In order to know whether the communist revolution is necessary and possible today, we have to pose the question of the deca­dence of capitalism, to define the historic basis of the pro­gramme and strategy of the proletariat in the present epoch.

Questions such as the content of socialism, the nature of the unions, the politics of ‘frontism’, the nature of national libera­tion movements, are intimately linked to an analysis of the decadence of capitalism.

Decadence theory in the history of the workers’ movement

It is not because the immense majority of men are exploited and thus alienated that socialism is a historic necessity today. Exploitation and alienation already existed under slavery, feu­dalism, and nineteenth century capitalism, but socialism could not possibly have been realised in any of those epochs.

For socialism to become a reality not only must the means for its instigation (the working class and the means of production) be sufficiently developed, but also the system which it is to supersede - capitalism - must have ceased to be a system indis­pensable to the development of the productive forces, must have become a growing fetter on the productive forces, that is to say, that it must have entered its period of decline or deca­dence.

The socialists of the early nineteenth century regarded social­ism as an ideal to be attained, and its realisation was to result from the sheer good will of men - in the case of the ‘utopian’ socialists, from the good will of the ruling class itself. The endur­ing contribution of Marx and Engels was their understanding and scientific elaboration of the material necessity for the dis­appearance of capitalism and the realisation of communism. It is no accident that when Marx attempted to encapsulate the essence of his work in a single passage, he concentrated on the mechanisms of the historic growth and decay of the various modes of production through which humanity has developed:

“In the social production of their life, 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 mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. 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 of 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. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense super­structure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic condi­tions of production, which can be determined with the preci­sion of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aes­thetic or philosophic - in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of him­self, so we cannot judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence hove matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself only arises when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bour­geois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.” (Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

The methodological approach adopted in this passage remains indispensable for understanding how different soci­eties arise and decline. The appreciation that a mode of pro­duction cannot expire until the relations of production upon which that social system is based have become fetters on the further development of the productive forces is the basis for the definition of the proletariat’s political programme. Marx and Engels were quite clear that the perspective for the communist revolution was bound up with the global and historic evolution of capitalism itself.

What was less clear for Marx, especially in his earlier writ­ings, was the actual delineation of the “epoch of social revolu­tion” in capitalism’s development; and this lack of clarity was itself an objective product of the fact that the methodology of historical materialism emerged long before that epoch had dawned: Marx issued his first clarion calls to the proletarian revolution not in the period of capitalism’s decline, but of its most spectacular ascent. The imminent proletarian revolution proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto was thrust aside by the continued growth and expansion of capitalist social relations across the whole planet. Marx was definitely wrong to assert at that time that capitalist social relations had entered into a final conflict with the productive forces; although the collision between the two was always a feature of capitalism, the conflict was never irrevocable in the nineteenth century because capi­tal still had vast areas of the globe available for its continued enlarged reproduction, for offsetting the fundamental contra­dictions which Marx had identified in its process of accumula­tion: the tendency towards generalised overproduction and the saturation of the market, and the tendency for the rate of profit to decline.

Despite these errors, however, Marx and Engels were still able to base their programme on the recognition that capital­ism had yet to exhaust its progressive mission. This recognition was expressed for example in those passages in the Manifesto which talk about the tasks of the proletariat if it were to come to power at that time: the measures advocated are aimed at developing capitalism in the most progressive possible man­ner, rather than at destroying it root and branch (and thus what was a good example of Marx’s insight has unfortunately been turned into a reactionary state capitalist programme by those who advocate the same measures in the present epoch). More important, the practice of the marxists in the First International was correctly based on the understanding that since capitalism still had a progressive role to play, it was necessary for the working class to support those bourgeois movements which were helping to lay the historic groundwork for socialism (for example the struggles for national unification in Italy, Ger­many and the USA); similarly, that it was necessary for the workers to continue to fight for reforms since the growth of cap­italism made reforms possible, and since the struggle for reforms enabled the workers to constitute themselves into a cohesive and social and political force. These materialist posi­tions were defended against the anarchists’ a-historical demands for the immediate abolition of capitalism and their complete opposition to the struggle for reforms (these positions, though apparently ultra-revolutionary, actually concealed a petty bourgeois desire to ‘abolish’ capitalism and wage labour not by advancing towards their historical supercession but by regressing to the world of the independent small producer).

The Second International made the strategic adaptation to the epoch even more explicitly by elaborating a ‘minimum pro­gramme’ of immediately obtainable reforms (trade union recognition, shortening of the working day, etc) alongside a ‘maximum programme’ of socialism to be put into practice when the inevitable historic crisis of capitalism came about.

But for the majority of the chief tacticians and official leaders of the Second International the minimum programme was to become more and more the only real programme of the social democratic parties. Socialism, proletarian revolution, became mere sermonising platitudes to be trotted out on May Day parades, while the energy of the official movement was more and more focussed upon winning a place for social democracy within the capitalist system. Inevitably the ‘revisionist’ wing of the International (Bernstein etc) began to reject the very idea of the necessity for the collapse of capitalism and thus for a revo­lutionary transition to socialism, and to argue for the possibility of a gradual and peaceful transformation of capitalism into socialism.

These ideologies were nurtured by the extraordinary devel­opment of the world capitalist economy in the last part of the 19th century, but this was already the last stage in the ascen­dant march of the capitalist system: imperialist expansion was beginning to show itself as the precursor to a new and cata­strophic phase in the life of bourgeois society, and class antag­onisms were becoming increasingly sharp and widespread (mass strikes in America, Germany, and above all Russia). Against the opportunist theorising of Bernstein and co, and the temporising of the social democratic ‘centre’ (Kautsky etc), the left wing within the International - Luxemburg, the Bolsheviks, the Dutch Tribune group etc - defended the fundamental marx­ist dictum of the necessity for the eventual violent overthrow of capitalism. The clearest statement of this defence was Luxem­burg’s Social Reform or Revolution (1898) which, while recognising that capitalism was still ascending by means of “brusque expansionist thrusts” (i.e. imperialism), insisted that the system would inevitably undergo a saturation of the world market, impelling its “crisis of senility” and producing an immediate need for the revolutionary conquest of power by the proletari­at. In 1913 Luxemburg published her great theoretical work The Accumulation of Capital, which attempted to analyse the real economic roots of this historic crisis, whose actual arrival was shortly to be announced to humanity in the form of the first imperialist world war.

Basing herself on Marx’s own insistence that the very nature of the wage labour relationship made it impossible for capital­ism to realise all the surplus value it extracted within its own social boundaries, Luxemburg concluded that capitalism’s his­toric decline must commence at the point where there is an exhaustion of the extra-capitalist markets in relation to the amount of surplus value generated by global capitalist produc­tion; for Luxemburg, capitalism was “...the first mode of econo­my which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other eco­nomic systems as a medium and a soil. Although it strives to become universal, and indeed on account of this tendency, it must break down – because it is immanently incapable of becoming a universal form of production.” (Accumulation of Capital). In sum, at the point which it dominated the globe, capitalism plunged into a permanent crisis of overproduction.

This conclusion remains to this day the clearest statement about the fundamental origins of the decadence of capitalism, subject of course to the various theoretical elaborations which the experience of another eighty years of decadence has enabled the revolutionary movement to put forward.

The outbreak of imperialist war in 1914 marked a historic turning point both in the history of capitalism and in the work­ers’ movement. No longer was the problem of the “crisis of senility” a theoretical debate between different wings of the workers’ movement. The understanding that the war marked a new period for capitalism as an historical system required and enabled the genuine marxist currents to draw a class frontier between themselves and those who, in one way or another, became apologists for the imperialist war. It was no accident that the frontier was essentially drown up between the old opportunist wing of social democracy - now openly acting as recruiting sergeants of the bourgeoisie - and the left fractions who had previously held on to the ground principles of the marxist theory of crisis. Luxemburg’s Internationale group, Lenin’s Bolshevik fraction, the left radicals of Bremen - these and others were the ones who held aloft the principles of prole­tarian internationalism, affirming that the war demonstrated the opening up of that period of “wars and revolutions” pre­dicted by Marx, and calling for the proletariat to oppose the imperialist war with its own revolutionary combat.

Of the revolutionaries who gathered together at the confer­ences of the internationalist opposition at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, the clearest on the question of the war itself were the Bolsheviks, who together with the German radicals insisted on the slogan “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”, sharply delineating the revolutionary position on the war from that of various centrist and semi-pacifist currents. And as the revolu­tionary situation in Russia matured, the Bolsheviks’ (and above all Lenin’s) understanding of the tasks of the new period enabled them to attack the mechanistic and nationalistic sophistries of the Mensheviks; while the latter attempted to hold back the tide of revolution by arguing that Russia was ‘too backward’ for socialism, the Bolsheviks pointed out that the world-imperialist nature of the war indicated the ripeness of the world capitalist system for socialist revolution. They thus boldly argued for the seizure of power by the Russian working class as a prelude to the world proletarian revolution.

It was to further the interests of the world revolution that the Bolsheviks were instrumental in the foundation of the Commu­nist International in 1919. The revolutionary parties which ral­lied round the banner of the Third International were fully aware of the crucial importance of defining the historic period for the elaboration of the communist programme:

“Aims and Tactics

1. The present epoch is the epoch of the disintegration and collapse of the entire capitalist wodd system, which will drag the whole of European civilisation down with it if capitalism with its insoluble contradictions is not destroyed.

2. The task of the proletariat is now to seize the State power immediately. The seizure of State power means the destruction of the State apparatus of the bourgeoisie and the organisation of a new proletarian apparatus of power.”

(From the ‘Invitation to the First Congress of the Communist International’, January 24, 1919)

The proclamations of the First Congress of the CI show a resounding clarity and confidence about the revolutionary tasks of the working class. Their whole emphasis was on the necessity for the immediate conquest of power by the workers, based on the dictatorship of the workers’ councils. There is con­sequently a clear understanding about the necessity for a break with the old aims and organisations of the pre-war work­ers’ movement: the social democratic parties which had sup­ported the war effort and then done all they could to crush the post-war revolutionary movements were roundly denounced as agents of capitalism, and cooperation with these organs was rejected; parliamentarism was to a great extent seen as being incapable of serving the interests of the working class; the problem of colonial oppression could, it was stated, only be solved in the context of a world socialist society. These and oth­er positions reflected the ascendant tide of revolution which was then sweeping through the whole world.

But the following congresses of the International, and espe­cially the Third, in 1921, showed a marked deterioration in coherence and revolutionary principles, and this is turn reflect­ed the reflux of the world revolution and the advancing degen­eration of the Bolshevik party in the context of the isolation of the Russian Soviet State. As the latter more and more took on the task of managing Russian national capital, and as the Bol­shevik party became more and more inextricably fused with the state, the International itself began to function more as an instrument of Russian foreign policy than as the world party of the revolution. The desperate attempts of the Bolsheviks to sal­vage something from this counter-revolutionary momentum led them to abandon the sharp revolutionary positions of the First Congress and to drift back towards the obsolete tactics of the previous period: parliamentarism, trade unionism, united fronts with the social democratic parties, support for the nation­al liberation struggle in the colonies, and so on. That all these tactics were justified by a revolutionary verbiage could not alter the fact that the change in the historic period could only render such tactics directly counter-revolutionary, no matter what were the intentions of those who resorted to them.

Those who today act within the working class as the extreme left wing of capitalism - Stalinists, Trotskyists, etc - are indeed the true inheritors of these counter-revolutionary policies; what were once the mistakes of the workers’ movement have become the raison d’etre of these bourgeois gangs. Of course Stalinist and Trotskyists may pay lip service to various concepts of capitalist decadence, but this is robbed of any material basis as soon as one considers that throughout their history these cur­rents have considered a large part of the world to be ‘socialist’ or at least ‘non-capitalist’, and therefore historically ascendant and deserving the support of ‘revolutionaries’; even those left­ists who consider the Stalinist regimes to be state capitalist have never hesitated to support either them or various third world countries in the innumerable inter-imperialist wars that have ravaged the planet since World War Two. In any case the application of the theory of capitalist decay to the countries these leftists do consider to be capitalist is entirely subordinated to their immediate pragmatic needs as apologists for capital: no amount of talk about state capitalism by the British Socialist Workers Party, for example, has ever prevented it from seeing something progressive in nationalisation and something work­ing class in the Labour or Communist Parties.

At the time of the first great revolutionary wave, the real con­sequences of a materialist analysis of the new epoch were defined essentially by the left communists who fought against the degeneration of the CI, in particular the German KAPD (Communist Workers Party). The interventions of the KAPC) at the Third Congress of the CI were all concerned with the tasks imposed on revolutionaries by the new period, and almost symbolically represent the fundamental split which was taking place in the workers’ movement of that time.

On the interpretation of the world economic crisis, the KAPD militant, Schwab, insisted on the fundamental difference between the period of capitalism’s ascendancy and its period of decline, and there was already an understanding that this historic decline did not signify a complete stagnation of the productive forces but a continuation of capitalism on a more and more destructive basis. “Capital rebuilds, preserves its profits, but at the expense of its productivity. Capital restores its power by destroying the economy”. Here already there are insights into the waste production, underutilisation of capital, and above all the cycle of crisis, war and reconstruction which are essential features of the decadent phase of capitalist soci­ety.

Of course, the left communists’ understanding of the histori­cal moment in which they found themselves was necessarily limited by the fact that they had not long emerged from the old period; and it was further limited by the rapid onset of the counter-revolution which took a heavy toll of their organisa­tions. In this sense, more lasting than the economic analysis put forward by the left communists of the early twenties was their intransigent insistence that the proletariat had to make a com­plete break with the habits of the old period - in effect, the habits of reformism - and adapt itself to the tasks imposed by the advent of the epoch of social revolution. It was on this mate­rialist basis, and not because of their inherently ‘anarchist’ or ‘infantile’ nature, that the left communists rejected the oppor­tunist tactics taken up by the International. Thus, at the Third Congress of the CI, while recognising that in the ascendant epoch it had indeed been necessary for the working class to organise parliamentary fractions, the KAPD now insisted that “to urge the proletariat to take part in elections in the period of capitalist decadence amounts to nourishing in it the illusion that the crisis can be overcome by parliamentary means.”

The same held true for the question of the unions: the KAPD pointed out that organisations which had been built to defend the working class in an epoch when genuine reforms were still possible were now not only unsuitable as instruments for mak­ing the revolution, but had actually become pillars of capitalist order which had to be smashed by the revolutionary working class. This was equally the case for the social democratic par­ties. The left communists therefore refused to engage in united fronts with what had become part of the state apparatus of the class enemy.

These analyses were not fully formed, of course, and still con­tained many inconsistencies - for example the KAPD’s illusion that you could replace trade unions with permanent ‘factory organisations’ of a revolutionary character, a position that expressed the influence of anarcho-syndicalism and thus of a form of trade unionism. Other weaknesses were also to play an important role - in particular the disastrous turn towards the theory that the October revolution had been a ‘dual’ or even a purely bourgeois revolution, a theory that completely negated the notion of the global decadence of capitalism. Ironically, but perhaps inevitably, a deeper understanding of the decadence of capitalism only emerged through the horrible experience of the counter-revolution, which reduced the authentic revolution­ary currents to a few small groups trying to draw up the lessons of the defeat and to chart the main characteristics of the new period.

In the 1930s, which saw the definitive triumph of the counter­revolution and the emergence of the purest expressions of cap­italist decay (Nazism, Stalinism, the war economy, etc), the fraction which developed the most coherent analysis of the epoch was the Italian left in exile around the review Bilan (i.e. ‘balance sheet’ - the balance sheet of the lessons of the revolu­tionary wave and of its defeat). Bilan’s application of the theo­ry of decadence was central to the clarifications they made regarding many aspects of the communist programme, in par­ticular their complete rejection of national movements any­where in the world, since in the new period the bourgeoisie could only a reactionary role, both in the colonies and the metropoles.

The clarity attained by the Italian left can be measured by cit­ing an article which appeared in 1934 (‘Crises and Cycles in the Economy of Capitalism in Agony’, Bilan 11, September 1934). The writer, Mitchell, traces many of the deepest trends of capital in its decadent epoch. Developing his argument on the basis of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of capitalist collapse, Mitchell defined the decay of the capitalist mode of production as having commenced in 1912-14 and as a process in which “capitalist society, because of the acute nature of the contradic­tions inherent in its mode of production, can no longer fulfil its historic mission: to develop in a continuous and progressive manner the productive forces and the productivity of human labour. The revolt of the productive forces against their private appropriation, once sporadic, has become permanent. Capi­talism has entered into its general crisis of decomposition”.

Mitchell points out the essential difference between the cycli­cal crises of ascendant capitalism and the periods of boom and slump in decadence. Whereas, in the former period, crises were necessary moments in the continued expansion of the world capitalist market, the saturation of the market which brought in the new era means that henceforward the crises of capitalism can only be ‘resolved’ through imperialist wars:

“In its decadent phase, capitalism can only guide the contradictions of its system in one direction: war. Humanity can only escape such an outcome through the proletarian revolution”.

With almost prophetic accuracy, the author goes on to dis­cuss the probable developments of the period ahead:

“Whichever way it turns, whatever means it tries to use to get over the crisis, capitalism is pushed irresistible towards its des­tiny of war. Where and how it will arise it is impossible to say today. What is important to know and to affirm is that it will explode with a view towards the carving up of Asia and that it will be worldwide”.

Mitchell concludes with a warning against the capitalist alternative of ‘fascism versus democracy’, which was no more than a means to divert the proletariat from its class struggle and mobilise it for capitalist war. But the working class at that time had suffered too many defeats to heed the warnings of the communist fractions, and the fractions themselves had no illu­sions about the enormity of the defeat the class had been through.

Alongside the Italian left, the council communists (the rem­nants of the KAPD, the Dutch left and others) stood alone in their defence of internationalist principles in face of the imperi­alist butchery in Spain and World War Two. But while the council communists were the first to recognise that the ‘workers state’ in the USSR was in fact a form of state capitalism, they were theoretically hamstrung by their increasingly rigid adher­ence to the notion that October 1917 had been a bourgeois revolution; this prevented them from making the crucial reali­sation that state capitalism was a universal tendency of deca­dent capitalism. In America, Paul Mattick did begin to elabo­rate a theory of permanent crisis based on Grossman’s emphasis of the falling rate of profit as the basic determinant of the cri­sis, but his methodology led him into a number of aberrations, such as seeing state capitalism as a new mode of production with no imperialist dynamic, and thus, in a sense, progressive. Hence Mattick’s ambivalence on the nature of China, the war in Vietnam, etc.

The elaboration of communist theory after World War Two consequently found its best expression in those who attempted a synthesis of the contribution both of the Italian left and the German and Dutch lefts. The Gauche Communiste de France, with its publication Internationalisme, which split from those elements of the Italian left who were voluntaristically seeking to form a party in a period of reaction, was able to assimilate many of the German left’s insights about the relationship between the party and the workers’ councils, something Bilan had been less clear about. More important still, it formulated a profound analysis of the tendency of decadent capitalism towards statification, and was thus able to grasp the capitalist nature of Russia and its satellites without falling into the error or calling October 1917 a bourgeois revolution.

The GCF disappeared in 1 952 under the tremendous pres­sure of the counter-revolution that had only been reinforced by the second world war and the victory of ‘democracy’ over fas­cism. The group had not seen with sufficient clarity that the war had provided world capital with a temporary breathing space:

the enormous ‘boom’ of the 50s and 60s was based on the reconstruction of the war-shattered economies of Europe and Japan and a new global economic arrangement characterised by the overwhelming superiority of US imperialism. The star­tling growth-figures of this period led many sociologists, and even elements in the revolutionary movement, to theorise about a new ‘crisis-free’ capitalism and the ‘embourgeoisiement’ of the working class.

But in Venezuela in the mid-60s a small group was formed around one of the leading elements of the old GCF. This new group, Internacialismo, took the work of the latter a step further by describing the whole cycle of capitalism’s decadence: crisis, war, reconstruction, new crisis ... and, on the basis of this understanding, was able to predict the end of the boom, the opening of a new phase of open crisis, and an international resurgence of struggles by a generation of workers no longer paralysed by the terror and delusion of the counter-revolution.

This perspective was amply confirmed by the massive strug­gles of May-June 68 in France and the subsequent internation­al wave of class movements, and by the visible deepening of the world economic crisis in the early 70s, which also brought about a sharpening of tensions between the US and Russian imperialist blocs: in sum, humanity was once again confronted with the historic dilemma between world war - which now meant the very destruction of the human race - and world revo­lution, the creation of a communist society.

The Internacialismo group was instrumental in the formation of Revolution Internationale in France, in the immediate after­math of the May68 events. The main body of this pamphlet is a series of articles published in the early issues of Revolution Internationale (no.5, old series, and nos. 2, 4 and 5 new series), and itself constitutes a lasting contribution to the theory of decadence. But RI also played a key role in the formation of similar groups in other countries, and which came together in 1975 to found the International Communist Current.

Through the 70s and 80s, the ICC systematically charted the course of the crisis, uncovering the factors that have made it the longest, deepest crisis in capitalisms’ history, a true expression of the death agony of this system. It followed the development of imperialist antagonisms, in particular the offensive of the US bloc after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the growing encirclement of the USSR which had the ultimate aim of strip­ping the latter of its status as a world power. At the same time, the ICC described the uneven but real development of class consciousness through this period, in two further international waves of class struggle(1978-80, 1983-89).

By the end of the 80s, decadent capitalism had reached an important watershed. The continuation of the workers’ struggle was blocking the path to world war, but the proletariat was not yet mature enough to raise the question of revolution; as a result, the exacerbation of the economic crisis was opening up a general process of social decomposition: capitalist society was rotting on its feet, falling apart at the seams. This process produced, and was considerably accelerated by, the sudden collapse of the Russian bloc and the consequent dislocation of its western rival, historical events that definitively opened up the final phase of capitalist decay, the phase of generalised decomposition. In the absence of imperialist blocs, world war has been taken off any foreseeable agenda - but this has in no way mitigated decadent capitalisms’ penchant for militarism and imperialism. On the contrary. As the huge slaughter in the Gulf at the beginning of 1991 showed quite clearly, the very process of decomposition itself, with its train of local and regional conflicts, ‘police actions’ by the great powers, of famines and ecological catastrophes, constitutes no less a threat to the survival of humanity.

The ICC is not the only organisation in the proletarian move­ment today which holds to the theory of decadence. But it is the only one that has been able to identify and analyse this final

phase. The text ‘Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism’ was first published in our International Review 62 in the summer of 1990. (See Appendix 2)

As can be seen from this brief historical sketch, the theory of decadence is not an invention of the ICC, but an authentic inheritance from the entire marxist tradition, and it is the indis­pensable basis to any consistent revolutionary activity. Without an appreciation of the epoch in which it is operating, the pro­gramme of a proletarian political organisation can have no material foundation, no orientation for its analyses or its inter­vention within the class. Without a grasp of the decadence of capitalism, there can be no firm defence of the class frontiers which separate the proletarian from the bourgeois camp. This was demonstrated very painfully by the collapse of the ‘Bor­digist’ International Communist Party (Communist Programme) in the early 80s. Although this current claims to be the genuine heir of the Italian left tradition, it rejected the notion of deca­dence which had been so crucial to the work of the Italian Frac­tion in the 30s. In particular, it rejected the idea that since the decadence of capitalism was a global phenomenon, there could no longer be any progressive role for ‘national libera­tion’ movements in the underdeveloped regions. Reiterating Bordiga’s sterile theory about the ‘invariance’ of marxism since 1848, the ICP saw a revolutionary significance in all kinds of national liberation wars - all of which were in fact proxy wars between the two imperialist blocs or between other local and regional imperialist sharks. By the beginning of the 80s the ICP’s support for Palestinian nationalism led a faction within if to pass over into the camp of leftism pure and simple, and this in turn resulted in the implosion of the whole international organisation.

On the other hand, groups which have attempted to defend class positions on such issues as the national or trade union questions while repudiating the notion of decadence have fared little better. The case of the Groupe Communiste Interna­tionaliste is instructive here: having started life with the claim of being ultra-orthodox marxists, this group has, through its fer­vent rejection of nearly all the theoretical pillars of left commu­nist politics for the last fifty years, drifted more and more into modernism and anarchism. A similar fate has befallen certain councilist groups who have been equally hostile to the notion of decadence. This should be a timely warning for all those who follow the recent fashion of denigrating the theory of deca­dence and of looking for alternative explanations and periodi­sations - for example those who misapply the concept of the ‘formal and real domination of capital’, developed by Marx to describe certain important changes that were already well underway within the ascendant period. The ICC has respond­ed to this ‘fashion’ with a series of articles in its International Review this series represents, in fact, a further development of the theory of decadence [1] [2].

The work of understanding the decadence of capitalism con­tinues. But the theory is above all a guide to action, to the inter­vention of revolutionaries in a historical situation where the very survival of humanity is at stake. This pamphlet begins with a long historical investigation of the decadence of previous class societies (a chapter which has never been published in full in English before),and it enters into number of complex theo­retical issues about the characteristics of the capitalist economy in this epoch. But this work has no academic pretensions what­ever; its only aim in investigating the reality of present day cap­italism is to arm the militant struggle against it.

[A brief not on the Footnotes]

The statistical references contained in the main body of this pamphlet were compiled in the 1970s and are now obviously 'out of date', but only in the sense that the continuing decay of this society has confirmed the tendencies that they illustrate. The ICC's International Review has published regular updates on the 'progress' of the capitalist crisis, and we recommend the reader to refer to these articles.

In order to define the decadence of capitalism, our approach will be as follows:

 - by looking at the main social transformations of the historical process we will draw out the general concept of the decadence of a mode of production; we will then apply this general concept to the specific case of capitalism and try to deduce the political consequences that flow from it.

 - and, in doing this, we will, like Marx, consider first “the material transformation of the economic conditions of production”, and secondly “the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”.

Decadence and open crises in capitalism in the twentieth century are phenomena which are linked together but distinct; not identical but interdependent. 

Our object here is not to study these moments of crisis (for example, 1929 or 1938); it is not to ascertain whether capitalism now is beginning to undergo these types of crisis. We shall address ourselves to the task of showing that capitalism has been in a state of senility, of decadence, since 1914 and that the magnificent 'rates of growth' of which it boasts, especially since World War 2, in fact merely hide the agony of a system which is less and less able to create the conditions for its own reproduction.

The concept of decadence

But what exactly is the meaning of this state of decline or decadence?

In the first part of this article (Revolution Internationale, Old Series, no 5) we attempted a definition of this phenomenon, its causes and its manifestations, as it occurred in past societies, particularly at the end of Roman slave society and west European feudalism.

We can briefly summarise the general idea which came out of this study in the following way.

Contrary to those who would like to hold an evolutionist view of history which presents progress in human society as a continual, uninterrupted, always ascendant process, no past society disappeared at the time of its zenith. It is only after a more or less long period of decline that the pre-capitalist societies gave way to new forms of social organisation.

The zenith of a society constitutes its limit. It corresponds in effect to that period wherein men are best able to obtain the maximum development of their material wealth given the existing level of technology, and the presence of certain social relationships. It is this degree of development which marks a certain stopping point. It cannot be superseded without the utilisation of new techniques of labour, without abandoning the hitherto prevalent relations of production and consequently without the overthrow of the social order founded on these relations. It is this zenith which makes the advent of the new society an objective necessity.

If the course of history were a harmonious process of constant evolution, then social upheavals would have taken place following these moments of apogee. But history is the history of class struggle. The material necessity of a social upheaval develops in accordance with the development of productive forces, as an objective process independent of the will of men. However, the upheaval itself is the work of men and more precisely that of a social class. Its effective realisation consequently depends on objective and subjective conditions which determine the will and also the possibility for action by this class.

Now, these conditions do not exist at the zenith of a social system. Following their apogee, before disappearing, all past societies have undergone a long period of crisis and convulsion. The old structures decompose; new forces attempt to assert themselves. This period of disintegration and of gestation, this era of barbarism, this 'era of social revolution', is what constitutes the decadent phase of a society.

The causes of decadence

What are the factors which, while they do not appear at the moment of apogee, make decadence an irreversible necessity?

A totality of social relations which have linked men together for centuries cannot be transcended in a day. Man never abandons a tool which has served him in the past until it has proven unable to serve him any longer. A social form cannot prove its 'uselessness', its historic obsolescence, except through the misery and barbarism which its maintenance provokes. Years of famine, plague, war, and anarchy were necessary before men were forced to begin to abandon slavery and feudalism. Only such events, engendered by the decadence of a society, can bring to an end centuries of customs, ideas and traditions. Collective consciousness always lags behind the objective reality which lies before it.

Parallel to these elements, there are two objective factors which are necessary for the realisation of the advent of the new society, also lacking at the time of society's zenith: on the one hand, the weakening of the power of the ruling class, and on the other hand, the appearance of a new historical project and of social forces capable of realising it.

The power of the ruling class and its attachment to its privileges are powerful factors in the conservation of a social system. But the power of this class has its roots in the efficiency of the system which it dominates. The existence of classes is the result of a certain necessary division of labour in a given moment of the development of the techniques of production. The strength of their power resides in the first place in the unique and indispensable relations of production existing under their rule. The zenith of an economic system is also the most stable period in the power of the ruling class. Consequently, the downfall of that power can only take place with the downfall of the relations of production, in the course of the system's decadent phase. All the attempts to artificially maintain this power by the state and political totalitarianism, (attempts which, as we shall see, have always been undertaken and which are significant symptoms of decline), are in fact the result of the decomposition of this power.

Finally, a man never definitely abandons a tool which has been indispensable to him before finding another tool to replace it. In order that a mode of production be abandoned (when it is this mode which has hitherto provided the means of subsistence for a society), it is necessary that there emerge within the old society the forces indispensable for the establishment of new relations of production. In past societies the class bearing the new order did not exist (or existed only in embryonic form), as long as the society had not yet entered into its decadent phase. (The great feudal properties did not really develop in Ancient Rome except under the Late Empire; similarly under feudalism the bourgeoisie did not come into its own until the beginning of the fourteenth century.)

These three principal elements brought about by the decline of a system are certainly not the only ones which explain the causes of decadence in Roman and feudal society. They do, however, enable us to understand the inevitability of a period of decadence for past societies. It remains for us to see whether these same reasons exist under capitalism. But first, it is necessary to recall the principal manifestation of periods of decadence.

The manifestations of decadence

All these manifestations can be observed in the state of generalised crisis affecting the whole structure of social life.

1) At the economic level: (the infrastructure of a society).

Production increasingly comes into conflict with constraints which are none other than the social relations of production themselves. The rhythm of the development of the productive forces slows down, sometimes even stops altogether. Society undergoes economic crises the gravity and extent of which grow larger each time.

2) At the level of the superstructure:

Since in all societies, including the present one, material subsistence is the foremost social question, in the last instance it is always the relations of production which have determined the form and content of different social structures. When these relations are undermined, they must progressively involve in their downfall the whole edifice which is based upon them. When such a state of crisis develops at the economic level, all other areas of social life are necessarily affected.

It is here that we must look for the real roots of the famous 'crisis of civilisation'. The idealist vision of history loses itself in studies of 'the decline of moral standards', of the destructive or beneficial influence of this or that philosophy or religion; in short, it seeks in the domain of ideas, of contemporary modes of thought, the reasons for these crises. Without denying the important influence of ideas in the course of events, it is, nevertheless, certain that, as Marx said:

“One does not judge an individual by the idea he has of himself. One does not judge an epoch of revolution according to the consciousness which it had of itself. This consciousness is explained rather by the contradictions of material life, by the conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production". (Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

3) In the domain of ideology

The preservation of the system becomes a painful absurdity and gives less and less rationality to the ideology which justifies it. Ideology decomposes, the old moral values run down, artistic creativity stagnates or functions in opposition to the status quo, there is a development of obscurantism and philosophical pessimism.

4) In the domain of social relations

Decadence is manifested by:

a - The development of conflicts between the different factions of the ruling class. The conditions for extracting profit; and even its quantity, become more and more difficult to maintain; those property owners who want to assure their subsistence must do so at the expense of other members or fractions of their class, thereby abandoning all possibility of co-operation.

b - The development of struggles between antagonistic classes: the struggles of the exploited class which undergoes more and more misery because exploitation is pushed to the extreme by the exploiting class; the struggle of the class which is the bearer of the new society, (in past societies, this class has always been distinct from the exploited class), and which comes up against the forces of the old order.

5) In the political domain

Faced with this state of crisis, in which the ruling class is unable to ensure its political power in the same way as before, the apparatus of order, the State, the ultimate crystallisation of the interests of the old society, tends to become strengthened and to extend its jurisdiction to all areas of social life.

In the first part of this article we showed how these characteristics appeared at the end of Roman slave society and during the decline of feudalism. We showed how the totality of these phenomena constitutes an unequivocal manifestation of the decadence of a society.

But how are we to go about defining decadence in capitalist society? Analogous symptoms do not allow us to diagnose the same illness for different individuals, unless the latter are of the same species or the same kind. Given the character of decadence in past societies, can we consider capitalism in the same light? Do the old symptoms and causes retain their validity when applied to capitalism?

On the level of material production, the subordination of the social system to the development of the productive forces is a law which remains valid under capitalism. As long as humanity lives under the 'reign of necessity', as long as it has not reached the stage of abundance which will permit it to eliminate problems of material subsistence or at least relegate them to a secondary place - a stage from which humanity is still a long way away - the first function of an economic system remains the development of the productive forces. What is more, in generalising the competitive market economy, capitalism (this system in which capital that does not develop is condemned to disappear or to pass into other hands), has made this necessity of development still more powerful.

It is thus certain that for capitalism, just as for feudalism and slavery, an insufficient development of the productive forces represents, in historical terms, a deadly impasse.

But if this condition came about could it, or must it, represent a phase of decadence as in other societies?

Capitalism remains first of all a society divided into classes; secondly, a society where men continue to live under the domination of their economic needs, and thus submit unconsciously to their social structures. We find in capitalism certain essential traits of past societies, and in particular those which make the appearance of a phase of decadence an inevitability. These characteristics can be summarised as follows: the lagging of collective consciousness behind reality, the dependence of the ruling class's power on the efficacity of productive relations, the weight and inertia of customs and habits deriving from the old society, the impossibility of attaining a new social form before the old one has proven its obsolescence, and before a new historical project has begun to germinate within society. Like the societies which precede it, capitalism thus can and must undergo a phase of decadence.

However, alongside these traits which are common to all societies based on exploitation, capitalism also has characteristics which radically distinguish it from slavery and feudalism. To begin with, the system which constitutes the negation and the supercession of capitalism is not itself a system of exploitation. Thus, the decadence of capitalism contains new specifics in relation to the other systems.

Socialism is the first system in history which does not grow up within the society which it is to supersede. Feudal economic relations were born within the Late Roman Empire in the great estates which become more or less independent from the central power; capitalism was born within the burghs and then the towns of feudal society. In both cases, the future ruling class progressively substituted itself for the former.

By contrast, the proletariat has no possibility of constructing a new society within capitalism. As an exploited class, the direct source of the ruling class's profit, it cannot push forward its own historical project without totally destroying the power of that class. In contrast with the past, the coexistence of the two systems is excluded. Since capitalism is the first system to have integrated the whole of world production into one circuit which incorporates the whole planet, socialism in one country is impossible. This means that the decadence of capitalism must be a decadence far clearer, far more violent than ever before.

Feudalism was able to survive in France even if under a monarchical form, until the eighteenth century, thanks to the prosperity of the bourgeoisie which allowed the partial satisfaction of economic needs which feudalism itself was no longer able to meet. This is not the case for capitalism which hurtles to its grave on its own. Its gravedigger is not a potentially useful competitor with which it can accommodate itself, however provisionally, but a mortal enemy engendered by centuries of oppression and with whom all compromise is impossible. All the consequences of capitalist decadence fall on society with a violence and directness that cannot be moderated. Thus, on the one hand this decadence has a more intense character than ever before, and on the other hand, it is much shorter: the greater evidence of its effects imply a much more abrupt period of reaction.

The proletariat

In contrast with other revolutionary classes in history the proletariat does not appear during the decadent phase of the previous system of production, but right at its beginning. When capitalist society reached its zenith, the proletariat was already fully developed as an economic class; when the system began to enter the period of its decline, its gravedigger was already at the height of its numerical strength. The end of capitalism will not be attained, as in the past, when the architect of its destruction is born and develops in the dung heap of the old world in decline.

Two other factors help to shorten the decadence of capitalism:

a - the lesser importance of ideological relations. Under the system of wage labour and capital there is no religious, political or personal relation to mediate the relations of exploitation (contrary to those which were produced under slavery and serfdom). A much more direct link between social life and economic life proper emerges. Therefore, a more rapid reaction occurs on the social level to the economic difficulties which characterise the period of decadence.

b - Finally and above all, living for competition alone (on a national and international scale), capitalism cannot exist without developing.

It is true that no society in the past could continue without ensuring in one way or another a certain development of the productive forces. But in the past this development was never truly an intrinsic feature of the existing relations of production. The profits and privileges of the members of the ruling classes did not directly depend on their capacity to ensure their own economic expansion. The profit which they extracted from the labour of serfs or slaves was dedicated to their personal consumption and to luxury. It is only incidentally that it served to develop production. When these systems began to come up against their economic contradictions, there had to be a slowing down of growth and even stagnation because otherwise the ruling classes would immediately have been weakened and poverty-stricken, and the economic life of society would have been paralysed.

Under capitalism, if the growing accumulation of capital cannot be ensured, the whole process of extracting profit and then the whole production process itself, finds itself blocked. This is one of the essential traits of the capitalist system.

Now the principal characteristic of the decadence of a system is the growing impossibility for society to develop economically without abandoning the existing relations of production. Therefore it is difficult to conceive of a long period of decadence for capitalism and it is clear that the decadence of a society is an historical phenomenon, the causes and principal manifestations of which can be fixed precisely. The decadent period of capitalist society reveals an analogous nature to the decadent stages of preceding societies, but for various reasons, capitalist decadence seems to have to be shorter and more intense than the period of decadence was for other systems. Having said this, it is necessary now to confront this analysis with the reality of capitalism.

The theory of decadence and  contemporary capitalism

It could be said that we should have begun this study at this point. For a variety of reasons, nothing could be less true. The concept of the decadence of capitalism could only really have been of interest to revolutionaries confronted with the beginning of the period startlingly landmarked by the outbreak of World War I. Indeed, the split between the 2nd and 3rd Internationals during World War I took place in the context of a debate concerning the end of the ascendant period of capitalism and its entry into the period of 'war and revolution'. However, since then throughout more than fifty years of triumphant counter-revolution, and precisely because of the counter-revolution, revolutionary theory has lacked the breadth and depth of insight which would have been necessary to understand the transformations world reality has undergone.

Today, at the end of this ideological tunnel, it is unfortunately too often the case that the different currents claiming to be part of the revolutionary proletarian movement are still divided between those who have an excessive relish for 'new implications' or a 'new reality' (marxism has been superseded) and those who maintain a religious attachment to old texts and ideas in reaction to the former tendency (cf. the 'Bordigists' of the International Communist Party with their cry of 'nothing new under the sun'; their 'invariability' of the revolutionary programme since 1848). Between these two poles but falling simultaneously into both currents, we find the Trotskyists sticking to the last letter of Trotsky's 'Transitional Programme' yet ready to follow every new faddish theory, (self-management, neo-capitalism, third worldism), as soon as it becomes clear that such theories can help win a few recruits. The result of this is that the concept of 'decadence', of which Marx only gave a rough outline, still remains an idea too hazy and surrounded by confusion for us to have avoided going over its definition at the outset of this study.

The superstructure

It may seem illogical to begin this 'confrontation with reality' by analysing the superstructure of capitalism (ideology, politics, social conflict), and not the economy, the first being in the final analysis a mere product of the latter. However, we will use this method in order to make our argument easier to follow. Indeed, while it is in general easy to recognise in modern capitalism the superstructural manifestations of a decadent epoch (every modern moralist feels obliged to talk from time to time of the 'crisis of civilisation', etc.), we rarely find a clear and lucid analysis of the underlying economic process. Consequently, the majority of explanations of our 'crisis of civilisation' do not go beyond idealist empiricism. By examining initially the 'superstructure', not only do we make the study simpler to understand by beginning with the most simple aspects; but, in order to solve the economic problem later we can enlarge an important argument here, thereby achieving the coherence vital to any scientific enquiry.

The ideological sphere

We cannot enter fully into a study of the links between the dominant ideology and the life of capitalism in the last decades here. We can simply establish the extent of decomposition of the dominant ideology.

It is hard to specify what constitutes capitalist ideology as such: firstly, because it has absorbed elements of the ideological heritage common to class societies for thousands of years. Secondly, under such a blindly mechanical system, the dependence of social relations vis-a-vis the means of production is such that ideology as a means of preserving these relations has not played such a central role as in the past, even if it remains extremely important. One can nevertheless, affirm that 'the work ethic', 'the glorification of social progress', 'confidence in and respect for institutions' or 'faith in the capitalist future' constitute the foundations of the dominant ideology. All these values have been violently eroded over the last fifty years as a result of the atrocities of capitalist life. It is more and more difficult to sing the praises and to glorify the values of a society which in fifty years has seen 100 million people killed as a result of wars whose uselessness has become more and more obvious; a society which shows itself to be incapable of allowing two men out of three to obtain the most elementary means of subsistence; a society in which the two greatest economic powers spend on arms alone the equivalent of the income of one third of humanity; a society in which in the most privileged areas of the planet, the price of the right not to die of hunger is a monstrous dehumanisation of daily life.

The recourse to gigantic works of ideology by the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, etc...(phenomena which can be compared with the cults of divinisation of the emperors of decadent Rome and of the monarchs of late feudalism); the crisis of the Church; the difficulties of capitalism in abandoning methods of teaching which have for a long time been ill-adapted to its technical needs; as well as the crisis of the university, the main centre of the ruling ideology (cf. 'Le mouvement etudiant' and 'Critique' in Revolution Internationale, old Series, no 3), all these are acute expressions of the first symptom of decadence: the decomposition of ideology.

This decomposition has over the last twelve years or more appeared in a spectacular fashion among youth. The present generation's disgust of the modern world, which results in various attempts to take flight in a kind of 'marginalism' or attitude of confrontation, has been dealt with thousands of times by the newspapers and media. This 'leap forward' has actually come rather late, (more than fifty years after 1914 and the revolutionary waves of 1917-23). And one reason for this is the constant time-lag between ideological forms and the evolution of socio-economic reality. It was necessary to await the arrival of a generation which has not lived through World War 2 or suffered the violent blows of the counter-revolution which followed the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. Also, this late development can be explained by the economic stability which the system enjoyed as a result of reconstruction after World War 2. The first signs of weakness were not felt until a few years ago, in particular among the young, the first social layer to be affected by problems of employment.

Philosophically, there is less and less room for ideas of making society more 'harmonious'. Intellectuals today either see themselves as revolutionaries or are disillusioned, pessimistic and indifferent. Obscurantism and mysticism have again become fashionable (cf. Revolution Internationale, old Series, no 6).

In the sphere of art, decadence has manifested itself in a particularly violent way, and it would take a long time to discuss the evolution of art faced with a world that has become an aberration. As in other periods of decadence, art, if it does not stagnate in an eternal repetition of past forms, seeks to take up a stance against the existing order, or is very often the expression of a cry of horror.

When the world of ideas undergoes such upheavals it is the sign that something is breaking down at the level of material production.

The social sphere

With the decline of capitalism, conflicts increase between factions of the ruling class. Although the exacerbation of competition between capitals within one nation is at times mitigated by concentration (which may reach the point at which the state takes control of the whole productive process), competition at the level of the world market has increased to a point of insanity:

  1914-18:  20 million dead   1939-45:  50 million dead.

Since World War 2, through the medium of national liberation wars, the war between different capitalist blocs has never stopped and has brought with it millions more deaths, sacrifices on the altar of world domination. Today the capitalists are unable to extract enough profit to be able to divide up the world on a co-operative basis. The decadence of previous societies led to the devastation of whole countries; today, the whole planet is threatened with destruction.

Development of struggles of the exploited class

In the nineteenth century the struggles of the working class generally were of a reformist nature, that is to say they sought to ameliorate the condition of the class within the system (the Paris Commune, in that it was dramatically revolutionary, was more an 'accident of history' than a sign of the times). During the course of these struggles, the proletariat acted essentially, and almost solely, as an exploited class. With the outbreak of World War I these conflicts underwent a radical transformation both in their extent and their content. The movement which developed was no longer confined to a few factories or to one town. The whole of Europe was set alight by the most powerful proletarian movement of all time. Its content was no longer the reform of the system but its radical overthrow. The Russian fraction of the world proletariat managed to destroy the apparatus of the bourgeois state and momentarily seize power for itself.

After three years of the war, capitalism had clearly proven its historic inability to continue to assure the progress of humanity. Simultaneously the proletariat transformed its struggle from one of an exploited class into a revolutionary struggle which for the first time in history, and on a world scale, represented the candidature of an exploited class for the leadership of humanity. Since that time, everything has had to change on the 'social' terrain of capitalism.

The revolutionary wave of 1917-23 was defeated and the Russian proletariat, isolated and alone, was strangled by the hands of some of its own leaders. But, despite the weight of the defeat and the confusion sown for decades by the Soviet experience, the 'proletarian menace', far from having disappeared remains a fact of life in capitalist society. Asserting itself in sporadic, isolated, proletarian uprisings, and through its day to day struggles, the working class represents a formidable presence throughout the last fifty years of history: all the states of the world have indeed become organs in defence of the workers, in other words, organs for ensuring the strict containment of the revolutionary class. The old forms of working class organisation, the unions, have become an essential element integrated within the state apparatus to assist in the containment of the revolutionary class.

And if the 'prosperity' which followed World War 2 has led some people to believe that 'the class struggle is over', the new elan of workers' struggles following 1968 throughout the world has forcefully reminded everyone of the continued existence of the revolutionary working class and  announced that mankind is on the brink of the most important revolutionary wave in history.

The political sphere

The strengthening of the state is one of the most striking manifestations of decadence in past societies. It is also one of the principal characteristics of capitalism since 1914. State capitalism, which is actually the most senile form of the system, but which the capitalists and bureaucrats the world over take pleasure in calling 'socialism', is simply the ultimate expression of this tendency.

The state played an important role in the early days of industrial capitalism at the time of the primitive accumulation of capital. This has led some pundits to assert that modern state capitalism, particularly in the underdeveloped countries, is the sign of a new development of world capitalism. However, the least amount of historical understanding enables one to see why the statism of our time has nothing in common with the timely interventions of the bourgeois state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In this century, statism is no longer a subsidiary aspect of the system but a continuous and irreversible process. Its basis is no longer rooted in the struggle against the hangovers of pre-capitalist, feudal relations but in capitalism's struggle against its own inner contradictions. The direct causes of the strengthening of the state in our epoch express all the difficulties which result from the definite inability of capitalist relations of production to adapt to the development of the productive forces. In effect, the state has attained the measure of its power today because it is the only capitalist institution capable of taking charge of companies in deficit; realising the economic centralisation and the 'rationalisation' which the intensification of international competition on a saturated market imposes on each nation; prosecution of wars and the preparation for wars, which has become the prime necessity for the survival of each nation; assuring the cohesion of social mechanisms which are constantly threatening to fall apart.

In short, the task for the state has become one of holding together by force (of which it has a monopoly) an edifice which of itself tends more and more towards collapse.

As to state capitalism in the underdeveloped countries, there is no possibility that this is a less senile form of the system than in the advanced countries. These countries are not 'young capitalisms', but the weakest sectors of world capital. Thus they feel the internal contradictions of world capitalism with greater violence, and thus they must more quickly and more energetically assume the statified form of the system.

The case of the Soviet Union does not contradict the decadent character of statified capitalism. Here, as elsewhere, we have the exhaustion of the limits imposed by capitalism, and the draconian measures which this calls forth on the part of each nation if it is to survive on the world market. This forms the basis for the strengthening of the state. Here, as elsewhere, the weakness or non-existence of private capital have been the principal accelerators of the process. The fact that these two principal factors are, in the case of Russia, the result of a situation engendered by the failure of a proletarian revolution does not in any way modify the essentials of the problem. These particularities only explain one thing: why the Soviet Union was the first country to concretise what has become a general tendency throughout the world.

Decomposition of ideology, of the dominant values; discord of social relations at all levels; antagonisms that reach the level of periodic paroxysms as much within the ruling class as between the ruling class and the exploited class; reinforcement of the apparatus of coercion, the state, and integration of the whole of social life under its direct control; we find in modern capitalism all the traits of the decomposition of a civilisation, all the characteristics of a system in decadence.

But what about the infrastructure, at the level of material production ? As we have shown, such phenomena of crisis have never appeared without being accompanied by economic decadence. From the marxist point of view, problems appearing in the superstructure of society are in the final analysis only signs of a crisis in material production.

From 1914 to 1939 the statistics, as we shall see, were very clear and few could deny that this was a period of stagnation. However, since the end of World War 2 the course of history would seem to have changed profoundly; the symptoms of a 'superstructural' decadence continued to develop but according to existing statistics capitalism has undergone an unprecedented phase of growth.

Has marxism perished in the barbarism of World War 2 ? Are we living under a 'neo-capitalism' ? Or are these manifestations of crisis merely warning signs of a decadence which is still a long way off ?

From 1953 to 1969 the gross national product of the United States (calculated by volume and per inhabitant) multiplied by 1.4. Similarly the GNP in Italy and Germany multiplied by 2.1; the French GNP doubled, and the Japanese multiplied by 3.8. Where then is the 'decadence' of capitalism?

Even if a large part of this production is used only for military purposes; even if the gap between industrialised countries and underdeveloped countries grows, it seems obvious that 'the productive forces have not stopped growing'. Even if the evolution of political structures indicates the decomposition of the dominant value system, the development of class antagonisms as well as conflicts within the ruling class are all evidence of a 'crisis of civilisation' - a decline of capitalism at the superstructural level - it seems that many marxists find it difficult to speak of 'decadence in the capitalist system' when they see so much 'economic expansion'.

Marx wrote: "No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have developed..." (Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

A certain way of interpreting this passage led Trotsky, for example, to write at the beginning of his Transitional Programme (1938):"The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Mankind's productive forces stagnate".

Trotsky was describing a reality that was more or less borne out by the statistics of the time. But apart from the realities of 1938, to prove that humanity has entered an age of social revolution and therefore the phase of capitalist decadence, must one hold that the productive forces have definitively stopped growing? And when twenty years later the same statistics show a relatively strong growth in world production must one then come to the opposite conclusion? In short, for a society to have irreversibly entered its period of decline, must the productive forces have entirely stopped growing? The problem raised by Marx in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is in fact the question of defining the economic conditions in which the passage from one form of society to another becomes possible.

Marx's answer can be summarised in this way: the relations of production which men enter into for the social production of their means of existence and which constitute the real basis of their society, correspond to a given degree of development of the productive forces. In the course of history, the full development of these forces necessitates important and repeated changes in these relations of production.

For a social form based on new relations of production to be viable, a corresponding evolution in the productive forces must have taken place. If these forces are not 'sufficiently developed', there is no objective possibility for a new system of production to arise and survive. The problem is to determine what 'sufficiently developed' entails, and what is the maximum development of productive forces for which the old 'social order... is sufficient' and which once attained makes a new society possible and necessary. The marxist response does not refer to any particular quantitative level, determined without reference to the economic mechanisms (zero growth included). On the contrary, it refers to a qualitative level of relationship which links the relations of production themselves and the development of the productive forces.

"At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within which they have operated hitherto...Then begins an era of social revolution." (Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, our emphasis).

It is the appearance of this definitive and irreversible 'conflict' and not a halt in the development of the productive forces which opens 'the era' of the decadence of the old society. Marx states this criterion clearly: "From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters." (Ibid).

Marx's statement must be understood in this sense: a society never expires before the development of the productive forces has begun to be definitively checked by the existing relations of production. According to the marxist view, the period of a society's decadence cannot be characterised by a total and permanent halt in the growth of the productive forces but by the definitive slackening of this growth. Absolute halts in the growth of the productive forces do, in fact, appear during the phases of decadence. But these stoppages appear only momentarily in the capitalist system because the economy cannot function without a constantly increasing accumulation of capital. They are the violent convulsions which regularly accompany the progression of decadence.

All social changes are the result of the deepening and prolonged collision of the relations of production with the development of the productive forces. If we defended the hypothesis of the definitive and permanent halt in this development, the deepening of this contradiction could only be demonstrated if the outer bounds of the existing property relations were 'absolutely' receding. However, it happens that the characteristic movement of the different periods of decadence in history (including the capitalist system) tends rather in the direction of expanding these frontiers up to their final limits than towards their restriction.

Under the aegis of the state and under the pressure of economic and social necessities, the system's carcass swells while casting off everything that proves superfluous to the relations of production, everything not strictly necessary to the system's survival. The system is reinforced but at its last limits.

The freeing of the slaves under the Late Roman Empire; the freeing of the serfs at the end of the Middle Ages; the partial liberties which the declining monarchy had to grant to the new bourgeois cities; the reinforcing of the central power of the crown, and the elimination of the 'nobility of the robe' completely dominated by the king; and likewise, in the capitalist framework, the attempts at economic planning; the efforts to try to relieve the burden of national, economic frontiers; the tendency to replace bourgeois parasites with efficient salaried 'managers' of capital; policies such as the New Deal and the continued manipulation of certain mechanisms of the law of value - all are evidence of this tendency to expand the juridical framework by laying bare the relations of production. There is no halt in the dialectical movement after a society has reached its apogee. This movement is qualitatively transformed but it does not end. The intensification of the contradictions inherent in the old society necessarily continues and for this reason the development of the imprisoned productive forces must continue even if it is at the slowest rate.

From an economic standpoint, what characterises the decadence of a given social form is therefore:

- An actual slowing down of the growth of the productive forces with respect to the rates which would have been technically and objectively possible without the obstacle of the relations of production. This slow-down must have an inevitable and irreversible character. It must be caused specifically by the perpetuation of the relations of production which hold the society together. The discrepancy between actual development and possible development of the productive forces can only widen. This discrepancy thus appears increasingly clear to the social classes. 

- The appearance of increasingly profound and widespread crises. These crises create the subjective conditions necessary for social revolution. In the course of these crises the power of the ruling class is profoundly weakened, and through the objective intensification of the necessity for its intervention, the revolutionary class finds the preliminary bases for its strength and unity.Our problem is therefore to find out whether these two phenomena characterise the capitalist system in the period from World War I to today.

Slow-down in growth of the productive forces since 1914

While from 1850 to 1913 the volume of world trade increased by more than tenfold [1] [10], "from 1919 to 1936-38, world trade increased by only 7.4 per cent (1913 = 100 per cent; 1936-38 = 107.4 per cent), and the level of trade in industrial products was lower in 1936-38 (92.2 per cent) than on the eve of World War I. It must be added that in 1950, the world economy after great difficulty caught up with the 1938 trade level; in other words, world trade stagnated from 1938 to 1950". [2] [11]

From 1914-1929 During World War I, production in the European countries decreased by more than one third and world production by 10 per cent. Never before had capitalism experienced such a decline in production .

Following the war and up until the 1929 depression, capitalism enjoyed a period of prosperity due to the reconstruction of the economies destroyed by the war and the completion of the expansion of the two young capitalist countries - the United States and Japan. But Europe lost its predominant place in the capitalist world and would never really recover from the collapse caused by 'the great war'. In spite of reconstruction, in 1929 Englandhad not yet regained its pre-war level of exports. Its position as world banker slowly eroded. Germany, the hardest hit, collapsed or stagnated. [3] [12]Compared with the relative decline of Europe, the United States and Japan enjoyed an undeniable prosperity. Indebted to Europe at the beginning of the war, the United States came out of the war as Europe's creditor and, in addition, increased its production by almost 15 per cent. But this expansion was already suffering from the effects of a lack of markets: the sum of all the positive balance of payments during those ten years (1919-1929) was less than the amount of capital mobilised a short time before for the extension of the railways, (which was practically completed in 1919). [4] [13] From 1919 to 1929, although the index of industrial production rose by almost 60 per cent, the number of workers decreased from 8.4 million to 8.3 million. From 1910 to 1924, 13 million acres of cultivated land reverted to prairieland, grassland or grazing land. In addition, the United States could no longer rapidly expand into new territories but only into zones already conquered by the warring powers, which meant 'dividing' those markets. The changes in the distribution of Argentina's imports from the big powers from 1919 to 1929 is, in this respect, particularly significant. [5] [14]
The American share almost doubled while the English share decreased by almost half. The same thing happened with American expansion into Latin American and Canada. Japanese foreign expansion developed in the same way . In British India from 1913 to 1929, the British share of its imports fell from 64.2 per cent to 42.8 per cent while the Japanese share rose from 2.6 per cent to 9.8 per cent [6] [15].

From 1929 to 1938 The Great Depression of 1929 was to the whole world what World War I was to Europe. This time world production fell by one third. The decline was three times greater than during the war; recovery would not be as rapid. World non-military production did not regain its 1929 levels until World War 2. Figures for world trade have already been given. Production in the leading world power collapsed.
Only the countries which had begun massive armaments production (Japan, Germany and the USSR) experienced a certain growth in their production.In view of the two extraordinary drops in production rates, linked together by a period of reconstruction and followed by a period of stagnation until World War 2, it is undeniably clear that the growth of the productive forces was drastically held back from 1914 to 1940.

But does this slowdown mean that capitalism has definitively entered its decadent phase or is this a serious but temporary slowdown in a general growth cycle which was only interrupted at Sarajevo the better to begin again at Yalta?

---

 

World War I marked a definitive turning point in two particularly significant aspects of capitalist expansion: imperialist expansion, and the proportional growth of the working class in society.

The end of capitalism's imperialist expansion

After its triumphant progress in the nineteenth century, its regular and irreversible conquest of one country after another, the imperialist expansion of the capitalist metropoles came to an almost total standstill at the beginning of this century. Capitalism had penetrated all countries and the different capitalist powers had entirely divided up the world among themselves.

World War I demonstrated the impossibility for any power to find a zone still untouched by capitalism in order to assure its expansion. Germany, which arrived relatively late for the 'conquest' was forced to provoke history's first world war in order to carve out a place for itself commensurate with its economic power. After the war, Japan and the United States, as we have seen, could assure their expansion only at Europe's expense.

After 1914, the world would be divided and re-divided according to the balance of power, but no really new geographic expansion could be carried out. Economic growth in capitalism's ascendant phase was characterised by the increasing importance of colonial markets in world trade. The importance of these markets continued to grow statistically from 1914-18. From 1914 to 1929 it only slowed down; from 1929 to 1938 it even slightly revived (see graph below). Only in the course of World War 2 was this tendency statistically totally reversed. But, in fact, this was only the result of a process begun in 1914.  The relative importance of the trade of third world countries during the inter-war period is mainly due to the dizzying fall of trade among the industrialised countries.  

The 1914 war, in signalling the end of world capitalism's era of imperialist expansion, marked the beginning of a process of rapid shrinking of markets outside the capitalist system.

 

The end of the percentage growth of the working class

It is estimated that the proportion of the world population engaged in capitalist production was 10 per cent in 1850. This proportion reached nearly 30 per cent in 1914. But since the beginning of this century this expansion has greatly declined in the industrialised countries. The number of German workers rose from 8 million in 1882 to 14 million in 1925, but their proportion in the working population, after having reached 50 per cent in 1895, fell to 45 per cent in 1925. [1] [22] "What was true of Germany was also true on an international scale. The working class percentage stabilised itself at round about 50 per cent; in England it was rather more, in France and Germany rather less." [2] [23] This marked decline in the expansion of the 'principal productive force' continues up to the present time.In the most industrialised countries of the world, the proportion of "industrial workers, including construction workers", according to INSEE [3] [24], in 1968 was only 47-48 per cent for Germany and England, 45 per cent for the whole of the European Economic Community, 35 per cent for the United States, USSR and Japan. These figures should be relatively higher since they exclude workers engaged in transportation, agriculture and fishing. But they undoubtedly prove that the rate of expansion of the working class has greatly declined since the end of the ascendant phase of the system after 1914.

In the underdeveloped countries this decline is even more pronounced. From 1950 to 1960 in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the number of new wage earners in every hundred inhabitants was 9 times lower than in the developed countries.Until 1914, the population effectively integrated into the capitalist economy grew faster than the world population. That was during the ascendant phase of capitalism. This tendency has, since then, been definitively reversed.

Growth since World War 2

There was, therefore, a profound change in capitalism after 1914 and especially after 1929. Without doubt, the fundamental characteristic of this change is the end of imperialist expansion. Imperialism was, in effect, the principal outlet for 'ascendant' capitalism. This outlet absorbed the relatively small part of capitalist production, the surplus value destined to be reinvested, the realisation of which is indispensable for capital accumulation. We need only observe the radical upheaval which accompanied the end of imperialist expansion: two world wars and a crisis as profound as the one in 1929-38 in less than thirty years.

The period which World War 2 initiated cannot be situated outside the framework of the conditions which existed in 1914. As we have seen, colonial, or semi-colonial, markets greatly declined in importance during this period.

Many have considered this phase of expansion to be quite different from the period of quasi-stagnation in the 30s. The Trotskyists of the '4th International' have even used the pompous term, 'Neo-Capitalism', to characterise and thus indicate the importance they attach to the change in the economy.

In a few instances, growth rates since World War 2 have caught up with or even surpassed those attained during the ascendant phase of capitalism before 1913. This is the case for countries such as France or Japan. It is, however, far from being the case for the greatest industrial power, the United States (with 50 per cent of world production at the beginning of the 50s, [4] [25] a 4.6 per cent average annual rate of growth between 1957 and 1965 as opposed to 6.9 per cent between 1850 and 1880 [5] [26]. But the real nature of this growth is radically different from the expansion which was completed by 1913.

The principal fields of economic expansion since World War 2 have been: post-war reconstruction; permanent and massive armaments production; and better exploitation of old markets.

Only the 'better exploitation of old markets' is common to the two periods, but is is not a new development in the history of capitalism. Thus we should consider the major importance that this policy has acquired in the epoch when the discovery of really new markets is impossible.

Even though the third world markets have lost importance due to their insufficiency, their exploitation has, nonetheless, been continued as effectively as possible. Likewise, those powers still possessing internal 'extra-capitalist' markets (in particular, a still backward agriculture as in Japan, France and Italy) have proceeded to systematically integrate them since the war. But unlike the nineteenth century, this type of outlet had become much too limited for the needs of the 'natural' expansion of capitalism. It is like the life cycle of the water-lily whose size doubles each day : while it may have required a relatively long time to start growing and to eventually cover half of the pool, it needs only one more day to reach, in a single spurt of growth, the outer limits of its field of expansion. Each day's growth requires the area of the pool to be double what it was the day before. But since the total surface of the pool is limited in advance, the area which remains diminishes at the same rate as its needs of expansion increase.

At the beginning of the century, the mass of outlets which capitalism needed to assure one year of growth was more than six times less than that which is necessary for a year's production today. This ratio would be even larger if capitalism had had the same ability to expand after 1913 as before. But simultaneously, with the greater demand for new markets, the external outlets have contracted rapidly. Because of this, capitalism has had to resort to the palliatives of destruction and arms production to try to compensate for rapid losses in 'living space'.

A 'reconstruction economy' never appeared during ascendant capitalism. The inter-imperialist conflicts of that phase had nothing in common with the wars of the twentieth century. Those efforts of destruction never touched the centres of production. There was no 'reconstruction' because there was no real destruction. As for the production of armaments and military costs, their volume as well as their proportion of the national product of the great powers in the nineteenth century can hardly be compared with what they have become under modern capitalism.

"Hohenzollern Germany was regarded as definitely militaristic, and in the years which immediately preceded the first world war she greatly increased her military budget, which reached its culminating point in peace-time with what was then (1913) the huge sum of £100 million , inclusive of naval expenditure. But even then it represented only rather less than 4 per cent of the total national income which was then no less than £2,500 million." (Our emphasis). [6] [27]

There is no possible comparison with the 10 per cent of the GNP devoted to military expenditures currently reached and often surpassed by the United States since the era of 'peace' after Word War 2, nor with the 20 per cent for the USSR.

Capitalism in the last decades, far from constituting a renewal of the ascendant phase which ended in 1913, appears instead to be the logical 'synthetic' outcome of the thirty years of decline which preceded it.

In effect, capitalism 'discovered' during these years of stagnation the economic 'benefits' of reconstruction and production for destruction. 

The self-destruction of Europe during World War I was accompanied by a 15 per cent growth in American production. Amid the chaos of the old continent, the United States discovered an important outlet; Europe had to import masses of consumer goods, means of production and arms from America. Once the war ended, the reconstruction of Europe proved to be the new and important outlet. Through massive destruction with an eye to reconstruction, capitalism has discovered a way out, dangerous and temporary but effective, for its new problems of finding outlets.

During the first war, the amount of destruction was not 'sufficient'; military operations only directly affected an industrial sector representing less than one-tenth of world production (around 5-7 per cent) [1] [34]. In 1929, world capitalism again ran into a crisis situation.

As if the lesson had been well-learned the amount of destruction accomplished in World War 2 was far more intense and extensive. "All in all therefore during the second world war almost a third of the total industrial sector of the world was drawn into the direct arena of military action." [2] [35]

Russia, Germany, Japan, Great-Britain, France and Belgium violently suffered the effects of a war which for the first time had the conscious aim of systematically destroying the existing industrial potential. The 'prosperity' of Europe and Japan after the war seemed already foreseen by the end of the war, (Marshall Plan, etc...).

Contrary to common opinion, 'reconstruction' does not stop when the ruined nation regains its pre-war levels of production: reconstruction does not only involve the directly productive goods but also all the infra-structures and means of life destroyed during the war, even though their reconstruction is not immediately necessary in order to attain pre-war production levels. Reconstruction is never undertaken with pre-war technology; important progress in productivity and the concentration of capital has occurred during the war. Also, the fact that the former levels of production are regained does not necessarily mean that the same mass of value will again be tied up in productive capital. Finally, during their destruction those countries concerned became industrially backward in relation to the other powers. Their reconstruction cannot be considered completed until the moment when they regain not their former levels o production, but ones which make them again internationally competitive.

In this sense, reconstruction characterised the growth of the post-World War 2 period right up to the 1960s and not just to the 1950s as is often supposed.

Such an overview necessarily demands an analysis of military production and thus of the more general problem of non-productive labour.

The panorama of crises presented by capitalism during the period 1914-46 requires no commentary: two world wars and a depression on the scale of 1929, in less than thirty years, speak eloquently enough. Two remarks may, nonetheless, be of use. Because it was an economic crisis in the most traditional meaning of the term, the depression of 1929-34 is often cited as the crisis of modern capitalism. But the two world wars also constituted crises of the system in no way less profound. In the same way as the economic depression of the inter-war period, the world conflicts expressed in the most brutal fashion the incapacity of capitalist relations of production to continue to reproduce themselves in the normal way. 'Pure' economic crises eliminate excess capital through bankruptcy; war achieves the same end through physical destruction and armed violence. But in both cases, the content is the same: capital is forced to destroy itself under the pressure of the contradictions of its own mode of functioning. In both cases, the system gives rise to violent convulsions provoked by the definitive inability of the dominant relations of production to adapt to the needs and potentialities of society. In a world dominated by capital, there is nothing which is not economic: these 'international political crises' called world wars, far from being extra-economic phenomena, have only been the barbarous manifestation of the most profound economic crises.

Unlike the crises of the ascendant phase of capitalism, the convulsions of decadent capitalism bring to the fore a general and accentuated movement of systematic deterioration. In this very fact lies the proof of their different nature. The crisis of 1929 brought about a fall in production greater than that caused by World War I. World War 2 was far more destructive than World War I, and was a disaster incomparably greater than that of 1929. This progression in intensity indicates the irreversible character of a general movement of decline.

From 1914 until the end of World War 2 the importance and meaning of these convulsions became more and more obvious. But the absence of serious crises during the twenty years following World War 2 was enough to convince commentators of the definitive disappearance of crises within capitalism, and consequently to relegate the crises of the preceding period to the never-never land of "crises of growth".

And yet, in the period immediately after World War 2, capitalism began a new cycle on foundations which were no more sound than those which had precipitated the war. Economic expansion depended more than ever on two crutches which had just demonstrated their inherent weaknesses in terms of any long-term solution to the crisis. These crutches were the mechanisms of "reconstruction" and production for military ends.

Of course, the destruction was far more extensive this time, and the reconstruction would last longer than it did after World War I. War became permanent through constantly maintained local conflicts, and the production of war material achieved higher levels in "peace time" than during the two world conflagrations. The state learned better how to handle the effects of internal contradictions which progressively undermine the system, and tended to emerge more and more as the system's controlling force. In short, capital had begun a new phase of its decline with an array of particularly effective palliatives, but the purely palliative nature of these measures has never been concealed for a moment.

The limits of reconstruction

This point has been dealt with at length in the article "La crise", which appeared in Révolution Internationale (old series) nos. 6 and 7, and we will not repeat it here. Rather we will content ourselves with a review of some of the principal economic phenomena which, since the second half of the 60s, unequivocally demonstrate the limits of these palliatives.

The completion of the reconstruction of the European countries, and of Japan, around 1965 gave rise to profound dislocation in the international economic channels which had presided over capitalist "expansion" since the war. All the international exchange mechanisms entered into crisis. The former outlets for American industry suddenly began to display a rude, commercial aggression. In 1967 the United States recorded its first balance of trade deficit since 1893. In short, what had for decades propped up the system was now itself exhausted, and with no possible remedy anywhere in sight. The cycle whereby capitalism had "developed" since the beginning of its decline (crisis - war - reconstruction), had once again arrived at a fatal turning point: the end of reconstruction.

The limits of the economic stimulus of military production

We saw in the previous sections the "virtues" of the outlet constituted by military needs and the importance of this factor in the capitalist economy since World War 2. The limits of this kind of outlet, universally recognised as one of the major "underpinnings of capitalist expansion" in our era, must be analysed if one wishes to understand the basis for the inevitability of the system's next major crisis. We dwell at length on this subject not only because it forms part of the answer to the problem of crises during the decadence of capitalism, but also because it is one of the most spectacular illustrations of a particularly significant phenomenon of this decadence: the precipitous development of non-productive sectors at the expense of the productive sector.

The general confusion which prevails with regard to military production is not foreign to our attempt to clarify the problem: it is indeed not rare to hear "marxists" claim that any distinction between production such as that of armaments and the means of production or means of subsistence corresponds to "ethical criteria" completely foreign to marxist economic criteria [1] [74].

Armaments: a pure loss for global capital

Capital lives only for and by its self-expansion, that is to say from that process which begins with the exploitation of living labour - the extraction of surplus value - and concludes with the increase of capital due to the transformation of a part of this surplus value into new capital.

Capital is not synonymous with accumulated wealth - even if it is also that. Its specific characteristic lies in its capacity to extract surplus labour and in the goal of this exploitation: the growth of capital. Capital is first and foremost a social relationship.

But armaments have the unique characteristic of possessing a use value which does not allow them to enter, in any form, into the process of production. A washing machine can contribute to the reproduction of labour power, just like a loaf of bread or a shirt. Through the content of their use value, these goods can serve as capital in the form of variable capital. A computer, a ton of iron, or a steam engine, insofar as they are means or objects of labour can function as capital in the form of constant capital. But arms can only destroy or rust (we are discounting for the moment the indirect productive effect of arms production - cf the second part of this article).

Obviously, arms can furnish capital by metabolism. Once sold, they are transformed into money, and with the sum obtained, the capitalist who sold them can buy means of production or subsistence. But the arms themselves do not become capital, for all that. The buyer of arms pays with capital and receives in exchange a product which can never become capital. What global capital earns in the person of the seller of arms is lost in the person of their purchaser. The global result of the operation is zero.

Let us take as an example Marcel Dassault, one of the world's leading arms manufacturers, who sells arms to foreign countries and also to the French state. Consider an example of the first type of sale: Mirage jets sold to Peru. Dassault receives in payment a sum of money, which he can use to replace the capital expended and to increase the capital of his enterprise through the purchase of new machines and new quantities of labour power. For that faction of capital represented by Dassault the exchange is a normal and productive affair. For French capital, the same holds true.

What does this exchange represent, however, for Peruvian capital? To get the necessary money for the purchase of these Mirages, Peru must, for example, sell an equivalent quantity of fish-meal. It could have used this value to increase its own power of exploitation, its capital (fish-meal factories, or fishing boats). Instead, Peru has transformed that value into supersonic fighter-bombers. Such bombers might inflate the pride of the "progressive" military clique in power, but the national capital will never be able to use them directly to extract a penny of surplus value (short of establishing a civil transport service of limited profitability). For Peruvian capital, then, this operation is paid for by a destruction of capital.

For world capital, the unproductive nature of armaments has not disappeared: it has simply been displaced from one point to another within its own sphere. Whatever the exchanges that have taken place, the fact remains that somewhere in the world productive labour has been sterilised as far as the development of capital goes. The place where the weight of that unproductive activity makes itself felt changes nothing about the problem; it is not because armaments cross a national border that their nature in relation to global capital has been transformed.

Now consider the second case: Dassault sells his Mirages to the French state. For the seller of armaments, the operation is still just as profitable and productive for his capital. But for French capital as a whole, it no longer is. Whether through indirect taxes, taxes on capital or taxes on labour, it is always surplus value extracted from living labour that the state, Dassault's customer, uses to buy the Mirages. For the national capital, it is a question of wasted surplus value.

Therefore, each time that the national capital sacrifices, through this waste of surplus value, a certain amount of labour for the production of arms consumed by the state, there is that much more surplus value which will be unproductively consumed and which will not expand at all the value of capital as a whole.

It is common to counter this analysis with the idea that the concept of global capital is a pure abstraction, without any real existence, which cannot be used in an argument concerning the problem of the profitability of any kind of production. According to this argument, each capitalist or each nation worries very little about ‘global capital'. It would therefore be absurd to attempt to define an economic totality on the basis of a sum of antagonistic entities.

The fact that capital, as a global phenomenon, lives only in a divided form does not imply that it does not exist at the global level. The totality of the thieves in one city live in constant competition with each other and the law of their environment is none other than that of the strongest thief. This in no way changes the fact that this totality exists in itself, and that it has its own interests (to extend the example, with regard to the police). The fact that it cannot exist for itself, that is with a collective and unified consciousness of its interests and acting in relation to those interests in no way changes the problem. Global capital is always a sum of antagonistic capitals. But it exists nonetheless with general laws which act exclusively at its own level, with its own phenomena (world war, world crises) which impose themselves on each of its fractions and over which no fraction of capital has a real control.

Under capitalism the domination of capital extended itself to the whole of the planet a long time age. Every commodity today contains labour and primary materials from every corner of the world. In such a state of affairs, it is first of all the reality of global capital which determines the reality of each of its parts, and not the other way around.

Massive military production is a phenomenon which, because of its origin, its development and its effects, concerns the world capitalist economy. To attempt to judge its nature outside the concept of global capital is quite simply a renunciation of any analysis.

In order to analyse the problem of the reproduction of capital, Marx does not hesitate to put himself on this terrain:

"In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing secondary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of the economy." (Marx, Capital, Book 1, p.581, London 1970)

This has nothing to do with any so-called theory of ultra-imperialism. It is a definition of the only objective terrain on which the fundamental phenomena of developed capitalism can be understood.

Certain individuals nonetheless accept the concept of global capital (a concept which can be applied both at the world level and at the level of national capital), without accepting the possibility of production which is simultaneously profitable for one capitalist or a fraction of global capital but not profitable for global capital as a whole. This is an objection which might be encapsulated by the American witticism: ‘What's good for General Motors is good for the United States'. It is thus imagined that if military production is productive for one capitalist, it is also productive for global capital.

Just as in the case of the first objection, here again the contradictory reality of capital is being ignored. The fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system, that which underlies all its contradictions, is that which opposes the ever-increasingly universal, socialised character of the production process, to its private, fragmented, property relations, on the basis of which the process takes place. In the first example, only the fragmented, divided aspect of capital is taken into consideration, while the global nature of capital is ignored. In this case, it is the inevitable antagonisms between capitals which is shunted aside, giving way to a harmonious vision of global capital without contradictions between its parts or between its parts and the whole. The conditions in which a particular capitalist realises his profits is obviously tied in the long run to those of capital as a whole. But things can develop in such a way that this tie becomes temporarily attenuated, to the point of making ‘what is bad' for the United States appear as ‘what is good for General Motors'! ( The classic example is that of the capitalist who produces consumer goods necessary for the working class: each general wage increase is for him, a supplementary condition for the realisation of a market, whereas it constitutes a threat to the rate of profit of capital as a whole.)

The inevitable disharmony which reigns in the private property system can only increase with the decline of the system. Thus, this phase gives rise to the development of state intervention with the aim of containing, through forced centralisation, the ever-increasing tendencies of disintegration.

There is then nothing surprising in the fact that the same criterion of profitability in the capitalist system gives different results when it is applied to a particular capitalist than when it is applied to global capital.

We must therefore explain why and how it is that the state, as the representative of national capital, maintains the capitalist sellers of armaments, while the production of armaments is ‘unproductive' for the national capital (leaving aside for the moment the possibility of transferring the costs to another state). And, first of all, it is necessary to define in a precise manner the marxist criterion of ‘productive' and ‘unproductive' labour.

 

Productive Labour and Unproductive Labour

Marx's answer can be summarised by the famous formula: "Labour which directly creates surplus value, that is to say, which expands capital, is productive." [1] [76]

This formulation is specific to the capitalist mode of production. It is distinct from that which applies to ‘the question of productive labour in general', when we study: "the labour process under its most simple aspect, common to all its historical forms, as a process between man and nature." [2] [77]

From this general viewpoint, historically, all labour is productive from the moment that it ends up in a product and that product corresponds to any human need. "In the labour process, therefore, man's activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, effects an alteration, designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon. This process disappears in the product; the latter is a use-value, nature's material adapted by a change of form to the wants of man. Labour has incorporated itself with its subject: the former is materialised, the latter transformed. That which in the labourer appeared as movement, now appears in the product as a fixed quality without motion. The blacksmith forges and the product is forging.

If we examine the whole process from the point of view of its result, the product, it is plain that both the instruments and the subject of labour, are means of production, and that the labour itself is productive labour." [3] [78]

Marx further explains: "This method of determining, from the standpoint of the labour-process alone, what is productive labour, is by no means directly applicable to the case of the capitalist process of production". (Marx, Ibid)

The productive process takes on, under capitalism, specific forms which no longer permit us to content ourselves with this first, almost tautological formulation. There are two reasons for this. The first appears when we look at capital from the viewpoint of labour. In capitalism, labour power is purchased by capital, of which it seems to become an integral part. This labour power can affirm its productive capacity only by restoring to capital a sum of value higher than which it receives from capital (wages). In order to be productive as living labour and not as mere part of capital, it is no longer sufficient for labour to produce any random value in any random quantity: it must create a ‘super value', a surplus value. The second reason becomes obvious if we look at living labour from the viewpoint of capital. The goal of capital is not to satisfy needs, but to produce profit, surplus value. This does not eliminate the first determination of productive labour, to the extent that capitalism produces commodities and therefore use values. But this determination becomes ‘insufficient'. Use value is no longer, as it was in previous systems, the basis of production; it remains only as something which must be tolerated, a necessary support for exchange value, but whose specific content is of no importance to the capitalist.

Thus, it is not sufficient, for the individual capitalist, for the labour he buys to concretise itself in any particular use value: that labour must expand his capital.

"Surplus value, the specific product of the capitalist process of production, is only created as a result of the exchange with productive labour. What constitutes its specific use-value for capital is not its particular useful character, any more than the particular useful qualities of the product in which it is materialised, but its character as the element which creates exchange-value (surplus value)." [4] [79]

"That labour alone is productive whose process is the same as the productive process of the consumption of labour power by capital or the capitalist." [5] [80]

In short, the way of determining productive labour under capitalism differs from the general determination which held true for previous systems by virtue of the difference which capitalism introduces at the level of ‘the productive process of the consumption of labour power'.

This difference does not reside in the actual extraction of surplus labour: the feudal lord or the slave owner of antiquity also disposed of the surplus labour of their serfs and slaves. What distinguishes surplus value from other forms of surplus labour is the fact that it is transformed into new capital and not consumed in a non-productive way as in antiquity or feudalism. It is only when this transformation of surplus value is completed that the expansion of capital has been achieved (the accumulation of capital). The problem of the possibility of this transformation is thus fundamental in the definition of productive labour in the capitalist system.

"The distinction between productive labour and unproductive labour is important with respect to accumulation, because the exchange against productive labour alone is one of the conditions for the reconversion of surplus-value into capital." [6] [81]

But it is at this level that most of the confusion about the problem of productive labour arises. In effect, the conditions for the transformation of surplus value differ depending on whether they involve the individual capitalist or global capital.

A capitalist consumes what his own enterprise produces only in exceptional cases. Each fraction of capital is only an atom within a network whose complexity increases at the same rate as the socialisation of production. Each capitalist has only the most fragmented consciousness of this network and has practically no control over it. Once a commodity has been produced, it plunges into commercial circuits and disappears from the sphere of the capitalist who produced it. What is important for the capitalist is to receive the monetary counterpart of the commodity which will permit him, in turn, to take from the productive circuit the goods necessary for the reconstitution and expansion of his capital.

It follows that for the individual capitalist, or in a more general way, a fraction of global capital, "... the fact that labour is productive has absolutely nothing to do with the determinant content of the labour, its particular utility or the particular use-value in which it is materialised". [7] [82]

Whatever the use value of his product might be, from the moment that he succeeds in realising their exchange value, his surplus value can be transformed into capital, the determination of productive labour is independent of the content of that labour.

Global capital, on the other hand, itself consumes the essential part of its product since it is constituted by all the capitalists. The use value content of what it produces directly conditions its possibilities of expansion and realisation.

"To accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product into capital. But we cannot except by a miracle, convert into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour-process (ie. means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the labourer (ie. means of subsistence). Consequently, a part of surplus-value must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity of those things required to replace the capital advanced. In one word, surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital." [8] [83]

From the viewpoint of global capital, the process of the general accumulation of capital - and this is the only point of view which can be taken into consideration when it is a question of judging the capitalist system - productive labour is that which creates surplus value and which is crystallised in use values which themselves can be productively consumed in the process of capital accumulation.

This why we assert that labour (living and dead) which goes into the production of goods such as arms (as well as luxury goods,etc) constitutes unproductive labour.

"The services that the capitalist buys voluntarily or involuntarily (through the state, etc) for his consumption because of their use-value, do not become factors of capital, any more than the commodities bought for his private consumption. Consequently, these do not constitute productive labour and their agents are not productive labourers." [9] [84]

Most of the confusion amongst marxists on the question of productive labour has two sources.

The first is that Marx mainly dealt with the problem from the viewpoint of the individual capitalist, or from the viewpoint of the worker as someone exploited by capital. Two reasons can explain Marx's insistence on this single aspect of the problem: the polemic he launched against J.B. Say and Bastiat, who located the problem on this terrain, and the relatively secondary importance of this problem in the course of the general development of capitalism at the time that Marx was writing. (Unproductive expenditures of capital took on really significant proportions only with the period begun by World War 1.) [10] [85]

The second source of confusion perhaps resides in the meaning of the term ‘surplus value'. Let us imagine a capitalist nation which in the course of a year produces only goods and services whose consumption is directly productive, that is to say, commodities entering directly into the productive process. (We therefore assume that, for example, there is no production of armaments or luxury goods.) At the end of the first year, the capitalists find themselves in possession of a mass of products which they dispose of to the exclusion of the rest of society: this is the mass of surplus value, the real surplus value of the global capital of the nation.

Let us further assume that at the end of this first year, they decide not to devote, as they have been doing up until then, all the extracted surplus value in the production of new productive goods. In keeping with their privileged situation, they agree to create luxury industries: in order to defend themselves from possible aggression from other nations, they decide to create a military industry. These two new industries are obviously going to function according to capitalist relations of production: wage labour, etc...[11] [86]

The problem is the following: what is the nature and origin of the profit which the capitalists of these new sectors are going to collect? Do the workers in these industries create surplus value? What is the relationship between the profit of the capitalists in this sector and the real surplus value of the productive sector?

The answer appears clearly as soon as one realises that all the production of these sectors is bought by capitalists, by the capitalist class as a whole (through their state apparatus in the case of military goods). The wages of the workers in these industries, as well as the profits of the corresponding capitalists, are paid for by previously created surplus value. Global capital is not going to be expanded by a single hour of the labour provided by these non-productive industries. It is, on the other hand, going to devote a part of surplus value which could have been devoted to its self-expansion to the maintenance of both the workers and the capitalists of these branches.

From the viewpoint of global capital - or national, in this case - these workers do not create surplus value. On the contrary, they consume it. But from the viewpoint of the capitalist in the sectors in question, these workers give them through their surplus labour, the right to dispose (at a rate determined in relation to the capital they have invested, according to the law of the ‘capitalist environment') of a certain portion of the mass of real surplus value.

Dassault or Chanel provide other capitalists with commodities produced according to the capitalist mode of exploitation: in the value of these commodities is included the unpaid labour furnished by the workers and whose equivalent in value of course belongs, once again by the laws of capitalism, to Dassault and Chanel. The other capitalists buy these commodities at their value and thus realise the surplus value of their colleagues.

The labour power of the unproductive sectors has thus affirmed its productive capacity in relation to the immediate capital which purchased it, by providing that capital with a value higher than the one which it received. Labour power creates surplus value for capital. But from the viewpoint of global capital, it destroyed surplus value.

The worker exploited by an unproductive capitalist industry is just as much a proletarian as the worker in the productive sector. But whereas the surplus value created by the latter is part of the REAL surplus value which expands global capital, the surplus value produced by the workers in the unproductive sector is a source of profit only for the immediate capitalist; it is an unproductive expense for global capital.

Our point of departure was to answer the question: is arms production a solution to capitalist crises? Can it prevent a new crisis? These questions led us to pose the problem of the determination of productive labour.

The answer to this problem in turn now permits us to respond clearly to the first question; ARMS PRODUCTION IS NOT A SOLUTION TO CRISES.

The outlet constituted by military spending also represents a heavy burden for the economy of each nation.. Military spending is an incredible waste for capital and for the development of the productive forces. [12] [87]. It is estimated that in the past few decades the United States has transformed, on average, one third of its annual surplus into military goods. This means that if this spending could have been transformed into productive goods, the growth of the American economy (provided it found the necessary markets) would have been 33 per cent more rapid.

The production of a cannon implies for capital not only the loss of the labour embodied in the cannon itself but even more a sterilisation of this labour, a blockage of the continuing process of the self-expansion of capital. Capital has to bear not only the loss of past labour but also the burden of a paralysis of its productive process.

It is clear that the ‘military stimulant' can in no way assure the eternal expansion of capitalism. As an outlet it can only be an auxiliary factor (in periods of reconstruction, for example) and in any case its effects, like those of reconstruction, are of a limited duration: a nation that transformed its whole annual surplus into arms would find its economic growth totally stopped at the end of a year. A country can resume its economic expansion only by making these armaments profitable, that is through war (and then only if the country is victorious). [13] [88] The greater the share of surplus transformed into arms, the shorter the duration of the stimulating effects of this outlet, and the sooner the question of their profitability becomes pressing. The longer this solution is put off, the greater becomes the immense weight of this unproductive burden on the national economy: inflation, decline in the competitiveness of the nation's products on the world market (because the cost of these products increasingly comprises military expenses), which in its turn, through the loss of markets which results, aggravates the internal problem of a lack of outlets. The increasing pressure exerted by the American government on the European nations to take care of their own military expenses cannot be explained in any other way.

This said, we must now answer the question implicit from the beginning: if military production is so detrimental to the development of capital, why do all the countries in the world, and first and foremost the great powers, devote such an enormous part of their productive capacity to this type of production?

We have seen that the demand created by military needs possesses certain particular advantages as an outlet: for example it affects nearly all sectors of industry, while bringing special advantages to those sectors where capital is most highly concentrated.

Its role as an economic stimulant has made certain analysts conclude that the development of the armaments industry was the result of a conscious decision on the part of the capitalists to create an artificial outlet invented to fill the needs of an economy constantly threatened by suffocation due to a lack of markets. Nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism produces commodities. Naturally its primary concern is the exchange value of the commodity, its monetary equivalent. But this does not allow it to ignore the use value of the commodity. A product which has no use value, which does not correspond to any social need whatsoever is anything but a commodity. It has no place in the capitalist world. The capitalist state which buys armaments is, like any other capitalist, a prisoner of the law of value: it can buy only what corresponds to a real need. Outlets which can be invented at will only exist in the dreams of bankrupt capitalists. The development of the armaments industry is linked to the exacerbation of the inter-imperialist antagonisms. In a world entirely split up among the competing powers and where there are too few pieces for all the competitors, the military strength of each nation becomes the indispensable, inevitable tool for its economic survival. The world wars have shown the price a country has to pay for any weakness in this domain.

Unproductive Costs

It is not only armaments which are an unproductive industry for capital. Capitalist decadence since 1914 is characterised by the dizzying growth of a whole series of unproductive economic activities. All these expenses have the same raison d'etre: to moderate the growing difficulties that the economic system encounters in all areas in trying to assure its own reproduction. Armaments are only one of these activities and if we have dealt with them separately it is because of their very important role as an ‘economic stimulant'.

Among the expenditure of this type which has becoming particular important we can cite:

1. Expenditure to maintain 'social peace'. All the costs of maintaining a whole body of employees ranging from the police to the union apparatus, from welfare workers to sociology professors. Also expenses such as unemployment compensation,etc. (Great Britain, for example, has ‘maintained' more than a million unemployed for more than five years!)

2. Expenditure to moderate economic difficulties within each nation - or within each company. The incredible swelling of the general economic administration of the state: planning bodies, regulatory agencies, etc. It is necessary to add to these all the costs of subsidising failing companies and the ever growing aberrations of agriculture under capitalism: payments for letting the land lie fallow, destruction of harvests and surpluses, the cost of stabilising the agricultural markets, etc. There are also the expenditures of private companies constantly confronted with sales problems which competition makes even more acute: marketing expenses, administrative costs, and above all advertising (these costs are generally lower in state capitalist countries but any savings are offset by the enormous waste that bureaucratic irresponsibility entails in the distribution network). The development of the Tertiary sector is largely the result of this type of unproductive expenditure.

3. Expenditure caused by the aberrations resulting from the desperate actions of firms in certain countries (United States and to some extent Europe and Japan) faced with the need to compensate for the lack of markets. The most striking aspect of this phenomenon is in the reduction in the use value of consumer goods (cars, stockings, electric appliances, etc) consciously made with a view towards planned obsolescence. This technique is reinforced by advertising intended to create ‘in' fashions and therefore ‘out' fashions. Amongst these aberrations we can take the example of the automobile: at first a real social need it has gradually become a social disaster. The productive aspect of the car (a means of transportation for labour power) has more and more given way to the unproductive aspect of the commodity as a noxious waste.

4. Expenditure arising from international relations in particular, the extent of military expenditure staggers the imagination. The military expenditure of the United States and the USSR together are greater than the combined national incomes of all of Latin America plus India and Pakistan. The state of the Middle East devote around 25 per cent of their GNP to armaments. In the last ten years world capital has spent more on armaments than in the first fifty years of this century - the two world wars included.

The Disproportionate Growth of the Unproductive Sector: The Characteristic of Decadence

Unproductive expenditure also existed in the ascendant phase of capitalism. Luxury goods for the ruling class, for example, have existed since the beginning of capitalism. The same is true for the police, army and the administrative costs of the state. But the extent of these expenses in the past centuries is in no way comparable to these same types of expenditures in the past sixty years.

The unproductive content of these ‘artificial' costs of production in ascendant capitalism was attenuated because the relations of production were at the time basic to the development of the productive forces. When capitalism was taking over the planet by destroying pre-capitalist relations, when it was imposing its techniques on the entire world, its relations of production were also productive forces. At the time the general costs necessary to the maintenance of the relations of production were offset by the productive nature of these relations. Therefore, when an imperialist army, for instance, imposed capitalist relations in a part of the world, world capitalism was enriched. These armies were on certain occasions true productive forces for world capitalism.

This situation completely changes the moment that the world is divided up amongst the competing powers. The war could only bring about a redivision of the spoils, any new conquest having become impossible. From that time, one capitalist power could militarily win a sphere of influence only at the expense of another power. For world capital war could only represent an internal disruption, a disastrous waste. When capitalist relations of production cease to be the instrument for the development of the productive forces and become fetters, all the ‘artificial' costs that they entail become simple waste. It is important to note that this inflation of artificial costs is an inevitable phenomenon which imposes itself on capitalism with as much violence as its contradictions.

For a half century the history of capitalist nations is filled with ‘austerity programmes', attempts to turn back the clock, struggles against the uncontrollable expansion of government costs and unproductive expenses in general. Every time international competition is aggravated in a critical fashion, the question of these expenses is more sharply raised [14] [89]. All these efforts, however, systematically end in failure. Remember the Nixon austerity plan (August 15,1972) and the anti-inflationary budget that went with it: in spite of all the speeches, military expenditures - the principle source of inflation in the United States - were once again increased. Unproductive expenditure functions for decadent capitalism like some drug, which is at once a medication and a poison, taken for certain illnesses. The worse the disease becomes, the more you have to increase the dosage; the more you increase the dosage, however, the worse the disease becomes. Inflation is the cancer of modern capitalism and unproductive expenses are its main source of nourishment. The more difficulties capitalism faces, the more it must develop its artificial costs. This vicious circle, this gangrene rotting the core of the wage labour system, is only one of the symptoms of the real disease: the decadence of capitalism. The consequences of all this have been known for more than half a century: world war or proletarian revolution: socialism or barbarism.

The problem of the decline of capitalism is far from being exhausted and there are many questions that have still not been investigated in this study. The last half century has raised a series of new problems for revolutionary theory and furnished evidence allowing for a better understanding of the problems posed years ago. We make no pretence of having gone into all these questions, still less of having resolved them.

Our principal aims have been the following: first, to explain the basis for our conviction that the proletarian revolution has been on the agenda since World War 1. Second, to deal with the profound changes capitalist society has undergone, which make so many of the traditional positions of revolutionaries out of date: tactics which were valid in the nineteenth century have become counter-revolutionary today (parliamentarism, working in the unions, participation in national struggles). This has led us to show that only an analysis which leads to the recognition of the decadence of capitalism since 1914 allows for the integration of all the important phenomena which have appeared since then into a coherent world view:

•The curbing and slow-down of the growth of the productive forces by the dominant relations of production.

•The permanent exacerbation of antagonisms between factions of the ruling class.

•The appearance of world crises and world wars on an unprecedented scale, which get worse with each outburst.

•The inordinate development of the unproductive sectors at the expense of the productive sectors.

•The accelerated decomposition of all the ideological values of the system.

•The development of class antagonisms and the outbreak of proletarian revolutionary movements calling into question the system on a world scale.

•The development and strengthening of the state apparatus and its control over the whole of society (the general tendency to state capitalism).

All these phenomena can only be understood as expressions of the definitive inability of capitalist relations of production to fulfil the historic needs of humanity.

Those who speak of revolution today and deny the reality of decadence, fail to account for, not isolated phenomena, but the underlying dynamic which necessarily links these phenomena.

But to those who accept this interpretation of the present historical period, there remains the task of deepening the analysis of decadence and drawing out all the consequences which follow for revolutionary practice.

R. Victor.