1919, this war marked the beginning of the new epoch, the end of the ascendant period of capitalism, of the first great burst of capitalist “globalisation” as it hit the barriers posed by the division of the world into rival national states: the epoch of “wars and revolutions” The capacity of the working class to overthrow the bourgeois state in an entire country and to endow itself with a political party capable of guiding the class toward the dictatorship of the proletariat was indicative that the promise of replacing capitalist barbarism was both an historic possibility and necessity.
Moreover the Bolshevik party which, in 1917, was in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement, recognised that the seizure of power by the workers’ soviets in Russia could only be sustained if it was the first blow of an incipient world revolution. Equally, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg understood that if the world proletariat did not respond to the challenge posed by the October insurrection, and put an end to the capitalist system, mankind would be plunged into an epoch of growing barbarism, a spiral of wars and destruction that would endanger human civilisation.
With the world revolution in mind, and with the need to create an alternative pole of reference for the proletariat to now counter revolutionary Social Democracy, the Bolshevik Party took the lead in the creation of the Communist International whose first congress took place in Moscow in 1919. The new Communist Parties particularly those in Germany, Italy were to spearhead the extension of the proletarian revolution to western Europe.
3. The revolution in Russia indeed sparked off a world-wide series of mass strikes and uprisings which compelled the bourgeoisie to put an end to the imperialist slaughter, but the international working class was not able to take power in other countries, aside from some short-lived attempts in Hungary and in some German cities. Faced with the greatest threat yet from its potential grave-digger, the ruling class was able to overcome its most bitter rivalries to unite against the proletarian revolution: isolating the soviet power in Russia by blockade, invasion and support for the armed counter-revolution; making use of the social democratic workers’ parties and the unions, which had already shown their loyalty to capital by participating in the imperialist war effort, to infiltrate or neutralise the workers’ councils in Germany and divert them towards an accommodation with the new “democratic” bourgeois regime. But the defeat not only showed the continuing capacity of a now reactionary ruling class to rule; it also derived from the immaturity of the working class which was forced to make a sudden transition from the struggle for reforms to the struggle for revolution, and still carried within itself many profound illusions in the possibility of improving the capitalist regime through the democratic vote, the nationalisation of key industries or the granting of social benefits to the poorest layers of society. In addition, the working class had been severely traumatised by the horrors of war, in which the fine flower of its youth had been decimated, emerging from it with deep divisions between workers of the “victorious” and “vanquished” nations.
In Russia, the Bolshevik party, faced with isolation, civil war and economic collapse, and more and entangled with the apparatus of the Soviet State, made a series of disastrous errors which more and more brought it into violent conflict with the working class, notably the policy of the “Red Terror” which involved the suppression of workers’ protests and political organisations, culminating in the crushing of the revolt at Kronstadt in 1921 when the latter demanded the restoration of the genuine soviet power which had existed in 1917. On the international level, the Communist International, which was also increasingly tied to the needs of the Soviet State rather than the world revolution, began to resort to opportunist policies which undermined its original clarity, such as the United Front Tactic adopted in 1922.
This degeneration gave rise to an important left opposition notably in the German and Italian Parties. And it was from the latter that the Italian fraction was able, in the late twenties and thirties to uncover the lessons of the eventual defeat of the revolution.
4. The defeat of the world revolutionary wave thus verified the warnings of the revolutionaries in 1917-18 about the consequences of such a failure: a new descent into barbarism. The dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia not only degenerated but turned into a capitalist dictatorship against the proletariat, a process that was confirmed (though not begun) by the victory of the Stalinist apparatus with its doctrine of “socialism in one country”. The “peace” installed to end the threat of revolution soon gave way to new imperialist conflicts which were accelerated and intensified by the outbreak of the world crisis of overproduction in 1929, a further sign that the expansion of capital was coming up against its own inbuilt limits. The working class in the heartlands of the system, especially the US and Germany, was fully exposed to the blows of the economic depression, but having tried and failed to make the revolution a decade earlier, it was fundamentally a defeated class, despite some real expressions of class resistance, such as in the USA and Spain. It was thus unable to stand in the way of another march towards world war.
5. The pitch-fork of the counter-revolution had three main prongs: Stalinism, fascism, democracy, each one of which has left deep scars in the psyche of the working class.
The counter-revolution plumbed the lowest depths in the countries where the revolutionary flame had risen the highest: Russia and Germany. But everywhere, faced with the necessity to exorcise the proletarian spectre, to cope with the greatest economic crisis in its history, and to prepare for war, capitalism assumed an increasingly totalitarian form, penetrating every pore of social and economic life. The Stalinist regime set the tone: a complete war economy, the crushing of all dissent, monstrous rates of exploitation, a vast concentration camp. But the worst legacy of Stalinism – in life as well as in death decades later – was that it masqueraded as the true heir of the October revolution. The centralisation of capital in the hands of the state was sold to the world as socialism, imperialist expansion as proletarian internationalism. Although, in the years when the October revolution was still a living memory, many workers continued to believe in this myth of the Socialist Fatherland, many more have been turned away from all thought of revolution by successive revelations of the true nature of the Stalinist regime. The damage Stalinism has done to the perspective of communism, to the hope that working class revolution can inaugurate a higher form of social organisation, is incalculable, not least because Stalinism did not descend on the proletariat from the clouds, but was made possible by the international defeat of the class movement and above all the degeneration of its political party. After the traumatic defection of the social democratic parties in 1914, for the second time in the space of less than two decades the organisations that the working class had laboured mightily to create and defend had betrayed it and become its worst enemy. Could there be a greater blow to the proletariat’s self-confidence, its conviction in the possibility of leading humanity onto a higher level of social life?
Fascism, initially a movement of outcasts from the ruling and middle classes, and even renegades from the workers’ movement, could be taken up by the most powerful factions of German and Italian capital because it coincided with their needs: to complete the crushing of the proletariat and the mobilisation for war. It specialised in the use of modern techniques to unleash the dark forces of irrationality that lie under the surface of bourgeois society. Nazism in particular, the product of a much more devastating defeat of the working class in Germany, attained new depths of irrationality, statifying and industrialising the mediaeval pogrom, and leading demoralised masses in a mad march towards self-destruction. The working class, on the whole, did not succumb to any positive belief in fascism – on the contrary it was much more vulnerable to the lure of anti-fascism, which was the principal rallying cry for the coming war. But the unprecedented horror of the Nazi death camps was no less a blow against confidence in mankind’s future – and thus the perspective of communism - than the Stalinist Gulag.
Democracy, the dominant form of bourgeois rule in the advanced industrial countries, presented itself as the opponent of these totalitarian formations – which did not prevent it from supporting fascism when it was finishing off the revolutionary workers’ movement, or allying with the Stalinist regime in the war against Hitler Germany. But democracy has proved itself to be a far more intelligent and durable form of capitalist totalitarianism than either fascism, which collapsed in the rubble of war, or Stalinism, which (with the notable exception of China and the anomalous regime in North Korea) was to fall under the weight of the economic crisis and its inability to compete on the capitalist world market, whose laws it had it tried to circumvent by state decree.
The managers of democratic capitalism have also been obliged by the crisis of the system to use the state and the power of credit to bend the forces of the market, but they were not compelled to adopt the extreme form of top-down centralisation imposed by a situation of material and strategic weakness on the eastern bloc regimes. Democracy has outlived its rivals and has now become the only game in town in the old capitalist heartlands of the West. To this day, it is irreligious to call into the question the necessity to have supported democracy against fascism in World War Two; and those who argue that behind the façade of democracy stands the dictatorship of the ruling class are dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Already during the 1920s and 30s, the development of the mass media in the democracies provided a model for the dissemination of official propaganda that was the envy of a Goebbels, while the penetration of commodity relations into the spheres of leisure and family life, as pioneered by American capitalism provided a more subtle channel for the totalitarian domination of capital than the mere reliance on informers and naked terror.
6. Contrary to the hopes of the much-reduced revolutionary minority which held onto internationalist positions during the 30s and 40s, the end of the war did not bring about a new revolutionary upsurge. On the contrary it was the bourgeoisie, with Churchill in the vanguard, which learned the lessons of 1917 and nipped any possibility of proletarian revolt in the bud, through the carpet bombing of German cities and through the policy of “letting the Italians stew in their own juice” in the wake of the massive strikes in the north of Italy in 1943. The end of the war thus deepened the defeat of the working class. And again, contrary to the expectations of many revolutionaries, the war was not followed by a further economic depression and a new drive towards world war, even if the imperialist antagonisms between the victorious blocs remained as a constant threat hanging over humanity’s head. Instead the post-war period witnessed a phase of real expansion of capitalist relations under American leadership, even if one part of the world market (the Russian bloc and China) attempted to shut itself off from the penetration of western capital. The continuation of austerity and repression in the eastern bloc did provoke important workers’ revolts (East Germany 1953, Poland and Hungary 1956), but in the West, following some post-war expressions of discontent like the strikes in France in 1947, there was a gradual attenuation of the class struggle, to the point where sociologists could begin theorising about the “embourgeoisiement” of the working class as a result of the spread of consumerism and the development of the welfare state. And indeed both these aspects of capitalism after 1945 remain as important added weights on the possibility of the working class reconstituting itself as a revolutionary force. Consumerism atomises the working class and peddles the illusion that everyone can attain the paradise of individual ownership. Welfarism – which was often introduced by left parties and presented as a conquest of the working class, is an even more significant instrument of capitalist control. It undermines the self-confidence of the working class and makes it reliant on the benevolence of the state; and later on, in a phase of mass migration, its organisation by the nation state would mean that the issue of access to health, housing and other benefits became a potent factor in the scapegoating of immigrants and divisions within the working class. Meanwhile, along with the apparent disappearance of the class struggle in the 1950s and 60s, the revolutionary political movement was reduced to the most isolated state in its history.
7. Some of those revolutionaries who did maintain an activity during this dark period had begun to argue that capitalism had, thanks to bureaucratic state management, learned to control the economic contradictions analysed by Marx. But others, more prescient, like the Internacialismo group in Venezuela, recognised that the old problems – the limits of the market, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall – could not be conjured away, and that the financial difficulties experienced in the late 60s heralded a new phase of open economic crisis. They also hailed the capacity of a new generation of proletarians to respond to the crisis through the reassertion of the class struggle – a prediction amply confirmed by the formidable movement in France in May 1968 and the subsequent international wave of struggles, which demonstrated that decades of counter-revolution had come to an end, and that the proletarian struggle was the key obstacle in preventing the new crisis initiating a course towards world war.
8. The proletarian upsurge of the late sixties and early 70s had been preceded by a growing political agitation among wide layers of the population in the advanced capitalist countries, and particularly among the young. In the US, protests against the Vietnam war and racial segregation; movements among German students who manifested an interest in a more theoretical approach to the analysis of contemporary capitalism; in France, the agitation of students against the war in Vietnam and the repressive regime in the universities; in Italy, the “operaist” or autonomist tendency which reaffirmed the inevitability of the class struggle when those wise sociologists were proclaiming its obsolescence. Everywhere, a growing dissatisfaction with the dehumanised life advertised as the luscious fruit of post-war economic prosperity. A small minority, propelled by the upsurge of militant struggles in France and other industrial countries, could have participated in the foundation of a conscious, internationalist political vanguard, not least because part of this minority had begun to rediscover the contribution of the communist left.
9. As we are only too aware, the rendez-vous between this minority and the wider class movement only took place episodically during the movements of the late sixties and early 70s. This was partly the result of the fact that the politicised minority was heavily dominated by a discontented petty bourgeoisie: the student movement, in particular, lacked the strong proletarian core brought into being by changes in the organisation of capitalism over the next few decades. And despite powerful class movements across the world, despite serious confrontations between the workers and the forces of containment in their midst – unions and left parties – the majority of class struggles remained defensive, and only rarely posed directly political questions. Furthermore the working class faced important divisions within its ranks as a world-wide class: the “iron curtain” between East and West, and the division between the so-called “privileged” workers of the centres of capital and the impoverished masses in the former colonial areas. Meanwhile the maturation of a political vanguard was held back by a vision of immediate revolution and by activist practices, typical of petty bourgeois impatience, which failed to grasp the long-term character of revolutionary work and the gigantic scale of the theoretical tasks facing the politicised minority. The predominance of activism made large parts of the minority vulnerable to recuperation by leftism or, when the struggles died down, to demoralisation. Meanwhile, those who rejected leftism were often hampered by councilist notions which rejected the whole problem of organisational construction. However, a small minority was able to overcome these obstacles and to take up the tradition of the communist left, initiating a dynamic towards growth and regroupment which continued throughout the 1970s, but this too came to an end at the beginning of the 1980s, symbolised by the break-down of the International Conferences. The failure of the struggles of this period to reach a more advanced political level, to nourish the seeds that, in the streets and meetings of 1968, had posed the problem the replacement of capitalism East and West with a new society, was to have very significant consequences in the following decade.
Nevertheless, this huge outburst of proletarian energy did not simply run out of steam, but required a concerted effort by the ruling class to divert, derail and repress it. Fundamentally, this took place at the political level, making maximum use of the forces of the capitalist left and the unions, which still had a considerable influence within the working class. Whether through the promise of electing governments of the left, or through the later strategy of the “left in opposition” coupled with the development of radical trade unionism, throughout the two decades that followed 1968 the instrumentalisation of organs which the workers still to some extent saw as their own was indispensable to the containment of the struggles of the class.
At the same time, the bourgeoisie took all the advantages it could of the structural changes imposed on it by the world crisis: on the one hand, the introduction of technological changes which replaced both skilled and unskilled labour in industries like the docks, automobile and print; on the other hand, the movement towards the “globalisation” of the production process, which decimated whole industrial networks in the old centres of capital and shifted production to the peripheries where labour power was incomparably cheaper and profits far greater. These alterations in the composition of the working class in the heartlands, often affecting sectors which had been at the centre of the struggle in the 70s and early 80s, became additional factors in the atomisation of the class and the undermining of its class identity.
10. Despite certain pauses, the dynamic of struggle unleashed in 1968 continued through the 70s. The high point in the maturation of the proletariat’s capacity for self-organisation and extension was attained in the Polish mass strike in 1980. However, this zenith also marked the beginning of a decline. Although the strikes in Poland revealed the classic interplay between economic and political demands, at no point did the workers in Poland pose the problem of a new society. In this aspect, the strikes were “below” the level of the movement in 68 where self-organisation was somewhat embryonic, but which provided a context for a much more radical debate about the need for social revolution. The movement in Poland, with a few very limited exceptions, looked to the “Free West” as the alternative society they wanted, to ideals of democratic government, “independent trade unions” and all the rest. In the West itself, there were some expressions of solidarity with the strikes in Poland, and from 1983, in the face of a rapidly deepening economic crisis, we saw a wave of struggles which were increasingly simultaneous and global in their scope; in a number of cases they showed a growing conflict between the workers and the trade unions. But the juxtaposition of struggles across the world did not automatically mean that there was an awareness of the need for the conscious internationalisation of the struggle; neither did clashing with the unions, which are of course part of the state, entail a politicisation of the movement in the sense of a realisation that the state must be overthrown, or of a growing capacity to put forward a perspective for humanity. Even more than in the 70s, the struggles of the 80s in the advanced countries remained on the terrain of sectional demands and in this sense also remained vulnerable to sabotage by radicalised forms of trade unionism. The aggravation of imperialist tensions between the two blocs in this period certainly gave rise to a growing preoccupation with the threat of war, but this was largely diverted towards pacifist movements which effectively prevented the development of a conscious connection between economic resistance and the war danger. As for the small groups of revolutionaries who maintained organised activity during this period, though they were able to intervene more directly in certain initiatives by the workers, on a deeper level they were coming up against the prevailing suspicion of ‘politics’ within the working class as a whole – and this growing gulf between the class and its political minority was itself a further factor in the inability of the class to develop its own perspective.
11. The struggle in Poland, and its defeat, would provide a summation of the global balance between the classes. The strikes made it clear that the workers of eastern Europe would not be prepared to fight a war on behalf of their Russian overlords, and yet they were not able to offer a revolutionary alternative to the deepening crisis of the system. Indeed, the physical crushing of the Polish workers had extremely negative political consequences for the working class in that entire region, who were absent as a class in the political upheavals that initiated the demise of the Stalinist regimes, and who were subsequently vulnerable to a sinister wave of nationalist propaganda which is today embodied in the authoritarian regimes reigning in Russia, Hungary and Poland. The Stalinist ruling class, unable to deal with the crisis and the class struggle without ruthless repression, showed that it lacked the political flexibility to adapt to changing historical circumstances. Thus in 1980-81 the scene was already set for the collapse of the eastern bloc as a whole, heralding a new phase in the historic decline of capitalism. But this new phase, which we define as that of the decomposition of capitalism, has its origins in a much wider stalemate between the classes. The class movements that erupted in the advanced countries after 1968 marked the end of the counter-revolution, and the continuing resistance of the working class constituted an obstacle to the bourgeoisie’s “solution” to the economic crisis: world war. It was possible to define this period as a “course towards massive class confrontations”, and to insist that a course towards war could not be opened up without a head-on defeat of an insurgent working class. In the new phase, the disintegration of both imperialist blocs took world war off the agenda independently of the level of class struggle. But this meant that the question of the historic course could no longer be posed in the same terms. The inability of capitalism to overcome its contradictions still means that it can only offer humanity a future of barbarism, whose contours can already be glimpsed in a hellish combination of local and regional wars, ecological devastation, pogromism and fratricidal social violence. But unlike world war, which requires a direct physical as well as ideological defeat of the working class, this “new” descent into barbarism operates in a slower, more insidious manner which can gradually engulf the working class and render it incapable of reconstituting itself as a class. The criterion for measuring the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes can no longer be that the proletariat holding back world war, and has in general become more difficult to gage.
12. In the initial phase of the rebirth of the communist movement after 1968, the thesis of the decadence of capitalism won numerous adherents and would provide the programmatic bedrock of a revived communist left. Today this is no longer the case: the majority of new elements who look to communism as an answer to the problems facing humanity find all kinds of reasons to resist the concept of decadence. And when it comes to the notion of decomposition, which we define as the final phase of capitalist decline, the ICC is more or less on its own. Other groups accept the existence of the main manifestations of the new period - the inter-imperialist free-for –all, the return of deeply reactionary ideologies such as religious fundamentalism and rampant nationalism, the crisis in man’s relationship with the natural world – but few if any draw the conclusion that this situation derives from an impasse in the balance of class forces, or agree that all these phenomena are the expressions of a qualitative shift in the decadence of capitalism, of a whole phase or period which cannot be reversed except by the proletarian revolution. This opposition to the concept of decomposition often takes the form of diatribes against the “apocalyptic” tendencies of the ICC, since we talk about it as the terminal phase of capitalism, or against our “idealism”, since although we see the long-drawn out economic crisis as a key factor behind decomposition, we do not see purely economic factors as the decisive element in the onset of the new phase. Behind these objections is a failure to understand that capitalism, as the last class society in history, is doomed to this kind of historical impasse by the fact that, unlike previous class societies when they entered into decline, capitalism cannot give rise from within itself to a new and more dynamic mode of production, while the only road to a higher form of social life must be built not on any automatic working out of economic laws, but on a conscious movement of the immense majority of humanity, which is by definition the hardest task ever undertaken in history.
13. Decomposition was the product of the stalemate in the battle between the two major classes. But has also revealed itself as an active factor in the increasing difficulties of the class since 1989. The very well-orchestrated campaigns about the death of communism which accompanied the fall of the Russian bloc – which showed the ability of the ruling class to use the manifestations of decomposition against the exploited – was a very important element in further undermining the self-confidence of the class and its capacity to renew its historic mission. Communism, marxism, even the class struggle itself, were declared over, no more than dead history. But the enormous and long lasting negative effects of the events of 1989 on the consciousness, combativeness and identity of the working class is not only the result of the gigantic scale of the anti-communist campaign. The effectiveness of this campaign must itself be explained. It can only be understood in the context of the specific development of revolution and counter-revolution from 1917 onwards. With the failure of the military counter-revolution against the USSR itself and at the same time the defeat of the world revolution, a completely unexpected, unprecedented constellation arose: that of a counter-revolution from within the proletarian bastion, and of a capitalist economy in the Soviet Union without any historically developed capitalist class. What resulted from this was not the expression of any higher historical necessity, but an historical aberration: the running of a capitalist economy by a counter-revolutionary bourgeois state bureaucracy completely unqualified and not adapted for such a task. Although the Stalinist command economy proved effective in getting the USSR through the ordeal of World War II, it completely failed, in the long run, in generating competitive national capitals.
Although the Stalinist regimes were particularly reactionary forms of decadent bourgeois society, not a relapse into any kind of feudal or despotic regime, they were in no sense of the term “normal” capitalist economies. A capitalist economy in which inefficient companies cannot be punished through elimination, and where workers cannot be laid off, cannot be a bourgeois success. To an important degree, it was thanks to this understanding of the specificities of Stalinism as an unexpected product of the counter-revolution that the ICC was able to understand the events of 1989; for instance that Stalinism had not been brought down by workers’ struggles, but by an economic and political implosion, and that the collapse in the east was not the harbinger of a pending similar collapse in the west. At the level of the balance of class forces, we understood that the demise of what in many ways was the worst enemy of the proletariat, would, for a considerable length of time, not be to the benefit of the working class. With its collapse, it rendered a last great service to the ruling class. Above all, its campaign about the death of communism seemed to find a confirmation in reality itself. The deviations of Stalinism from a properly functioning capitalism were so grave and far reaching that it indeed appeared to people not to have been capitalist. Prior to this, and as long as it was able to maintain itself, it appeared to prove that alternatives to capitalism are possible. Even if this particular alternative was anything but attractive for most workers, its existence nonetheless left a potential breach in the ideological armoury of the ruling class. The resurgence of the class struggle in the 1960s was able to profit from this breach to develop the vision of a revolution which would be at once anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist and based, not on a state bureaucracy or a party state, but on workers’ councils. During the 1960s and 70s, if, to many, the world revolution was seen as an unrealisable utopia, as “pie in the sky”, it was because of the immense power of the ruling class, or what was seen as the inherent egoistic and destructive streak in our species. Such feelings of hopelessness however could and sometimes did find a counter-weight in the massive struggles and solidarity of the proletariat. After 1989, with the collapse of the “socialist” regimes, a qualitatively new factor emerged: the impression of the impossibility of a modern society not based on capitalist principles. Under these circumstances, it is more difficult for the proletariat to develop, not only its class consciousness and class identity, but even its defensive economic struggles, since the logic of the needs of the capitalist economy weigh much heavier if they appear to be without any alternative.
In this sense, although it is certainly not necessary that the working class as a whole become marxist, or develop a clear vision about communism, in order to make a proletarian revolution, the immediate situation of the class struggle is altered considerably, and is dependent on whether or not wide sectors of the class see capitalism as something which can be put in question.
14. But working in a more underhand manner, the advance of decomposition in general and “by itself” gnawed away at the working class, its class identity and its class consciousness. This was particularly evident among the long-term unemployed or partially employed layers “left behind” by the structural changes introduced by the 1980s: whereas in the past, the unemployed had been in the vanguard of the workers’ struggle, in this period they were far more vulnerable to lumpenisation, gangsterism, and the spread of nihilistic ideologies like jihadism or neo-fascism. As the ICC predicted in the immediate aftermath of the events of 89, the class was about to enter into a long period of retreat. But the length and depth of this retreat have proved even greater than we ourselves expected. Important movements of a new generation of the working class in 2006 (the anti-CPE movement in France) and between 2009 and 2013 in numerous countries across the world (Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, USA, Spain…), together with a certain re-emergence of a milieu interested in communist ideas, made it feasible to think that the class struggle was once again taking centre stage and that a new phase in the development of the revolutionary movement was about to open up. But a number of developments over the last decade have shown just how profound are the difficulties facing the world proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard.
15. The struggles around 2011 were explicitly linked to the effects of the deepening economic crisis, their protagonists frequently referring, for example, to the precariousness of employment and the lack of opportunities for young people even after several years of university education. But there is no automatic link between the aggravation of the economic crisis and the qualitative development of the class struggle – a key lesson of the 1930s when the Great Depression tended to further demoralise an already defeated working class. And given the long years of retreat and disorientation that had preceded it, the financial earthquake of 2007-8 was to have a largely negative impact on the consciousness of the proletariat.
An important element in this was the proliferation of the very credit system that had been at the heart of the economic expansion of the 90s and 2000s but whose inbuilt contradictions now precipitated the crash. This process of “financialisation” now operated not only at the level of great financial institutions, but also in the lives of millions of workers. At this level, the situation is very different from that of the 1920's and 1930's, when for the most part the so-called middle classes (small property owners, the liberal professions etc.) but not the workers had savings to lose; and where the state insurances were barely enough to prevent the workers from starving. If, on the one hand therefore, the immediate material situation of many workers in such countries is still less dramatic than it was eight or nine decades ago, on the other hand millions of workers precisely in such countries find themselves in a predicament which hardly existed in the 1930s: they have become debtors, often on an important scale. During the 19th century, and still to a large extent before 1945, the only creditors workers had were the local pub or café and the grocery store. They had to rely on their own class solidarity in times of particular hardship. The crediting of proletarians began on a large scale with housing and building credits, but then exploded in recent decades with the development of mass-scale consumer credits. The ever more refined, cunning and treacherous development of this credit economy for a large part of the working class has extremely negative consequences for proletarian class consciousness. The expropriation of working class income by the bourgeoisie is hidden and appears incomprehensible when it takes the form of devaluation of savings, the bankruptcy of banks or of insurance schemes, or the forfeiting of house ownership on the market. The increasing precariousness of “welfare state” insurances and their financing makes it easier to divide the workers between those who pay for these public systems, and those who are maintained by them without paying in equivalently. And the fact that of millions of workers have fallen into debt is a new, additional and powerful means of the disciplining of the proletariat.
Even though the net result of the crash has been austerity for the many and an ever more shameless transfer of wealth to a small minority, the overall result of the crash has not been to sharpen or extend an understanding of the workings of the capitalist system: resentment against growing inequality has been to a great extent directed against the “corrupt urban elite”, a theme that has become a major selling point of right wing populism. And even when the reaction to the crisis and its attendant injustices gave rise to more proletarian forms of struggle, such as in the Occupy movement in the USA, the latter were also to a considerable extent weighed down by a tendency to put the blame on the greedy bankers or even on secret societies who had deliberately engineered the crash to strengthen their control over society.
16. The revolutionary wave of 1917-23, like previous insurrectionary movements of the class (1871, 1905), was sparked off by imperialist war, leading revolutionaries to consider that war provided the most favourable conditions for the proletarian revolution. In reality, the defeat of the revolutionary wave showed that war could create profound divisions in the class, in particular between those of the ‘victor’ and ‘vanquished’ nations. Furthermore, as the events at the end of World War Two demonstrated, the bourgeoisie has drawn the necessary lessons from what happened in 1917, and has shown its capacity to limit the possibilities of proletarian reactions to imperialist war, not least by developing strategies and forms of military technology that make fraternisation between opposing armies increasingly difficult.
Contrary to the promises of the western ruling class after the fall of the Russian imperialist bloc, the new historic phase it opened up was by no means one of peace and stability, but of spreading military chaos, of increasingly intractable wars that have ravaged whole swathes of Africa and the Middle East and even shook the gates of Europe. But while the barbarity displayed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and now Yemen and Syria has certainly aroused horror and indignation among sizeable sectors of the world proletariat – including those in the capitalist centres whose own bourgeoisies have been directly implicated in these wars – the wars of decomposition have only very rarely given rise to proletarian forms of opposition. In the countries most directly affected, the working class has been too weak to organise itself against the local military gangsters and their imperialist sponsors. This is most evident in the current war in Syria, which has seen not only the merciless decimation of the population by aerial and other forms of bombardment, above all by the official forces of the state, but also the derailing of an initial social discontent by the creation of military fronts and the enrolment of opponents of the regime into a myriad of armed gangs, each one more brutal than the next. In the capitalist centres, such appalling scenarios have mainly produced feelings of despair and helplessness – not least because it can seem as though any attempt to rebel against the present system can only end in an even worse situation. The grim fate of the “Arab spring” can easily be used as a new argument against the possibility of revolution. But the savage dismemberment of entire countries on the peripheries of Europe has over the past few years begun to have a boomerang effect on the working class in the centres of the system. This can be summarised by two questions: on the one hand, the world-wide and increasingly chaotic development of a refugee crisis which is truly planetary in its scope; and on the other, by the development of terrorism.
17. The trigger moment of the refugee is crisis in Europe was the opening of the borders of Germany (and Austria) to refugees from the “Balkan route” in summer 2015. The motives for this decision of chancellor Merkel were twofold. Firstly the economic and demographic situation of Germany (a thriving industry faced with the prospect of a shortage of qualified and “motivated” labour power). Secondly the danger of the collapse of law and order in south-east Europe through the concentration of hundreds of thousands of refugees in countries unable to manage them. The German bourgeoisie however had miscalculated the consequences of its unilateral decision on the rest of the world, in particular Europe. In the Middle East and in Africa, millions of refugees and other victims of capitalist misery started to make plans to set off for Europe, in particular Germany. In Europe, EU regulations such as “Schengen” or the “Dublin Refugee Pact” made Germany's problem that of Europe as a whole. One of the first results of this situation, therefore, was a crisis of the European Union – perhaps the most serious in its history to date.
The arrival of so many refugees to Europe was met initially with a spontaneous wave of sympathy within broad sectors of the population – an impulse which still is strong in countries like Italy or Germany. But this impulse was soon smothered by the rise of xenophobia in Europe. It was led not only by the populists, but also by the security forces and the professional defenders of bourgeois law and order, who were alarmed by the sudden and uncontrolled influx of often not identified persons. The fear of an influx of terrorist agents went hand in hand with the fear that the arrival of so many Muslims would enforce the development of immigrant sub-communities within Europe not identifying with the nation state of the country they live in. These fears were reinforced by the increase of terrorist attacks in France, Belgium and Germany. In Germany itself, there was a sharp increase of right wing terror attacks against refugees. In parts of the former GDR, a veritable pogrom atmosphere developed. In western Europe as a whole, after the economic crisis, the “refugee crisis” became the second major factor (augmented by fundamentalist terror) fanning the flames of right wing populism. Just as the economic crisis after 2008 opened up serious divisions within the bourgeoisie about how best to manage the world economy, summer 2015 marked the beginning of the end of its consensus on immigration. The basis of this policy, until now has been the principle of the semi-permeable border. The Wall against Mexico which Donald Trump wants to build, already exists, as does the one around Europe (also in the form of military patrol boats or airport prisons). But the purpose of the present walls is to slow down and regulate immigration, not prevent it. Making immigrants enter illegally criminalises them, thus obliging them to work for a pittance under abominable conditions without any social benefit rights. Moreover, by obliging people to risk their lives to gain admission, the frontier regime becomes a kind of barbaric selection mechanism, where only the most daring, determined and dynamic get in
Summer 2015 was in fact the beginning of the collapse of the existing immigration system. The disequilibrium between the ever-growing number seeking access on the one hand, and the shrinking demand for wage labourers in the country they are entering on the other (Germany is something of an exception) has become untenable. And as usual, the populists have an easy solution to hand: the semi-permeable border must be made impermeable, whatever the levels of violence required. Here again, what they propose seems very plausible from the bourgeois point of view. It amounts to nothing more or less than the application of the logic of “gated communities” at the scale of entire countries..
Here again, the effects of this situation for the consciousness of the working class are, for the moment, very negative. The collapse of the eastern bloc was presented as proof of the ultimate triumph of western democratic capitalism. In face of this, there was hope, from the point of view of the proletariat, that the development of the crisis of capitalist society, at all levels, would eventually help to undermine this image of capitalism as the best possible system. But today – and in spite of the development of the crisis – the fact that many millions of people (not only refugees) are ready to risk their lives to gain access to the old capitalist centres which are Europe and North America, can only enforce the impression that these zones (at least in comparison) are, if not a paradise, at least islands of relative prosperity and stability.
Unlike during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the breakdown of the world economy was centred on the USA and Germany, today, thanks to a global state capitalist management, the central capitalist countries seem likely to break down last. In this context, a situation resembling that of a besieged fortress has arisen in particular (but not only) in Europe and the United States. The danger is real that the working class in these zones, even if it is not actively mobilised behind the ideology of the ruling class, seeks protection from its “own” exploiters (“identification with the aggressor”, to use a psychological term) against what is perceived as being a common danger coming from outside.
18. The “blow-back” of terrorist attacks from the wars in the Middle East began well before the current refugee crisis. The attacks by Al Qaida on the Twin Towers in 2001, followed by further atrocities on the transport systems of Madrid and London, already showed that main capitalist states would reap the whirlwind they had sown in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the more recent spate of murders attributed to Islamic State in Germany, France, Belgium, Turkey, the USA and elsewhere, despite often having an apparently more amateurish and even random character, in which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish a trained terrorist “soldier” from an isolated and disturbed individual, and occurring in conjunction with the refugee crisis, has further intensified feelings of suspicion and paranoia among the populations, leading them to turn to the state for protection from an amorphous and unpredictable “enemy within”. At the same time, the nihilistic ideology of Islamic State and its emulators offers a brief moment of glory to disaffected immigrant youths seeing no future for themselves in the semi-ghettoes of the big western cities. Terrorism, which in the phase of decomposition has more and more become a means of warfare between states and proto-states, also makes the expression of internationalism much more difficult.
19. The current populist upsurge has thus been fed by all these factors – the 2008 economic crash, the impact of war, terrorism and the refugee crisis – and appears as a concentrated expression of the decomposition of the system, of the inability of either of the two major classes in society to offer humanity a perspective for the future. From the point of view of the ruling class, it signifies the exhaustion of the “neo-liberal” consensus which has enabled capitalism to maintain and even extend accumulation since the onset of the open economic crisis in the 70s, and in particular the exhaustion of the Keynesian policies which had presided over the post-war boom. In the wake of the 2008 crash, which widened the already immense wealth gap between the very rich few and the vast majority, deregulation and globalisation, the “free movement” of capital and labour in a framework devised by the world’s most powerful states, has been called into question by a growing section of the bourgeoisie, typified by the populist right, even though it can simultaneously put forward neo-liberalism and neo-Keynesianism in the same campaign speech. The essence of populist politics is the political, administrative and judicial formalisation of the inequality of bourgeois society. What the 2008 crisis in particular helped to make clear, is that this formal equality is the real basis of an ever more glaring social inequality. In a situation in which the proletariat is unable to put forward its revolutionary solution – the establishment of a society without classes – the populist reaction is to want to replace the existing hypocritical pseudo-equality by an open and “honest” system of legal discrimination. This is the kernel of the “conservative revolution” advocated by president Trump’s adviser, Steve Bannon.
A first indication of what is meant by slogans such as “America First” is given by the “France d'abord” electoral programme of the Front National. It proposes to privilege French citizens, at the levels of employment, taxation and social benefits, in relation to people from other European Union countries, who in turn would have priority over other foreigners. There is something of a similar debate in Britain about whether or not, after Brexit, EU citizens should be given an intermediate status between natives and other foreigners. In the UK, the main argument put forward in favour of Brexit was not objections to the EU trade policies, or any British protectionist impulses towards continental Europe, but the political will to “regain national sovereignty” regarding immigration and the national labour market. The logic of this argumentation is that, in the absence of a longer-term perspective of growth for the national economy, the living conditions of the natives can only be more or less stabilised by discriminating against everybody else.
20. Instead of being an antidote to the long and deep reflux of class consciousness, class identity and combativeness after 1989, the so-called finance and euro crisis had the opposite effect. In particular, the pernicious effects of the loss of solidarity within the ranks of the proletariat were increased significantly. In particular, we are seeing the rise of the phenomenon of scapegoating, of ways of thinking which blame persons – onto whom all of the evil of the world is projected – for whatever goes wrong in society. Such ideas open the door to the pogrom. Today populism is the most striking, but far from being the only manifestation of this problem, which tends to permeate all social relations. At work and in the everyday life of the working class, it increasingly weakens cooperation, and favours atomisation and the development of mutual suspicion and of mobbing.
The marxist workers’ movement has long defended the theoretical insights which help to counter-weigh this tendency. The two most essential insights were a) that under capitalism exploitation has become non-personal, since it functions according to the “laws” of the market (law of value). The capitalists themselves are obliged to obey these laws; b) despite this machine- like character, capitalism is a social relation between classes, since this “system” is based and maintained by an act of will of the bourgeois state (the creation and enforcement of capitalist private property). The class struggle, therefore, is not personal but political. Instead of combating persons, it is directed against a system - and the class which embodies it - in order to transform social relations. These insights never immunised even the more class conscious layers of the proletariat against scapegoating. But it made it more resilient. They partly explain why, even in the midst of the counter-revolution, and even in Germany, the proletariat resisted the upsurge of anti-semitism more and for longer than other parts of society. These proletarian traditions continued to have positive effects, even where the workers no longer in any conscious manner identified with socialism. The working class remains the only real barrier to the spread of this kind of poison, even if certain parts of the class have been seriously affected by it.
21. All of this has led to a changing political disposition of bourgeois society as a whole; one however which, for the moment, is not at all in favour of the proletariat. In countries like the United States or Poland, where populists are now in government, large scale protests on the streets have above all been in defence the existing capitalist democracy and its “liberal” regulations. Another issue mobilising masses is the struggle against corruption Brazil, South Korea, Romania or Russia. The Five Star movement in Italy is mainly animated by the same issue. Corruption, endemic in capitalism, assumes epidemic proportions in its terminal phase. To the extent that this hampers productivity and competitiveness, those who struggle against it are among the best defenders of the interests of the national capital. The masses of national flags on display at such protests are thus no coincidence. There is also a renewal of interest in the bourgeois electoral process. Some parts of the working class fall prey to voting for the populists, under the influence of the retreat of solidarity, or as a kind of protest against the established political class. One of the barriers to the development of the cause of emancipation today is the impression these workers have that they can shock and pressurise the ruling class more through a populist vote than by proletarian struggle. The perhaps biggest danger however is that the most modern and globalised sectors of the class, at the heart of the production process, might out of indignation against vile populist exclusionism, and out of a more or less clear understanding that this political current puts in danger the stability of the existing order, fall for the trap of defending the reigning democratic capitalist regime.
22. The rise of populism, and of anti-populism, has certain similarities with the 1930s, when the working class was caught between the vice of fascism and antifascism. But despite these similarities, the present historic situation in not the same as in the 1930's. At that time, the proletariat in the Soviet Union and in Germany had suffered not only a political reverse but also a physical defeat. As opposed to this, the situation today is not one of counter-revolution. For this reason, the likelihood that the ruling class would even try to impose a physical defeat on the proletariat is, at the present time, remote.
There is another difference with the 1930: the ideological adherence of proletarians to populism or anti-populism is not at all definitive. Many workers who today vote for populist candidates can from one day to the next find themselves struggling alongside their class brothers and sisters, and the same goes for workers caught up in anti-populist demonstrations.
The working class today, above all in the old centres of capitalism, is not ready to sacrifice its life for the interests of the nation, despite the increased influence of nationalism on certain sectors of the class; nor has it lost the possibility of fighting for its own interests, and this potential continues to come to the surface, even in a much more dispersed and ephemeral manner than in the 68-89 period and the struggles between 2006 and 2013. At the same time, a process of reflection and maturation among a minority of proletarians continues despite difficulties and set-backs, and this in turn reflects a more subterranean process taking place among wider layers of the proletariat.
In these conditions, the attempt to terrorise the class would be politically dangerous and most probably counter-productive. It would strongly dent the existing illusions of the workers in democratic capitalism, which constitutes one of the most important ideological advantages of the exploiters.
For all of these reasons, it is much more in the objective interest of the capitalist class to use the negative effects of decomposing, dead-end capitalism to weaken the working class.
23. One of the main lines of attack by the “liberal” bourgeoisie against the October revolution of 1917 has been, and will continue to be, the alleged contrast between the democratic hopes of the February uprising and the October “coup d’Etat” by the Bolsheviks, which plunged Russia into disaster and tyranny. But the key to understanding the October revolution is that it was based on the necessity to break the imperialist war front, which was maintained by all factions of the bourgeoisie not least its “democratic” wing, and thus strike the first blow for the world revolution. It was the first clear answer of the world proletariat to capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decline, and it is at this level above all that October 1917, far from being a ruin from a lost age, is the signpost to humanity’s future.
Today, after the all the counter-blows it has received from the world bourgeoisie, the working class may seem very far away from recapturing its revolutionary project. And yet “In a sense the question of communism is at the very heart of the predicament of humanity today. It presently dominates the world situation in the form of the void it has created through its absence” (Report on the World Situation, 22nd ICC Congress). The multiple barbarisms of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Hiroshima and Auschwitz to Fukushima and Aleppo are the heavy price humanity has paid for the failure of the communist revolution all those decades ago; and if, at this late hour in the decadence of bourgeois civilisation, the hopes of revolutionary transformation are definitively dashed, the consequences for the survival of human society will be even more grave. And yet we are convinced that these hopes are still alive, still founded on real possibilities.
On the one hand, they are based on the objective possibility and necessity for communism, which is contained in the sharpening clash between the forces of production and relations of production. This clash has grown more acute precisely because capitalism in decadence decomposition, in contrast to previous class societies which endured whole epochs of stagnation, has not stopped expanding globally and penetrating every pore of social life. This can be seen at several levels:
The unbearable sharpening of the contradictions cited above all point to one solution: associated world production for use not profit, an association not only between human beings but also between human beings and nature. Perhaps the main expression of the potential for this transformation is that, within the central and most modern sectors of the world proletariat, the young generation, although increasingly aware of the seriousness of the historical situation, no longer shares the “no future” hopelessness of the previous decades. This confidence is based on the awareness of one's own associated productiveness: on the potential represented by scientific and technological progress, on the “accumulation” of knowledge and of the means of access to it, and on the growth of a more profound and critical understanding of the inter-action between humankind and the rest of nature. At the same time, this part of the proletariat – as we saw in the movements in Western Europe in 2011, which at their height raised the slogan of “world revolution” – is much more aware of the international character of labour association today, and thus better able to grasp the possibilities of the international unification of struggles.
But the global unification of the proletariat is a solution which capital must avoid at all costs, even when it must adopt means which show the inherent limits of production for exchange. The development of state capitalism in the decadent epoch is in a sense a kind of a desperate search for a way of trying to hold a society together by totalitarian means, an attempt by the ruling class to exert control over economic life in a period in which the unfolding of the “natural laws” of the system push towards its own collapse.
24. While capitalism cannot conjure away the necessity for communism, we know that this new mode of production cannot arise automatically, but requires the conscious intervention of the revolutionary class, the proletariat. Despite the extreme difficulties facing the working class today, its apparent inability to renew its “ownership” of the communist project, we have already outlined our reasons for insisting that this renewal, this reconstitution of the proletariat as the class for communism, is still possible today. Because just as it cannot conjure away the objective need for communism, neither can it ever entirely suppress the subjective longing for a new society, or the search to understand how to achieve it, among the class of association, the proletariat.
The memory of what Red October really meant, and indeed the memory that the German revolution and the world-wide revolutionary wave set in motion by October ever happened at all, cannot entirely disappear. It has been, so to speak, repressed, but all repressed memories are fated to reappear when the conditions are ripe. And there is always, within the working class, a minority who have sustained and elaborated the real story and its lessons on a conscious level, ready to fertilise the reflection of the class when it recovers the need to make sense of its own history.
The class cannot reach this level of inquiry on a mass scale without going through the hard school of practical struggles. These struggles in response to the growing attacks of capital are the granite basis for the development of the self-confidence and unrestricted solidarity which are generated by the reality of associated labour.
But the impasse reached in the proletariat’s purely defensive, economic battles since 1968 also necessitates, on the one hand, a theoretical struggle, a quest to understand its “deep” past and its possible future, a quest which can only point to the need for the class movement to pass from the local and national to the universal, from the economic to the political, from the defensive to the offensive. While the immediate struggle of the class is more or less a fact of life in capitalism, there is no guarantee that this next vital step will be taken. But it is indicated, in no matter how limited and confused a manner, by the struggles of the present generation of proletarians, above all in movements like that of the Indignados in Spain which was indeed an expression of a genuine indignation against the entire system – an “obsolete” system as demonstrators proclaimed on their banners, of a desire to understand how this system works, and what might replace it; and, at the same time, to discover the organisational means which may be used to break out of the institutions of the existing order. And lo and behold, these means were not essentially new: the generalisation of the mass assemblies, the election of mandated delegates, was a clear echo from the days of the soviets in 1917. This was a clear demonstration of the workings of the “Old Mole” deep in the underground of social life.
It also gave a first glimpse of a potential for the development of what we can call the political-moral dimension of the proletarian struggle: the emerging of a deep seated rejection of the existing way of life and behaviour on the part of wider sectors of the class. The evolution of this moment is a very important factor of the preparation and maturation both of massive struggles on a class terrain, and of a revolutionary perspective.
At the same time, the failure of the Indignados movement to restore a real class identity points to the necessity to link this incipient politicisation on the streets and the squares to the economic struggle, to the movement in the workplaces where the working class still has its most distinct existence. The revolutionary future lies not in a “negation” of the economic struggle as the modernists proclaim, but in a true synthesis of the economic and the political dimensions of the class movement, as observed and advocated in Luxemburg’s Mass Strike.
25. In developing this capacity to see the link between the economic and political dimensions of their movement, communist political organisations have an indispensable role to play, and this is why the bourgeoisie will do all it can to discredit the role of the Bolshevik party in 1917, presenting it as a conspiracy of fanatics and intellectuals interested only in winning power for themselves. The task of the communist minority is not to provoke struggles, or organise them in advance, but to intervene within them in order to elucidate the methods and goals of the movement.
The defence of Red October also of course demands the demonstration that Stalinism, far from representing any continuity with it, was the bourgeois counter-revolution against it. This task is all the more important today in face of the weight of ideas that the collapse of Stalinism proved the economic unfeasibility of communism. The negative effects of this on politically searching minorities – the unstable milieu between the communist left and the left of capital – are considerable. Whereas before 1989 confused but recognisably anti-capitalist ideas, for instance of a councilist or autonomist variety, were relatively influential in such circles, since then there has been an important advance of conceptions based on forming networks of mutual exchange at the local level, on preserving and extending areas of subsistence economy or the still existing “commons”. The advance of such ideas indicates that even the more politicised layers of the proletariat today are often unable to even imagine a society beyond capitalism. Under these circumstances, one of the necessary factors preparing the emergence of a future generation of revolutionaries is that the existing revolutionary minorities today expound in the most profound and convincing manner possible (without falling into utopianism) why communism today is not only a necessity, but a very real and practicable possibility.
Given the extremely reduced and dispersed nature of today’s communist left, and of the enormous difficulties faced by a wider milieu of elements searching for political clarity, it is evident that a huge distance has to be travelled between today’s small revolutionary movement and any future capacity to act as an authentic vanguard in massive class movements. The revolutionaries and the politicised minorities are not purely passive products of this situation, since their own confusions serve to further aggravate their disunity and disorientation. But fundamentally, the weakness of the revolutionary minority is an expression of the weakness of the class as a whole, and no organisational recipes or activist slogans will be able to overcome this.
Time is no longer on the side of the working class, but it cannot leap beyond its shadow. Indeed, it is compelled today to retrieve much of what it has lost not only since 1917, but also from the struggles of 1968-89. For revolutionaries, this demands a long-term, patient work of analysing the real movement of the class and the perspectives revealed by the crisis of the capitalist mode of production; and on the basis of this theoretical effort, providing answers to the questions posed by those elements edging towards communist positions. And the most important aspect of this work is that must be seen as part of the political and organisational preparation of the future party, when the objective and subjective conditions once again pose the problem of the revolution. In other words, the tasks of the revolutionary organisation today are similar to those of a communist fraction, as elaborated most lucidly by the Italian Fraction of the Communist left in the 1930s.
ICC, April 2017
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/ir159_final_3.pdf
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/node/3252
[3] https://es.internationalism.org/accion-proletaria/201709/4229/atentados-terroristas-en-cataluna-la-barbarie-imperialista-del-capital
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converg%C3%A8ncia_Democr%C3%A0tica_de_Catalunya
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_Catalonia
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201710/14407/catalan-quagmire-shows-deepening-decomposition-capitalism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201604/13907/podemos-new-clothes-service-capitalist-emperor
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/spain
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201711/14435/22nd-icc-congress-resolution-international-class-struggle
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition
[11] https://de.internationalism.org/content/2731/nach-dem-erfolg-der-populisten-schadensbegrenzung-durch-die-deutsche-bourgeoisie
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201709/14384/threat-war-between-north-korea-and-us-it-capitalism-which-irrational
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2075/donald-trump
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2074/brexit
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2085/donald-trump
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2086/populisme
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201702/14255/trump-election-and-crumbling-capitalist-world-order
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2087/political-crisis
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2088/american-bourgeoisie
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2090/macron-emmanuel
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2089/france
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2091/germany-between-russia-and-united-states
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2092/french
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2093/german
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions