THE STILL-BORN NATIONS

Throughout the 20th century, all the ‘new nations’ are no sooner born than dying. At the beginning of the century there were about 40 indepen­dent nations in the world, today there are 169, to which we have to add the 20 coming out of the explosion of the USSR and Yugoslavia.

The fiasco of the chain of ‘new nations’ created throughout the 20th century, and the certain ruin of the most recent ones, are the clearest expressions of capitalism’s bankruptcy. From the beginning of the century the order of the day for revolutionaries has not been the creation of new frontiers, but their destruction through the proletarian world revolu­tion. This is the central axis of the present series on the bal­ance sheet of 70 years of ‘national liberation’ struggles.

In the first article of the series (International Review 66) we demonstrated how ‘national liberation’ acted as a deadly poison for the international revolutionary wave of 191 7-23; in the second part (IR 68) we showed how ‘national libera­tion’ wars and the new states form inseparable cogs of impe­rialism and imperialist wars. In this third part we want to demonstrate the tragic economic and social disaster caused by the existence of the 150 nations created in the 20th cen­tury.

Reality has pulverised all the brave words about the ‘developing countries’ which were supposed to become new, dynamic poles of economic development. All the blather about the new ‘bourgeois revolutions’ which were supposed to bring about an explosion of prosperity based on the natu­ral wealth contained in the former colonies has ended up in a gigantic fiasco: one in which capitalism has shown itself to be incapable of making use of two thirds of the planet, of in­tegrating into global production the billions of peasants it has ruined.

THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THE ‘NEW NATIONS’ ARE BORN: THE DECADENCE OF CAPITALISM

The essential criterion for judging whether the proletariat should or shouldn’t support the formation of new nations is this: what is the historical dynamic of capitalism? If it is one of expansion and development, as in the 19th century, then workers could support it - but only for certain countries, which really represented a movement of expansion, and on condition of maintaining the autonomy of the proletarian class. However, with capitalism’s entry into its epoch of mortal decadence, that is, since the First World War, this support no longer has any validity and must be emphatically rejected. 

“The national programme could play an historic role only so long as it represented the ideological expression of a growing bourgeoisie, lusting for power, until it had fastened its class rule, in some way or the other, upon the great nations of central Europe and had created within them the necessary tools and conditions of its growth. Since then, imperialism has buried the old bourgeois democratic programme com­pletely by substituting expansionist activity irrespective of national relationships for the original programme of the bourgeoisie in all nations. The national phrase, to be sure, has been preserved, but its real content, its function has been perverted into its very opposite. Today the nation is but a cloak that covers imperialistic desires, a battle cry for impe­rialistic rivalries, the last ideological measure with which the masses can be persuaded to play the role of cannon fodder in imperialistic wars” [1] [1].

This historical and global criterion is quite opposite to those based on abstract speculation and on a partial and contingent vision. Thus, the Stalinists, Trotskyists and even certain proletarian groups have cited, in support of the call for ‘national independence’ for countries in Africa, Asia etc, the argument that these countries have important feudal and pre­-capitalist leftovers. From this they deduce that the ‘bourgeois revolution’ and not the proletarian revolution is on the agenda.

What these gentlemen deny is that the integration of all of the essential territories of the planet into the world market closes off the possibility of capitalist expansion, resulting in a per­manent and insoluble crisis. This is a state of affairs which dominates the life of all countries: “If it survives, the old formation retains control over society, guiding it not towards new fields of development of the productive forces, but, in line with its new and henceforth reactionary nature, towards their destruction” [2] [2].

Another argument in favour of the creation of new nations is that they possess immense natural resources which could and should be developed to free them from foreign tutelage. This argument falls into the same localist and abstract vision. Enormous potentialities certainly exist, but they cannot be developed because every country is dominated by decadence and chronic crisis.

From its origins, capitalism has been based on furious com­petition, as much at the level of nations as of individual firms. This has produced an unequal development of pro­duction according to country. However, while “the law of the unequal development of capitalism, on which Lenin and his epigones based their theory of the weakest link, was ex­pressed in the ascendant period of capitalism through a pow­erful push by the backward countries towards catching up with and even overtaking the most developed ones ... this tendency tends to reverse itself as the system as a whole reaches its objective historical limits and finds itself inca­pable of extending the world market in relation to the neces­sities imposed by the development of the productive forces. Having reached its historical limits, the system in decline no longer offers any possibility of an equalisation of develop­ment: on the contrary it entails the stagnation of all devel­opment through waste, unproductive labour and destruction. The only ‘catching up’ that now takes place is the one that leads the most advanced countries towards the situation ex­isting in the backward countries - economic convulsions, poverty, state capitalist measures. In the 19th century, it was the advanced country, Britain, which showed the way for­ward for the rest: today it is the third world countries which, in a way, indicate the future in store for the advanced ones. However, even in these conditions, there cannot be a real ‘equalisation’ of the situation of the different countries in the world. While it does not spare any country, the world crisis exerts its most devastating effects not on the most powerful, developed countries, but on the countries which arrived too late in the world economic arena and whose path towards development has been definitely barred by the older powers” [3] [3].

This is concretised in the way that “the law of supply and demand works against the development of new countries. In a world where markets are saturated, supply exceeds demand and prices are determined by the lowest production costs. Because of this, the countries with the highest production costs are forced to sell their commodities at reduced profits or even a loss. This ensures that they have an extremely low rate of accumulation and, even with a very cheap labour force, they are unable to realise the investments needed for the massive acquisition of modern technology. The result of this is that the gulf which separates them from the great in­dustrial powers can only get wider” [4] [4].

Therefore “the period of capitalist decadence is characterised by the impossibility of any new industrial nations emerging. The countries which didn’t make up for lost time before World War I were subserviently doomed to stagnate in a state of total underdevelopment, or to remain chronically back­ward in relation to the countries at the top of the sand-castle”. In this framework, “in the 20th century protectionist policies have been a total failure. Far from allowing the less developed economies to have a breathing space, they have led to the asphyxiation of the national economy” [5] [5].

WAR AND IMPERIALISM EXACERBATE BACKWARDNESS AND UNDER-DEVELOPMENT

In these global economic conditions, war and imperialism -fundamental features of decadent capitalism - are imposed as an implacable law on all counties and act as a millstone around the neck of the new nations. In the situation of stag­nation, which reigns over the world economy, each national capital can only survive if it arms itself to the teeth. As a consequence, each national state is obliged to make the ap­propriate alterations to its economy (creation of heavy indus­try; location of industries in strategic areas, which has grievous results for global production; subordination of the infrastructure and communications to military activity; enor­mous ‘defence’ costs, etc) - all of which produces serious consequences for the whole national economy in countries whose social base is underdeveloped at all levels (economic, cultural, etc):

- the artificial injection of very advanced technologies into this social fabric results in a squandering of resources and an increasingly aggravated disequilibrium of economic and so­cial activity;

- likewise, the necessity to confront spiralling costs, which can never be paid, produces growing indebtedness and ever-increasing fiscal pressure: “The capitalist state, under the imperious necessity to establish a war economy, is a huge in­satiable consumer which creates its buying power through massive borrowing that drains all national savings, under the control of and with the self-seeking assent of finance capital; it pays for all this by mortgaging the future incomes of the proletariat and small peasants” [6] [6].

In Oman, the defence budget absorbs 46% of public spend­ing, in North Korea it is not less than 24% of GNP. In Thailand, in 1991 production fell, agriculture only grew by 1% and the education budget was cut, but “the military have shown their willingness to cooperate with Europe and the United States in the modernisation of the army and have even more clearly allied themselves with the Western camp, proposing to buy German transport helicopters, various Franco/British-built Lynx helicopters, a squadron (12 planes) of F16 fighter bombers and 5(%) American M60, A1 and M48 AS tanks” [7] [7]. Burma has an infant mortality rate of 64.5 per 1000 (it is 9 per 1000 in the USA), a life-expectancy of 61 years (75.9 in the US), while only 673 books were published (for a population of 41 million) “From 1988 to 1990 the Burmese army grew from 170,000 to 230,000) men and its ar­senal was also improved. In October 1990 it ordered 654 Yu­goslavian planes and 20 Polish helicopters. In November it signed a $1200 million contract - its foreign debt is $417.1 million - with China to buy, amongst other things, 12 F7 planes, 12 F6 and 60 armoured personnel carriers” [8] [8].

India is a particularly serious example. The huge military machine in this country is in a great measure responsible for the fact that “between 1961 and 1970, the percentage of the rural population which lived below the physical minimum rose from 52 to 70%. While in 1880 each Indian had avail­able 270 kgs of cereals and dried pulses, by 1966 this had fallen to l34kgs” [9] [9]. “In 1960 the military budget was the equivalent of 2% of GNP or $600 million. In order to renew its arsenal and military equipment arms factories have multi­plied, increasing and diversifying their production. A decade later, the military budget is equal to $1600 million or 3.5% of GNP ... to this we can add the strengthening of the infrastructure, in particular strategic routes, naval bases

The third military programme, which covers 1974 to 79, will absorb $2500 million annually” [10] [10]. Since 1973 India has produced an atomic bomb and developed a programme of nu­clear research, power stations for the fusion of plutonium etc. This has produced one of the highest percentages of GNP dedicated to ‘scientific research’ in the world (0.9%!).

The disadvantage of the new countries compared to the more developed ones is accentuated by militarism. The 16 largest countries of the third world (India, China, Brazil, Turkey, Vietnam, South Africa etc) went from having 7 million sol­diers in 1970 to 9 million in 1990, an increase of 32%. On the other hand, the four most industrialised countries (the USA, Japan, Germany and France) reduced their number of troops from 4.4 million in 1970 to 3.3 million in 1990, a re­duction of 26% [11] [11]. It’s not that the latter have relaxed their military effort: they have merely made it more productive by economising on human expenses. The opposite tendency has been unfolding in the less developed countries: despite in­creased spending on sophisticated technological weapons, they have had to increase their dependence on manpower.

This necessity to give priority to the military effort has grave political consequences, which further aggravate economic and social chaos, and the general weakness of these nations: it imposes an inevitable and forced alliance with the remnants of feudal society and all the other backward sectors, because it is more vital to maintain national cohesion in the face of the imperialist world jungle than to ensure the ‘modernisation’ of the economy, which becomes a secondary and indeed utopian objective compared to the requirements of imperialist competition.

The survival of feudalism and pre-capitalist formations ex­presses the burden of the colonial and semi-colonial past, which has left these countries as specialised economies de­pendent upon the production of minerals and basic agricul­tural products, thus monstrously deforming them: “Hence the contradictory phenomenon whereby imperialism exports the capitalist mode of production and systematically destroys pre-capitalist: economic formations - while simultaneously holding back the development of native capital by ruthlessly plundering the colonial economies, subordinating their in­dustrial development to the specific needs of the metropolitan economy, and bolstering up the most reactionary and submis­sive elements in the native ruling class ... In the colonies and the semi-colonies there were to be no fully formed, indepen­dent national capitals with their own bourgeois revolutions and healthy economic bases, but rather stunted caricatures of the metropolitan capitals weighed down by the decomposing remnants of the previous mode of production, industrialised in pockets to serve foreign interests, with bourgeoisies that were weak, born senile, both at the economic and at the po­litical level” [12] [12].

The old metropoles - France, Britain etc - along with their competitors - the USA, the USSR, Germany, exacerbated these problems by ensnaring the ‘new nations’ in a thick spiders web of investments, loans, occupation of strategic en­claves, “treaties of assistance, cooperation and mutual de­fence”, integrating them into their international organisations for defence, commerce etc, all of which has tied them hand and foot and created a practically insurmountable handicap.

The Trotskyists, Maoists and all types of third worldists call this reality ‘neo-colonialism’. This term is a smokescreen that hides the decadence of world capitalism and the im­possibility of the development of new nations. They blame the problems of the third world on ‘foreign domination’. Foreign domination certainly blocks the development of these new nations, but it is not the only factor and above all it can only be understood as a constituent element of the global conditions of decadent capitalism, dominated by militarism, war and stagnant production.

To complete this tableau, it should be said that the new na­tions are born with an original sin: their territories are in­coherent, made up of a chaotic mixture of ethnic, religious, economic and cultural remnants; their frontiers are usually artificial and incorporate minorities from neighbouring countries. All of which can only lead to disintegration and permanent conflicts.

A revealing example of this is the gigantic anarchy of races, religions and nationalities which coexist in such a strategi­cally important region as the Middle East. Along with the three most important religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam (and each of these is sub-divided into a multitude of sects in conflict with each other: there are Maronite, Ortho­dox and Coptic Christian minorities, Alawite, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims) - “there also exist ethnic-linguistic minori­ties. In Afghanistan there are Persian speakers (Tadjikr) and Turkish speakers (Uzbeks, Turkomans) as well as other more particular groups ... The turbulent politics of the 20th cen­tury have produced minorities of ‘stateless peoples’. There are 22 million Kurds: 11 million in Turkey (20% of the pop­ulation), 6 million in Iran (12%), 4.5 million in Iraq (25%), 1 million in Syria (9%), without forgetting the Kurdish dias­pora in Lebanon. There is also the Armenian diaspora in Lebanon and Syria. And finally, the Palestinians, who con­stitute another ‘stateless people’, 5 million are divided be­tween Israel (2.6 million), Jordan (1.5 million), Lebanon (400,000), Kuwait (350,000), Syria (250,000)” [13] [13].

In these conditions, the new nations are a caricature of the general tendency towards state capitalism, which does not overcome the antagonistic contradictions of decadent capital­ism, but acts as a heavy fetter, exacerbating the problem even more: “In the most backward countries, the confusion be­tween the political and economic apparatus allows and en­courages the development of a wholly parasitic bureaucracy, whose sole concern is to fill its own pockets, systematically to pillage the national economy in order to build up the most colossal fortunes: the cases of Battista, Marcos, Duvalier, and Mobutu are well known and far from unique. Pillage, corruption and extortion are endemic in the underdeveloped countries, at every level of the state and economy. This situ­ation is obviously a still greater handicap for these economies, and helps to push them still further into the mire” [14] [14].

A CATASTROPHIC BALANCE-SHEET

Thus, all the new nations, far from reproducing the develop­ment of the youthful capitalism of the 19th century, have from the beginning run up against the impossibility of real accumulation and have sunk into an economic morass and a wasteful and anarchic bureaucracy. Far from providing a framework where the proletariat could improve its situation, the latter has found itself up against constant pauperisation, the threat of starvation, militarisation of labour, forced work, banning of strikes etc.

In the 60’s and 70’s politicians, experts, bankers went on ad nauseam about the ‘development’ of the countries of the third world. From being ‘underdeveloped countries’ they were presented as ‘countries on the way to development’. One of the levers of this so-called ‘development’ was the concession of massive credits, which accelerated above all after the re­cession of 1974-75. The great metropoles bestowed buckets full of credit to the new countries so that they could buy brand new machinery and installations. The only problem was that what these factories produced could not then be sold on a world market that was already suffering from gener­alised overproduction.

This did not produce the slightest development (as can be clearly seen today), but instead mortally indebted these new countries and plunged them into endless crises throughout the 80’s.

Our publications have made clear this widespread disaster; it is enough to record some figures: in Latin America GNP per head fell in 1989 to the level of 1977. In Peru income per capita in 1990 was that of 1957! Brazil, which in the 70s was presented as the ‘miracle economy’ suffered in 1990 a 4.5% fall in GNP and inflation of 1657%. Argentina’s industrial production fell in 1990 to the level of 1975 [15] [15].

The population, and especially the working class, has suf­fered cruelly. In Africa 60% of the population were living below the vital minimum in 1983, and in 1995 the World Banks says it will be 80%. In Latin America 44% are poor. In Peru 12 million people (out of a total population of 21 million) are chronically poor. A third of the population of Venezuela do not have enough income to buy basic products.

The working class has been viciously attacked: in 1991 the government of Pakistan closed or privatised public enter­prises, throwing 250,000 workers onto the streets. A third of public employees in Uganda were made unemployed in 1990. In Kenya “the government in 1990 decided not to fill 40% of the vacant posts in the public utilities, and decreed that those who used public services would have to pay for them” [16] [16]. In Argentina the proportion of national income taken up by wages has fallen from 49% in 1975 to 30% in 1983.

The clearest manifestation of the total failure of world capi­talism is the agricultural disaster which the majority of the independent nations of the 20th century have suffered: “Capitalism’s decadence has simply pushed the peasant and agrarian problem to its limits. From the worldwide view­point, it is not the development but the under-development of modern agriculture that has been the result. The peasantry today constitutes a majority of the world population, as it did a century ago” [17] [17].

The new countries, through the state, have created a web of bureaucratic organisations for ‘rural development’, extending the relations of capitalist production to the countryside and destroying the old forms of subsistence agriculture. But this hasn’t produced the least ‘development’ but instead total dis­aster. These ‘development’ mafias, which unite the headmen, landowners and rural usurers, ruin the peasants, forcing them to introduce export crops which they buy at absurdly low prices, while charging the peasants extortionate prices for seed, machinery etc.

With the disappearance of subsistence crops: “The threat of hunger is as real today as it was in previous economies; agricultural production per head is below its 1940 level ... A sign of the total anarchy of the capitalist economy: since World War II most of the one-time productive agricultural countries of the third world have become importers. Iran, for example, imports forty per cent of the foodstuff it consumes” [18] [18].

A country like Brazil - with the largest agricultural potential in the world - has seen “since February 1991 shortages of meat, rice, beans, milk products and soya oil” [19] [19]. Egypt - the granary of empires throughout history - today imports 60% of basic food items. Senegal only produces 30% of its consumption of cereals. In Africa food production is hardly 100kgs per head, whereas the vital minimum is 145kgs.

Furthermore, the channelling of production towards mono-culture for export coincided with the general fall in prices of raw materials, a tendency aggravated by the accentuation of the economic recession. In the Ivory Coast income from the sale of cocoa and coffee fell by 55% between 1986 and 1989. In the countries of West Africa the production of sugar fell by 80% between 1960 and 1985. Senegal, a producer of peanuts, earned less in 1984 than in 1919. Coffee production in Uganda fell from 186,000 metric tons in 1989 to 139,000 in 1990 [20] [20].

The result of this is the increasing destruction of agriculture, both subsistence agriculture and industrialised export agri­culture.

In this context, the majority of African, Asian and Latin American countries have been forced by falling world prices, and the massive indebtedness in which they were trapped in the 70’s, to extend even more their industrial export crops.

This has meant the massacre of forests, Pharaoh-like projects for draining swamps and costly irrigation schemes. As a re­sult, harvests are being continually reduced and the soil has been almost totally exhausted; deserts are advancing, and the once generous natural resources have been annihilated.

This catastrophe is of incalculable proportions: the Senegal river in 1960 had a flow of 2400 million cubic meters; by 1983 it had fallen to 7000. In 1960, 15% of Mauritania was covered by vegetation, by 1986 it was only 5%. In the Ivory Coast (a producer of precious woods) the area covered by forest has fallen from 15 million hectares in 1950 to only 2 million in 1986. 30% of the cultivatable soil in Nigeria has been abandoned, while cereal production on what is left de­clined from 600kgs per hectare in 1962 to 350 in 1986. UN figures for 1983 shows that the Sahara desert is advancing towards the south by 150 km a year [21] [21].

The peasants are expelled from their land and crowded into in the shanty towns of the great cities: “Lima, which in the 1940’s was a garden city, has used up all its subterranean water supplies and is being invaded by desert. Its population grew sevenfold between 1940 and 1981. It now has a surface area of 400 square kilometres and accounts for a third of the Peruvian population. The former oasis is now covered by rubbish dumps, cement and advancing sand ... On the rub­bish dump of Callao barefoot children and entire families work in the middle of a hell infested by millions of flies and an unbearable stench” [22] [22].

“Capital likes its pre-capitalist clients just as the ogre ‘likes’ children: it eats them. The worker of a pre-capitalist econ­omy who has had ‘the misfortune to have dealings with the capitalists’ knows that sooner or latter, he will end up, at best proletarianised and at worst - and this has become more and more frequent since capitalism slid into decadence - re­duced to misery and bankruptcy in the now sterilised fields, or marginalised in the vast slums of urban conglomerations” [23] [23].

This incapacity to integrate the peasant masses into pro­ductive work is the clearest demonstration of the bankruptcy of world capitalism, whose essence is the gen­eralisation of wage labour by uprooting the peasants and artisans from the old pre-capitalist forms of labour and transforming them into proletarians. In the 20th century this capacity to create new jobs has been blocked and turned back on a global scale. The new countries over­whelmingly express this phenomenon: in the 19th century the average rate of unemployment in Europe was between 4-6% and could be absorbed after the cyclical crises; while in the countries of the third world it reaches 20-30% and has be­come a permanent structural phenomenon.

THE FIRST VICTIMS OF THE WORLD-WIDE DECOMPOSITION OF CAPITALISM

The first victims of capitalism’s entry into its terminal stage of world decomposition from the end of the 70s have been the chain of ‘young nations’ which during the 60’s and 70’s were presented to us as the ‘nations of the future’ by the champions of the bourgeois order - from the liberals to the Stalinists.

The terrible situation into which these ‘nations of the future’ have sunk has been pushed into second place by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in 1989. The countries which lived under the Stalinist boot belong to the group of countries which arrived too late on the world market. They manifest all of the features of the ‘new countries’ of the 20th century. However, their specificities [24] [24] have made their collapse much more serious and chaotic, and the repercussions of this are of far greater historical and global importance, especially as regards the exacerbation of international imperialist chaos [25] [25].

Nevertheless, without underestimating the particularities of the Stalinist countries, today the other underdeveloped coun­tries express the same basic characteristics: chaos, anarchy and generalised decomposition.

The explosion of states

In Somalia the northern tribal chiefs announced on the 24th of April 1991 the partition of the country and the creation of the state of ‘Somaliland’. Ethiopia has been dismembered; on the 28th of May 1991 Eritrea declared ‘sovereignty’; Tigre, Oromos and Ogaden have totally escaped the control of the central authority. Afghanistan has been divided up between four different governments: the one in Kabul, a radical Is­lamic one, a moderate Islamic one and a Shi’ite one. Almost two thirds of Peru is controlled by the narco-mafias and the guerrilla mafias of Sandero Luminoso or Tupac Amaru. The war in Liberia has caused 15,000 deaths and more than a million people have fled (out of a total population of 2.5 million). Algeria, because of the open confrontation between the FLN and FIS (behind which lurks an imperialist struggle between France and the USA) is sinking into indescribable chaos.

Collapse of the army

The soldiers’ revolt in Zaire, the explosion of the Ugandan army into a multitude of gangs who terrorise the population, the widespread gangsterisation of the police in Asia, Africa and South America express the same tendency - though in a less spectacular way - as the present explosion of the army in the ex-USSR.

General paralysis of the economic apparatus

Food supplies, transport and services are collapsing and eco­nomic activity is reduced to the barest minimum: in the Cen­tral African Republic - the capital, Bangui “has become to-tally isolated from the rest of the country; the ex-colony lives on subsidies from France and the traffic in diamonds” [26] [26].

In these conditions of widespread starvation, misery and death, life has no value. In Lima very fat people are being kidnapped by gangs who kill them and sell their grease to pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies in the United States. In Argentina half a million people live by selling their livers, kidneys and other visceral organs. In Cairo (Egypt) a million people live in the tombs of the Coptic cemetery. Children are kidnapped in Peru and Colombia and sent to the mines or agricultural exploitation where they work in such conditions of slavery that they die like flies. The fall of the price of raw materials on the world market leads the local capitalists to use such atrocious practices in order to compensate for the fall in their profits. In Brazil the impossibility of integrating the new generations into wage labour has resulted in the sav­agery of the police gangs and thugs who are paid to extermi­nate street kids who have been pulled into mafia-like gangs involved in all kinds of traffic. Thailand has been turned into the world’s largest brothel, and AIDS is widespread: 300,000 cases in 1990, and this is forecast to rise to over 2 million in the year 2000.

The wave of emigration which has accelerated since 1986, principally from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, demon­strates the historical bankruptcy of these nations and through this, the bankruptcy of capitalism.

The disintegration of these social structures, which were born as degenerate cells of a mortally ill body - decadent capital­ism - literally vomits human masses fleeing from disaster to-wards the old industrial countries. These countries, for some time, have had the ‘closed’ signs up and only offer these starving masses the language of repression, threats and de­portation.

HUMANITY DOES NOT NEED NEW FRONTIERS BUT THE ABOLITION OF ALL FRONTIERS

The new nations of the 20th century have not enlarged the proletarian army, but - and this is most dangerous for the revolutionary perspective - they have placed the proletariat of these ‘new nations’ into conditions of extreme fragility and weakness. The proletariat is a minority in the great majority of the un­derdeveloped countries, hardly making up 10-15% of the population (whereas in the large industrialised countries it is over 50%). The workers are dispersed into centres of pro­duction which are often far away from the nerve-centres of political and economic power. They live immersed in an enormous mass of marginals and lumpens who are very vul­nerable to the most reactionary ideas and who are a very neg­ative influence on them.

Also, the way in which the collapse of capitalism is mani­fested in these countries makes it much more difficult for the proletariat to become conscious of its tasks:

- the overwhelming domination of the great imperialist pow­ers increases the influence of nationalism;

- widespread corruption and the incredible waste of eco­nomic resources hides the real roots of the bankruptcy of capitalism;

- the openly terrorist control by the capitalist state, even when it has a ‘democratic’ mask, adds weight to democratic and union mystifications;

- especially barbaric and archaic forms of exploitation facil­itate unionism and reformism.

This situation does not mean that the proletariat in these countries are not an inseparable part of the struggle of the world proletariat [27] [27], or that they don’t have the strength and potential necessary to fight for the destruction of the capitalist state and the international power of the workers’ councils: “The strength of the proletariat in a capitalist country in infinitely greater than its numerical proportion in the population. This is because the proletariat occupies a key position in the heart of the capitalist economy and also be­cause the proletariat expresses, in the economic and political domain, the real interests of the immense majority of the working population under capitalist domination” (Lenin).

The real lesson is that the existence of these ‘new nations’, instead of contributing anything to the cause of socialism, has done just the opposite: it poses new obstacles, new difficul­ties to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.

“It is not possible to maintain, as the anarchists do, that a socialist perspective could remain open even though the pro­ductive forces were in regression. Capitalism represents an indispensable and necessary stage for the establishment of socialism to the extent that it brings about the sufficient de­velopment of the objective conditions. However, just as in the present stage it has become a brake on the development of the productive forces, the prolongation of capitalism beyond this stage could bring about the disappearance of the conditions for socialism. It is in this sense that the historical alternative of socialism or barbarism is posed today” [28] [28].

The new nations favour neither the development of the pro­ductive forces, nor the historic tasks of the proletariat, nor the dynamic towards the unification of humanity. On the contrary, they are - as an organic expression of the agony of capitalism - a blind force which leads towards the destruction of the productive forces, towards difficulties and dispersion for the proletariat, towards the division and atomisation of humanity.

Adalen, 8.2.92

"The theoretical conclusions of the communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes." (Communist Manifesto)

In the first article in this series, we attempted to counter the bourgeois cliché that 'communism is a nice idea, but it will never work' by showing that communism was not an 'idea,' invented by Marx or any "would-be universal reformer", but was the product of an immense historical movement which stretched back to the earliest human societies; and above all, that the demand for a society without classes, private prop­erty or the state had been raised in every great upheaval of the proletariat from its very beginnings as a social class.

There was a proletarian communist movement before Marx was born, and when the young student Marx was just begin­ning to enter the arena of radical democratic politics in Ger­many, there was already a plethora of communist groups and tendencies, notably in France, where the working class movement had made the greatest strides towards developing a communist outlook. Thus Paris in the late 1830s and early 1840s was the stamping ground of such currents as Cabet's utopian communism, the prolongation of the views outlined by Saint-Simon and Fourier; there were Proudhon and his followers, forerunners of anarchism but who at that time were making a rudimentary attempt to criticize bourgeois po­litical economy from the standpoint of the exploited; the more insurrectionary Blanquists, who had led an aborted ris­ing in 1839 and were the heirs of Babeuf and the 'Equals' in the great French revolution. In Paris too there was a whole milieu of exiled German intellectuals and workers. The communist workers were mainly grouped in the League of the Just, animated by Weitling.

Marx entered into the political fray from the starting point of critical philosophy. During the course of his university stud­ies he fell - reluctantly at first, because Marx did not enter his commitments lightly - under the spell of Hegel. Hegel at that time was the acknowledged 'Master' in the field of phi­losophy in Germany, and in a more profound sense his work represented the very summit of bourgeois philosophical en­deavor, because it was the last great attempt of this class to grasp the entire movement of human history and consciousness, and because it aimed to accomplish this by means of the dialectical method.

Very rapidly, however, Marx joined up with the 'Young Hegelians', (Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, etc) who had begun to recognize that the Master's conclusions were not consistent with his method, and even that key elements of his method were deeply flawed. Thus while Hegel's dialectical approach to history showed that all historical forms were transitory, that what was 'rational' in one period was completely 'irrational' in another, he ended up positing an 'End of His­tory' by presenting the existing Prussian state as the incarna­tion of Reason. Similarly - and here the work of Feuerbach was particularly important - it was clear to the Young Hegelians that, having effectively undermined theology and unreasoning faith with his philosophical rigor, Hegel ended up reinstating God and theology in the guise of the Absolute Idea. The aim of the young Hegelians was, first and fore­most, to take Hegel's dialectic to its logical conclusion and arrive at a thorough-going critique of theology and religion. Thus for Marx and his fellow Young Hegelians it was literally true that "the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism" ('A contribution to the critique of Hegel's phi­losophy of right', 1843-44).

But the Young Hegelians were living in a semi-feudal state where the criticism of religion was forbidden by the state censor: therefore the criticism of religion very quickly turned into the criticism of politics. Having given up all hope of gaining a university teaching post after Bauer was dismissed from his, Marx turned to political journalism, and soon be­gan formulating his attack on the wretched Junker stupidity of the prevailing political system in Germany. His sympa­thies were immediately republican and democratic, as can be seen from his first articles for the Deutsche Jahrbuche and the Rheinische Zeitung, but they were still couched in terms of a radical bourgeois opposition to feudalism, and concentrated very much on matters of 'political liberty', such as freedomof the press and universal suffrage. In fact, Marx explicitly resisted the attempts of Moses Hess, who had already gone over to an overtly communist standpoint, if of a rather senti­mental variety, to smuggle communist ideas into the pages of the Rheinische Zeitung. In answer to a charge by the Augs­burger Allgemeiner Zeitung that Marx's paper had adopted communism, Marx wrote that "The Rheinische Zeitung, which cannot even concede theoretical reality to communistic ideas in their present form, and can even less wish or consider possible their practical realization, will submit these ideas to thorough criticism" ('Communism and the Augs­burger Allgemeiner Zeitung'). Later on, in a famous, almost programmatic letter to Arnold Ruge, (September 1843) he wrote that the communism of Cabet, Weitling etc was a "dogmatic abstraction".

In fact, these hesitations about adopting a communist position were similar to Marx's hesitations when initially confronted with Hegel. He was really being won over to communism, but refused any superficial adhesion, and was well aware of the weaknesses of the "actually existing" communist tendencies. Thus in the same article which appeared to reject com­munist ideas, he went on to say that "if the Augsburger wanted and could achieve more than slick phrases, it would see that writings such as those by Leroux, Considerant, and above all Proudhon's penetrating work, can only be criticized after long and deep study, not through superficial and passing notions". And in the above-mentioned letter to Ruge, he went made it clear that his real objection to the commu­nism of Weitling and Cabet was not that it was communist but that it was dogmatic, ie that it saw itself as no more than a good idea or a moral imperative to be brought to the suf­fering masses from a redeemer on high. In contrast to this, Marx outlined his own approach:

"Nothing prevents us, therefore, from lining our criticism with a criticism of politics, from taking sides in politics, ie from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall de­velop for the world new principles from the existing princi­ples of the world. We shall not say: abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with the true campaign slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must ac­quire whether it wishes or not".

Having broken from the Hegelian mystification which posited an ethereal 'self-consciousness' standing outside the real world of men, Marx was not about to reproduce the same theoretical error at the level of politics. Consciousness did not pre-exist the historical movement; it could only be the coming-to-consciousness of the real movement itself.

The proletariat as a communist class

Although in this letter there is no explicit reference to the proletariat and no definite adoption of communism, we know from its date that Marx was in the process of doing just that. The articles written in the period 1842-3 about social ques­tions - the Prussian wood theft law and the situation of the Mosel wine growers - had led him to recognize the funda­mental importance of economic and class factors in political affairs; indeed Engels said later that he had "always heard from Marx that it was precisely through concentrating on the law of thefts of wood and the situation of the Mosel wine­growers that he was led from pure politics to economic rela­tionships and so to socialism" (Engels to R Fischer, 1885, Marx and Engels, Werke xxxix 466). And Marx's article 'On the Jewish question', also written in late 1843, is communist in all but name, since it looks forward to an emancipation that goes beyond the purely political domain to the emanci­pation of society from buying and selling, from the egoism of competing individuals and of private property.

But it should not be thought that Marx came to these views simply through his own capacities for study and reflection, enormous though they were. He was not an isolated genius contemplating the world from on high, but was engaged in constant discussion with his contemporaries. In the process of his 'conversion' to communism, he acknowledged his debt to the contemporary writings of Weitling, Proudhon, Hess and Engels; and with the latter two in particular, he had engaged in intense face to face discussions when they were commu­nists and he was not. Engels above all had the advantage of having witnessed firsthand the more advanced capitalism of England, and had begun to develop a theory of capitalist de­velopment and crisis which was vital to the elaboration of a scientific critique of political economy. Engels had also seen firsthand the Chartist movement in Britain, which was no longer a small political group but a veritable mass movement, clear evidence of the capacity of the proletariat to constitute itself as an independent political force in society. Perhaps most important of all in convincing Marx that communism could be more than a utopia was his direct contact with the groups of communist workers in Paris. The meetings of these groups made a tremendous impression upon him:

"When communist artisans form associations, education and propaganda are their first aims. But the very act of asso­ciating creates a new need - the need for society - and what appears to be a means has become an end. The most striking results of this practical development are to be seen when French socialist workers meet together. Smoking, eating and drinking are no longer simply means of bringing people to­gether. Company, association, entertainment which also has society as its aim, are sufficient for them; the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their toil-worn bodies" (Economic  and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844).

We may forgive Marx a certain exaggeration here; commu­nist associations, workers' organizations, are never actually an end unto themselves. The real point is elsewhere; that in participating in the emerging proletarian movement, Marx was able to see that communism, the real and concrete broth­erhood of man, could be not just a high-minded phrase but a practical project. It was in Paris, in 1844, that Marx first ex­plicitly identified himself as a communist.

Thus, what above all else allowed Marx to overcome his hesitations about communism was the recognition that there was a force in society which had a material interest in com­munism. Since communism had ceased to be a dogmatic ab­straction, a mere 'Good Idea', the role of the communists would not be reduced to preaching about the evils of capital­ism and the benefits of communism. It would involve identi­fying themselves with the struggles of the working class, showing the proletariat "why it is struggling" and "how it must become conscious" of the ultimate goals of its struggle. Marx's adhesion to communism was identical to his adhesion to the cause of the proletariat, because the proletariat was the class that bore communism within itself. The classic exposi­tion of this position is the concluding passage to the 'Critique of Hegel's philosophy of right'. Although this article was attempting to deal with the question of what social force could bring about the emancipation of Germany from its feu­dal chains, the answer it gave was actually more appropriate to the question of how mankind could be emancipated from capitalism, since the "positive possibility of German emanci­pation" lay "in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general; a sphere of society which can no longer lay any claim to a historical title, but merely to a human one ... and finally, a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from - and therefore emancipating - all the other spheres of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of hu­manity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat."

Despite the fact that the working class was only beginning to form in Germany itself, Marx's acquaintance with the more developed workers' movement in France and Britain had al­ready convinced him of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Here was a class which embodied all the suf­ferings of humanity; in this it was not unlike previous ex­ploited classes in history, though its "loss of humanity" was taken to an even more advanced level. But in other respects it was quite unlike previous exploited classes, and this became clear once the development of modern industry had given rise to a modern industrial proletariat. In contrast to the earlier exploited classes such as the peasants under feudalism, the working class was first and foremost a class of associated labor. This meant, to begin with, that it could only defend its immediate interests by means of an associated struggle -by uniting its forces against all the divisions imposed by the enemy class. But it also meant that the ultimate solution to its condition as an exploited class could only lie in the creation of a real human association, of a society based on free coop­eration instead of competition and domination. And because this association would be based on the enormous progress in the productivity of labor brought about by capitalist indus­try, it would not collapse back to a lower form under the pressures of scarcity, but would be the basis for the abundant satisfaction of human needs. Thus, the modern proletariat contained within itself, within its very being, the dissolution of the old society, the abolition of private property, and the emancipation of the whole of humanity:

"When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the exist­ing world order, it is only declaring the secret of its own ex­istence, for it is the actual dissolution of that order. When the proletariat demands the negation of private property, it is only elevating as a principle for society what society has already made a principle for the proletariat, what is embod­ied in the proletariat, without its consent, as the negative re­sult of society" (ibid).

This is why, in The German Ideology, written a couple of years later, Marx was able to define communism as "the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs": communism was none other than the real movement of the proletariat, which was led by its innermost nature, by its most practical material interests, to demand the collective ap­propriation of all social wealth.

To such arguments the Philistines of the day responded in the same way as they do today: 'how many workers do you know who want a communist revolution? The vast majority of them seem quite resigned to their lot under capitalism'. But Marx was ready with his response in The Holy Family (1844): "It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will be historically compelled to do". Here he warns against taking a purely empiricist snapshot of the proletariat as represented by the views of a particular worker, or by the consciousness of the vast majority of the class at a given moment. Instead, the proletariat and its struggle must be seen in a context which encompasses the whole sweep of its history - including its revolutionary future. It was precisely his capacity to see the proletariat in this historic frame which enabled him to predict that a class which up till then was still a minority of the soci­ety around him, and had only troubled bourgeois order on a local scale, would one day be the force that would shake the entire capitalist world to its very foundations.

"The philosophers only interpreted the world,

The point is to change it"

The same article which announced Marx's recognition of the revolutionary nature of the working class also had the temer­ity to proclaim that "philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat". For Marx, Hegel had marked the supreme point in the historical evolution not only of bourgeois philos­ophy, but of philosophy in general, of all philosophy since its very beginnings in ancient Greece. But after reaching the mountain top, the descent was very quick. First came Feuer­bach, the materialist and humanist, to unmask Hegel's Ab­solute Idea as the last manifestation of God; and having un­masked God as the projection of man's suppressed powers, to elevate the cult of man in his place. This was already a sign of the coming end of philosophy as philosophy. All that re­mained was for Marx, acting as the avant-garde of the proletariat, to deliver the coup de grace. Capitalism had estab­lished its effective dominion over society; philosophy had had its last word, because now the working class had (albeit in a more or less crude form) formulated a realizable project for the practical emancipation of humanity from the chains of all the ages. From this point onwards, it would be perfectly correct to say, as did Marx, that "philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love" (German Ideology, 1845). The ensuing nullity of virtually all bourgeois 'philosophy' after Feuerbach only bears this out[1].

The philosophers had made their various interpretations of the world. In the field of 'natural philosophy', the study of the physical universe, they had already had to cede their place to the scientists of the bourgeoisie. And now, with the arrival of the proletariat, they had to cede their authority in all matters pertaining to the human world. Having found its material weapons in the proletariat, philosophy was dissolved as a separate sphere. In practical terms, for Marx, this meant a break both with Bruno Bauer and with Feuerbach. With re­gard to Bauer and his followers, who had retired to a true ivory tower of self-contemplation, known under the grandiose term of 'Critical Criticism', Marx was sarcastic in the extreme: this truly was philosophy as self-abuse. Towards Feuerbach, Marx had a far deeper respect, and never forgot the contribution he had made to 'turning Hegel on his feet'. The basic criticism he made of Feuerbach's humanism was that its 'man' was an abstract, unchanging creature, divorced from society and its historical evolution. For this reason Feuerbachian humanism could do no more than propose a new religion of humanity's oneness. But as Marx insisted, humanity could not really become one until class divisions had reached their ultimate point of antagonism, and so all the honest philosopher could do from now on was to throw in his lot with the proletarian side of the divide.

But the whole sentence reads: "Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy". The effective sup­pression of philosophy by the proletarian movement did not imply that the latter had carried out a crude decapitation of intellectual life. On the contrary. It had now assimilated the best of 'philosophy' - and by extension the accumulated wis­dom of the bourgeoisie and of previous social formations -and had embarked upon the task of transforming it into a sci­entific critique of existing conditions. Marx did not come empty-handed into the proletarian movement. He brought with him in particular the most advanced methods and con­clusions elaborated by German philosophy; and, along with Engels, the discoveries of the bourgeoisie's most lucid politi­cal economists: in both fields, these represented the intellec­tual apogee of a class which not only retained a progressive character, but had only just completed its heroic, revolution­ary phase. The entry of men like Marx and Engels into the ranks of the workers' movement marked a qualitative step in the latter's self-clarification, a move from intuitive, specula­tive, half-formed theoretical groping to the stage of scientific investigation and comprehension. In organizational terms, this was symbolized by the transformation of the sect-like, semi-conspiratorial League of the Just into the Communist League, which adopted The Communist Manifesto as its pro­gram in 1847.

But let us repeat: this did not signify that class consciousness was being injected into the proletariat from some higher as­tral plane. In the light of what we have written above, it can be seen more clearly that the Kautskyite thesis, according to which socialist consciousness is brought to the working class by bourgeois intellectuals, is actually a continuation of the utopian error criticized by Marx in the 'Theses on Feuer­bach' :

"The materialist doctrine that men are products of cir­cumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed up­bringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Hence this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example).

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of hu­man activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice."

Put in other terms: the Kautskyite thesis - which Lenin took up in What is to be done but later abandoned[2] - starts off with a crude materialism, seeing the working class as eter­nally conditioned by the circumstances of its exploitation, unable to become conscious of its real situation. To break out of this closed circle, vulgar materialism then turns itself into the most abject idealism, positing a 'socialist consciousness' that for some mysterious reason is invented ... by the bour­geoisie! This approach completely reverses the way that Marx himself posed the problem. Thus, in The German Ide­ology he wrote:

"From the conception of history we have sketched we obtain these further conclusions: in the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the ex­isting relationships only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces ... and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of so­ciety without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from so­ciety, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist con­sciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class".

Clear enough: communist consciousness emanates from the proletariat, and as a result of this, elements from other classes are able to attain communist consciousness. But only by breaking with their 'inherited' class ideology and adopting the standpoint of the proletariat. This latter point in particular is stressed in a passage in The Communist Manifesto:

"In times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a vi­olent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of com­prehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole."

Marx and Engels could only 'bring' to the proletariat what they did by "cutting themselves adrift" from the ruling class; they could only "comprehend theoretically the historical movement" by examining critically bourgeois philosophy and political economy from the standpoint of the exploited class. In fact a better way to put this is to say that the proletarian movement, by winning over the likes of Marx and Engels, was able to appropriate the intellectual wealth of the bour­geoisie and use it to its own ends. Furthermore, it would not have been able to do this if it had not already embarked upon the task of developing a communist theory. Marx was quite explicit about this when he described the workers Proudhon and Weitling as the theoreticians of the proletariat. In sum: the working class took bourgeois philosophy and political economy and forged them with hammer and anvil into the indispensable weapon that bears the name of marxism, but which is none other than the "fundamental theoretical acqui­sition of the proletarian struggle the only conception which really expresses the viewpoint of that class" (ICC plat­form). CDW

***

In subsequent parts of this series, we will examine further Marx's protest against the condition of the proletariat in bourgeois society, and his initial definitions of the commu­nist society that would overcome these conditions.

[1] Henceforward, only those philosophers who recognize the bankruptcy of capitalism have anything at all to say. But traumatized by the growing barbarism of the declining capi­talist system, and yet unable to conceive that anything but capitalism could exist, they decree that not only present-day society, but existence itself, is a complete absurdity! Unfortunately, the cult of despair is not a very good advertise­ment for the health of an age's philosophy.

[2] See our article in International Review, 43, 'Reply to the Communist Workers Organization: On the subterranean mat­uration of consciousness'. The CWO, and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party to which it is affiliated, continues to defend a slightly watered-down version of the Kautskyite theory of class consciousness.

Wars, barbarism, class struggle: The only solution to the spiral of wars and barbarism is the international class struggle 

Since the beginning of the 'era of peace and prosperity' opened by the fall of the Berlin wall, the disappearance of the eastern bloc and the break-up of the USSR, there have never been so many wars and local conflicts; never has mili­tarism been more omnipresent, never have arms sales of all kinds reached, such a scale, never has the threat of nuclear proliferation been so great, never have the plans for new weapons, including ones to be used in space, been so far ad­vanced; never have so many human beings suffered such hunger, poverty, exploitation and wars; never since capital­ism began has such a large proportion of the world popula­tion been thrown out of the productive process, most of them condemned to permanent unemployment, to absolute pauperization, to begging, to all kinds of illicit trades, to crime, to wars and nationalist or inter-ethnic massacres ... The open economic recession is getting deeper in the big industrial countries, the great world powers, and in particular the biggest one of all, the USA; hundreds of thousands of work­ers are being hurled into the jaws of unemployment and mis­ery. The era of peace and prosperity promised by President Bush, by the whole world bourgeoisie, is proving itself to be an era of wars and economic crisis.

Chaos and Anarchy In every corner of the planet

The USSR is gone. Exit Gorbachev. The CIS is still-born. Tensions between the republics get sharper and more ag­gressive every day. The emerging states squabble over what's left of the ex-Union. The main thing at stake is the remains of the Red Army, its conventional weapons of course, but also its nuclear ones (33,000 to 35,000 warheads!). It's a question of forming the strongest possible national armies in order to ensure the imperialist interests of each state against its neighbors. The ex-USSR is under the bloody reign of every man for himself; nuclear threats are being issued by rote. Despite the (western) international pressure, Kazakhstan refuses to say whether or not it is going to hand over the tac­tical and above all strategic weapons on its territory; Ukraine has grabbed a division of nuclear bombers (17 February) and is trying to keep the Black Sea fleet for itself. Yeltsin's Russia, in command of the 'unified' army of the CIS, ie in a po­sition of strength vis-a-vis the others, has even expressed its fears about a future nuclear conflict with Ukraine[1]. This tells us a lot about the nature of the relations between the new states and the role played by the military within them. These relations are imperialist and antagonistic: the balance of forces rests on military and especially nuclear power.

This conflict-ridden situation is made more acute by the catastrophic state of the economy. 90% of the Russian popu­lation is living below the poverty line. Famine is spreading despite the aid from the west. Industrial production is falling brutally while the liberation of prices has led to three-figure, South American style inflation. This total bankruptcy will in turn throw oil on the fire of the conflicts between the new states. "Economic war between the republics has already be­gun" affirmed Anatoli Sobtchak, the mayor of St Petersburg on January 8.

This conflict of interests, both political and economic, is go­ing to accelerate the chaos, and multiply tensions and con­flicts, local wars and massacres, among the various na­tionalities of what we can already call the ex-CIS. The re­publics are at odds over the military heritage left by the de­funct USSR. Nearly all of them are in conflict over the ques­tion of frontiers: the case of Crimea - Russian or Ukrainian -is the best known. Each republic in turn has one or more na­tional minority declaring its independence, taking up arms, forming militias: Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenian mi­nority in Azerbaijan; the Chechenes in Russia, who have been attacking barracks in order to get weapons; and every­where the Russian minorities who are getting increasingly anxious, in Moldova, in Ukraine, in the Caucasus and in the central Asian republics. And then there's Georgia, torn in two by murderous combats between partisans of the 'democratically elected' president Gamsakhurdia on the one hand, and his former leading ministers and their militias on the other. Everywhere there are dead, wounded, massacres of civilians, destruction, nationalist hatred and terror between small peoples who previously lived together, and who to­gether suffered the terror of Stalin's version of state capital­ism. Today, desolation and chaos rule without any challenge.

This explosion of the ex-USSR, this situation of bloody anar­chy, has reawakened local imperialist appetites that for a long time were contained by the all-powerful 'Soviet' apparatus; and they hold the seeds of even bigger confrontations. Iran and Turkey are engaged in a real race to establish the first embassies in the Muslim republics. The Iranian press accuses Turkey of wanting to 'impose the western model' on these republics by making them lose their 'Muslim identity'. Turkey, supported by the USA, uses the Turkish-speaking nationalities (Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Turkomens) to get one step ahead of Iran, which in turn tries to enlist the aid of Pakistan in this imperialist contest ...

The disappearance of the division of the world into two great imperialist blocs has meant the end of the discipline that used to reign, the end of the established, 'stable' rules that regu­lated local imperialist conflicts. Today, they are breaking out everywhere and in all directions. The explosion of the USSR can only further aggravate this phenomenon. Everywhere, on all the continents, new conflicts are breaking out, develop­ing, while the old hot spots have not cooled down either, on the contrary.

The Philippines and Burma suffer from bloody and perma­nent guerilla warfare (China has sold more than a billion dollars worth of arms to Burma!). A state of anarchy is de­veloping in central Asia. Military confrontations of all kinds (Kurdistan, Lebanon) continue in the Middle East despite the 'calm' in the region since the terrible crushing of Iraq in the Gulf war.

Africa as a continent is sinking into a nightmare: bloody re­pression of riots by hungry populations; coups d'Etat, guerilla wars and inter-ethnic clashes, proliferating in the midst of an economic disaster. Imperialist tensions between Egypt and Sudan are exacerbating. Social chaos is spreading in Algeria, the fighting goes on in Chad, Djibouti is shaken by confrontations between Afars and Issas.

"Africa cannot rid itself of the spectre of alimentary in­security ... Aid is urgently needed for Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and even for Zaire. Civil wars, massive de-placements of populations, drought, these are the causes in­voked by the FAD"[2]. Do we need to explain that the term "alimentary insecurity" is an elegant way of avoiding the more brutal word famine?

In comparison, Latin America seems a haven of peace. It should be said that it does enjoy the particular attention of its great northern neighbor. The sub-continent is still the USA's backyard. The numerous antagonisms between Ar­gentina and Chile, and between Ecuador and Peru, to cite only two of the various frontiers that have given rise to mili­tary skirmishes, have so far been contained. But the continent is still marked by violence. Guerilla violence (Peru, Colom­bia, Central America); the violence of state repression against populations which are also hungry (eg the riots in Venezuela); violence resulting from the advanced decompo­sition which is hitting the states: drug gang wars in Colom­bia, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia; the massive assassination by the police and various militia of the street children abandoned in their millions and subjected to the miseries of hunger and drug addiction, left to themselves in the slums, vast shit-heaps that ring the cities.

This list of chaos and wars, of killing and terror, would not be complete if we didn't mention Yugoslavia. This country no longer exists. It has exploded in a fracas of fire and blood. For months, Serbs and Croats killed each other and tensions grew between the three nationalities of Bosnia-Herzegovina. New confrontations are brewing a few hundred kilometers from the big industrial centers of Europe! Like the explosion of the USSR, the explosion of Yugoslavia has reawakened old tensions and created new ones. For example, Macedo­nia's desires for independence have dangerously revived an­tagonisms between Greece and Bulgaria. And above all it has sharpened tensions between the great powers, Germany and the USA, and within Europe.

Here is a rapid and incomplete, and yet frightening and dra­matic, photograph of the world (for the moment we are ex­cluding the situation in the big industrial countries, the USA, Japan and western Europe; we will be coming back to this later). Here in a few words is the reality of the capitalist world. A capitalist world that is rotting and decomposing. A capitalist society that can only offer humanity wars and misery.

Arms sales at fever pitch

If anyone doubted this war-like perspective, the explosion of arms sales must convince them of it.

Arms sales of every kind, from the most simple to the most sophisticated and murderous, are now escaping any control. The planet has become an immense supermarket of weapons, where competition between the merchants is becoming sharper all the time. The disappearance of the eastern bloc and the economic catastrophe which is hitting the countries of Eastern Europe and of the CIS have thrown the incredible ar­senal of the Warsaw Pact onto the market, with prices tum­bling daily: hundreds of armored cars are being sold by weight, at 10,000 dollars a ton![3]

In 1991, the ex-USSR sold 12 billion dollars in arms. Russia and Kazakhstan sold 1000 T-72 tanks and also submarines to Iran. "Information gathered by the western services would give one to believe that the Glavosmos company, which is shared by both states, offered its foreign clients the propul­sive sections of the SS-25, SS-24 and SS-18 ballistic missiles, that could if need be serve as space launchers".[4]

Czechoslovakia under the 'humanist' Vaclav Havel sold the bulk of the 300 tanks it put on the market to Syria. The lat­ter, plus Iran and Libya, are buying from North Korea Scud missiles "much more precise and effective than the Soviet Scuds that Iraq launched during the Gulf war".[5]

Although they are worried about these massive and feverish sales, the great powers also take part in this huge bazaar. The USA wants to sell more than 400 tanks cheap to Spain.

"Germany has promised to deliver to Turkey, for around one billion dollars, materials that comes from the stocks of the former 'eastern' army".[6]

All states being imperialist, when one buys weapons others are forced to follow, thus further sharpening tensions: "Iran has bought at least two new attack submarines built by the Russians. Saudi Arabia wants to buy 24 F-15E McDonnel Douglas fighters in order to transform its aerial forces in such a way that they can deal with Iranian submarines".[7]

All capitalist states, big or small, weak or powerful, are in­volved in these imperialist rivalries, in these growing ten­sions, in the arms race, in the bottomless pit of militarism.

Although the fear of chaos forces the great powers into joint action behind the USA ...

There is a real concern about the growing chaos sweeping the capitalist world. This is forcing the most powerful national bourgeoisies to try to limit the expression of their imperialist appetites.

With the break-up of the eastern bloc, the USA, Germany and the other European countries were at first very careful not to accelerate the disorder in the former Warsaw Pact countries. In particular, they all supported the efforts of Gor­bachev to maintain the unity and stability of the USSR, and to keep himself in power. Nevertheless, their worst fears have already been realized. Their concern now is the eco­nomic and social chaos that is unfolding: the threat of famine, and as a result of massive emigration, the risk of all kinds of military confrontations, and above all the burning question of the control over tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. There is an extremely grave risk of nuclear prolif­eration. Now four unstable states, instead of one, are in pos­session of weapons of mass destruction. And while it is easy for the USA to survey 'strategic' weapons, it's not the same with 'tactical' weapons. The 'small' atomic bombs are highly mobile, dispersed, and anyone could get hold of them, use them or sell them given the prevailing state of anarchy. This is why we are seeing conferences about aid to the CIS, pro­posals for the dismantling of nuclear weapons, agreements between the USA and Germany to employ the atomic scien­tists of the ex-USSR. The aim is to maintain a minimum de­gree of control over nuclear weapons and limit the extension of chaos.

... Imperialist antagonisms grow stronger all the time and exacerbate tensions

Presenting to the US Congress the war scenarios that the USA might have to confront in the future, the Pentagon chief General Powell made it clear that "the real threat we face to­day is the threat of the unknown, the uncertain".[8] It's in order to face up to this unknown that the US is changing its military strategy and is setting up a version of Reagan's Star Wars more adapted to the current international situation and to its fear of surprise, uncontrollable nuclear wars. This is called GPALS, Global Protection Against Limited Strikes, the aim of which is to completely neutralize any nuclear mis­sile no matter where it is launched from or where it is going.

The US defends its hegemony

The USA has a particular interest in the struggle against chaos in general, and against nuclear proliferation and the risk of uncontrolled local nuclear conflicts in particular, be­cause such things could undermine its position as dominant imperialism. We saw this during the Gulf war[9], and during the Middle East peace conferences, from which the European countries were excluded[10]. We have just seen it again at the conference about aid to the CIS held in Washington, in which the USA organized everything, dictated the agendas, nominated the commissions and their presidents at its conve­nience. It once again reduced the European countries, Ger­many and above all France, to an impotent walk-on role; in the media presentation of the first airlifts of food to Russia these countries were made to look quite ridiculous.

The GPALS program, which, we might say in passing, says a lot about the world, and especially about the Ameri­can, bourgeoisie's belief in the 'era of peace' that is supposed to reign under Bush's new world order - this new Star Wars program is also the latest expression, and it is a consider­able one, of the USA's aim to preserve its hegemony. It wants to ensure "collective security from Vancouver to Vladi­vostok". Translation: it wants to maintain, definitively or at least for a very long time, American military supremacy "from V to V" over Europe and Japan.

As for the 'reductions' in arms expenditures, the so-called 'peace dividend' for the American bourgeoisie, there's no question here of it reducing its armaments and its war effort. It's simply a matter of dispensing with all that is obsolete. That is to say, the part of its arsenal that was concentrated on the USSR and which has less reason to exist. They will try to sell some of this at unbeatable prices. The rest? A mountain of metal which cost a fortune (it's the lion's share of the huge American deficit). On the other hand the Star Wars pro­gram (SDI) is increasing by 31%. The total cost of the program will be 46 billion dollars ... the arms race con­tinues.

Germany is more and more a factor in the world imperialist scene

A whole series of events have confirmed the inevitable ten­dency for Germany to come forward as the main imperialist rival to the USA[11]. And the American bourgeoisie knows this quite well. Since the month of September 1991, a few months after the US demonstration of force in the Gulf, the Washington Post pointed to the various expressions of Ger­many's new "assertiveness":

"Germany threatens to recognize Croatia and Slovenia; it led Europe to ratify the independence of the Baltic states; it sharply criticizes its western allies for their hesitations about aid to the USSR; it is calling for a rapid ban on short range missiles; proposes that the CSCE creates its own peacekeep­ing force, and calls on its allies to give it more control over the troops stationed on its own soil".[12]

"In December, Germany forced the hand of its European partners by recognizing the two republics barely a month af­ter the Maastricht summit where the principle of a joint for­eign policy and defense was accepted at Bonn's request; the Bundesbank has unilaterally raised its interest rates by half a point, ten days after this same summit, which had rated a process of monetary union; Germany did not facilitate dis­cussion at the GAIT, despite Helmut Kohl's promise to make concessions over agricultural subsidies. Finally, the diplo­mats of Federal Germany are adopting an increasingly impe­rious attitude in Europe and the USA. We know that Kohl wants to impose German as the working language of the EEC ...".[13]

The American, British and French bourgeoisies, even though in different ways, are all offended by the new German "assertiveness". They are no longer used to it. The former appearance of unity is cracking up more and more as Ger­many is inevitably forced to defend its own imperialist inter­ests, which are antagonistic to those of the USA. In particu­lar, it urgently feels the need to revise the Constitution which forbids it from sending troops abroad: "The engagement of military means to realize political objectives in Europe and the nearby regions should not be excluded".[14]

In fact, after the Gulf war, Germany also revealed its current limitations in the Yugoslav affair: without any military weight, and above all absent from the UN Security Council, it could not give the aid it wanted to Croatia. The USA, by paralyzing the EEC's efforts to establishing a cease-fire, and by delaying the decision to send in the UN Blue Helmets, gave a free hand to the Serbian army to wage a bloody war and push back Croatia's territorial ambitions.

French imperialism, caught between two evils, chooses the lesser

The French bourgeoisie, which finds no consolation in being a second-rate imperialist power, is caught between its desire to break free of the onerous protection of the USA, and its 'eternal' fear (ie, since the beginning of capitalism) of Ger­many's power. It believes that it has found a solution to its problem in Europe, in the EEC. In the framework of a United Europe, it could rival the USA, and at the same time, among twelve nations, it could juggle with Germany and control it.

For the moment, it is playing the German card and is playing it very seductively: it has proposed putting its nuclear forces in the service of European defense. The German minister of foreign affairs has responded "with interest" to this proposal. The USA gave itself all the main parts in the conference on aid to the CIS - which Mitterrand judged to be superfluous - and in the organization of Operation Provide Hope (the de­livery of food supplies to Russia). In response France pro­posed that it should be the G7 that organized this operation. The G7 is currently presided over by ... Germany.

The latter has not been immune to the charms of the French: after the creation of the Franco-German brigade, there was an agreement to cooperate on a 'Eurocopter' (a military one of course) and Germany is keen on buying the French fighter, the Rafale.

But if any marriage takes place, it will be one of con­venience. The love between them doesn't go that deep, as we saw over Yugoslavia, when France, a 'Mediterranean power', leaned at first towards the US-British side, since it wasn't too happy about Germany getting to the shores of the Mediterranean as it was attempting to do via Croatia. How­ever, for the moment, the idyll continues. But it is bound to pose problems for France.

Tensions between the USA and Europe get sharper

In fact, France is now at the center of a battle which goes be­yond it. "The revival of tension between the USA and France marks the dawn of a new era in which the old allies seem to be turning into new rivals in areas such as trade, military strategy and the new world balance, according to certain high officials of America and France".[15]

The weak point of the French-German alliance, on which the American bourgeoisie is concentrating its strength, is of course France. America is pushing all the harder because France could help Germany to acquire nuclear weapons.[16]

The events in Algeria, Chad and Djibouti, the social and po­litical instability of these countries, are being exploited by the US to put pressure on France, putting into question the latter's presence in its historic spheres of influence, and this after France has already been expelled from Lebanon. This is taking place through the FIS, which is financed by Saudi Arabia; through the government of Djibouti which, under Saudi influence, is challenging the presence of the French army on its territory; and through Hissene Habre, the Ameri­can protégé in Chad. The hand of the USA is there, making use of the frightful chaos in these countries, a chaos which it is exacerbating in the pursuit of its own imperialist interests, just as the defense of German imperialist interests in Yu­goslavia has only amplified the decomposition that reigns there.

American pressure is also very strong at the economic level, via the GATT negotiations with the EEC. Here again, it's France which is the main target on the question of agri­cultural subsidies. Linking together questions of security, of American engagement in Europe, to the resolution of the dif­ferences in the GATT, the USA is blackmailing the European countries and trying to divide them.

As a Bulgarian journal Douma, put it: "While Europe is building the 'common European home from the Atlantic to the Urals', brick by brick, the USA is destroying it brick by brick under the banner of from Vancouver to Vladivos­tok".[17]

Japan, another rising imperialist power

More and more, Japan is playing an international political role which, is of course still far below its real ambitions, but which is getting there bit by bit. Bush's journey to Asia and Japan in particular, which had the fundamental objective of redeploying American military forces in the Pacific (the mil­itary base in Singapore) gave rise to all sorts of declarations by the Japanese leaders about the 'illiteracy of American workers', their 'lack of ethics'. This was following US pres­sure to open the Japanese market to American products. Apart from these secondary matters, which do however re­veal the current climate and the new "assertiveness" of the Japanese bourgeoisie, Japan is more and more demanding that it should play an important political role in the imperial­ist arena: it is increasingly posing the question of the reorganization of the permanent council of the UN; it heads the UN force in Cambodia; it is intervening more and more on the Asian continent (China, Korea), which has made the USA more than a little anxious[18]; and it is demanding with growing insistence that Russia should restore the Kurile Is­lands to it (here it is supported by Germany).

Japan is moving much faster than Germany on military ques­tions. The revision of the Constitution limiting the dispatch of foreign troops abroad is much more advanced. And above all, "it is amassing enormous quantities of plutonium. A hun­dred tons. Much more than it could consume in its 39 nuclear reactors ... The prospect of a pacifist and stable Japan being transformed into a nuclear power isn't a priori alarming. However, Japan is giving itself the means to build nuclear weapons, and each step it takes will be heavy with interna­tional consequences".[19]

There can be no doubt about it: the new world order, which was supposed to bring humanity peace, is heavy with men­ace. On the one hand chaos and decomposition invade the planet and exacerbate all kinds of local conflicts, rivalries and regional imperialist wars; on the other hand, imperialist antagonisms between the great powers are getting increas­ingly acute. On the surface still relatively 'soft', measured, even polite and courteous, they are going to deepen and they will aggravate and accelerate - in fact they are already doing so - the effects of the decomposition of the capitalist world, the chaos and the growing social and economic catastrophe.

One alternative to capitalist barbarism: communism

Faced with the barbarism of the capitalist world, where the tragic disputes with the absurd, the only force capable of of­fering an alternative to this historic impasse is still suffering from the effects of the events which marked the end of the eastern bloc and of the USSR. The international ideological campaigns about the 'end of communism' (which falsely amalgamate communism with Stalinism), about the 'definitive victory of capitalism' have momentarily succeeded in depriving the workers of any perspective of another soci­ety, of an alternative to the hell of capitalism.

This disarray affecting the proletariat, and the decline of its militancy[20], add further weight to the growing difficulties resulting from the decomposition of society. Lumpenisation, despair, nihilism, which already affect large portions of the world proletariat (especially in the east) are a real danger for those workers who have been thrown out of production. This is particularly true for the young. The cynical way that the bourgeoisie uses this despair adds up to a further difficulty. In particular, the ruling class is developing and heightening anti-immigrant and racist feelings, which risk being further fuelled by the massive waves of immigration to come (especially from the eastern countries). The false opposition between racism and anti-racism, totalitarianism and democ­racy, fascism and anti-fascism, is part of an attempt to divert the workers away from their own struggles, from the anti-­capitalist terrain of the defense of their living conditions and of opposition to the bourgeois state. This is why revolution­aries have to denounce these campaigns implacably.

Nevertheless, times are changing and the economic crisis, the open recession which is hitting the biggest world powers, above all the USA, has returned to first place in the workers' concerns. Attacks against the working class are accelerating brutally in the main industrial countries. Wages have been blocked for a long time and in the USA "the real average wages of the workers are lower than they were 10 or 15 years ago".[21] But above all, there is a dramatic increase in re­dundancies, particularly in the central branches of the world economy. In the computer industry, IBM cut 30,000 jobs in 1991 and intends to do the same in 1992; in the car industry, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have built up huge losses (7 billion dollars) and are also pushing through massive lay­offs; the same goes for the arms industries (General Dy­namic, United Technologies). Thousands of jobs have been chopped in these sectors. Thousands more in the service in­dustries (banks, insurance): "The number of people request­ing unemployment benefit leads to the conclusion that 23 million people had no jobs last year."

Out of a population of 250 million in the USA, 9% of the population, 23 million people are living from 'food stamps'. More than 30 million live below the poverty line and so qualify for health insurance, 'Medicaid'. But 37 million, who live just above the poverty line, don't qualify even though they still can't afford to pay for health care. For these peo­ple, the smallest illness becomes a family catastrophe. All to­gether that's 70 million people living in poverty! This is the much vaunted 'prosperity' of 'triumphant capitalism'.

Of course, the massive redundancies don't only hit the American workers. Unemployment rates are particularly high in countries like Spain, Italy, France, Canada, Britain. This involves the central sectors of the economy, cars, steel, armaments. Even the flowers of German industry, Mercedes and BMW, are laying off workers.

The working class of the industrialized countries is being subjected to a truly terrible attack, an attack which aims to bring its living conditions to the lowest possible level.

Redundancies, wage-cuts, the general deterioration of living conditions, will compel the working class to return to the fray, to the path of massive struggles. These struggles will again have to confront the political barriers erected by the left parties and the leftists; they will have to deal with union maneuvers and corporatism, and look again for the extension and unification of the struggles. In this political combat, revolutionary groups and the most militant workers will have a crucial role, intervening to help the movement go beyond the traps laid by the political and union forces of the bourgeoisie.

At the same time, these attacks against working class living conditions will give the lie to the myth of capitalist prosper­ity, and will expose to the mass of workers the real bankruptcy of capitalism, its historic failure on the economic level. This development of consciousness will push workers once again to look for an alternative to capitalism; bit by bit it will undo the effects of the bourgeoisie's campaigns about the 'end of communism' and accelerate the search for a wider and deeper perspective, for the historic and revolutionary struggle. In this process, communist groups have an indis­pensable role in reminding workers of the historical experi­ence of their class, in reaffirming the perspective of commu­nism, its necessity and possibility.

The future will be at stake in the class confrontations which will inevitably take place. Only the proletarian revolution and the destruction of capitalism can take humanity out of the daily hell that it is living through. This alone can prevent the barbarism of capitalism going on to its ultimate, dramatic conclusion. This alone can lead to the establishment of a hu­man community where exploitation, poverty, famines and wars will be eradicated once and for all. RL 23.2.92

"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but itself life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs ! " (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program)

[1] Le Monde 31.1.92

[2] Le Monde 19.1.92

[3] According to the Czech press translated in Courier Inter­nationale 66 and Le Monde 11.2.92

[4] Le Monde 16.2.92

[5] International Herald Tribune 21.2.92

[6] Le Monde 16, 2.92

[7] Baltimore Sun, cited in International Herald Tribune 12.2.92

[8] International Herald Tribune 19.2.92

[9] See International Review 63, 64, 65

[10] See International Review 68

[11] See 'Towards the greatest chaos in history' IR 68

[12] Washington Post 18.9.91, translated into French by Courier International 65

[13] Editorial of Courier International 65, 30.1.92

[14] Declaration by the German Minister of Defense, G Stoltenberg, Le Monde 18.1.92

[15] Washington Post, cited by the International Herald Tri­bune, 23.1.92

[16] See the declarations of the US Vice President, Dan Quayle, Le Monde, 11.2.92

[17] cited by Le Monde, ibid

[18] International Herald Tribune, 3.2.92

[19] Financial Times, translated into French by Courier In­ternational 65

[20] See IR 67, 'Resolution on the international situation', 9th congress of the ICC

[21] International Herald Tribune, 13.1.92

The worst crisis in capitalism's history

As capitalism undergoes the most serious crisis in its history, all the defenders of the established order proclaim incessantly the death of Marxism: the only theory which is able to understand this crisis' reality, and which foresaw it. They are wringing the last drop out of that old and vile lie which equates Marxism and Stalinism, revolution and counter-revolution. The ruling class aims to dress up the bankruptcy of Stalinist state capitalism as the bankruptcy of communism, and of its theory: Marxism. This is one of the most violent ideological attacks that the working has been subjected to for decades. But no amount of hysterical exorcism by the bourgeoisie's hired hacks can change the bare truth: their theories have shown themselves completely incapable of explaining the present economic disaster, while the Marxist analysis of capitalist crises finds itself strikingly verified.

The impotence of bourgeois 'theory'

It is remarkable to see the most lucid of the ruling class' "thinkers" and "commentators" merely observe the extent of the disaster which grips the planet, without being able to of­fer even the beginnings of an explanation for it. They occupy hours of television, fill pages in the newspapers, on the rav­ages of poverty and disease in Africa, the destructive anarchy which is threatening the old "soviet" empire with famine, the ecological devastation of the planet which is putting the very survival of the human race in peril, on the damage done by the drugs trade, which has reached the same scale as trade in oil, on the absurdity of sterilising cultivable land in Europe while famine proliferates throughout the world, on the des­peration and decomposition eating away at the suburbs of the major countries, on the all-pervasive feeling that society is going nowhere... All their "sociological" and economic studies, in every field, make not a jot of difference: the why and the wherefore of it all remain a complete mystery.

The less shortsighted of them vaguely perceive that at the heart of it all lies some kind of economic problem. Without saying so, without even realising it, they are coming round to that old discovery of Marxism: that, to this day, the economy has always been the key to the anatomy of social life. But this merely adds to the puzzlement. In the mish-mash which serves as their theoretical framework, the blockage of the world economy remains a complete mystery.

The dominant ideology is founded on the myth of the per­manence of capitalist relations of production. The little that is left standing of its philosophical edifice would be laid low for good, were it to be though even for an instant that these relations - wage labour, profit, nations, competition - not only are not the only possible form of economic organisation, but have become the one calamity at the source of all the scourges that have befallen a suffering humanity.

For twenty years, the economists have used a more and more incomprehensible language to try to "explain" the constant decline of the world economy. These "explanations" all have two characteristics in common: the defence of capitalism as the only possible system, and the fact that reality has made a laughing stock of each in turn, no sooner than they had been announced.

As the "prosperity" of the post-war reconstruction drew to a close at the end of the 60's, there were two recessions: in 1967 and in 1970. Compared to the economic earthquakes that we have experienced since then, these recessions seem insignificant enough,[1] but at the time they were a rela­tively new phenomenon. The ghost of the economic crisis, which had been thought exorcised for good since the slump of the 1930's, returned to haunt the bourgeoisie's economists.[2] Reality spoke for itself: with reconstruction finished, capitalism was plunging once again into economic crisis. Decadent capitalism's post-1914 cycle was verified: crisis -war - reconstruction - renewed crisis. The "experts" ex­plained that this was quite untrue. These tremors were due to nothing but "the rigidity of the monetary system inherited from World War II", the famous Bretton Woods agreement based on the dollar-standard and fixed exchange rates. And so a new international currency was created (the IMF's Spe­cial Drawing Rights - SDRs) and exchange rates allowed to float.

But only a few years later world capitalism was once again hit by two new recessions, much longer and deeper than those before them: 1974-75, and 1980-82. The "experts" found a new explanation: scarce energy supplies. These new convulsions were called the "oil shocks". Twice, it was ex­plained that the system had nothing to do with these new dif­ficulties. They were the result of the greed of a few Arab sheiks, or even of the revenge of a few under-developed oil producers. And as if they wanted to convince themselves of the system's eternal vitality, the economic "recovery" of the 1980's was baptised a return to "pure" capitalism. "Reaganomics" would restore to private businessmen the freedom and authority that the state had supposedly confis­cated, and this would at last allow the full creative power of the system to burst forth. Privatisation, the merciless elimi­nation of unprofitable businesses, destruction of job security the better allow the "free play of the market" to regulate labour power, the naked affirmation of "unrestrained capital­ism", were all supposed to show that the foundations of the capitalist system remained healthy, and indeed offered the only perspective possible. Yet already, at the beginning of the 80's the economies of the Third World were in collapse. In the mid-80's, the USSR and the countries of Eastern Eu­rope set off down the road to "liberalism", trying to break free from the most rigid forms of their ultra-statified capital­ism. The decade came to an end with a still worse disaster, as the ex-Soviet bloc plunged into unparalleled chaos.

At first, the Western democracies' ideologues presented all this as a confirmation of the truth of their gospel: the USSR and the Eastern bloc countries were collapsing because they had not managed to become really capitalist, and the "Third World" countries because they managed capitalism badly. But the beginning of the 1990's revealed the economic crisis striking violently at the most powerful nations on the planet, capitalism's very heart. And right in the forefront of this new plunge into crisis stood the champions of liberalism: the countries which were supposed to serve an example to the rest of the world of the miracles accomplished by the "market economy" - Great Britain and the USA.

At the beginning of 1992, we saw the fine flower of Western capitalism, the best-managed companies in the world, an­nounced that their profits were melting away and that they were preparing to shed tens of thousands of jobs: IBM, the world's biggest computer manufacturer, which has never had any losses since its creation; General Motors, the world's biggest industrial company, whose power could be summed up in the saying that "what is good for General Motors is good for America", announced the biggest losses ever recorded in the history of capitalism, at $4 billion; United Technologies, one of America's most modern industrial groups; Ford; Mercedes Benz, the symbol of the power of German capital, which boasted of being the only car manufacturer to take on workers during the 80's, Sony, the champion of Japanese dynamism and efficiency... As for the banking and financial sectors, which had experienced the greatest "prosperity" during the 1980's and which had bene­fited most from the most gigantic level of speculation and indebtedness ever seen in history, it has been struck to the heart by the recession, to the point where it is even in danger of collapse, worn out by its own abuses. Some economists seem only to have "discovered" these abuses today. In real­ity, they have been world economy's lifeline for the last two decades: headlong flight into credit. The "machine for pushing problems into the future" has broken down, crushed by the weight of accumulated debt.[3]

What is left of the explanation that the crisis was caused by the "rigidity of the monetary system", when the anarchy of exchange rates has become a major factor in world economic instability? What is there left of all the chatter about "oil shocks" when oil prices are drowning in an oil-slick of over­production? What is left of the speeches about "liberalism" and "the miracles of the market economy" as the economy collapses in the midst of a bitter commercial war for the planet's shrinking markets? And what can they be worth, these "explanations" that the crisis is the fault of debt, when it is precisely this suicidal debt that, alone, has kept this dy­ing economy alive?

In decadent capitalism, the economists have become high priests of the absurd. They can no more explain the crisis, than they can give any perspective for the medium or long term.[4] Their job is to defend capitalism and this prevents them, however "intelligent" they may be, of understanding this most elementary reality: the problem with the world economy has nothing to do with this or that country, this or that way of managing capitalism. It is the system itself, cap­italism, which is the problem. All their "reasons" and "ideas" will undoubtedly go down in history as some of the most sinister examples of the blindness and stupidity of a decadent class.

Marxism: the first coherent conception of history

Before Marx, human history appeared generally as a series of more or less disparate events, evolving at the mercy of bat­tles, or the religious or political convictions of the world's great men. In the final analysis, the only logical thread in history had to be sought outside the material world, in the ethereal spheres of divine Providence, or at best in the development of Hegel's Absolute Idea.[5] Today's ruling class economists and "thinkers" have got no further. There is even one who, since the collapse of what they call "communism", has repeated a caricature of Hegel's thought and announced the "end of history": since all countries have now reached the most developed form of liberal, "democratic" capitalism, and since there can be nothing after capitalism, we have reached the end of the road. With such "ideas", today's chaos, the blockage of the economy, the generalised disintegration, can only remain a mystery... of Providence. Those who believe that nothing can exist after capitalism must be struck with stupor and despair in humanity as they contemplate the terri­ble bankruptcy that is the result of several centuries of capi­talist domination.

But for Marxism, today's events are a striking confirmation of the historic laws which it first discovered and formulated. From the viewpoint of the revolutionary proletariat, capital­ism is no more eternal than any of the other modes of ex­ploitation that went before: feudalism, slavery, and so on. Indeed, Marxism is distinguished from the communist theo­ries which preceded it precisely by the fact that it bases the communist project on an understanding of the history's dy­namics. Communism becomes historically possible because capitalism has created both the material conditions which make it possible to achieve a true society of abundance, and the class which is capable of undertaking the communist rev­olution: the proletariat. The revolution has become a neces­sity because capitalism has reached a dead end.

The more this dead end disconcerts the bourgeois and their economists, the more it confirms the Marxists in their revo­lutionary convictions.

But how do Marxists explain this "historic cul-de-sac"? Why should capitalism not develop into infinity? One sentence of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto sums up the answer:

"The institutions of bourgeois society are too narrow to com­prise the wealth created by them".

What does this mean? Is it confirmed by reality?

'The institutions of Bourgeois Society'

One of the traps of bourgeois ideology, into which the economists fall themselves, is to think that capitalist relation­ships are "natural". Egoism, greed, hypocrisy and the cynical cruelty of capitalist exploitation are only the most refined forms attained by the always "bad", "human nature".

But whoever so much as glances at history can see that this is nonsense. Today's social relationships have only lasted some 500 years, if we, like Marx, place the beginning of their domination in the 16th Century, when the discovery of America and the explosion of world trade which followed allowed the capitalist merchants to begin definitively impos­ing their power on the economic life of the planet. Humanity had known other class societies, such as slavery or feudalism, and before them it lived for millennia under various forms of "primitive communism", in other words classless societies without exploitation.

"In the social production of their life" Marx explains,[6] "men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of produc­tion constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political super­structure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness".

The institutions of bourgeois society, capitalist relations of production and their "legal and political superstructure", far from being eternal realities, are nothing but a particular, temporary form of social organisation, which "correspond to a definite stage of development of (...) material productive forces". Marx used to say that the hand mill stood for slav­ery, the water mill for feudalism, and the steam mill for capitalism.

But what do these relationships consist of? In the mythology that identifies communism with Stalinism, it is common to define capitalist social relations in opposition to those which reigned in the so-called communist countries, like the ex-USSR. The determining criterion was supposedly the question of ownership of the means of production by private capitalists, or by the state. But as Marx and Engels has already shown in their battle against Lassalle's state so­cialism, the fact that capitalist state owns the means of pro­duction, only makes this state the "ideal collective capitalist".

Rosa Luxemburg, one of the greatest theoreticians since Marx, insists on two main criteria, two aspects of social or­ganisation, in determining the specificities of one mode of exploitation relative to others: the aim of production, and the relationship that ties the exploited to the exploiters. These criteria, defined well before the Russian revolution and its defeat, leave no doubt as to the capitalist nature of the Stal­inist economies.[7]

The aim of production

Rosa Luxemburg sums up the specificity of the capitalist mode of production thus: "The slave-owner bought slaves for their usefulness, or for his pleasure. The feudal lord extorted payment in kind from his serfs with the same aim: to live well off his inheritance. The modern businessman does not make workers produce food, clothing, or luxury goods for his own enjoyment: he makes them produce goods for sale, in order to make a profit".[8]

The aim of capitalist production is the accumulation of capi­tal, to the point where, in its early radical days, the puritan bourgeoisie condemned the spending on luxuries of the ex­ploiting classes. Marx speaks of such spending as a "theft of capital".

The bourgeois bureaucrats claim that in their regimes, they do not pursue capitalist objectives, and that the income of the "leaders" comes in the form of "wages". But the fact that revenue is distributed as fixed income (falsely called a "wage" in this case) and privileges, rather than as share divi­dends or individual savings, is quite irrelevant in determining whether the mode of production is capitalist or not.[9] The revenue of the high state bureaucrats is nonetheless made of the workers' sweat and blood. The Stalinists' "planning" pur­sued the same objectives as the investors on Wall Street: feed the god National Capital with the surplus labour extracted from the exploited, increase the power of capital and ensure its defence against other national capitals. The hypocritical "Spartan" face put on by the Stalinist bureaucrats, especially when they have just seized power, is no more than a degener­ate caricature of the puritanism of capitalism's stage of primitive accumulation, a caricature deformed by the gan­grene of decadent capitalism: bureaucracy and militarism.

The link between exploited and exploiter

The specific capitalist relation between exploited and ex­ploiter is no less important, nor less present in Stalinist state capitalism.

In ancient slave society, the slave was food just like the ani­mals belonging to his master. From his exploiter, he received the minimum necessary for him to live and reproduce. This quantity was relatively independent of the amount he pro­duced. Even if he did no work, or the crop was destroyed, the master would feed him, just as he would feed a horse to avoid losing it.

Under feudal serfdom, though less strictly, the serf remained like the slave, attached personally to his exploiter, or to a property: a chateau would be sold with its lands, its cattle, and its serfs. However, the serf s revenue was no longer truly independent of his labour. He had a right to a share (a percentage) of what was actually produced.

Under capitalism, the exploited proletarian is "free". But this "freedom" which is so vaunted by bourgeois propaganda in fact comes down to the fact that their is no personal tie be­tween the exploited and his exploiter. The worker belongs to nobody, he is attached to no land or property. His ties with his exploiter are reduced to a purely commercial transaction: he sells, not himself, but his labour power. His "freedom" is to have been separated from his means of production. It is the freedom of capital to exploit him anywhere, to make him produce whatever it wants. The worker's share of what is produced (when he has any right to it at all) is independent of the product of his labour. His share is equivalent to the price of the only commodity that he possesses and reproduces: his labour power.

"Like any other commodity, 'labour power' has a definite value. The value of any commodity is determined by the quantity of labour required to produce it. To produce the commodity 'labour power', a determined quantity of work is also necessary: the work which produces food, clothing, etc for the worker. A man's labour power is worth what it costs in labour to maintain him in a state to work, to maintain his labour power".[10]

This is wage labour.

The Stalinists claim that there is no exploitation under their rule, because there is no unemployment. It is true that, gen­erally speaking, in the Stalinist regimes the unemployed are "put to work". The labour market is a state monopoly, where the state buys everything that comes on the market, in ex­change for miserably low wages. But the state, the "collective capitalist", is no less buyer and exploiter for that. The proletariat pays its guaranteed employment in the ban on any demands, and wretched living conditions. Stalinism is not the negation of wage labour, but its totalitarian form.

Today, the Stalinist countries' economies are not "turning capitalist". They are merely trying to jettison the most rigidly statified forms of decadent capitalism.

Production exclusively for sale in order to accumulate capi­tal, workers remunerated by wage-labour: obviously this does not define all the "institutions of bourgeois society", .but it highlights the most specific of them, and in particular those which allow us to understand why capitalism is condemned to go nowhere.

'The wealth created by them... '

At the twilight of feudal society, capitalist production rela­tions - the "institutions of bourgeois society" - made possible a gigantic leap forward in society's productive forces. At a time when the labour of one man could barely feed more than himself, and when society was still divided up into a multi­tude of virtually autonomous fiefdoms, the development of "free" wage labour and the unification of the economy through trade were powerful factors of social development.

"The bourgeoisie (...) has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals (..) The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and colossal pro­ductive forces than have all preceding generations together".[11]

Contrary to pre-Marxist communist theories, which thought that communism was a possibility at any moment in history, Marxism recognised that only capitalism creates the material means for such a society. Before becoming "too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them", bourgeois institutions were capable, "in blood and filth", of creating two vital con­ditions for the erection of a truly communist society: a worldwide productive network (the world market), and a suf­ficient development of labour productivity. As we will see, these were to become a nightmare for capital's survival.

"Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way... The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nes­tle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections ev­erywhere... It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, ie to be­come bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world af­ter its own image".[12]

This unification of the world economy was both a stimulant and a product of the greatest progress ever seen in labour productivity. The very nature of capitalist relationships, the competition to the death between different fractions of capi­tal, whether nationally or internationally, forces them to a permanent race for productivity. Lowering production costs to improve competitivity is a condition for survival on the market.[13]

Despite the destructive weight of the war economy, which became quasi-permanent after World War I, and despite the irrationality introduced by its increasingly difficult, contra­dictory, and militarised functioning since the definitive for­mation of the world market at the beginning of this century,[14] capitalism has continued to develop the technical pro­ductivity of labour. It has been calculated[15] that around 1700, a French agricultural labourer could feed 1.7 people: in other words, he could feed himself, and provide three quarters of the nourishment for one other person. In 1975, an American farm worker could feed 74 people as well as him­self! In 1708 in France, the production of one quintal of wheat cost 253 hours of labour; in 1984, it cost 4 hours. Progress has been no less spectacular on the industrial level: to produce a bicycle in France in 1891 cost 1500 hours of labour; in the USA of 1975, it cost 15 hours. The production time of an electric light bulb in France was divided by more than 50 between 1925 and 1982, that of a radio by 200. During the last decade, marked by an unrestrained exacerba­tion of trade wars - which have only become still more bitter with the collapse of the Eastern bloc[16] - computerisation and the increasing introduction or robots into industry have accelerated still further the development of productivity.[17]

But these conditions, which make it possible consciously to organise production worldwide for the benefit of humanity, and which would in a few years make it possible to wipe hunger and poverty from the face of the earth forever by giving free rein to the development of science and the other productive forces - in short, the material conditions which make communism a possibility - are, from the bourgeois point of view, a veritable torment. And from the point of view of humanity, the survival of bourgeois production rela­tions becomes a nightmare.

"Institutions which are too narrow..."

"At a certain stage of their development, the material pro­ductive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters".[18] In the case of pre-capitalist exploitative societies, as in capitalism, this "collision" between the "development of the productive forces" and the "property relations" are concretised by scarcity and famine. But whereas, in ancient slave society or feudalism, when production relations became "too narrow", society found itself materially incapable of pro­ducing enough goods or food from the earth, in capitalism we find a quite new kind of economic blockage: "over-pro­duction".

"Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of mo­mentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much com­merce" (Communist Manifesto).

What Marx and Engels described in the mid-19th century in analysing the commercial crises of ascendant capitalism, has become a virtually chronic situation in decadent capitalism. Since World War I, the "over-production" of armaments has become a permanent disease of the system. Famines are de­veloping in the under-developed countries at the same time as US and "soviet" capital compete in space with the most costly and sophisticated technology. Every year since the cri­sis of 1929, the US government has devoted part of its farm support subsidy to pay farmers not to cultivate land.[19] At the end of the 80's, as the UN Secretary General announced more than 30 million deaths from starvation in Africa, almost half the American orange crop was destroyed (intentionally!) by fire. At the beginning of the 1990's, the EEC began an enormous plan to take 15% of cereal lands out of cultivation. The new open recession, which is only a worsening of the crisis in which the system has been mired since the end of the 60's, is hitting every sector of the economy, and all over the world the sterilisation of land is being accompanied by the closure of mines and factories.

Between humanity's needs and the means to satisfy them, there is an "invisible hand" which forces the capitalists not to produce but to lay-off, and the exploited to exist in poverty. This "invisible hand" is the "miraculous market economy", the capitalist relations of production which have become "too narrow".

Cynical and merciless as the capitalist class is, it does not create such a situation voluntarily. It could ask no better than to have industry and agriculture running at full capacity, to extort a constantly growing mass of surplus-value from the exploited, to sell without limits and to accumulate profit into infinity. If it does not do so, this is because it is prevented by capitalist relations of production. As we have seen, capital does not produce to satisfy human need, not even that of the ruling class. It produces to sell. But since it is based on wage labour, it is incapable of giving its own workers, and still less those it does not exploit, the means to buy all that it is able to produce.

As we have also seen, the share of production which goes to the worker is determined not by what he produces, but by the value of his labour power, and this value (ie the work needed to clothe and feed him, etc) is constantly diminishing as the overall productivity of labour increases.

By reducing the value of commodities, increases in productivity allow one capitalist to seize the markets of another, but it does not create new markets. On the contrary, it reduces the market which is constituted by the producers themselves.

­­"The workers' power of consumption is limited partly by the laws of wages, and partly by the fact that they are only employed as long as their employment is profitable to the capitalist class. The sole reason for all real crises, is always the poverty and limited consumption of the masses, faced with the tendency of the capitalist economy to develop the productive forces as if their only limit were society's absolute power of consumption".[20]

This is the fundamental contradiction which condemns capital to a dead end.[21]

Capitalism has born this contradiction - the inability to create its own outlets - since its beginnings. At first, it could be overcome by selling to feudal markets, then through the conquest of colonial markets. The search for outlets drove the bourgeoisie to "invade the whole planet". Once the world market was formed, and shared out amongst the great powers, it led to the First, then the Second World Wars.

Today, twenty years after the 'respite' provided by the recon struction of the gigantic destruction during World War II, after twenty years of flight into debt, pushing back the dead­line with credit after credit, capitalism is once again faced with its old contradiction: but with a year and a half of debts into the bargain.

The narrowness of bourgeois institutions has finally made the world economy into a monster, where less than 10% of the population produces 70% of the wealth! Contrary to the hymns of praise to the future "miracles of the market economy" that the bourgeoisie is singing solemnly over the grave of Stalinism, reality has revealed in all its horror the barbaric scourge of humanity that is the continued existence of capitalist social relations. More than ever, the very survival of the human species demands the emergence of a new society. To overcome the dead-end of capitalism, this society will have to be based on two essential principles:

• production exclusively for human need;
• the elimination of wage labour, and the organisation of distribution first of all as a function of existing wealth, and once material abundance is achieved worldwide, as a function of the needs of each member of society.

More than ever, the struggle for a society founded on the old communist principle "From each according to his abilities,to each according to his needs", opens up the only way out for humanity.

The economists' attachment to the capitalist mode of exploitation blinds them, and prevents them from seeing and understanding its bankruptcy. The revolt against exploitation, by contrast, pushes the proletariat towards a historic lucidity. By looking from the viewpoint of this class, Marx, and the real Marxists, have been able to rise to a coherent historical vision. A vision which is capable not only of grasping what is specific in capitalism relative to past societies, but of understanding the contradictions which make this mode of production as transitory as those of the past. Marxism places the possibility and necessity of communism on a scientific footing. Far from being buried, as the defenders of the established order would like to think, it remains more current than ever.

RV 6/3/1992

[1] In 1967, it was above all Germany that was marked by the recession. For the first time since the war, its GDP stopped growing. The "German mira­cle" was replaced by a 0.1% drop in GDP. In 1970, it was the turn of the world's most powerful economy, the USA to suffer a 0.3% fall in produc­tion.

[2] In 1969, the cover of the French economic review L'Expansion titled "Can 1929 begin again?"

[3] Some estimates put total world debt at 30,000 billion dollars (Le Monde Diplomatique, February 1992). This is equivalent to seven years of Amer­ica's GNP, or of the EEC's, or a year and a half of labour (under present conditions) of the whole of humanity!

[4] In December 1991, the OECD presented its Economic Perspectives, to the press: they announced an imminent economic recovery, encouraged amongst other things, by the drop in German interest rates. The same day, the Bundesbank announced a substantial increase in rates, and the OECD immediately revised its forecasts downwards, emphasizing how great were the unknowns which dominate the epoch....

[5] See the article in this issue "How the proletariat won Marx to commu­nism"

[6] In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Lawrence and Wishart)

[7] Economists have difficulty understanding that the capitalist nature of these economies can in fact only be understood from a Marxist viewpoint.

[8] Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy, Chapter 5, Wage Labour"

[9] By contrast, this difference is important for an understanding of the dif­ference in efficiency between Stalinist state capitalism and so-called "liberal" variety. The fact that the leaders' income is irrespective of the production for which they are supposed to be responsible has made them veritable monsters of irresponsibility, corruption, and inefficiency (see "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the Eastern countries" in In­ternational Review n°60).

[10] Rosa Luxemburg, op, cit.

[11] The Communist Manifesto, "Bourgeois and proletarians"

[12] idem

[13] In the case of a country like the USSR, where internal competition is blunted by the state monopoly, the constant pressure to improve productiv­ity appears at the level of international military competition.

[14] See our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism [73] .

[15] The data on productivity are drawn from various works by Jean Fourastié La Productivité (ed. PUF, 1987); Pourquoi les prix baissent (ed. Hachette, 1984); Pouvoir d'achat, prix et salaires (ed. Gallimard, 1977)

[16] See the article in this Review: "Trade wars: the infernal mechanism of capitalist competition".

[17] We can get some idea of the increase in labour productivity from the evolution of the number of "unproductive" people supported by truly productive labour (productive in the general sense of the term, ie useful to hu­man existence). The farmworkers, and the workers in industry, services, and building who produce goods or services destined for consumption or the production of consumer goods, allow an ever-growing number of people to live without doing any really productive work: the military, the police, workers in all the industries producing weapons or military equipment, a large part of the state bureaucracy, workers in the finance, banking, mar­keting and advertising sectors, etc. The share of truly productive labour is constantly diminishing in capitalist society, to the benefit of activities which are vital to the survival of each national capital, but useless if not downright destructive from the point of view of the needs of humanity.

[18] Marx, Preface to The Critique of Political Economy.

[19] From the purely technical viewpoint, the USA alone could feed the en­tire planet.

[20] Marx, Capital, Vol III

[21] This is not the only contradiction that the Marxist analysis uncovers within capitalist relations of production: the law of the falling rate of profit, the contradiction between the need for ever more massive investment and the demands of capital circulation, the contradiction between the worldwide character of production and the national nature of the appropriation of cap­ital, etc, are all among the essential contradictions which Marxism has shown to be both motive power and brake in the life of capital. But all these other contradictions only become a real barrier to the growth of capital once it comes up against the most fundamental reason for the crisis: capital's in­ability to create its own markets.

The trade war: The infernal machinery of capitalist competition

'War, 'battle', 'invasion': the language of war has taken over the sphere of trade and the economy. As the economic crisis gets more severe, competition for shrinking markets gets sharper and sharper, and is now turning into a real trade war. Economic competition is a constant feature in the life of capitalism, one of its foundations, inherent to its be­ing. But there is a fundamental difference between periods of prosperity during which capitalist enterprises fight to open up new markets and increase their profits, and periods of acute crisis, like the one we're in now, where the question isn't so much to increase profits but to limit losses and ensure your survival in an increasingly savage economic brawl. Irrefutable proof of the economic dogfight going on today: the record number of bankruptcies in all countries of the world. In 1991 they rose by 56% in Britain, by 20% in France. It's a cull that has hit all sectors of the economy.

One example among many: Air transport

One example among others, but a particularly significant pointer to the trade war, is the air transport sector. The air­plane has for decades been the symbol of the development of the most modern aspects of world trade.

From the Second World War to the beginning of the 1970s, the boom in this sector enabled the air companies to carve up a market in full expansion, leaving each other with a wide margin for development in a situation where competition was not severe. The biggest companies grew steadily under the cozy protection of the laws and regulations introduced by the state acting in the role of patron. Bankruptcies were rare and only affected second-rate companies.

With the return of the capitalist crisis, competition becomes increasingly rough. The rise of the 'charter' companies which came along to compete with the big companies for the most profitable routes, thus breaking their monopoly, was the harbinger of the terrible crisis which really got going in the 80s. Under the growing pressure of competition, the regula­tions which had previously limited it broke down. The deregulation of the American domestic market, at the begin­ning of the Reagan presidency, brought the curtain down on the period of prosperity and security which the big air com­panies had enjoyed up till then. In one decade, the number of big US domestic companies fell from 20 to 7. In the last few years, some of the biggest names in US air transport have crash-landed into bankruptcy: TWA has recently joined Pan Am, Eastern, Braniff and others in the cemetery of broken wings.

Losses are accumulating: In 1990, Continental lost $2,343 million; US Air $454 million; TWA $237 million. In 1991 the situation was even worse. United Airlines and Delta Air­lines, which were the only big American companies to an­nounce a profit in 1990, have just declared respectively losses of $331 million for the year and $174 million for the first two months.

In Europe, the situation of the air companies is no brighter. Lufthansa has just announced provisional losses of 400 mil­lion DM; Air France consolidated losses of 1.15 billion francs in the first two months of 1991;. SAS 514 million crowns of losses for the first quarter of 1991. Sabena is up for sale, while the small regional companies are going down like flies.

As for the world's biggest air company, Aeroflot, it doesn't have enough kerosene for its planes and is threatened with break-up by the disappearance of the USSR.

At first, this somber balance-sheet was officially explained as the result of the Gulf War, which did of course reduce the frequency of flights for several months. But once the war was over, the situation didn't improve, and the excuse wore thin. The recession in the world economy wasn't caused by the Gulf War; air transport merely provides us with a perfect re­sume of its devastating effects.

The least profitable airlines have gone to the wall and entire regions of the globe, the most underdeveloped ones, are less and less linked up to the industrial centers of capitalism.

On the most profitable routes, competition is intense. North Atlantic flights have multiplied, resulting in overcapacity and a reduction in maintenance standards, while the price war is leading to a policy of dumping that is reducing the profit on fares.

In order to make themselves more competitive, at a time when the market was flourishing more, the air companies had, over a period of some years, launched ambitious pro­grams of buying new planes, getting deep into debt in the perspective of future prosperity. Today they're landed with brand new planes which they can't use and are obliged to cancel their orders or to ask the plane makers to delay deliv­ery. The planes have no takers on the market and dozens of jets are standing idle in the airplane parking lots.

In order to plug the hole in their treasuries, the air companies are trimming their budgets in all sorts of ways:

- they are laying off workers in droves: over the last two years, there's not one company which hasn't laid off work­ers. Tens of thousands of highly qualified workers are out of work with no prospect of re-employment;

• - maintenance of planes has been 'lightened': in the last few years several companies have been caught out for failing to respect the very strict rules for keeping the vehicles in proper order;
• - training budgets have been reduced and the qualifications demanded of pilots and technicians have become more 'flexible' ;

- flight crews are subjected to more severe conditions of ex­ploitation.

Such measures lead only to a deterioration of air safety and a multiplication of accidents.

While on the one hand the companies are involved in a policy of drastic economies in order to patch up their balance sheets, the same laws of competition force them to make massive ex­penditures. One of the laws of survival in a situation of exac­erbated competition is the search for the ideal size through the development of commercial alliances, fusions and the buying up of other companies. But while this policy eventu­ally leads to 'economies of scale' through a better manage­ment of personnel and planes, it can also involve heavy ini­tial outlays. One example among others: Air France, which has just bought up UTA, fused with Air Inter, and is partici­pating in the newly privatized Czech company, now wants to buy the Belgian firm Sabena, not because the latter is partic­ularly interesting economically, but above all because the competition mustn't be allowed to grab it. Such policies are very costly and mean big increases in debt. In their will to survive, all the companies are playing this game of 'the loser wins', where victories are purely Pyrrhic affairs that merely mortgage the future.

The trade war shaking up the air transport sector is one illus­tration of the absurdity of a system based on competition, of the catastrophic contradictions into which capitalism is sinking. This reality dominates all sectors of the economy and all firms, from the smallest to the biggest. But it also lays bare another reality, characteristic of capitalism in its decadent phase: the dominant role of state capitalism.

The state at the heart of the trade war

The air transport sector is strategically essential to any capi­talist state, not only on the strict economic level, but also on the military level. When it comes to transporting troops, as in the Gulf conflict, the requisition of civil aviation by the army becomes a necessity. Every state, as soon as it has the means to do so, sets up an air company bearing its colors and enjoying a quasi-monopoly over internal routes. All the airlines of any importance are under the control of one state or another. This is obviously the case of companies like Air France which is the direct property of the French state, but it's also true for the private airlines which are totally depen­dent on the juridical-administrative arsenal which each state has set up to keep a strict control over them. And sometimes this involves capitalism's most esoteric lines of control, as during the Vietnam war, where the Air America company turned out to be owned by the CIA. Behind the trade war in the air transport sector, as in all other spheres, it's not just firms confronting each other, but states.

The offensive discourse of American capitalism, which drapes itself in the standard of 'liberalism', of the sacrosanct 'law of the market' and 'free competition', is a complete lie. Each state needs to protect its internal market, its enterprises, its economy. Here again, air transport is a good example. While the USA pretends to be the champion of deregulation in order to allow 'free competition', the US domestic market is protected and reserved for US aircraft. Each state passes a panoply of laws, rules and norms whose essential aim is to limit the penetration of foreign products. The speeches about liberalism are mainly aimed at getting other states to open their internal markets. The state everywhere is the main eco­nomic agency and companies are no more than the champions of one or other brand of state capitalism. The juridical form of property, private or public, doesn't change this. The myth of 'multinationals' propagated by the leftists in the 70s is well-worn by now. These firms aren't independent from the state; they are simply the vectors of the economic imperial­ism of the world's great states.

Economic rivalries in the Logic of imperialism

The collapse of the Russian bloc, by putting an end to the military threat of the Red Army, has taken away the cement which enabled the USA to impose its discipline on the coun­tries that made up the western bloc. Countries like Germany or Japan, which were the USA's main economic rivals, had still been its faithful allies. In exchange for America's mili­tary protection, they accepted the economic discipline their guardian imposed on them. Today, this is no longer the case. The dynamic towards every man for himself, towards unre­strained trade war, has now been unleashed. Logically, the weapons of economic competition will go together with the weapons of imperialism. This reality was expressed very clearly by US Vice President Dan Quayle when he declared in Germany in early February: "We mustn't replace the cold war with a trade war," then adding, to make himself quite clear, that "trade is a question of security" and "national and international security requires a coordination between politi­cal, military and economic security."

In the economic battle, all the propaganda arguments about 'liberalism' have little connection with reality. The last meeting of the G7 and the GATT negotiations are a striking example of the current situation of trade war in which, in the name of 'liberalism', it's the states which do the negotiating.

The time when the USA could impose its diktat is over. The G7 didn't come to any agreement about an ordered 'relaunch' of the world economy. Germany, preoccupied with inflation, acted the lone cavalier by maintaining high bank rates, lim­iting the capacity of other countries to lower theirs and so fa­cilitate this hypothetical recovery. President Bush's trip to Japan, whose explicit aim was to open the Japanese market to American exports, was a fiasco. The GATT negotiations got bogged down despite the pressure from the US, who were using all their economic and imperialist strengths to try and impose economic sacrifices on their European rivals.

It's significant that these negotiations have taken on the ap­pearance of a free-for-all between the USA and the EEC. Each one accuses the other of subsidizing their exports and thus of subverting the holy laws of free exchange, and both are right. The European states directly subsidize the makers of the Airbus through grants, loans, guarantied sales, while the American state directly subsidizes its aeronautic con­struction firms through military orders or research budgets. In 1990, the OECD countries dedicated $600 billion to assist their industries. In the agricultural sector, in the same year, subsidies in the OECD grew by 12%. The average American farmer gets $22,000 in subsidies; in Japan it's $15,00; in Eu­rope $12,000.

All the fine liberal words about the 'magic of the market' are pure hypocrisy: we're seeing the heightened, permanent in­tervention of the state at all levels.

Despite all the phrases about 'free competition', 'free trade', the 'fight against protectionism', every nation state uses any means at hand to ensure the survival of its economy and its enterprises in the world market free-for-all: subsidies, dumping, bribes are all current practices of firms acting un­der the benevolent eye of their guardian state. And when that's not enough, the statesmen become representatives of commerce, adding their imperialist strength to arguments about economics. At this level, the USA sets a fine example.

Although its economy is deep in recession and less competi­tive than those of its rivals, its resort to the concrete argu­ments provided by its imperialist strength has become an es­sential means for opening up markets that the game of eco­nomic competition doesn't permit it to obtain. And all the other states do the same thing, as far as their means allow.

The only law is survival, and in this battle all means are jus­tified. This is the law of the trade war, as it is in any war. 'Export or die' said Hitler: this has become the obsessive slogan of all the states of the world. Anarchy and disorder reign on the world market. Tension is mounting and a formal GATT agreement isn't going to stop this slide into chaos. Although negotiations have been going on for years, with knives drawn, to try and put some order into the market, the situation is already out of control. There are more and more underhand deals which don't follow GATT regulations. Each state is already looking for ways of getting round future agreements.

The prospect isn't the attenuation of tension. The more the world economy sinks into recession, the sharper international competition will be.

With the dive into recession, The trade war can only intensify

Despite the hopes and expectations of the world leaders, the American economy has not climbed out of the recession in which it's been stuck officially for a year. The measures aimed at initiating a recovery - the lessening of the bank rate by the Federal bank - have merely slowed down the slide and limited the damage. In the end, the year 1991 saw a 0.7% fall in GNP for the USA. The other industrialized countries are about to follow the American economy in its descent into the Hades of recession.

In Japan, industrial production fell by 4% during the twelve months preceding January 1992. Out of the first three months of the year 1991, industrial production fell by 4% in the western part of Germany, by 29.4% in Sweden (!), by 0.9% in France. In 1991, the British GNP diminished by 1.7% in comparison to the previous year. The dynamic of the reces­sion affects all the industrialized countries.

President Bush's recent speech about the state of the Union, which was supposed to announce measures that would take the US economy out of the mire, was a great disappointment. Essentially it was a sprinkling of recipes which have already proved ineffective for months, and which had more to do with electoral demagogy than economic efficiency. The tax reductions will basically have the effect of increasing the budget deficit which already stood at $270 billion in 1991 and which according to official predictions will reach $399 billion in 1992, posing the problem of America's debt even more dramatically. As for the reduction in the arms budget, the famous 'peace dividend', its sole result will be to push the US economy deeper into the mud, by diminishing state orders for a sector that's already in crisis - 400,000 redun­dancies are envisaged in the coming .years.

In fact, the only slightly positive aspect for American capital in 1991 is an improvement in its balance of trade, even though it's still mainly in deficit. In the first eleven months of 1991, it stood at $64.7 billion, a 36% improvement over the same period in the previous year when it reached $101.7 billion. However, this isn't the result of the American econ­omy becoming more competitive, but of the USA's capacity to use all its economic and imperialist strengths at the same time. It's this which gives it its status as the world's number one economy in the current global trade war. The im­provement in the US balance of trade means above all the deterioration of those of its rivals, and thus an aggravation of the world crisis and even sharper competition on the world market.

The nationalist lie - a danger for the Working class

The other side of the trade war is economic nationalism. Each state has to mobilize 'its' workers in the economic war, calling on them to pull in their belts in the name of solidarity with the national economy, launching campaigns to get them to buy home-produced goods. "Buy American" is the new slogan of the protectionist lobbies in the USA.

For years workers have been asked to show wisdom and re­sponsibility by submitting to austerity measures, so that 'tomorrow' things will get better; and for years, things have been going from bad to worse. Everywhere, in all countries, the working class has been the first victim of the trade war. Its wages, its buying power, have been amputated in the name of economic competition, lay-offs have been pushed through in the name of the survival of the firm. It would be the worst of all traps for workers to believe that the lie of economic nationalism is a solution to the crisis, or a lesser evil. This nationalist propaganda, which today aims to get workers to give more sweat for the capitalists, will tomorrow be used to get them to give up their lives for the 'defense of the country'.

The trade war, with its ravages on the world economy, is the expression of the absurd dead-end reached by global capital, now stuck in the greatest economic crisis in its history. At a time when poverty and penury rule over the major part of mankind, production is falling, factories are closing, land is being sterilized, workers reduced to unemployment, the means of production left unused. This is the logic of capital­ism, of a system based on competition. It is leading to the desperate struggle of each against all, to wars, to destruction after destruction. Only the working class, which has no par­ticular interests to defend, whatever country it is in; which everywhere suffers from exploitation and misery - only the struggle of this class can offer an alternative future to hu­manity. By defending itself, by going beyond all the divi­sions and frontiers of capitalism, by forging its international unity and solidarity, the working class alone can show the way out of the increasingly awful tragedy which capitalism is lining up for the planet. JJ 28.2.92.

Notes

• (1) G7: the group of the seven biggest industrial countries, who organise regular meetings in order to 'try' to coordinate their economic policies in the face of the economic crisis.
• (2) General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade: international negotiations aimed at establishing 'regulations' for interna­tional competition.

The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labor, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society -where the laborer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the laborer - undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labor, the greater is the pressure of the laborers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence." (Marx, Capital, Vol 1, part 7, chap xxv)