Eight years after his father, George W Bush has begun his term as president of the USA. His father promised us "peace and prosperity" after the disintegration first of the Eastern bloc, then of the USSR. The son inherits a situation of widespread war and poverty, which has proliferated and deepened throughout the 1990s. The state of the world is truly catastrophic, and this is not merely a temporary transition before the promised land prophesied by Bush Senior. All the signs are that capitalism is dragging humanity down into a vicious circle of bloody military conflicts on every continent, of increasing imperialist antagonisms especially between the great powers, a new and brutal aggravation of economic crisis and poverty, and a series of disasters of every kind. These three elements - war, economic decline, and the destruction of the planet - are making conditions ever more intolerable for today's generations, and are endangering the very survival of the generations to come. It is becoming ever clearer that capitalism is leading the human species to extinction.
The illusion of peace collapsed quickly enough, following the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 and then the interminable slaughter in the Balkans. The illusion of prosperity, on the other hand, has been given several new leases of life thanks to America's positive growth rates during the 1990s, the increasing value of stocks and shares, and the mirage of the "new economy" linked to the Internet. American growth rates and the rising stock market have not prevented a dramatic increase in world poverty and hunger - indeed quite the contrary. As for the "new economy", it is long gone, and the illusion of a coming prosperity for all lies shattered.
An economy in virtual bankruptcy
In this Review we have already denounced many times the lies about the "good health" of the capitalist economy based on positive growth rates. The bourgeoisie has established criteria for defining a recession, which is only considered to exist after two consecutive quarters of negative growth. By these criteria of bourgeois propaganda - let us note in passing - Japan has been "officially" in recession for the last ten years. Nonetheless, and quite apart from all the cheating with the figures and the ways of calculating the recession, the reality of a positive "official" growth rate does not mean that the economy is in good health. The increasing poverty in the US itself under the Clinton presidency, despite "exceptional" growth rates, is an illustration of this.
In order to define a catastrophic economic crisis, and to show that everything today is going well by comparison, economists, historians, and the media generally always refer to the great crisis of 1929. But the experience of 1929 itself gives the lie to this assertion: "In the lives of most men and women, although the central economic experience of the time was certainly cataclysmic, and crowned by the Great Crisis of 1929-1933, economic growth did not stop during these decades. It simply slowed down. In the biggest and richest economy of the day, the USA, the average growth in GNP per person between 1913 and 1938 did not exceed a modest 0.8% per annum. At the same time, world industrial production grew by slightly more than 80%, in other words about half the growth rate of the previous quarter-century (WW Rostov, 1978, p662). (...) The fact is that had a Martian observed a graph of economic movement from far enough away not to see ups and downs that earth-bound humans have suffered, he would undoubtedly have concluded that the world economy had undergone a continuous expansion" (EJ Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes).
Our rulers and their economists are not Martians, but defenders of capitalist order, which is why they spend so much effort in trying to conceal the reality of the economic disaster. Only rarely, and in more confidential publications, does a partial recognition of this reality confirm what we are saying: "Nonetheless, economic growth will remain insufficient to reduce the level of poverty or improve the well-being of the population", admits The Economist with regard to Latin America (The World in 2001). But of course the same is true for the rest of the world's population. And what will it be like if Fred Hickey's forecast, cited by The Wall Street Journal, comes true, of a coming recession?
Since the collapse of the world's stock markets at the beginning of 2001, it is hard to make believe that all is well in the realm of finance and the "new Internet economy". "Since their historic high point of 5132 points on 10th March 2000, technology values have fallen by almost 65%. A sorry anniversary, since in the same period some $4.5 trillion have evaporated from US stock markets" (Le Monde, 17/03/01).
It is not just Internet values, but the whole stocks and shares market which is affected by the decline in values. For the moment, contrary to the market crises of the 1980s and 1990s in America, Russia, and Asia, the decline seems to be under control, although it is certainly a major crash. One question remains posed however: the Japanese financial and banking system, seriously undermined by bad debts, is on the verge of bankruptcy. According to Le Monde of 27th March, "The rout of the Japanese banking system threatens the rest of the world". If Japan withdraws its money from the US, then the whole credit financing of the US economy will be at risk: "If foreign investors no longer want to supply the necessary capital, then the impact on growth, the stock market, and the dollar, could be substantial" (The World in 2001). All the more so in that US household savings are nil, while individual and company debt for stock market speculation has reached impressive heights. As we have shown many times, the world capitalist economy is based on a mountain of debt which will never be repaid. After deferring the consequences of the crisis in space and time, by pushing them onto the "emerging" countries, these debts are now coming home to roost, to deepen and accelerate these same consequences. The world's largest economy, the USA, is also its most endebted, and its growth rates are being paid for by "a colossal trade deficit, and massive foreign debt" (idem). Even the experts have their doubts. "In short, the US economy in 2001 will need intelligent management and above all, a good dose of luck" (idem). Who would travel by plane if they were warned in advance that the pilot would need intelligence, "and above all, a good dose of luck"?
At the same time, after the different financial crises which have shaken Russia, Asia, and Latin America on several occasions, each time due to an inability to meet debt repayment deadlines, it is now Turkey's turn to go virtually bankrupt, and to see the IMF run to its sickbed. Unable to meet a $3 billion repayment deadline on 21st March, Turkey has received $6 billion in aid from the IMF, in exchange for a drastic plan of economic attacks on the population. The Argentine economy has suffered another relapse. This winter, it had to be propped up in extremis "by an exceptional financial package of $39.7 billion, intended above all to prevent it defaulting on its foreign debt of $122 billion (42% of GNP)" (Le Monde economic supplement, 20/03/01). These local crises might appear in themselves to express merely the fragility of the countries concerned. In fact, they express the fragility of the world economy, since in each case - and there have been many of them since the Latin American crisis of 1982 - where an "emerging" country is unable to meet its debt repayments, it has immediately endangered the whole world financial system. Whence the hurried interventions by the governments of the great powers and by the IMF, bearing new and ever greater credits.
In this situation, what is at stake - and has been for several years - for the world bourgeoisie, is to keep the inevitable decline in the North American economy under control. "The excess of demand over supply symbolises the other side of this miracle [of US growth]. This is also a danger, since it is accompanied by a colossal trade deficit, and massive foreign debt. If this deficit and debt were to continue, then the collapse would become inevitable. But this will not happen. In 2001, American growth will return to a more modest rhythm, no longer miraculous but merely impressive, and the foreign trade and balance of payments deficits should diminish" (The World in 2001). The first journalist we quoted counts on good luck. This one counts on a miracle (in an article entitled "The golden age of the world economy"). But for the different sectors of the world bourgeoisie - leaving aside their antagonistic imperialist, political, and commercial interests - the crucial question remains the success or otherwise of the "soft landing" of the US economy. In other words, one that avoids any excessive crises which would run the risk of revealing to the world population, and especially to the international working class, the irreversible bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. The perspective for the world's population, North America and industrialised Europe included, is one of growing poverty.
In the industrialised countries, the crisis of agricultural overproduction will lead to the ruin of thousands of small and medium farmers and an accelerated concentration in this branch of the capitalist economy. "Mad cow" disease, and the foot-and-mouth epidemic, are not natural, but social disasters caused by the capitalist mode of production. They are the consequence of sharpening economic competition and the race for productivity. In short, they are an expression of worldwide agricultural overproduction. At the same time, they provide the opportunity to "solve" this overproduction temporarily by the mass slaughter of livestock... when a large part of the world's population does not get enough to eat. And when it would suffice... to vaccinate the animals. "The agricultural crisis emphasises yet again that hunger in the South can perfectly well exist alongside waste and excess of supply in the North" (Sylvie Brunel of "Action contre la faim", in Le Monde, 10/03/01). This crisis will also have serious consequences for the peasants in the countries of the capitalist periphery, in other words for a large part of the world's population. "Another disastrous consequence for the Third World of the collapse of the meat trade is looming: an overproduction of cereals" (idem). What clearer expression of the irrationality of the capitalist world, of the absurdity of its survival, than these healthy animals condemned to slaughter and destruction when millions of human beings have not enough to eat? "The world's food problem lies not in its production, which is amply suffiicient for all, but in its distribution: those who suffer from under-nourishment are too poor to nourish themselves" (idem). This is why capitalism cannot even offer itself the "luxury" of vaccinating cows and sheep: prices would collapse, all the more so if the animals destined for slaughter were offered free to the world's hungry populations.
As long as capitalism's economic laws, and especially the law of value, survive, it will be impossible to give away the animals that are to be slaughtered. The same is true of agricultural overproduction as it is of any other kind, whence the land lying fallow in the industrialised countries, and their unsold stocks of milk and butter. Only a society where the law of value, and so wage labour and social classes, have disappeared, will be able to resolve these questions, because it will be able to give rather than destroy.
But it is not only the population involved in agricultural production, whether small farmer, day-labourer, or farm worker, that will be hit by the brutal deceleration of the world economy.
Redundancies are being announced in every branch of industry. In the USA, "new economy" companies like Intel, Dell, Delphi, Nortel, Cisco, Lucent, Xerox, and Compaq are laying off by the tens of thousands, but so are traditional industries such as General Motors and Coca-Cola. In Europe, lay-offs and shop and factory closures have abruptly taken off: Marks & Spencer and Danone, in the armaments industry at EADS and Giat Industries (builders of Leclerc tanks). Job reductions are hitting major companies and state employees.
In these industrialised countries, the national bourgeoisie is aware of the danger of a reaction from a concentrated working class with a strong historical experience of struggle, and so takes a maximum of political precautions to carry out its attacks. In countries where the working class is younger, less experienced, or more dispersed, the attacks are far more brutal. Amongst many other examples, it is clear that the working class will suffer particularly in Argentina and Turkey.
These massive attacks in every country and every branch of industry are dealing a serious blow to the lie of the "healthy economy", and above all to the idea that lay-offs in a particular company are exceptional, because elsewhere, everything is going fine. The whole international working class is affected, every branch of industry is undergoing redundancies, wage cuts, job insecurity and precariousness, speed-ups and longer working hours, a deterioration in living conditions, etc.
Bush Senior, accompanied by a chorus of states, governments, politicians, ideologists, journalists, and intellectuals, spoke of prosperity. Instead we have had, we have now, and all the signs are that we will continue to have more, and more widespread, poverty.
Humanity is faced with a historic log-jam. On the one hand, capitalism has nothing to offer but crisis, war, destruction, poverty, and increasing barbarism. On the other, the international working class, the only social force able to offer a perspective of an end to capitalism and a different society, remains unable to assert this perspective openly. In this situation, capitalist society is decomposing, rotting on its feet. Apart from the wars, the urban violence, the generalised insecurity, the most dramatic consequences threaten humanity's future and its very survival as a result of the destruction of the environment and the proliferation of all kinds of disasters.
Holes in the ozone layer, the pollution of seas, rivers, the soil, the cities and the countryside, adulteration of foodstuffs, epidemics amongst human beings and livestock: this non-exhaustive list is a demonstration that the planet is becoming less and less livable, and that its very equilibrium is in danger.
Up till now, catastrophes and the deterioration of the environment appeared as simply the "mechanical" results of the deepening economic crisis, of capitalist competition and the frantic search for maximum productivity. Today, environmental questions have become stakes in the imperialist confrontations between the great powers. The US' breaking of the Kyoto agreements on the emission of greenhouse gases has been an opportunity for the other powers, especially the Europeans, to denounce American irresponsibility. "The European Union sees no solution to the climate problem outside the Kyoto protocol, and remains determined to apply it, with or without the United States" (Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, Le Monde, 6th April 2001). Like "humanitarian" causes and the "defence of human rights", the environment and environmental disasters have become an area of competition between states. The "humanitarian interference" in Bosnia was a terrain for confrontations between the powers, just as it was during the intervention in Somalia. Humanitarian aid is in the same situation: whenever there is an earthquake, American and European teams compete to pull the most corpses from the ruins.
More and more, the link is becoming clear between capitalism's economic impasse, the exacerbation of imperialist tensions provoked on the historic level by the economic crisis, and all the consequences for the whole of social life, which in their turn sharpen imperialist rivalries and conflicts, and weigh still more heavily on the economic crisis. The capitalist world is dragging humanity and the planet down in an infernal spiral.
"Not the least tragic aspect of this catastrophe, is that humanity has learnt to live in a world where massacre, tortures, and mass exile have become daily experiences that we no longer even notice" (EJ Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes).
The world today presents a terrifying panorama. The world is bloody with a multitude of interminable military conflicts, on every continent: the ex-USSR, especially its one-time Asian republics and the Caucasus; the Middle East from Palestine to Pakistan, via Iraq and Afghanistan; Africa; Latin America, especially Colombia; and the Balkans. Today, those countries or regions which are still untouched in one way or another by open or latent conflict, are islands of "peace" in an ocean of warfare.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the situation in the Lebanon was the clearest expression of the capitalist world's entry into its phase of decomposition. "Lebanisation" became an expression to describe countries prey to the dislocation caused by interminable war. Today, whole continents are "Lebanised". How many African countries? It is hard to count them all, but most have become new Lebanons. Afghanistan is doubtless one of the most extreme examples, after 20 years of continuous fighting.
And let there be no mistake, the primary responsibility in the aggravation of all these wars lies with imperialism in general, and with the great powers in particular. The wars have been started and stoked by the rivalries among the great imperialist powers: this is the case in Afghanistan since its invasion by Russia in 1980, and America's subsequent support for the Islamic guerrillas, including the Taliban, in the days of imperialist blocs. It is obviously the case in the Balkans, where Germany supported Croat and Slovene independence in 1991, and today supports the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia, while Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Spain and the USA - to name only the major powers - have intervened actively to counter Germany. The same is true in Africa. The great powers continue to stoke the flames even when the conflicts no longer represent any great interest for them, as is the case today for Africa and Afghanistan.
In general, the direct imperialist rivalries between the powers have been more discreet, especially since the end of the blocs in 1989. Today, however, tensions are rising. The USA has adopted a particularly aggressive attitude towards China, as in the case of the collision between the Chinese fighter and the American spy plane on 1st April 2001, towards Russia with the expulsion of 50 Russian diplomats at the end of March 2001, and towards Europe with the American rejection of the Kyoto accords on reducing greenhouse gases and with the proposed national missile defence system.
Bush Senior, accompanied by a chorus of states, governments, politicians, ideologists, journalists, and intellectuals, spoke of peace. Instead we have had, we have now, and all the signs are that we will continue to have more, and more widespread, war.
Capitalism seems to be irrational from a historic standpoint. It is leading the human species to destruction, and no longer has any economic or historical "rationality".
"During the 20th Century, more human beings have been killed or left to die than ever before in history (?) It has undoubtedly been the most murderous century for which records exist, both by the scale, the frequency, and the duration of the wars which have filled it (and which barely paused for an instant during the 1920s), but also by the incomparable extent of the disasters which it has produced - from history's greatest famines to systematic genocide. Unlike the 19th century, which seemed to be, and indeed was, a period of almost uninterrupted material, intellectual, and moral progress (that is to say, progress in civilised values), since 1914 we have seen a marked regression in those values once considered as normal in the developed countries and the bourgeois milieu, which it was once thought would spread to the most backward regions of the planet and the least enlightened strata of the population" (Hobsbawm, op. cit.).
It is true that capitalism has a history which allows us to understand its present dynamic. There are historical reasons for its irrationality. The most important is its entry into its period of historic decline, of decadence, at the beginning of the 20th Century - the 1914-18 war being the proof, the product, and an active factor in this decadence. It is with the period of decadence that wars ceased to be national or colonial wars - in other words with rational aims such as the conquest of new markets, or the formation and consolidation of new nations, aims which moreover were globally part of a process of historical development - to become imperialist wars caused by the lack of markets and the search for a new imperialist division of the world, objectives which could not contribute to historical progress. Imperialist wars have become ever more barbarous, bloody, and destructive. In the period of decadence, wars are no longer at the service of the economy: the economy is at the service of war, whether in war or in "peace". The whole period from 1945 to today thoroughly illustrates the phenomenon.
"During the 20th Century, warfare has increasingly targeted states' economy and infrastructure, as well as the civilian population. Ever since World War I, the number of civilian war victims has greatly exceeded the military in all the belligerent countries, with the exception of the United States (?) Under these conditions, why did the ruling powers conduct World War I as if it could only be totally won or totally lost? (?) In fact, the only war aim that counted was total victory, with what was called in World War II 'unconditional surrender' as the only fate for the enemy. This was an absurd and self-destructive objective, which ruined both victors and vanquished. It dragged the latter into revolution, the former to bankruptcy and physical exhaustion" Hobsbawm, op.cit.).
These specific characteristics of 20th Century warfare have been dramatically confirmed in all the conflicts from World War II onwards. Since 1989, and the disappearance of the imperialist blocs formed around the USA and the USSR, the threat of a world war has disappeared. But the disappearance of the bloc system and the discipline that went with it has opened the way to the explosion of a multitude of military conflicts provoked, stoked, and exacerbated by the great powers, even though the latter have difficulty controlling them once they are started. The characteristics of warfare in decadence have not disappeared with the disappearance of imperialist blocs, quite the reverse. They have been aggravated still further by the development of an attitude of "every man for himself" unbridled by bloc discipline, with every imperialist power, great or small, playing a lone suite against all the others. The capitalist world has entered into a particular phase of its historic decadence: a phase which we have defined as being its phase of decomposition. But whatever one's analysis, or the name one gives it, "there can be no serious doubt that a world historical era closed at the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, and that a new one began (?) The last part of the century has been a new era of decomposition, uncertainty and crisis - and for much of the world, such as Africa, the ex-USSR, and the old socialist Europe, it has been one of catastrophe" (idem).
Today's imperialist tensions must be understood within this unprecedented historical situation.
"In the period of capitalist decadence, all states are imperialist and take measures in consequence: war economy, armaments, etc. This is why the aggravation of the world economy's convulsions can only sharpen the antagonisms between different states including, increasingly, on the military level. The difference with the period that has just come to a close is that these antagonisms, which previously were contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs, are now going to come to the fore. The disappearance of the Russian imperialist cop, and the resulting disappearance of its American counterpart as far as the latter's main 'partners' of yesteryear are concerned, will unleash a whole series of more local rivalries. At the present time, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into world war (even supposing that the proletariat were unable to oppose it). By contrast, given the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the existence of the blocs, they are likely to be more frequent and more violent, especially in those areas where the proletariat is weakest" (International Review n°61, 10th February 1990).
As long as capitalism exists, the Balkans and the Middle East will continue to be subject to endless war and conflict. In recent weeks, however, we have seen a proliferation of direct inter-imperialist tensions among the great powers. The attitude of the US has been particularly aggressive: "The motive remains mysterious for what seems gratuitous brutality in the Bush administration's approach not only to Russia and China, but also to South Korea and the Europeans" (W. Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, 28/03/01). It would be simplistic to blame this new aggressiveness solely on Bush Junior. True, a change in president and in the governing team provides an opportunity for a change in policy. But the underlying tendencies of US policy remain the same. The policy of "muscle-flexing" and "hold me back or I'll do something I'll regret" has nothing to do with the intellectual failings of the Bush family, as the European and even sometimes the US media try to tell us. It is a fundamental tendency imposed by the historic situation.
"With the disappearance of the Russian threat, the 'obedience' of the other great powers was no longer guaranteed (this is why the Western bloc fell apart). To obtain obedience, the US has had to adopt a systematically offensive stance on the military level" ("Report on the international situation, 9th ICC Congress, 1991", International Review n°67). This fundamental characteristic of US imperialist policy has remained unchanged ever since, for "Faced with this irresistible rise of 'every man for himself', the USA has had no choice but to wage a constantly offensive military policy" ("Report on imperialist conflicts, 13th ICC Congress, 1999", International Review n°98).
Increasing imperialist antagonisms
The US has all the more need to show its muscles when it finds itself in diplomatic difficulty. The Balkan wars' spread to Macedonia is an expression of the US' difficulty in controlling the situation there. The US has no real power base in the region, unlike the French, British and Russians traditionally allied to Serbia, or the Germans with the Croats and Albanians, and is therefore forced to adapt its policies to events. It is therefore no accident that "NATO has permitted a partial return by the Yugoslav army to the 'security zone' around Kosovo (?) There is clearly a desire to associate Belgrade to the effort to prevent a new conflict in the region" (Le Monde, 10th March 2001). As Serbia's ally, the US is interested in maintaining the stability of Macedonia "which has always been considered a weak link which must be preserved, if the whole of south-east Europe is not to be destabilised" (idem). The only power to profit from the extension of war to Macedonia, and the only power not interested in the maintenance of the status quo, is Germany. With an independent Croatia, a Croat province in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a greater Albania created at the expense of Macedonia and Montenegro, Germany would have achieved its historical geo-strategic goal of a direct opening to the Mediterranean. Obviously, this perspective would give new life to Greece and Bulgaria's temporarily stifled appetites in Macedonia. And indeed, the Macedonian president is under no illusions as to who is really responsible for the Albanian guerrilla offensive. This was before the change in US policy. "Nobody in Macedonia today believes that the US and German governments don't know who are the terrorist leaders, and could not put a stop to their activity if they wanted" (Le Monde, 20th March 2001).
As in Afghanistan, in Africa, as in all the other regions of the world subjected to wars and conflicts typical of decomposing capitalism, there will be no peace in the Balkans until capitalism is overthrown.
The same is true of the Middle East. As we said in the previous issue of this Review, "the plan that Clinton has been trying to push through at any cost will have remained a dead letter, as forecast". The new Bush administration seems to be trying to take account of the US' inability to impose its pax americana. In fact, it seems to have come to terms with the idea that the region will always be subject to war, or at least that there will be no end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Colin Powell, the new US Secretary of the State Department and ex-Chief of General Staff during the Gulf War, recognises that there is no "magic formula", especially since Israel no longer hesitates to formulate its own policy, expressing the reign of "every man for himself" characteristic of the present period, even when this goes against US policy. As for Palestine, where the population is economically strangulated, poverty-stricken and oppressed, the bourgeoisie there can only express its despair in a suicidal anti-Israeli nationalism, supported by the European powers. France in particular has no hesitation in encouraging anything that counters US policy in the region.
America responded to its own impotence with the bloody bombardment of Baghdad as soon as Bush took office. The message is aimed at the Arab states, as well as the other powers: the US may not be able to impose its peace, but it will strike militarily whenever necessary, whenever it thinks that "the line has been crossed". Not only will there be no peace between Palestinians and Israeli, there is the danger that war, at least in latent form, will spread throughout the region.
The capitalist world's own laws inevitably exacerbate imperialist rivalries, spread military conflict on every continent; equally inevitable is the aggravation of the economic crisis. Capitalism in its death throes cannot offer peace and prosperity. It can only offer endless war and poverty.
Only marxist theory was able, in 1989, after the collapse of the Eastern bloc and even before the disintegration of the USSR, to understand the significance of these events and foresee their consequences for the capitalist world and the international working class. This is not the result of the superiority of a few individuals, nor of blind and mechanistic faith in some Bible. If marxism is farsighted, it is because it is the theory of the international proletariat, the expression of its revolutionary being. It is because the proletariat is the revolutionary class that marxism exists and is able to apprehend the main lines of historical development, and in particular capitalism's inability to resolve the dramatic problems that its continued existence causes.
Even if the bourgeoisie tries to minimise its consequences and the attacks against the international working class, the avowed deterioration of the world economy can only help to awaken workers to the myth of capitalism's present prosperity and bright future. Already, there is a certain tendency towards a development of workers' militancy which the trade unions are doing everything to channel, to contain, and to derail. However slow their development, however timid the international working class' response to the present situation, these struggles bear the seeds of the overcoming of this daily barbarism, and of humanity's survival. The overthrow of capitalism demands the working class' refusal to accept economic attacks, and its refusal of all participation in imperialist war through the assertion of proletarian internationalism. It demands the widest possible development and extension, whenever possible, of workers' struggles. This is the only possible road towards a revolutionary perspective and the possibility for the whole human species to create a society without war, without poverty. There is no other solution. There is no other alternative.
RL, 7th April 2001
IR105, 2nd Quarter 2001
We are publishing below a letter that we have received from one of our close contacts, in disagreement with our position on the economic foundations of capitalism’s decadence. The letter is followed by our reply, and we will publish the second part of this correspondence in the next issue.
a) General Considerations
One of the supposedly most telling criticisms Luxemburg makes about Capital is that, since it is an incomplete work, it is necessarily a flawed one. Though it is true that Capital is unfinished insofar as Marx clearly intended to extend it further, what he did write is, with Engels’ assistance, in its essentials, a unified, coherent and consistent analysis. [1] [4] This becomes apparent if you grasp that Marx’s theory of crisis is based uniquely on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. What critics such as Luxemburg fail to grasp is that Marx had already worked out the contradictions of capitalist accumulation prior to writing Capital in the collection later known as the Theories of Surplus Value.
In fact, to argue that Capital has such serious deficiencies as Luxemburg does is to reduce Marx’s analysis to a mere description rather than a critique of capitalist political economy, that is, to fall into an empiricist perspective.[2] [5] It means that Luxemburg does not understand the nature of the method of presentation Marx uses in Capital. This is borne out by her inability to heed Marx’s warning that “it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth (1976), p102). She cannot grasp that Marx chose the particular method of presentation he did for Capital so as to enable the proletariat to pierce through the world of appearances, of commodity fetishism that the capitalist relations of production necessarily create; so that the basic contradictions, the “real movement can be appropriately presented” (ibid.).
This method “abstracts from all the less essential and continuously changing surface phenomena of the market economy” (Paul Mattick, ‘Value and Capital’, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie, Merlin Press, London (c.1983), p74). Capital is therefore not intended to “tell the whole story of capitalistic development” (ibid., p.75) or “to predict the actual course of capitalist development” (ibid., p.94), but to “lay bare the dynamics of that development” (ibid., p.74); that is, it reveals the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation from the perspective of the revolutionary transformation of society, from the point of view of the totality.
Capital does NOT consist of a series of progressively detailed descriptions of concrete capitalist reality, analogous to a series of photographs of successively greater magnification. Although explanations in Capital proceed from those of a more abstract and general nature to those of a more concrete and particular one, this is not a simple linear progression; rather at each stage, on the basis of simplified conditions, a provisional analysis is made. At a subsequent stage this provisional analysis is extended and concretised. The levels therefore do not contradict either each other or empirical capitalist reality, as they might seem if simply compared [3] [6], as Luxemburg mistakenly does. Marx removes the apparent contradictions between the different levels in the following way. First, he draws all the logical conclusions that follow on the basis of the assumptions of the lower level. By then showing that “these conclusions lead to a logical absurdity” (I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Black Rose Books, Montreal (1975) p.248) he thereby demonstrates that the “analysis is not yet finished and has to be continued further” (ibid.); that is, the previous assumptions need to be modified to remove the contradictions. These modified assumptions define the next level. Examples of this in Capital are the transition from the value of commodities to the value of labour-power in Chapter 4 of vol.1, and the transition from different rates of profit in different spheres of production to the formation of the average rate of profit in Chapter 8 in vol.3.
“The impossibility of surplus value in Chapter 4 of Volume 1, and the possibility of different profit rates in Chapter 8 of Volume III, do not serve as necessary links for his constructions, but as proofs of the opposite. The fact that these conclusions lead to a logical absurdity shows that the analysis is not yet finished and has to be continued further. Marx does not determine the existence of different profit rates, but on the contrary, the inadequacy of any theory which is based on such a premise” (ibid.).
Fundamental to an understanding of Marx’s method is the distinction between the ‘inner’ or ‘general’ nature of capital [4] [7] and its empirical and historical reality; the “general and necessary tendencies” (Marx, op.cit. p.433) as distinct from the “forms of their appearance” (ibid.). To fail to grasp this crucial difference risks a headlong flight into empiricism, an acceptance of mere appearances for the truth. Conversely, ignoring the “necessary links” between this inner nature and the forms of appearance turns Capital into a mere abstract ideal divorced from reality.
There is nothing mystical or scholastic about this distinction; Marx clearly regarded it as vital to an understanding of capitalist accumulation.
“ …a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses” (ibid.).
In his reproduction schemes Marx merely intends to show the reproduction of total capital in its fundamental form; they lay “no claim to presenting a picture of concrete capitalist reality” (H. Grossmann, quoted in Paul Mattick, ‘Luxemburg versus Lenin’, Anti-Bolshevik Communism, Merlin Press, London (1978), p.37).
“But the essential, important point is seen clearly from these reproduction schemes: for production to expand and steadily progress given proportions must exist between the productive sectors; in practice these proportions are approximately realised; they depend on the following factors: the organic composition of capital, the rate of exploitation, and the proportion of surplus value which is accumulated” (Anton Pannekoek, ‘The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism’, Capital and Class 1, London (Spring 1977), p.64).
They are NOT intended to reveal the cause of the crisis. The real cause of the crisis is investigated at a later stage in Marx’s analysis.
“Neither the possibility of overproduction nor the impossibility of overproduction follows from the schemas themselves. What must be remembered is that these schemas are only a particular stage, represent a certain level of abstraction, in the development of Marx’s theory. The production process and the circulation process, the problem of production and realisation, have to be seen within the total process of capitalist production as a whole...” (David S. Yaffe, ‘The Marxian theory of crisis, capital and the state’, Economy and Society, vol.2 no.2, p.210).
Marx explains the falling rate of profit as a consequence of the unity of the production, circulation and distribution of capital, i.e., the “capitalist accumulation process has three distinct but inter-related moments: extraction of surplus value; realisation of surplus value; capitalisation of surplus value” (‘Correspondence: Saturated Markets & Decadence’, Internationalism 20, p.19). He explains the capitalist crisis uniquely in terms of the falling rate of profit because this embodies the whole process of capitalist accumulation. He shows that, eventually, this causes a crisis because of the overproduction of capital. Moreover, this overproduction of capital is not absolute or permanent, but relative to a given rate of profit and recurrent.
“Periodically, however, too much is produced in the way of means of labour and means of subsistence, too much to function as means for exploiting the workers at a given rate of profit. Too many commodities are produced for the value contained in them, and the surplus-value included in this value, to be realised under the conditions of distribution given by capitalist production, and to be transformed back into new capital, i.e. it is impossible to accomplish this process without ever-recurrent explosions” (Karl Marx, Capital vol.3, p.367, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth (1981).
c) Capital and the Historical Evolution of Capitalism
To understand how the unfinished and abstract analysis of Capital can be applied to the historical evolution you need to grasp the following. First, that the abstract analysis of Capital is applicable to all phases of capitalism:
“Marx’s formulas deal with a chemically pure capitalism which never existed and does not exist anywhere now. Precisely because of this, they revealed the basic tendency of every capitalism but precisely of capitalism and only of capitalism” (Leon Trotsky, quoted in Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today, Pluto Press (1975), p.132).[5] [8]
Secondly, that:
“Although the actual crisis has to be explained out of the real movement of capitalist production, credit and competition, it is the general tendencies of the accumulation process itself and the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall that form the basis of that explanation” (D.S. Yaffe, op. cit., p.204).
Lastly, that this “real movement of capitalist production, credit and competition” cannot be reduced to pure economics, but needs to be seen from the viewpoint of the evolution of capitalism as a whole.
“Moreover, the crisis cannot be reduced to ‘purely economic’ events, although it arises ‘purely economically’, that is, from the social relations of production clothed in economic forms. The international competitive struggle, fought also by political and military means, influences economic development, just as this in turn gives rise to the various forms of competition. Thus every real crisis can only be understood in connection with social development as a whole” (Paul Mattick, ‘Marx’s Crisis Theory’, Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, Merlin Press, London (1981), p.76).
Herein lies the great contribution of Luxemburg to the Marxism. Even though her economic theory is seriously flawed, by proceeding from the viewpoint of the totality, Luxemburg arrives at the insight that:
“Imperialism is not the creation of one or any group of states, but is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will” (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, quoted in Nation or Class? International Communist Current, (autumn 1979), p.25).
The nature of capitalist decadence and the crisis theories of Marx, Luxemburg and Grossmann
The lynchpin to understanding the decadence of capitalism is, as Bukharin stresses in Imperialism and World Economy[6] [9], the formation of the world economy. Thus the decadence of capitalism is synonymous with the creation of the world economy.
“The existence of a world economy, implies the intensification of the international division of labour and commodity exchange to the point where whatever happens at one point in the economic chain directly influences all the other points. International competition levels prices and conditions of production, and tends towards the equalisation of the rate of profit at the international level, (though of course this is always modified by the existence of capitalism in its nation-state form). The industrialised countries are now so inter-dependent in terms of trade and investments, that crises are a phenomenon that spreads like wildfire from one to another. As for the under developed areas, they have no internal dynamic, and are totally circumscribed by the formal domination imposed on them by capitalism. The existence of the world economy doesn’t mitigate, rather it intensifies imperialist antagonisms, and its consequences are world economic crises and world wars.” (‘The Meaning of Decadence’, Revolutionary Perspectives 10 (Old Series), p.12).
Even though the creation of the world economy results in the “hellish cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction-new crisis” (‘The Platform of the ICC’, in Platform and Manifesto, International Communist Current, Winter (1980), p.3), this does not mean that decadence is characterised by a total halt to the growth of the productive forces. Rather, “Since the beginning of the century we have witnessed a massive arrestation of the growth of the productive forces, compared with what is objectively possible, given the level of scientific knowledge, technical progress and level of proletarianisation in society” (Revolutionary Perspectives 10 (Old Series), op. cit., p.7).
This is of course in keeping with the outline of the decadence of class societies in Marx’s famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
During the reconstruction period after World War II, many workers, mainly those in the Western countries of course, did experience substantial improvements in their material conditions. But in no way could these improvements in living conditions be considered real reforms because of the material costs associated with them. That is, these improvements occurred because of the massive destruction of the productive forces during World War II, and their profound shackling during the ‘Cold War’. During reconstruction capitalism was destroying humanity’s future in advance at the same time as it was preparing for even greater destruction in the future.
The material reality of decadence therefore gives the lie to the idea of a final, death crisis. And Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories are unquestionably those of the death crisis as they both set an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation; that is, they predict that, eventually, capitalism must breakdown because accumulation becomes literally impossible. (Specifically, Luxemburg argues that capitalism is prone to crisis because it is impossible to realise surplus value within capitalism [7] [10]; Grossmann that crises occur because capitalist accumulation inevitably leads to an absolute lack of surplus value [8] [11].)
It is true that Luxemburg and Grossmann believe that well before capitalist accumulation becomes impossible, the intensification of the class struggle resulting from growing economic difficulties would have disrupted capitalist accumulation anyway[9] [12]. Nonetheless, as they still see an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation, they argue that capitalism would eventually breakdown regardless of the class struggle.
The virtual zero growth of capitalism between the World War I and World War II at the time seemed to vindicate both Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s theories as they both tend to identify the decadence of capitalism with a permanent economic crisis. However, the expansion of capitalism after World War II is the strongest possible refutation of these theories. According to Luxemburg, solvent pre-capitalist markets, without which capitalist accumulation is impossible, were exhausted globally by World War I. And it is clear that there has since been an ongoing destruction of these markets. Logically, capitalist growth CANNOT thereafter attain let alone surpass that reached prior to World War I. Seen in the light of her theory, it is therefore inexplicable that capitalist growth after World War II reached substantially greater levels than that before World War I, even taking into account unproductive capitalist production, as the ICC themselves admit. As Grossmann shares Luxemburg’s mechanistic idea of an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation, logically his theory can account for the expansion of capitalism after World War II ONLY if capitalism was still a progressive system, that is, it was NOT yet decadent.
The impossibility of real reforms and national self-determination, the imperialist nature of all nations, the rise of state capitalism, the reactionary nature of all factions of the bourgeois and the world-wide nature of the communist revolution; in short, the decadence of capitalism, CANNOT be reduced to the impossibility of capitalist development as Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories imply, but “can only be understood in connection with social development as a whole” (Paul Mattick, ‘Marx’s Crisis Theory’, Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, Merlin Press (1981), p.76).
Thus the permanent crisis DOES NOT mean a permanent economic crisis, that it is only in relation to “social development as a whole” that one can talk about a permanent crisis; but this is exactly what Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories imply.
The actual course of capitalist development contradicts the crisis theories of Luxemburg and Grossmann. The attempt to reconcile these theories with the actual evolution of capitalism can but lead to explanations that are ad hoc, inconsistent and contradictory. In particular, it is a flagrant error to argue that the view that there is an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation is a non sequitur to these theories. The Marxist view of decadence as a fetter on the productive forces and the notion of an absolute economic limit to capitalism are totally incompatible; you cannot coherently subscribe to both ideas at the same time.
Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s distortion of Capital
Because the world economic crisis coincides with the geographical division of the whole world, it could appear that a lack of external markets is the cause of this crisis. Luxemburg accepts this appearance for reality and proceeds to revise [10] [13] Capital in the light of her empiricist vision. In particular, after examining Marx’s schema of expanded reproduction, she concludes that capitalist accumulation inevitably gives rise to an absolute excess of surplus value. [11] [14]
“The problem which seemed to have been left open was who was to buy the products in which surplus value was contained. If Departments I [means of production] and II [means of consumption] buy from each other more and more means of production and means of subsistence this would be a pointless circular movement from which nothing would result. The solution would lie in the appearance of buyers situated outside capitalism…” (Pannekoek, op.cit., p.64).
However, this is a “pointless circular movement” to Luxemburg only because of her profound misunderstanding of the process of capitalist accumulation; she constructs her ‘proof’ upon some of the most elementary theoretical errors ever made by a revolutionary Marxist. (This criticism is made by Left-wing Social Democrats such as Lenin and Pannekoek in their contemporary reviews of Luxemburg’s, The Accumulation of Capital.)
“Luxemburg’s basic mistake is that she takes the total capitalist as an individual capitalist. She underrates this total capitalist. Therefore she does not understand that the process of realisation occurs gradually. For the same reason she portrays the accumulation of capital as an accumulation of money capital.” (Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, p.201-202).
Luxemburg confuses the total capitalist with the individual capitalist because she carries over to Marx’s scheme of expanded reproduction the assumption from his scheme of simple reproduction that the “total amount of variable capital, and hence the also the consumption of the workers, must remain fixed and constant” (Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy, Monthly Review Press, New York (1964), p.204).
“But to except such an assumption means to exclude expanded reproduction from the very beginning. If, however, one has excluded expanded reproduction from the start in one’s logical proof, it naturally becomes easy to let it disappear at the end of it, for here one is dealing with the simple reproduction of a simple logical error.” (Bukharin, op.cit., p.166).
Luxemburg makes the incredible argument that the total surplus value to be accumulated has to be matched by an equal amount of money for its realisation to occur. [12] [15]
“In each given moment, the total surplus value destined for accumulation appears in various forms: in the form of commodity, money, functioning means of production and labour-power. Therefore, the surplus value in money form should never be identified with the total surplus value.” (Bukharin, op.cit., p.180).
“From this - as we believe - results the manner in which she explains imperialism. Indeed, if the total capitalist is equated with the typical individual capitalist, the first of course cannot be his own consumer. Furthermore, if the amount of gold is equivalent to the value of the additional number of commodities, this gold can only come from abroad (as it is obvious nonsense to assume a corresponding production of gold). Finally, if all capitalists have to realise their surplus value at once (without it wandering from one pocket to another, which is strictly forbidden), they need ‘third persons’, etc” (ibid. p.202).
However, even if she did succeed in showing that an excess of surplus value arose on the basis of this schema, she would prove NOTHING because she would be drawing conclusions that were “derived from a schema having no objective validity” (Paul Mattick, ‘Luxemburg versus Lenin’, Anti-Bolshevik Communism, Merlin Press (1978), p.38). That is, Luxemburg’s principal mistake is to think that Marx’s schema of expanded reproduction is supposed to portray concrete capitalism (ibid. p37).
“In a reproduction scheme built on values, different rates of profit must arise in each department of the schema. There is in reality, however, a tendency for the different rates of profit to be equalised to average rates, a circumstance which is already embraced in the concept of production prices. So that if one wants to take the schema as a basis for criticising or granting the possibility of realising surplus value, it would first have to transformed into a [production] price schema.” (Henryk Grossmann, quoted in Paul Mattick, op. cit., p.37).
And this has the following consequences: “If one takes into account this average rate of profit, Rosa Luxemburg’s disproportionality argument loses all value, since one department sells above and the other under value and on the basis of production price the undisposable part of the surplus value may vanish.” (Paul Mattick, op.cit. p.38).
Superficially, Grossmann would seem to follow Marx’s falling rate of profit theory because he uses Otto Bauer’s schema, which has a rising organic composition of capital in both departments of social reproduction. However, the schema also assumes a fixed and constant rate of surplus value for the two departments; hence we have “two conditions which completely contradict and neutralise one another” (Rosa Luxemburg, op. cit. p.99), “an impossibility, nay an absurdity” (Paul Mattick, ‘The Permanent Crisis’, Council Correspondence, Nov. 1934, No.2, New Essays, vol.1, 1934-1935, Greenwood Reprint Corporation, Westport, Connecticut (1970), p.6). (Though these assumptions were adequate for showing the falseness of Luxemburg’s so-called realisation problem.)
Under these assumptions, eventually, “there will reach a point where the organic composition of total composition is so large and the rate of profit so small, that to enlarge on the existing constant capital would absorb the whole of the surplus value produced” (The Economic Foundations of Capitalist Decadence’, Revolutionary Perspectives 2 (Old Series), p.27). Thus the crisis results from an absolute lack of surplus value.
In Grossmann’s analysis, therefore, the fall in the rate of profit is only an accompanying factor, not the cause of the crisis.
“How could a percentage, a pure number such as the rate of profit produce the breakdown of the real system? - A falling rate of profit is thus only an index that reveals the relative fall in the mass of profit.” (Grossmann, op.cit. p.103).
Though his argument is logically impeccable, it proceeds from false premises. Grossmann is unaware that, in using Bauer’s schema, he is committing the same fundamental error that he and Paul Mattick correctly criticise Luxemburg for: he derives conclusions from a schema that has no objective validity. For if one wants to take Bauer’s scheme as a basis for criticising or granting the possibility of an under-accumulation of capital, one would have to transform it into a production price schema. Grossmann fails to realise the importance of the fact that, in volume III of Capital, Marx analyses the fall in the rate of profit after he investigates the transformation of values into prices of production; namely that as the latter is responsible for the formation of the average rate of profit, capitalism’s tendency towards crisis cannot therefore be deduced independently of this process. What Grossmann overlooks is that Bauer’s schema, by virtue of its two contradictory assumptions, thereby excludes the average rate of profit; and that this consequently negates any conclusions he draws.
In addition, not only does Grossmann depart from Marx in ignoring the consequences of the average rate of profit, he also does so through his view that the capitalists are compelled to increase constant capital owing to the “growth of capital demanded by technology” (Pannekoek, op.cit. p.69). Grossmann argues that, “when the rate of profit becomes less than the rate of growth demanded by technical progress then capitalism must break down” (ibid., p.69). This concept, which is foreign to both Capital and Marxism in general, furnishes Grossmann with the principal reason why capitalist accumulation advances inevitably towards its collapse. In his theory, therefore, the falling rate of profit is not the cause of the crisis, merely an accompanying factor. He draws the logical conclusion that capital is exported because it is impossible to use it at home rather than because of higher profits abroad (ibid., p.73).
Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s conclusions about the cause of the capitalist crisis and the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation are therefore meaningless since they are derived from schemas that have no objective validity. These schemes are worthless for an analysis of these matters since they are based on assumptions that are historically and logically absurd for their resolution.
These erroneous crisis theories stem from fragmented and one-sided views of capitalist accumulation. Whereas Marx explains that the crisis arises from the unity of the production, circulation and distribution of capital, Luxemburg and Grossmann separate, respectively, the circulation of capital, and the production of capital from the capitalist production process as a whole.
Luxemburg’s revision of Marx’s economics is cruder and more extreme than Grossmann’s. It is cruder because of the elementary mistakes she makes about capitalist accumulation; it is more extreme because she sees the fundamental barrier to capitalist accumulation being outside the capitalist economy whereas he at least agrees with Marx that the “true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself” (Karl Marx, Capital vol. III, p.358). Though Luxemburg succumbs to empiricism in her explanation of the contradictions of capitalist accumulation, she follows the Marxist method in analysing the historical development of capitalism from the viewpoint of the capitalist system as a whole. Rather than empiricism, Grossmann’s interpretation of the capitalist crisis reflects an idealist perspective. He argues that the real cause of the capitalist crisis is the mirror image of what it appears to be: the crisis appears as an overproduction of commodities, i.e., an absolute excess of surplus value, therefore the crisis is actually due to an absolute lack of surplus value. It is true that Grossmann has some insight into the method of Capital, but this insight is used to justify his idealist vision of capitalism.
Only Marx’s Capital explains the fundamental contradictions of capitalist accumulation, which underpin the historical evolution of capitalism. Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories explain neither.
Only Marx’s analysis explains the fundamental contradictions of capitalist accumulation and thus the economic foundations of capitalist ascendance and decadence.
Political Consequences
“We would say that any errors on the level of economics tend to reinforce errors deriving from the totality of a group’s politics. Any incoherence in a group’s analysis can open the door to confusions of a more general kind; but we are not dealing with irrevocable fatalities - an analysis of the economic foundations of decadence is part of a more global proletarian standpoint, a standpoint which demands an active commitment to ‘change the world’ - the political conclusions defended by revolutionaries do not derive in a mechanical way from a particular analysis of economics” (‘Marxism and Crisis Theory’, International Review 13, p.35).
In the light of this, I draw the following conclusions.
The principal strength of the analyses of imperialism of Bukharin [13] [16], Luxemburg, Bilan, Paul Mattick [14] [17], the FFCL and the ICC is their recognition of the global nature of capitalist decadence. Conversely, the principal weakness of Pannekoek’s, Lenin’s, the Bordigist’s and the IBRP’s analyses of imperialism is their tendency, in varying degrees, to view capitalist development from the point of view of each nation taken in isolation, to view the world economy as a mere sum of separate national economies. In other words, their analyses of imperialism are partially influenced by the erroneous mechanical stages theory of Social Democracy.
Luxemburg’s flawed economics encourages a tendency to see an absolute as opposed to a qualitative difference between ascendant and decadent capitalism. This is because in her theory the exhaustion of pre-capitalist markets is logically an impassable barrier to capitalist accumulation. The ICC, for example, sometimes finds it difficult to “see that the tendencies which brought about capitalist decadence don’t just conveniently stop at the beginning of the First World War” (‘The Material Basis of Imperialist War: A Brief Reply to the ICC’, Internationalist Communist Review 13, p.13).
Grossmann’s crisis theory agrees with Luxemburg’s that there is an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation. But as his theory argues that this absolute limit is entirely due to internal capitalist factors, then what the expansion of capitalism after World War II logically implies is that capitalism was still in its ascendant period. Hence his theory encourages a tendency to see mere quantitative differences between ascendant and decadent capitalism.
However, above all else it is the rigour and coherence of a current’s political program that is the determining influence on the clarity and insight of its analyses. Thus the ICC’s flawed economics has a much less adverse effect on the clarity of their analysis than it otherwise would owing to the strength of their political program, a program that draws out all the consequences of capitalist decadence.
Conversely, it is the political programs of the IBRP and, to a greater degree, the Bordigists, which embody incoherence, ambiguity and error. These weaknesses reflect the inability of the former current to draw out all the consequences of decadence [15] [18] and that of the latter to recognise that capitalism as a global system is decadent at all [16] [19]. These currents, particularly the Bordigists, therefore tend to see mere quantitative differences between ascendant and decadent capitalism.
CA.
[1] [20] Marx did hold contradictory views about when decadence would occur. One finds some statements that suggest he believed the crises in his time were the mortal crises of capitalism. Others that suggest he believed it would be decades away. He also thought that the workers could peacefully come to power in a few countries. But this does not diminish the validity of his method; Marx’s method transcends the limitations of Marx the nineteenth century revolutionary.
[2] [21] Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Questions At Issue’, The Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-Critique, published with Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, trans. Rudolph Wichmann, Monthly Review Press, New York (1972).
[3] [22] Henryk Grossmann, The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system: being also a theory of crisis, translated and abridged by Jairus Banaji, Pluto Press, London (1992) and I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Black Rose Books, Montreal (1975).
[4] [23] Roman Rosdolsky, ‘Appendix II: Methodological comments on Rosa Luxemburg’, The Making of Marx’s Capital, Pluto Press, London (1980), pp. 61-72.
[5] [24] Though Trotsky is referring specifically to the reproduction schemes in Volume II of Capital, the point that is made can be applied to Capital as a whole.
[6] [25] Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, Merlin Press, London (1972).
[7] [26] Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Imperialism’, The Accumulation of Capita: An Anti-Critique, p.145.
[8] [27] Henryk Grossmann, op. cit., p.74-8.
[9] [28] Rosa Luxemburg, op. cit., p.146-7. Henryk Grossmann, quoted in Introduction by Tony Kennedy, Henryk Grossmann, op. cit., p.20.
[10] [29] Rosa Luxemburg remained a revolutionary Marxist despite her distortions of Marx’s economics.
[11] [30] ‘The Accumulation of Contradictions (or The Economic Consequences of Rosa Luxemburg)’, Revolutionary Perspectives 6 (Old Series), pp.5-27.
[12] [31] Revolutionary Perspectives 6 (Old Series), op. cit., p.15.
[13] [32] Prior to his political degeneration in the early 1920’s, as is already evident in Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital.
[14] [33] During the Cold War, Mattick’s analysis becomes clouded with ambiguities and inconsistencies.
[15] [34] The IBRP attempt to justify this through their argument about the ‘autonomy’ of tactics from the political program as per the Preamble in ‘Theses on Communist Tactics for the Periphery of Capitalism’, International Communist 16.
[16] [35] The dogma of the ‘Invariance of the Program’.
IR105, 2nd Quarter 2001
The economic convulsions and avalanche of job losses that are sweeping over workers throughout the world and principally in the most industrialised countries are casting a clear shadow of doubt over the endless propaganda about the “good health” and “bright future” of this social system and generating a justified concern about the future.
Given this situation, it is of great importance to discuss the theories that exist in the revolutionary movement and to see which gives the most coherent explanation of the present state of things and the perspectives. The correspondence that we are publishing here is part of this process. The comrade does not have any doubts about the decadence of capitalism. The starting point for the comrade is the fundamental position put forward by the 1st Congress of the Communist International: “A new system has been born. Ours is the epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the Communist revolution of the proletariat…the present period is that of the decomposition and collapse of the whole of the world capitalist system and this will mean the collapse of European civilisation in general if capitalism and its insoluble contradictions are not destroyed”. The comrade also shares the political positions derived from this historical analysis: “The impossibility of authentic reforms and national self-determination, the imperialist nature of all nations, the reactionary nature of all the fractions of the bourgeoisie, the worldwide nature of the proletarian revolution”. The comrade is also very clear that “ The principle strength of Bukharin’s, Luxemburg’s, Bilan’s, Paul Mattick’s, the Communist Left of France and the ICC is that they recognise the global nature of capitalist decadence”. The comrade insists that it is essential to see capitalism in its totality and not partially or abstractly and makes clear that despite the critique he directs at us: “above all else it is the rigour and the coherence of the political programme of the Current that has the determinant influence on the clarity and insight of its analysis”.
It is within this framework that the comrade rejects Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis concerning the theoretical explanation of the capitalist crisis, the comrade believes that the ICC falls into dogmatism about this question and asserts that Marx: “explained the capitalist crisis only in terms of the fall in the rate of profit because this encompasses the total process of capitalist accumulation”.
Our reply will not take up all the questions that are posed. We will limit ourselves to taking up the concrete problems responded to by the two main theories that have developed within the Marxist movement in order to explain the historic crisis of capitalism (the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and the tendency towards overproduction). We will try to demonstrate that they are not contradictory and that from the global and historic point of view it is precisely the second, which emerges from the work of Marx and was later developed by Rosa Luxemburg [1] [40], that provides a clearer explanation, which moreover coherently integrates the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. In the same way, we intend to deal with a series of misunderstandings that exist about Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis.
Capitalism has led to the prodigious development of the productivity of human labour in every domain of social activity. For example transport, which under feudalism was limited to the slow and uncertain methods of horse, cart and sail, has been increased to once unthinkable speeds by capitalism; successively by the railways, steam ships, aeroplanes or high-speed trains. The Communist Manifesto takes note of this enormous dynamism of the capitalist system: “It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all the former exoduses of nations and crusades (…) The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood (…) The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. Therefore, whilst “the conservation of the old modes of production was the prime conditions of existence of all the proceeding classes”, the bourgeoisie on the contrary “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and, thereby, the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society” (idem)
The adorers of capital unilaterally highlight this feature of the system attributing it to the “enterprise spirit”, to the impetuous “innovator”, which “freedom of trade” has supposedly liberated in the individual. Marx clearly recognised the historic contribution of capitalism, but he also exposed these siren songs.
Firstly, he showed the material base of these prodigious transformations. Capitalism contains a permanent tendency for Constant Capital (machines, buildings, installations, raw materials etc.) to grow proportionately much more than Variable Capital (workers’ labour). The first is constituted by the coagulation of previously realised labour, that is to say, dead labour, whilst the second sets in motion the means for creating new products, that is living labour. Under capitalism the weight of dead labour tends to progressively increase to the detriment of living labour. That is, Constant Capital (dead labour) increases proportionately much more than Variable Capital (living labour). This is the dominant tendency in the growth of the organic composition of Capital.
What are the social and historical consequences of this tendency? Marx exposed the dark and destructive side of what the propagandists of capital unilaterally present as Progress, with a capital “P”. In the first place, it engendered a permanent tendency towards unemployment, which in the decadence of capitalism has tended to become chronic [2] [41]. But furthermore, he demonstrates that the increase in the organic composition of capital means that globally the mass of exploited living labour tends to diminish and with it the capitalists’ source of surplus value also diminishes: the surplus value extracted from workers thus, as Mitchell showed in the above cited work, “ONE CONSUMPTION ALONE excites its interest and passion, stimulates its energy and its will, gives it reason to exist: the CONSUMPTION OF LABOUR POWER!” (International Review no102, page 10).
In the words of Marx: “this gradual growth in the constant capital, in relation to the variable, must necessarily result in a gradual fall in the general rate of profit, given that the rate of surplus-value, or the level of exploitation of labour by capital remain the same” (Capital Vol. 3, Part 3, Chapter 13: “The Law Itself”, emphasis in the original, page 318, Penguin Books, 1981). That is to say, the development of the productivity of labour which is translated into an increase in the organic composition of capital has as it counterpart the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Therefore, Mitchell affirms that “ the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall generates cyclical crisis and will be a potent ferment of the decomposition of the decadent capitalist economy” [3] [42].
In the historic epoch of the expansion and apogee of capitalism (the 19th century), where humanity underwent an amazing succession of endless inventions and developments that transformed every aspect of social life, Marx was able to see in this progress, in a rigorously scientific way, the factors of the historic crisis and decomposition of a system which was then at its peak. He was the first to discover this law and systemise its possible historical consequences. But it was precisely his rigour and meticulousness that led him to also see its limitations, the factors that counter-acted it and its own contradictions: “If we consider the enormous development in the productive powers of social labour over the last 30 years (…) then instead of the problem that occupied previous economists, the problem of explaining the fall in the rate of profit, we have the opposite problem of explaining why this fall is not greater or faster. Counteracting influences must be at work, checking and cancelling the effect of the general law and giving it simply the character of a tendency” (Capital vol. 3, Part 3, chapter 14: “The counteracting factors”, page 338).
This question heads up Chapter XIV of Part 3 of Vol. 3 of Capital, which is titled “Counteracting Factors”. In this chapter Marx enumerates six “counteracting factors”:
a) more intense exploitation of labour
b) reduction of wages below their value
c) cheapening of the elements of constant capital
d) the relative surplus population
e) foreign trade
f) the increase in share capital.
Within the limited framework of this reply we cannot make a profound analysis of these counteracting factors, their range and validity. But we must highlight the most important: while the rate of profits falls, the mass of surplus-value tends to increase [4] [43] that is, the capitalists try to compensate for the fall in the rate of profit by increasing workers’ exploitation. In response to the self-interested thesis of the bourgeoisie, trade-unionists and economists according to which the technical progress and productivity diminish exploitation, Marx showed that “The tendential fall in the rate of profit is linked with a tendential rise in the rate of surplus-value, i.e. in the level of exploitation of labour. Nothing is more absurd, then, than to explain the fall in the rate of profit in terms of a rise in wage rates, even though this too may be an exceptional case. Only when the relationships that form the rate of profit have been understood will statistics be able to put forward genuine analyses of wage-rates in different periods. The rate of profit does not fall because labour becomes less productive but rather because it becomes more productive”. (page 347, idem).
This is the reality of the whole of the 20th century where capitalism has intensified the exploitation of the working class in an incredible manner: “It is necessary to note that, despite a certain fall in relation to the last century, the present rate of profit has remained at around 10% - a level that is essentially due to the formidable increase in the rate of exploitation suffered by the workers: for the same working day of 10 hours; if the workers of the 19th century worked 5 hours for himself and 5 for the capitalist (figures frequently reported by Marx) today the worker works 1 hour for himself and 9 for the boss [5] [44]”( “The crisis, are we heading for a new 1929?”, which appeared in Révolution Internationale old series n°6 and 7).
Thus “this theory of crisis [i.e. which explains them by the tendency for the rate of profit to fall] seeks to put forwards the transitory character of the capitalist mode of production and the growing seriousness of the crisis shaking bourgeois society. With this vision one can thus partially interpret the qualitative change that has taken place between the 19th and 20th centuries in the nature of the crisis: the growing gravity of this crisis would be explained by the aggravation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. However this vision is not enough, in our opinion, to explain everything and particularly to provide a satisfactory answer to two questions:
- Why do crises take the form of market crises?
- Why, once a certain point has been reached, do crises lead to war, when previously they could be resolved peacefully?”.
Capitalism is not only characterised by its capacity for increasing the productivity of labour. In reality its essential feature is the generalisation of commodity production: “Although commodities have existed in nearly all societies, the capitalist economy is the first to be fundamentally based on the production of commodities. Thus the existence of an ever-increasing market is one of the essential conditions for the development of capitalism. In particular the realisation of surplus-value which comes from the exploitation of the working class is indispensable for the accumulation of capital which is the essential motor-force of the system” (Point 3 of the ICC Platform). Capitalism was not born from the artisan’s intelligence, nor from the inventor’s genius, but from the merchant class. The bourgeoisie arose as a class of traders and throughout its history it has resorted, and continues to resort, to forms of labour of very low productivity:
- until well into the 19th century slavery was still used;
- today there is massive use of forced labour by prisoners, for example in the main industrial concentration in the world: the USA6;
- the continuing exploitation of domestic labour;
- throughout large epochs diverse forms of forced labour have been used;
- today child labour is increasingly widespread;
Capitalism’s driving force is to maximise profit and this finds its global framework in the market. However, when we talk about the “market” and “commodity production” it is necessary to be precise. Bourgeois economists present the market as a world of “producers and consumers”, as if capitalism were a regime of simple interchange of commodities where each sells in order to buy the necessities of life. The basis of capitalism is wage labour, i.e. the exploitation of a special commodity, labour power, with the aim of obtaining the largest profit. This determines a specific form of exchange characterised by the following features:
- the wide scale breaking up of the narrow local or even national framework;
- the losing of all links with barter or the simple exchange of the commodities of more or less self-sufficient small local communities, in order to take a universal form based on money;
- it is at the service of the formation and accumulation of capital;
- it needs, as a condition of its existence, to constantly expand, without ever reaching a point of equilibrium.
It is certain that the market is not the aim of capitalist production. Manufacture is not carried out to satisfy the needs of solvent buyers but rather, in order to obtain surplus-value on an ever-increasing scale. However, surplus-value can only be materialised through the market and there is no other means of obtaining ever growing surplus value apart from through the expansion of the market.
Within the revolutionary movement those who explain the crisis exclusively by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as is the case with the comrade, tend to play down or purely and simply deny the role of the market in the crisis of capitalism. They claim that the market is nothing but the reflection of what takes place in the sphere of production. According to them, the proportional relations between the distinct departments of capitalist production (essentially, department 1 is the means of production and department 2 is the means of consumption) are expressed by an equilibrium or disequilibrium in the market.
This abstract schema totally bypasses the historical conditions in which capitalism has grown and developed. If the market could be compared to a medieval fair where the producers offer their crops or their craft production to consumers who are seeking to obtain or barter for what they need to sustain themselves, then indeed, “the market is a reflection of what happens in the sphere of production”. However, the capitalist market is nothing like this deformed image. Its main foundation is the expropriation of the producers by separating them from their means of livelihood and production, transforming them into proletarians and progressively subjecting them on this basis to the regime of commodity exchange. This struggle against pre-capitalist forms was carried out in the market and for the market and could expand itself without meeting decisive obstacles whilst existing within territories of sufficient size that had not been fully subjected to capitalist production.
Those who support the “falling rate of profit” explanation usually say that Marx did not consider the question of the market when analysing the cause of the crisis of capitalism. A brief analysis of what Marx really said in Capital and other works shows that this is not the case.
1. He begins by asserting the necessity for commodities to be sold in order for surplus value to be realised and capital valorised. “With the development of this process as expressed in the fall in the profit rate, the mass of surplus-labour thus produced swells to monstrous proportions. Now comes the second act in the process. The total mass of commodities, the total product, must be sold, both the portion which replaces constant and variable capital and that which represents surplus-value” (Capital, Vol. 3, Chapter 15 “The development of the law’s internal contradictions”, page 352, our emphasis). He went on to say that: “If this does not happen, or happens only partly, or only at prices that are less than the price of production, then although the worker is certainly exploited, his exploitation is not realised as such for the capitalist and may even not involve any realisation of the surplus-value extracted, or only a partial realisation; indeed, it may even mean a partial or complete loss of his capital” (idem).
The extraction of surplus value does not finish the process of capitalist production; commodities have to be sold in order to realise the surplus value and to be able to valorise capital. This second part Marx called “The somersault of commodities”, in Volume 1. The extraction of surplus-value (which determines the average rate of profit on the basis of the organic composition of capital) forms a unity with the realisation of surplus-value whose determinant is the general situation of the world market.
2. He defines the market as the global framework for the realisation of surplus value. What are the conditions of this market? Is it merely an external manifestation, a superficial form of an internal structure determined by the proportionality between the different branches of production and general organic composition? This is the idea defended by those who talk of “Marx’s abstract method” and who brand as “empiricism” any efforts to talk about the “market” and such prosaic things as “selling” commodities. But Marx’s response does not go in that direction: “The conditions for immediate exploitation and for the realisation of that exploitation are not identical. Not only are they separate in time and space, they are also separated in theory. The former is restricted only by society’s productive forces, the latter by the proportionality between the different branches of production and by society’s power of consumption” (idem).
3. He made it clear that the capitalist relations of production, based on wage labour, determine the historical limits of the capitalist market. What determines ‘society’s power of consumption’? “This is determined neither by the absolute power of production nor by the absolute power of consumption but rather by the power of consumption within a given framework of antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the vast majority of society to a minimum level, only capable of varying within more or less narrow limits” (idem).
Capitalism is a society of commodity production based on wage labour. This determines a certain limit to the capacity of consumption of the great majority of society – the wage earners: wages have to oscillate more or less around the cost of the social reproduction of labour power. Therefore Marx affirmed clearly in Capital that “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them” (Capital Vol. 3, part 5, Chapter 30 “Money capital and real capital: 1”, page 615). The masses’ capacity to consume is “further restricted by the drive for accumulation, the drive to expand capital and produce surplus-value on a larger scale. This is the law governing capitalist production, arising from the constant revolutions in methods of production themselves, from the devaluation of the existing capital which is always associated with this, and from the general competitive struggle and the need to improve production and extend its scale, merely as a means of self-preservation, and on the pain of going under” (Capital Vol. 3, part 3, Chapter 15, “The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit”, page 352).
4. He understood the necessity for the constant expansion of the market within the perspective of the formation of the world market. Marx saw the constant expansion of the market as inevitable, and as an essential condition of capitalist accumulation: “The market, therefore, must be continually extended, so that its relationships and the conditions governing them assume ever more the form of a natural law independent of the producers and becomes ever more uncontrollable. The internal contradiction seeks resolution by extending the external field of production. But the more productivity develops, the more it comes into conflict with the narrow basis on which the relations of consumption rest. It is in no way a contradiction, on this contradictory basis, that excess capital coexists with a growing surplus population; for although the mass of surplus-value produced would rise if these were brought together, yet this would equally heighten the contradiction between the conditions in which this surplus-value was produced and the conditions in which it was realised” (idem page 353).
He saw the formation of the world market as the fundamental historical task of capitalism: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere” (Communist Manifesto). In the same sense, Lenin said that: “What is important is that capitalism cannot exist and develop without constantly expanding the sphere of its domination, without colonising new countries and drawing old non-capitalist countries into the whirlpool of the world economy” (“The Development of Capitalism in Russia”. Collected Works Vol. 3, page 594).
5. He gave great importance to the market in the development of the crisis. Due to its own relations of production based on wage labour this tendency leads to the aggravation of its contradictions at the same time: “If the capitalist mode of production is therefore a historical means for developing the material powers of production and for creating a corresponding world market, it is at the same time the constant contradiction between this historical task and the social relations of production corresponding to it” (Marx, Capital Vol. 3, page 359).
Therefore, the evolution of the market is central to the explosion of the crisis: “However, the mere admission that the market must expand with production, is, on the other hand, again an admission of the possibility of over-production, for the market is limited externally in the geographical sense (…) For it is then possible – since the market and production are two independent factors - that the expansion of one does not correspond with the expansion of the other; that the limits of the market are not extended rapidly enough for production, or that new markets – new extensions of the market – may be rapidly outpaced by production, so that the expanded market becomes just as much a barrier as the narrower market was formerly” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 2, pages 524-25. Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1969).
In the Communist Manifesto he puts the question: “In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. How does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented” (The Revolutions of 1848, The Pelican Marx Library, 1978, page 73).
The latter element is very important for understanding the causes of the historic crisis of capitalism, its irreversible decadence. Whereas in previous modes of production the crises were due to under-production (starvation, droughts, epidemics) the crises of capitalism, for the first time in history, have the character of crises of overproduction. The poverty of the majority is not born from the lack of the means of consumption but from their excess. Unemployment and factory closures are not due to the lack of stores or the lack of machinery, but from their abundance. Destruction, stagnation and the threat of the collapse of humanity into barbarity, arise from over-production. This shows us the basis of communism, the task of the new society: to direct the forces of production towards the full satisfaction of human needs freed from the yoke of wage labour and the market.
Marx analysed the two sides of the coin of the capitalist system as a totality. On one side is the production of surplus value, this determines the rate of profit, the development of productivity of labour and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The other side is the realisation of surplus value and it is on this side of the scales that the market intervenes: the limits of production imposed by capitalism’s relations based on wage labour and the necessity to conquer new markets in order as much to realise surplus value as to obtain new sources of labour (the separation of the producers from their means of production and life and their incorporation into wage labour).
These two sides or to put it more precisely these two contradictions, contain the premises for the convulsions that led capitalism to its decadence and the necessity for the working class to destroy it and to establish communism. Overall, Marx developed a more elaborate formulation of the first “side” but, as we have seen, he did give the second great importance.
One can easily understand this imbalance if one analyses the historical conditions in which Marx lived and struggled. Between 1840 and 1880, the period in which Marx developed his militant activity, the dominant feature of capitalist production was the prodigious acceleration of its technical discoveries, the increasingly vast development of industry. After the exaggerations of 1848 when the Manifesto foresaw a practically definitive crisis, Marx and Engels developed a more circumspect analysis, taking into consideration all factors and beginning a large-scale investigation of the social structure.
On the one hand, the main political battle against the economists and ideologues of the bourgeoisie had two axes: to demonstrate the material bases of production – the exploitation of the workers, the extraction of surplus value - and to demonstrate the historical limits to capitalist production. In relation to the latter aspect, they concentrated on demonstrating that the tendency that the supporters of capitalism praised most – the progress of the productive force of labour- contained within it the germ of the crisis and the decisive convulsions of the system – the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
On the other hand, the problem of the realisation of surplus value, although it raised its head during the cyclical crises, was not directly presented as the decisive historical problem. In 1850 only 10% of the world population lived under the capitalist regime, the system’s capacity for expansion appeared infinite and vast and each cyclical crisis unleashed a new extension of the capitalist terrain. Despite this, Marx understood the gravity of the dynamic contained within these conditions and he highlighted the underlying contradiction between capitalism’s tendency to unlimited production and the inherent necessity of its own social structure to confine the consumption of the great majority of the population within narrow limits.
The situation changed radically at the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. The phenomenon of imperialism and worsening imperialist wars appeared and led to the terrible slaughter of 1914. With this, the fundamental theoretical question for understanding the historical crisis of capitalism became the realisation of surplus-value and not simply its production: “it is certain that the overwhelming tendency of capitalist production to penetrate into the non-capitalist countries has acted, since it first set foot on the historical stage, as an incessant spur throughout its development, increasingly gaining in importance, until finally in the phase of imperialism, it has become the predominant and decisive factor in social life for the last quarter of a century” (Rosa Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital, an Anti-critique).
Rosa Luxemburg used an historical method to elaborate this problem. She did not pose it – as her critics say - as a circumstantial question – how to find “third persons” distinct from capitalists and workers in order to find markets for the commodities they could not sell – but as a global question: what are the historical conditions for capitalist accumulation? Her answer was that: “Capitalism arises and develops historically amidst a non-capitalist society. In Western Europe it is found at first in a feudal environment from which it in fact sprang - the system of bondage in rural areas and the guild system in the towns - and later, after having swallowed up the feudal system, it exists mainly in an environment of peasants and artisans, that is to say in a system of simple commodity production both in agriculture and trade. European capitalism is further surrounded by vast territories of non-European civilisation ranging over all levels of development, from the primitive communist hordes of nomad herdsmen, hunters and gatherers to commodity production by peasants and artisans. This is the setting for the accumulation of capital” (Rosa Luxemburg The Accumulation of Capital, page 368, Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968).
She distinguishes three parts to this process: “the struggle against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for the remaining conditions of accumulation” (idem, page 368). Although these three parts are present throughout the life of capitalism, nevertheless one of them has more preponderance in each of its historical phases. Thus in the phase of primitive accumulation – the genesis of English capital between the 16th and 17th centuries so brilliantly studied by Marx – the dominant feature was the struggle against the natural economy. The period from the 17th century to the first third of the 19th century was generally dominated by the second aspect – the struggle against commodity economy. In the last thirty years of the 19th century the crucial factor was the third aspect: the worsening competition over the division of the planet.
With this analysis she underlined that: “The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system” (idem).
From this historical and global point of view she put forwards a critique of the schemas of expanded reproduction that Marx had used in order to represent the regular process of capitalist production. She did not question their validity in relation to the concrete and immediate aim that Marx had given them. Marx demonstrated against Adam Smith and the classical bourgeois economists that expanded reproduction was possible and exposed the error that they committed in denying the existence of constant capital. In effect, not recognising the existence of constant capital makes it impossible to understand the continuity of production and the role of accumulated labour in this and consequently the accumulation of capital.
Neither did she criticise Marx’s schemas because they do not represent immediate reality – in contrast to what the comrade thinks when he attributes a “basic error” to Rosa Luxemburg. She understood perfectly well the legitimacy of the abstract model that Marx developed with the concrete aim of demonstrating that expanded reproduction was possible.
What Luxemburg criticises is the assumption that all the extracted surplus value is consumed within the ambit formed by the capitalists and workers. This assumption could be valid if you only wanted to explain that the accumulation of capital is possible in a general way, but it does not help if you are trying to understand the process of historical development and consequently the general crisis of the capitalist system.
Therefore, Rosa Luxemburg argued that there was a fraction of the total surplus-value extracted from the workers that is not consumed by the capitalists and explained that its realisation took place through the struggle to incorporate pre-capitalist territories into the commodity system and capitalist wage labour. In this way she was trying to respond to a very concrete reality of capitalism in its climactic period (1873-1914): “If capitalist production constituted a sufficient market for itself and allowed the expansion of the total of accumulated value, it would mean that another phenomenon of modern development – the struggle for distant markets and for the exportation of capital, that are such significant expressions of imperialism – are totally incomprehensible. Why so much ruin? Why conquer the colonies and why the present struggles for the swamps of the Congo and the deserts of Mesopotamia? It would be much more convenient for capital to stay at home and lead the good life. Krupp could produce happily for Thyssen, Thyssen for Krupp, they would not have to worry about anything but investing capital at one time or another in their operations and mutually expanding indefinitely. The result is that the historical movement of capital is simply incomprehensible and with it, present-day imperialism” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Anti-critique).
Marx posed exactly the same problem when he wrote: “to say that only the capitalists can exchange and consume their commodities amongst themselves is to completely forget the character of capitalist production and to forget that it is a question of the valorisation of capital, not consuming it” (op cit).
It is necessary to make it clear that Rosa Luxemburg did not see the pre-capitalist territories as the “third persons” that the capitalists need in order to get rid of their surplus commodities as some of her critics reproach her for:
“In detail, capital in its struggle against societies with a natural economy pursues the following ends:
1. to gain immediate possession of important resources of productive forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc
2. to ‘liberate’ labour power and to coerce it into service.
3. to introduce a commodity economy.
4. to separate trade and agriculture” (The Accumulation of Capital, page 369)
The apologists for the capitalist system pretend that it is a system based on the regular exchange of commodities, which depends on a gradual equilibrium of sale and demand that develops with the growing economy. In response to this Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that: “…capitalist accumulation as a whole, as an actual historical process, has two different aspects. One concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced – the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate. Regarded in this light, accumulation is a purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction between the capitalist and wage labourer. In both its phases, however, it is confined to the exchange of equivalents and remains within the limits of commodity exchange. Here, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail, and the keen dialects of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership of other people’s property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes class-rule” (op cit chapter XXXI, page 452).
The exposing of this ultimate aspect – to reveal the world of violence and destruction that the simple regular exchange of commodities contained - was Marx’s aim in Capital, but faced with the imperialist epoch and the entry of the system into its decadence it was essential to polarise around: “The other aspect of the accumulation of capital [that] concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loans system – a policy of spheres of interest - and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed” (idem).
In the second part of this correspondence, we will publish a further letter that we have received from the comrade, containing his explanation of the reconstruction periods and his criticism of the ICC’s dogmatism on economic questions. Our reply will further develop our defence of Luxemburg’s analyses, and respond to these criticisms.
Adalen 2.4.2001
[1] [45] The contribution made by Mitchell in Bilan “Crisis and cycles in the economy of dying capitalism” International Review, n°102 and 103, is also important.
[2] [46] See International Review no 93 and our supplement Manifesto on Unemployment.
[3] [47] See “Crises and cycles in the economy of dying capitalism” International Review, numbers 102 and 103
[4] [48] The distinction between the rate of surplus-value and the rate of profit that Marx makes is very important from the point of view of the evolution of capitalism:
· Rate of surplus-value = p / v (p = surplus-value and v = variable capital or the total mass of wages)
· Rate of profit = p/ (c + v) (c = constant capital),
[5] [49] It is not the aim of this article to rebut the idea according to which the ”modern” worker is much less exploited than his predecessor in the 19th century. This mystification which is repeated daily in order to falsify the reality of exploitation. For a response to this see amongst other articles “Who can change the world?” International Review numbers 73 and 74 and the series “Reply to doubts about the working class” which has appeared in various territorial publications of the ICC.
The Franco-German public TV channel Arte recently ran a long documentary with the eloquent title: "Les dessous de la guerre du Golfe" (which translates something like "The truth behind the Gulf War). At the same time as the documentary, a number of articles appeared in various weeklies full of "revelations" about the preparation and execution of the war. The title of the French weekly Marianne (22/28 January 2001) was even more explicit: "The lies about the Gulf War". Why are these "revelations" coming out now, ten years after the event? Why, after the tons of lies during the war, that accompanied the tons of bombs, are some fractions of the bourgeoisie bringing into the open the criminal manoeuvring by the elder Bush's administration in the preparation, setting up, and conduct of the war, from the outset in the summer of 1990 until February 1991 and even to this very day?
The official version
"The Gulf War was a military operation carried out during January and February 1991 by the United States and their Allies, acting under the authority of the United Nations, against Iraq, with the aim of ending the occupation of Kuwait by the troops of Saddam Hussein's army, which had invaded the country on 2nd August 1990. The United Nations Security Council demanded the withdrawal of Iraqi troops immediately, on 2nd August, then declared an economic, financial, and military embargo ("Operation Desert Shield"), which then became a blockade. On 29th November, a further resolution by the Security Council authorised member states to use force, if Iraqi troops had not withdrawn from Kuwait by 15th January 1991. On 17th January, the anti-Iraqi coalition, based in Saudi Arabia under American command and made up of troops from the USA, Britain, France, and some twenty other allied countries, began Operation Desert Storm, bombing Iraqi and Kuwaiti military targets. From the 24th to 28th February a victorious ground offensive towards Kuwait City put an end to the war on the front. Iraq lost several tens of thousands of troops and civilians killed, against less than 200 casualties for the coalition. Two thirds of Iraqi military capacity were destroyed. The war ended officially on 11th April, 1991, with Saddam Hussein's acceptance of the conditions laid down by the Security Council, in particular the destruction of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, and its long and medium range missiles"1.
This is the kind of account that we can see flourishing in the school text books. Everything is there to make us think that so-called historical "objectivity" is being respected. This is more or less what we were told ten years ago (except for the casualty figures).
The war was justified by the defence of sacrosanct international law, trampled underfoot by the "evil" Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. This happened at the very moment when the collapse of the Eastern bloc was supposed to have opened up for humanity a radiant future of "peace and prosperity". At any rate, this is what we were promised, and this is what the US president of the day expressed in the phrase "a new world order". The warmonger and his refusal to respect international law had to be stopped by whatever means necessary. The UN, international forum of "peace", became the scene on which, from embargo to blockade, a sinister diplomatic farce was staged to condition the world's population (in other words the proletariat) to accept the coming war. Finally, the war itself, supposed to be a "clean" surgical war, where the only people killed were the "bad guys". Officially, the war came to an end in April 1991, but in reality its epilogue has not yet been written, since for ten years the American bourgeoisie has played the Lone Ranger (sometimes accompanied by its British acolyte), regularly using Saddam (or rather the Iraqi population) as a punching ball to flex its muscles, in a world which since the war has plunged ever deeper into barbarism2.
Today, some parts of the bourgeois press recognise the truth of what the ICC was saying ten years ago. We are not "proud" of the fact - this is not what interests us. But what does interest us, is more than ever to put forward the need for revolutionaries to ground their analyses in the marxist method, to remain vigilant in the face of events, to subject our analyses to the test of reality, to be critical, and not to change our orientations like weather-cocks, with every shift in the wind. This is a precondition for the advance of the class struggle, and one of the main functions of the revolutionary organisation. We are also interested in understanding why the bourgeoisie has decided today to reveal what was previously hidden: to understand the workings of what one might call the "democratic Goebbels"3.
Washington's trap
This is what the Arte documentary, and the review Marianne, say: "Washington's trap: Washington barely reacted when Saddam spoke of invading his one-time province", the US insisted on the fact that it "had no defence agreement with the Kuwaitis". "It was a manoeuvre to trick him", and "'We can say that after the invasion, the US did not want a diplomatic solution', concludes Dr Halliday of the UN".
And this is what we said in early September 1990, one month after the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam's troops and well before the outbreak of war: "But this is not the end of their hypocrisy and cynicism. It appears that the US, discreetly but deliberately, allowed Iraq to embark on this military adventure. True or false - and it is doubtless true - this enlightens us as to the habits and practices of the bourgeoisie, its lies and manipulation, the use it makes of events". "Iraq had no choice. The country was driven to carry out this policy. And the USA let it do so, encouraging and exploiting Saddam Hussein's military adventure, conscious of the growing chaos in the world situation, conscious of the need to make an example". In the summer of 1990, the bourgeois press itself had very discreetly revealed this information. And here we can see very well how the propaganda machine works under the democratic dictatorship: even after some papers had given a veiled account of the trap that the US had laid for Saddam Hussein, they then echoed the anti-Iraqi coalition's military propaganda almost to a man. These hypocrites recognise this today: "This time, the US Army ensured that the journalists would remain 'loyal'. 'The government succeeded in keeping the press at arm's length. In fact, you never knew what was going on', says Paul Sullivan, president of the help centre for Gulf War veterans (?) For four months, they played at frightening themselves with the idea that the Iraqi army, 'the world's fourth largest', remained a dangerous adversary?" (Marianne). "This gross blindness [sic] did not keep Western journalists from writing reams about [Saddam's] diabolical talents for manoeuvre? The Western press went on endlessly about the occupying army's real or supposed outrages. For example, it published the story of a 'young woman of the people', witness to unmentionable horrors. This 'survivor' was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington?". And so, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2nd August, everything was done to "condition" public opinion and make it accept what was to follow. And the journalists, whether with their agreement or more or less unbeknownst to them, played their part to the full.
But what the journalists, with their claims to be "honest" today, don't say, is that the US trap was laid above all for their "allies" of the day, in other words for the other great powers.
In an article in our International Review4 dated November 1990, we took position at greater length on the situation created by the Gulf crisis, before it turned to war. Our analysis was based on positions we had adopted previously, where we put forward the fact that the collapse of the Eastern bloc had brought about the disappearance of the Western bloc, and the development within it of centrifugal tendencies, a tendency of each of the major powers to "look after number one". The so-called "new international order" was thus nothing but a sinister farce. In laying its trap for Iraq, US policy was principally aimed not at Iraq, nor at the Middle East region, nor even at oil, but at the other major powers, above all at France - which was forced to confront its long-time Iraqi ally - while Germany and Japan were forced to cough up financial support for the war effort. The USSR was already in a state of disintegration, and a few diplomatic crumbs were enough to give it its orders. But at the end of 1990, "The US succeeded in creating a facade of unity among the 'international community' in August 1990 by provoking the 'Gulf Crisis' against the 'madman Saddam'. But barely two months later, every member of the 'international community' is openly out to defend their own interests" (International Review n°64). By the end of October, Saddam may have begun to understand the trap that the US government had drawn him into; at all events, perhaps "because he was aware of the rifts between the different countries" (International Review no.64), he played on the obvious disagreements within the Western coalition: at the end of October 1990, he freed all the French hostages, and around the same time received the visit of Germany's ex-chancellor Willy Brandt (also followed by the release of the German hostages).
In fact, the US used Iraq, at a moment when its status as the world's only super-power was bound to be called into question to "demonstrate its power and determination to the other developed countries" (ibid) by inflicting a brutal and bloody punishment on Iraq. In the same article, under the heading "The opposition between the US, seconded by Britain, and the others", we wrote: "With the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc, the planet's entire political-military and geo-strategic balance of forces has been overthrown. And this situation has not only opened a period of complete chaos in the countries and regions of the old Eastern bloc, it has also accelerated everywhere the tendencies to chaos, threatening the world capitalist 'order' whose main beneficiaries are the United States. The latter have been the first to react. They (?) provoked the 'Gulf crisis' in August 1990, not only in order to gain a definitive foothold in the region, but above all (?) to make an example intended to serve as a warning to any who might be tempted to oppose their position as the dominant super-power in the world capitalist arena" (idem).
By January 1991, the USA had succeeded in establishing its mastery of the UN coalition. A deluge of bombs rained down on Iraq. The cynicism of the gangsters running the coalition went so far as to call this a "clean war". "According to the Pentagon, these raids were extremely precise. That is completely untrue. In the space of 41 days, 85,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq, equivalent to 7½ Hiroshimas! Between 150,000 and 200,000 people were killed, mostly civilians" (Ramsey Clark, ex-US Attorney General, in Marianne and the Arte documentary). "In fact, the coalition did far more than wipe out the Iraqi war machine: it methodically destroyed its economic infrastructure".
The press collaborated, almost without hesitation, with the governments of the different countries at war. It was not enough for the press to accuse the Iraqi regime and its bloodstained dictator5: they put themselves under the command of the coalition's military. We should remember the TV documentaries, with their civilian and military experts and their erudite speeches on the "highly dangerous" Iraqi army, supposedly the world's fourth most powerful. These same journalists inundated us with details of Baghdad's terrifying weapons, capable of delivery throughout the "civilised" world. We were told how the bloodthirsty Saddam's armies were killing babies in the crèches of Kuwait. On the Western side, by contrast, our nice pilots would take care only to destroy the strategic targets of the hated power. Today the weekly review Marianne confirms the media's contemptible subjection and complicity: "For four months, they played at frightening themselves with the idea that the Iraqi army remained a dangerous adversary. They talked of converted pesticide factories, of purchases of enriched uranium, the range of the 'super-cannon'. Nobody, it seemed, dared to put forward the most obvious hypothesis: that this swaggering braggart [Saddam] was simply as stupid as he was stubborn. The real specialist military historians were not duped by all this conditioning: 'exposed in the open desert, the Iraqi army will not hold out for one hour against the coalition's firepower'. (?) Thoroughly conditioned, Western opinion swallowed the fiction of the 'smart bombs', and bombardments reduced to the strict minimum" (Marianne). Nor did the manipulation stop there. the US encouraged the Kurds in Northern Iraq, and the Shiites in the south, to rebel against Saddam. "On 3rd March, General Schwarzkopf accepted the Iraqi surrender, allowing them to keep their helicopters [in order to put down the rebellion]6. For weeks, the CIA radio had been calling for an insurrection, and yet the Allies didn't budge when Saddam attacked the rebels with the best units of the Republican Guard, miraculously spared by the bombers" (ibid).
Why are the media "revealing all" today?
In these quotes, Marianne speaks of "conditioning". This task fell to the media in general, and to the television in particular. We have been able to judge what the "democratic" bourgeoisie means by "freedom of the press", above all in vital moments like the Gulf War. All those defenders of "press freedom" unhesitatingly put themselves under military censorship for the duration. And should one of them be tempted to play at Tintin in search of the truth or a fabulous scoop, the army was always there to call him to order. As Marianne says in its own way: "Nobody, it seemed, dared to put forward the most obvious hypothesis".
We can clearly see the workings of the propaganda services in the democratic states. When events require silence, then nothing important filters out. Instead we are fed all kinds of lies, half-truths, manipulations, all tarted up with the opinions of "independent" experts, university specialists and the like, and made all the more credible by the free "tone" of the press in the democratic countries. After the events, little by little, "everything can be brought into the open", or almost. The most popular media (the TV) is inundated by an avalanche of dis-information. Ten years later, the "truth" can only be found in reviews of limited circulation, or on the low-audience TV channels. We have seen the same mechanism at work in 1995 during the genocide in Rwanda, and above all during the last war in ex-Yugoslavia (Kosovo), where the Gulf media model struck again.
Following the Gulf War, and after handing the Kurd and Shiite populations over to Saddam Hussein's hired killers, the "great democracies" had the incredible cynicism to launch their famous "humanitarian interventions", "flying to the rescue of innocent populations". We have been served up the "duty of humanitarian interference" ad nauseam. The Gulf War has been a kind of template for all the imperialist campaigns that have succeeded it around the world.
If a part of the truth is published today, it is essentially because the ruling class needs to justify its system. We are supposed to believe that such openness is only possible in "democratic" capitalism. The ability to "say everything in a democracy" is used to justify those occasions when everything must be manipulated, deformed, or hidden.
But there is another reason why certain media are publishing such facts today. All these articles and documentaries have one thing in common: the US state appears in them as the sole guilty party. Although all the great powers share the responsibility for the massacres caused by the war, it is true that it was the US that led the "crusade", that prepared the trap and sprang it, and that provided most of the coalition's armed power. Certain European powers - especially France and Germany, for whom the USA is the main rival on the world imperialist scene - have every interest today in minimising their own responsibility and exposing the savagery and cynicism of "American imperialism" (which of course are real enough).
Obviously, we also get our information from the bourgeois press. Even in 1990 some papers gave a limited coverage to the manipulation. Thereafter, the deluge of lies was such that what we said in our press made some people (including those in good faith, even including some militants of the Communist Left) think that we had gone completely off the rails, that we were obsessed with machiavellian plots.
But the news in itself is not the most important thing. What is important is the method used to analyse events, and we use the marxist method. If we were able to understand what was going on in the Middle East during 1990-91, it is because we had worked to analyse the consequences of the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and the decomposition of capitalism. Revolutionaries are not, and cannot have, "secret informers". Our strength lies in our attachment to our class, the proletariat, to its history, and to the marxist method which it has forged.
Nor should we be under any illusions. Revolutionaries today only publish under surveillance. Our only protection is not the "freedom of the press", but the strength and the struggle of our class.
During the events themselves, only revolutionaries were able to show what was at stake, and so to denounce the barbarity of the war and the ruling class' manipulation of the truth. Some fractions of the bourgeoisie denounced the barbarism visited on Iraq, but for nationalist (anti-American), or even frankly pro-Iraqi reasons (as was the case with certain leftist groups). Only the groups of the Communist Left defended the internationalist proletarian position during the war. And among these groups, only the ICC was able to highlight what was really at stake in the situation. The trap set for Iraq was pointless if all that was at stake was oil. But its purpose becomes clear when we consider that what was really at stake, was US leadership in the situation following the collapse of the bloc system7. And it is only in this context that the question of oil gains its full importance, as an element in overall imperialist policy.
In terms of its propaganda and "news" the bourgeoisie does everything it can to prevent the working class - which alone can put an end to the bourgeoisie and its system - from becoming aware of what is at stake. Its efforts are redoubled whenever the mortal economic crisis affecting the system for the last thirty years, or events like the Gulf War are involved. As far as their ideological capacities are concerned, their ability to lie, hide, and deform reality, the democratic bourgeoisie has nothing to learn from the propaganda specialists of totalitarian regimes. Revolutionaries have a duty to denounce, not only imperialist barbarism, but also the mechanisms whereby the bourgeoisie tries to anaesthetise the proletariat by stultifying it with mendacious propaganda.
PA, 30/03/2001
1 This quote is taken from the Encyclopaedia Universalis. Its articles are written by eminent historians, and we can suppose that the chapters in the school text books used to indoctrinate the young generations will be written in the same way.
2 This account does not mention the extras who served to complete the scenario: the so-called "anti-imperialists" and pacifists. Some fractions of the European bourgeoisie (from the extreme right to the extreme left, including in France the "national-republicans" and other "defenders of national sovereignty) stirred up anti-American feeling to express their disagreement with the policy of the right or left wing governments in power in Europe at the time. In general, all these bourgeois fractions that criticised the anti-Iraqi coalition pointed to oil as the main cause of the war.
France was then under President Mitterrand's socialist government. The only member of the government to express any reticence at the anti-Iraq coalition was the left national-republican Chevènement. In Spain, Felipe Gonzales' socialist government also took part in the anti-Iraqi coalition, despite the whining of certain socialists. It is worth noting that in Germany, the Greens were out-and-out pacifists. Today, they are in government. during the last war in Yugoslavia (1999), they were unhesitatingly in favour of the bombing of Serbia. One good thing about the German Greens, is that they save us the need for lengthy analyses of the real nature of pacifism. It is enough to look at their actions.
3 Dr Goebbels was the German Nazi regime's minister for propaganda and information. If we use this expression, it is because Goebbels has since become the archetypal mastermind of the bourgeois state's propaganda indoctrination and manipulation. But, as this article aims to show, there is no shortage of similar examples in Stalinist or democratic regimes.
4 "Against the spiral of military barbarism, there is only one solution: the development of the class struggle", in International Review no.64, 1st Quarter 1991.
5 Indeed, right up until the moment of the Gulf crisis, the Western press had sung Saddam's praises, depicting him as a "modern" ruler, and above all as someone who should be supported against the ambitions of the Iranian ayatollahs during the Iran-Iraq war. In 1988, Western governments supported Saddam's suppression of the Kurds using chemical weapons, because at the time he was a key element against Iran.
6 Marianne goes on to say that it was "a bit as if the Allies, in the winter of 1945, had stopped at the Rhine, leaving Hitler enough weapons to deal with any eventual uprisings". But it is not "a bit as if"; this is exactly what the Allies did in Italy in 1944: they stopped their northward advance, in order to leave the fascist regime's hands free to crush the workers' strikes and insurrection that had broken out there.
7 Read "The proletarian political milieu confronted with the Gulf War" (01/11/90), in International Review no.64, and our "Appeal to the proletarian political milieu" in no.67 (July 1991).
The Dutch communist left is one of the major components of the revolutionary current which broke away from the degenerating Communist International in the 1920s. Well before Trotsky's Left Opposition, and in a more profound way, the communist left had been able to expose the opportunist dangers which threatened the International and its parties and which eventually led to their demise. In the struggle for the intransigent defence of revolutionary principles, this current, represented in particular by the KAPD in Germany, the KAPN in Holland, and the left of the Communist Party of Italy animated by Bordiga, came out against the International's policies on questions like participation in elections and trade unions, the formation of 'united fronts' with social democracy, and support for national liberation struggles. It was against the positions of the communist left that Lenin wrote his pamphlet Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder; and this text drew a response in Reply to Lenin, written by one of the main figures of the Dutch left, Herman Gorter.
In fact, the Dutch left, like the Italian left, had been formed well before the first world war, as part of the same struggle waged by Luxemburg and Lenin against the opportunism and reformism which was gaining hold of the parties of the Second International. It was no accident that Lenin himself, before reverting to centrist positions at the head of the Communist International, had, in his book State and Revolution, leaned heavily on the analyses of Anton Pannekoek, who was the main theoretician of the Dutch left. The continuity and experience of the Dutch left in the combat for the defence of revolutionary positions led it to become the main theoretical inspiration for the German left (KAPD and AAU), which it survived in the 1930s in the shape of the GIK (Group of Internationalist Communists) animated by Pannekoek and Canne-Meijer. After the disappearance of the GIK in 1940, the 'council communist' (or 'councilist') current - a name which the German-Dutch left gave itself in opposition to 'party communism' or 'state communism' - had a certain renaissance with the formation of the Spartacusbond and to some extent of the group Daad en Gedachte. Spartacusbond disappeared at the end of the 1970s, while Daad and Gedachte suspended publication in 1998.
Despite its weaknesses, in particular its underestimation of the role of communist organisations which was to play a big role in the gradual disappearance of this current, the Dutch left made a vital contribution to the revolutionary movement during the terrible counter-revolution which descended on the working class after the revolutionary wave of 197-23. This contribution was taken up in the most complete way after the second world war by the Gauche Communiste de France, whose positions were the basis for those of the International Communist Current. The GCF emerged from the Italian left, which had achieved a high level of clarity thanks to its correct conception of the role of communist fractions in a period of counter-revolution. This is why this document is an indispensable complement to The Communist Left of Italy, already published by the ICC, for all those who want to know the real history of the communist movement behind all the falsifications which Stalinism and Trotskyism have erected around it.
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In the last article in this series (‘1924-28: The Thermidor of Stalinist state capitalism’, International Review 102) we looked at the attempts of the various currents on the left wing of the Bolshevik party to understand and combat the degeneration and demise of the October revolution. As these groups gradually succumbed to the merciless terror of the Stalinist counter-revolution, the focus of this political and theoretical struggle shifted to the international arena, particularly to western Europe. The next two articles will concentrate on the attempts of the international communist left to provide a clear marxist analysis of the regime which had arisen in the USSR on the ashes of the proletarian revolution.
Understanding the nature of the Stalinist system is a key aspect of the communist programme: without such an understanding, it would be impossible for communists to outline clearly what kind of society they are fighting for, to describe what socialism is and what it is not. But the clarity that communists have today about the nature of the USSR was not easily attained: it took many years of intensive debate and reflection within the proletarian political movement before a truly coherent synthesis could be achieved. Never before had revolutionaries been compelled to analyse a proletarian revolution that had perished from within. As a result, for a long time, the USSR appeared as a kind of enigma1, a problem unforeseen in the annals of marxism. Our aim in the following articles will therefore be to chronicle the main stages by which the groups of the marxist vanguard, in the dark years of the counter-revolution, gradually succeeded in unravelling the enigma and bequeathing the analysis of Stalinist state capitalism to their present-day heirs
We take up the story in 1926. The Communist Party of Germany, the KPD, is being ‘Bolshevised’, ostensibly to bring all the Communist parties outside Russia into synch with the intransigent and disciplined methods of the Russian party. But the campaign of Bolshevisation launched by the Communist International in 1924-5 is in truth part of the process of the destruction of Bolshevism. The party which had led the revolution in 1917 is being turned into a mere annex of the Russian state; and the Russian state has become the axial point of the capitalist counter-revolution. Stalin’s theory of ‘socialism in one country’, first announced in 1924, is a declaration of war against the real internationalist traditions of the Russian party. By 1926, all the remaining Bolsheviks – including Zinoviev, under whose auspices the Bolshevisation campaign had been imposed on the International – have gone over to the opposition and shortly afterwards will be expelled from the party.
In Germany too there is widespread resistance to the increasing opportunism and bureaucratism of the KPD, to the attempt to silence all serious questioning about the internal situation within Russia and the foreign policy of the CI. The inability of the KPD apparatus to tolerate any real debate has resulted in the mass expulsion of nearly all of the most revolutionary elements within the party, of a whole series of groups influenced not only by the (today) better known opposition around Trotsky, but also by the German communist left. The KAPD, although far weaker than in its hey-day during the revolutionary wave, still exists and has carried out consistent work towards the KPD, which it defines as a centrist organisation still capable of giving rise to revolutionary minorities.
Our book on the German-Dutch left contains precise evidence of the scale and importance of this split, which involved the following groups:
“the group around Schwarz and Korsch, the ‘Entschiedene Linke’ or Intransigent Left, which regrouped about 7000 members;
The Iwan Katz group, which together with Pfemfert’s group formed an organisation of 6000 members, close to the AAUE. It operated in the name of a cartel of left communist organisations and published the journal Spartakus. This became the organ of the Spartakusbund mark II;
the Fischer-Maslow group, which had 6000 militants;
the Urbahns group, the future Leninbund, which regrouped 5000 members;
the Wedding opposition, excluded in 1927-28 was later, with part of Urbahn’s Leninbund, to create the German Trotskyist opposition” (The Dutch and German Communist Left, chapter 6).
The Korsch group is the one which is most strongly influenced by the KAPD – later on a rather hasty and short-lived fusion will take place between them. The platform of this group is not widely known or available – a measure of the degree to which the German left has disappeared from history. Better known is the letter to Korsch, commenting on the platform, by Amadeo Bordiga, at that point the most important figure of the Italian communist left, which has been conducting a particularly powerful polemic against the growing opportunism of the CI. Our attention thus moves on to this correspondence because it gives us a valuable insight into the different approaches adopted by the German and Italian left communists towards the fundamental problems that confronted them at that time – understanding the nature of the regime in the USSR and defining a coherent policy towards the International and its component parties.
The first noticeable thing about Bordiga’s reply (dated 28th October 1926) is that there is no trace of the sectarianism which led him to consider himself the sole repository of truth, nor of the slightest refusal to discuss with other currents on the left. In short, we are very far away from the ‘Bordigism’ of today, which claims to be the true heir of the Italian left communist tradition, and which has theorised a refusal to hold any kind of debate with groups who do not fit into a very restricted definition of this tradition. It is certainly true that the Bordiga of 1926 does not consider that there is as yet sufficient political homogeneity for a regroupment or even for the publication of a common international declaration. But his whole emphasis is on the necessity for discussion and for a work of clarification in which the various currents of the international left will have a role to play: “I think in general that the priority today, rather than manoeuvring and forming organisations, is the preliminary work of elaborating a political ideology of the international left based on the eloquent experiences undergone by the Comintern” Later on he adds that parallel declarations about the situation in Russia and the Comintern by the different left groupings will contribute to this work, even if he is anxious to avoid “going as far as a fractionist ‘plot’”
Bordiga’s argument is founded on the conviction that “we are not yet at the moment of definite clarification”: ie, it is too early to write off the Communist Parties or the International. Revolutionaries must carry on the struggle within the Communist Parties as long as possible, in spite of the increasingly artificial and mechanical discipline which reigns within them: “we have to respect this discipline in all its procedural absurdities, without ever renouncing positions of political and ideological criticism and without ever solidarising with the dominant orientation”. Defending the decision of the Russian left opposition to submit to discipline and so avoid a split, he argues that “the objective and external situation is still such that, not only in Russia, the fact of being chased out of the Comintern leaves one with still less chance of influencing the course of the working class struggle than one could have from within the party”.
In hindsight we can take issue with some of Bordiga’s conclusions: while it was certainly true that struggle for the ‘soul’ of the Communist parties was far from over in 1926, his reluctance to recognise the necessity for forming organised fractions – including, when possible, an international fraction – goes some way to explaining why he was unable to play a part in the next phase in the history of the Italian left: the phase initiated precisely by the formation of the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy in 1928. But what is important here is Bordiga’s method, which was without doubt handed on to those who did participate in the work of the Fraction. The priority he accords to the work of clarification in an unfavourable objective situation, the insistence on the necessity to fight to the end to save organisations which the proletariat has created with such difficulty – this was the hallmark of the Italian left and provides a key to understanding why it was destined to play the central role in “elaborating a political ideology of the international left” during the bleakest years of the counter-revolution. By contrast, the German left’s premature dismissal of the Communist Parties and the CI had been one of the weightiest causes of its rapid organisational disintegration.
The same can be said when Bordiga takes up the question of the nature of the regime in Russia, which is in fact the first issue addressed in the reply to Korsch. The ‘Intransigent Left’, like previous currents of the German communist left (Rühle as early as 1920, the KAPD from around 1922 onwards) had already declared that capitalism had triumphed over the revolution in Russia. But in both cases this conclusion, arrived at impressionistically and without a through-going theoretical inquiry, had resulted in the proletarian nature of the revolution being put into question, and in a de facto regression to the positions of the Mensheviks or the anarchists, many of whom had from the start denounced the October insurrection as a coup d’Etat by the Bolsheviks, installing a new variety of capitalism in place of the old. The KAPD, on the whole, did not go this far, but it did develop the theory of the “double revolution”, proletarian in the cities, bourgeois in the countryside, and it had tended to see the New Economic Policy introduced in 1921 as the point where a kind of “peasant capitalism” had gained supremacy over the remains of proletarian power.
Another irony for latter-day Bordigism: Bordiga’s reply to Korsch contains no hint of the “double revolution” theory which he elaborated after the second world war, and which defined the bourgeois economy of the USSR as the product of a “transition towards capitalism” which had taken place under the auspices of the Stalinist apparat. On the contrary: Bordiga’s overriding concern is to defend the proletarian character of October, no matter what subsequent degeneration has taken place:
“…your ‘way of expressing yourself’ on the subject of Russia does not seem right to me. One cannot say that the Russian revolution was a bourgeois revolution. The 1917 revolution was a proletarian revolution even if it was an error to generalise its ‘tactical’ lessons; now the problem is posed as to what happens to the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country, if the revolution does not carry on in other countries. There can be counter-revolution, there can be a process of degeneration whose symptoms and reflections within the Communist Party have to be discovered and defined. One cannot simply say that Russia is a country tending towards capitalism. The thing is much more complex: it’s a question of new forms of the class struggle which have no precedent in history. It is a question of showing how the Stalinist conception of relations with the middle classes is equivalent to renouncing the communist programme. It would seem that you exclude the possibility of a policy by the Russian Communist Party which would not lead to the restoration of capitalism. This would end up justifying Stalin or supporting the unacceptable policy of ‘resigning from power’. On the contrary we must say that a correct class policy would have been possible in Russia, avoiding the series of grave errors in international policy committed by ‘The Leninist old guard in its entirety’”.
Again, with the benefit of hindsight it is possible for us to answer some of Bordiga’s conclusions: at the time of writing, capitalism – not based on concessions to the middle classes, but on the very state that had emerged out of the revolution – was indeed becoming the master of Russia, not only economically (since it had never been vanquished at this level) but also politically, and the longer the Communist Party tried to hang on to political power, the more it was separating itself from the proletariat and becoming subsumed to the interests of capital. But here again the essential thing is the method, the theoretical starting point: the revolution was proletarian, but it was isolated; now it is a question of understanding something that has never happened in history: the degeneration of a proletarian revolution from within. And here again, even if Bordiga’s heirs in the Fraction took a long time coming to the correct conclusions about the nature of the regime in the USSR, the solidity of their analytical method was to ensure that they did so with much greater depth and seriousness than those who had proclaimed the capitalist nature of the USSR much earlier on, but only by breaking solidarity with the October revolution. The German left was to pay heavily for this: cutting the roots that connected it to October and Bolshevism also meant cutting its own roots, and without roots a tree cannot survive. To this day it is evident that it is virtually impossible to maintain any organised proletarian political activity that is not grounded in the lessons both of the October victory and of its subsequent defeat.
We move on to 1933. The defeat of the German proletariat has been sealed by Hitler’s assumption of power. The workers of the two other main centres of the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23 – Russia and Italy – have also been crushed. The defeats result in the disappearance or dispersal of the revolutionary vanguard. The political life of the working class no longer takes place in the Communist parties, which have been thoroughly Stalinised and are on the verge of capitulating to the ideology of national defence. It survives nonetheless in a very much reduced milieu of opposition groupings and fractions. By now the crux of this oppositional activity has shifted to France, and in particular to Paris, the traditional city of European revolutions.
By 1933 some of these groups have already come and gone. Such had been the fate of one ‘wing’ of the Italian left in exile, the Reveil Communiste group around Pappalardi. Formed in 1927, this group had attempted a bold synthesis between the Italian and German lefts. Without rejecting the proletarian character of the October revolution, it had come to the conclusion that a bourgeois counter-revolution had taken place in Russia. And yet the group’s tendency towards impatience and sectarianism soon led it to lose its connection with the thorough-going methodology of the Italian left. By 1929 its synthesis had mutated into a wholesale conversion to the tradition of the German left, to its weaknesses as well as its strengths. This mutation was marked by the appearance of the paper L’Ouvrier Communiste, which worked closely with the Russian left communist exiled in Paris, Gavril Miasnikov2. Very quickly the new group had succumbed to anarchist influences and ceased publication in 1931.
In 1933, the majority of the ‘native’ oppositional groups are influenced by Trotsky, although the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy, formed in the Paris suburb of Pantin in 1928, is extremely active within this milieu. The official section of the International Left Opposition is the Communist League, formed in 1929 on a very heterogeneous basis strongly criticised by the Italian Fraction. Already ‘Trotskyism’ has begun to adopt an unprincipled, activist approach to regroupment which is not founded on any solid programmatic agreement. Such approaches can only result in splits, especially because it is combined with an increasingly opportunist approach to such key questions as relations with the Communist and Socialist parties and the defence of democracy against fascism. The League has already been through a number of splits. The first, fuelled by but not limited to personal antagonisms and clan loyalties, had taken place after the feud between the Molinier group and the Rosmer-Naville group. Trotsky’s intervention in the situation from exile in Prinkipo had been unfortunate to say the least, since he was already growing impatient to form new mass organisations and had been taken in by the activist schemes of Molinier, who was in essence a political adventurer. Rosmer’s tendency had at least been more concerned with the need to reflect and develop a clearer understanding of the conditions facing the class, but Trotsky’s ‘Prinkipo peace’ led to Rosmer’s virtual withdrawal from militant life. But the split also gave rise to an organised current – the Gauche Communiste group around Collinet and Naville’s brother. It was followed in 1932 by another split, resulting in the formation of the Fraction de Gauche animated by the former Zinovievist Albert Treint, and by Marc, later of the Gauche Communiste de France and the ICC. The cause of the split was the group’s rejection of a growing tendency within the League towards conciliation with Stalinism. By the beginning of 1933, the League is on the verge of another and even more damaging split, as a growing minority reacts against the politics of conciliation towards social democracy which will culminate in the ‘French turn’ of 1934 – the policy of ‘entrism’ into the social democratic parties, once denounced by the Communist International as instruments of the bourgeoisie.
It is at this point that another oppositional group known as the ‘15th Rayon group’, whose best-known militant is Gaston Davoust (Chaze) issue an invitation to all the oppositional currents to hold a series of meetings aimed at programmatic clarification and eventual regroupment. This initiative is warmly welcomed by the Italian Fraction, which had been manoeuvred out of the International Left Opposition by 1932, but which sees these meetings as the possible basis for the formation of a Left Fraction of the Communist Party of France, to use its terminology of the time. There is a positive response as well from virtually all the French groups, while some groups outside France also participate or send their support (Ligue Communiste Internationaliste in Belgium, the Austrian opposition group, etc). Over the next few months there is a series of meetings which involve an impressive list of groups: the Fraction de Gauche and the Gauche Communiste, Davoust’s group, the Communist League as well as a separate delegation of its latest minority; the Italian Left Fraction; a number of small (and ephemeral) groups such as Pour une Renaissance Communiste, made up of three elements who have split from the Italian Fraction over the Russian question, considering the USSR to be state capitalist; Treint’s new group Effort Communiste, which had left the Fraction de Gauche because it too no longer saw anything proletarian in the ‘Soviet’ regime, and had begun developing the theory that Russia was now under the sway of a new exploiting class; and a number of individuals such as Simone Weil and Kurt Landau.
The nature of the regime in the Soviet Union is one of the key issues on the agenda. At this point, the majority of the invited groups formally defend the view, enshrined in the 1927 platform of the Russian opposition and still vigorously advocated by Trotsky, that the USSR is a proletarian state, albeit in a condition of severe bureaucratic degeneration, because it has not done away with the state ownership of the principal means of production. But what is particularly interesting about the discussions at this conference is the way they provide us with an illustration of the evolution taking place on this question within the opposition milieu.
Thus for example the report on the Russian question is made by the Gauche Communiste group. This text is highly critical of Trotsky’s arguments: “Comrade Trotsky, in order to explain the bureaucracy’s offensive against the peasantry and Stalinism’s conversion to a policy of industrialisation, despite the ‘liquidation of the party as a party’, is led to argue that while the economic infrastructure of the proletarian dictatorship has got stronger, its political superstructure has continued to weaken and degenerate. A proposition that is hard to make sense of when you take into account the marxist thesis that ‘politics is only concentrated economics’, especially when we are talking about a regime where the essential political issue is the direction of the economy”. It concludes that the bureaucracy has indeed constituted itself into new class, neither proletarian nor bourgeois. But unlike Treint, and without any apparent consistency, the text also argues that this bureaucratic state still contains some proletarian vestiges and thus still needs to be defended by revolutionaries against any attack by imperialism. A resolution drawn up by the Chaze group expresses equally contradictory conclusions – the USSR remains a workers’ state, but the bureaucracy is “playing the role of a real class, whose interests are more and more opposed to those of the working class” More important, perhaps, than the actual content of these texts is the approach adopted by the conference, its open attitude to the question. Thus, when the ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist group, the Communist League, proposes a resolution excluding all those who deny the proletarian nature of the USSR, it is almost unanimously rejected.
The conference does not succeed in unifying all the groups that had taken part, nor in creating a French Fraction: in a period of defeat, the dominant tendency is inevitably towards dispersal and isolation. But a partial regroupment does take place and this too is significant: the Fraction de Gauche, Davoust’s group, and later on the minority of the Communist League – a minority of 35 members whose departure virtually crippled the League – unite to form the Union Communiste group which continued up until the war. Although it begins with a heavy baggage of Trotskyism, and is later found wanting when it comes to the ordeal of the Spanish civil war, a process of evolution does take place in this group: it calls the ideology of anti-fascism into question and by 1935 has concluded that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a new bourgeoisie. A similar position is adopted by the LCI in Belgium.
When we consider as well that the Italian Fraction, though still talking about the USSR as a proletarian state, also moves rapidly towards rejecting any defence of the USSR during this period, we can see that by the mid 1930s Trotsky’s position on the USSR has already been challenged or abandoned by an important component of the Trotskyist movement, just as it had been within the Russian opposition itself. And the importance of this component is both quantitative and qualitative: quantitative because by the mid-30s it is actually larger than the ‘official’ Trotskyist group in the country which is the ‘heartland’ of the International Left Opposition; and qualitative because it is generally the most intransigent and consistent elements, many of them formed during the revolutionary wave or soon afterwards, who have rejected the defence of the USSR and begin to grasp, albeit in an incomplete and often contradictory manner, that a capitalist counter-revolution has taken place in the ‘Land of the Soviets’. Small wonder that the history of these currents is systematically ignored by the Trotskyist historians.
In order to understand the evolution of Trotsky’s position on the USSR, it is necessary to recognise these pressures on him from the left. If we look briefly at Trotsky’s most important statement on the nature of the USSR during this period – his book The Revolution Betrayed, written during his exile in Norway and published in 1936 – we can readily grasp that he was engaging in a polemic on two fronts: on the one hand, against the Stalinist deception that the USSR was a paradise for the workers, and on the other hand, against all those currents on the left who were converging towards the view that the Soviet Union had lost all connection with the proletarian power of 1917.
Let us state first of all that contrary to conclusions that have been put forward within the communist left, and even by the Italian Fraction at the time, the Trotsky of 1936 had not ceased to be a marxist, and The Revolution Betrayed contains ample proof of this. The main thrust of the book is aimed at refuting Stalin’s absurd claim that the USSR had already achieved full ‘socialism’ (though not yet ‘communism’) by 1936. Against this monstrous lie, Trotsky marshals the full force of his statistical knowledge, his acerbic wit and his political clarity to expose the absolutely miserable conditions of the working class and the peasantry, the deplorably shoddy character of the goods produced for mass consumption, the growing privileges of the bureaucratic elite, the increasingly reactionary, nationalistic, and hierarchical trends in the spheres of art and literature, education, the army, family life, and so on. Indeed Trotsky’s depiction of the mentality and practices of the bureaucracy is so sharp that he all but proves that we are in the presence of an exploiting class. In the article ‘The unidentified class: Soviet bureaucracy as seen by Leon Trotsky’, written for International Review n°92 by one of the comrades involved in the emerging proletarian milieu in Russia today, this point is made very clearly: “Trotsky is in fact describing the following picture [in The Revolution Betrayed]: there exists a fairly numerous social stratum which controls production, and therefore its produce, in a monopolistic manner, and which appropriates a large part of production (in other words, exercises a function of exploitation), which is united around an understanding of its common material interests, and is opposed to the producing class. What do marxists call a social stratum that displays all these characteristics? There is only one answer: this is the ruling social class in every sense of the term. Trotsky leads his reader to the same conclusion. But he does not come to it himself…Trotsky starts with ‘a’, but after describing the exploiting ruling class, Trotsky hesitates at the last moment, and refuses to go on to ‘b’”.
Trotsky’s book also poses an extremely important question about the nature of the transitional state, and why it is particularly vulnerable to the pressures of the old social order. Taking up Lenin’s suggestive phrase from State and Revolution that the transitional state is in a certain sense a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”, Trotsky adds: “This highly significant conclusion, completely ignored by the present official theoreticians, has a decisive significance for the understanding of the nature of the Soviet state – or more accurately, for a first approach to such understanding. In so far as the state which assumes the task of socialist transformation is compelled to defend inequality – that is, the material privileges of a minority – by methods of compulsion, insofar does it also remain a bourgeois state, even though without a bourgeoisie…The bourgeois norms of distribution, by hastening the growth of material power, ought to serve socialist aims – but only in the last analysis. The state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character: socialist in so far as it defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois, in so far as the distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing therefrom. Such a contradictory characterisation may horrify the dogmatists and scholastics; we can only offer them our condolences” (Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder press, p 53-4). This line of questioning about the nature of the transitional state could, if properly developed have led Trotsky to understand how the state established after the October revolution had become the guardian of the statified capital; but again, Trotsky was unable to pursue the question to its final daring conclusions.
The more directly political conclusions embodied in the book – although Trotsky had already reached some of these by 1933 – also represent a certain advance on his previous thinking. In 1927, as we saw in the last article in this series, Trotsky had issued a warning about the danger of a Thermidor, a “counter–revolution on the instalment plan”, within the USSR. But he had as yet not accepted that this was already an accomplished fact. By the time he writes The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky has revised his view and concluded that Thermidor had already taken place under the aegis of the bureaucracy; as a result “the old Bolshevik party is dead, and no force will resurrect it” ibid, p100). And he concludes that the bureaucracy which had strangled Bolshevism can no longer be reformed – it must be forcefully overthrown in what he calls a “political revolution” by the working class. By this time he has also decided that the Communist International had also breathed its last and that the formation of new parties is on the agenda in all countries.
Finally, it is important to remember that Trotsky’s book does not completely close the question of the nature of the USSR. He considers that history has yet to determine this question, insisting that the reign of the bureaucracy cannot be a stable one: either it will be overthrown by the workers, or by an overtly bourgeois counter-revolution, or it will transform itself into a possessing class in the fullest sense. And as the world lurched towards a new world war, it became more evident to Trotsky in his final years that the role that the USSR played in the war would be a decisive factor in finally fixing its class nature.
Despite all these positive aspects, the book is also a vigorous defence of the thesis that the USSR remains a workers’ state because it has carried through the integral nationalisation of the means of production, thus “abolishing” the bourgeoisie. When his book talks about Thermidor, it is not used in quite the same sense as Trotsky had used it in 1927. Then Thermidor had meant a bourgeois counter-revolution. Now it leans more heavily on the ambiguity of this comparison with the French revolution. In France, Thermidor had not meant a feudal restoration, but the coming to power of a more conservative fraction of the bourgeoisie. By the same token, Trotsky argues that the Soviet Thermidor has not restored capitalism but installed a kind of “proletarian Bonapartism”, in which a parasitic bureaucratic stratum defends its privileges at the expense of the proletariat, but is still dependent for its survival on the continuation of the “proletarian property forms” ushered in by the October revolution. This is why he calls not for a complete social revolution in the USSR, but merely a political revolution which will eliminate the bureaucracy while retaining the basic economic form. And this too is why Trotsky remains entirely devoted to the “defence of the Soviet Union” against the hostile intentions of world capitalism, which, he argues, still sees the USSR as an alien body within its midst.
Here we come to the reactionary side of Trotsky’s work – and it is a thesis directed against the left. This becomes explicit in the latter part of the book when Trotsky poses, and dismisses, the question of whether the USSR could be seen as state capitalist or the bureaucracy as a ruling class. With regard to state capitalism, Trotsky is aware of the general trend towards state intervention in the economy within capitalism, and sees it as an expression of the historic decline of the system. He even accepts the theoretical possibility that the entire ruling class of a given country could constitute itself into a single trust via the state, and goes on to say that “the economic laws of such a regime would present no mysteries. A single capitalist, as is well known, receives in the form of profit, not that part of the surplus value which is directly created by the workers of his own enterprise, but a share of the combined surplus value created throughout the country proportionate to the amount of his own capital. Under an integral ‘state capitalism’, this law of the equal rate of profit would be realised, not by devious routes – that is, competition among different capitals – but immediately and directly through state bookkeeping”. But having described in a nutshell the operation of the law of value in the USSR, he quickly adds the disclaimer that “such a regime never existed, however, and, because of profound contradictions among the proprietors themselves, never will exist – the more so since, in its quality of universal repository of capitalist property, the state would be too tempting an object for social revolution” (Revolution Betrayed, p245). We could add that the most advanced bourgeoisies have also shunned the model of integral state capitalism because, as in the collapse of the ex-Stalinist countries confirmed, it has proved to disastrously inefficient. But what Trotsky entirely fails to do in this chapter is to ask this obvious question: could an integral state capitalism arise out of a unique situation where the proletarian revolution has expropriated the old bourgeoisie, and then degenerated due its international isolation?
As for Trotsky’s argument that the bureaucracy cannot be a ruling class, due to the fact that it has no stocks and shares or any right of inheritance enabling it to pass on property to its heirs, our Russian comrade AG writes a very lucid rejoinder: “In Revolution Betrayed Trotsky tries to refute theoretically the thesis of the bureaucracy’s bourgeois class nature with arguments as weak as the fact that ‘it has neither stocks nor bonds’ (p249). But why should the ruling class necessarily possess them? For it is obvious that the possession of stocks and bonds is of no importance in itself: the important thing is whether this or that class appropriates to itself a surplus product of the direct producers. If yes, then the function of exploitation exists whether the distribution of the appropriated product is done via dividends on shares, or through a salary and privileges attached to a job. The author of Revolution Betrayed is just as unconvincing when he says that the representatives of the leading stratum cannot bequeath their privileged status (…) it is highly unlikely that Trotsky thought that the children of the elite could become workers or peasants”. By attributing this decisive significance to the law of inheritance, Trotsky clearly deviates from the fundamental marxist axiom that juridical relations are only the superstructural expression of the underlying social relationships; equally, by insisting on finding such proof of personal membership of a ruling class, Trotsky forgets that marxists define capital as a wholly impersonal power; it is capitalism which creates capitalists, not the other way round.
Equally, behind Trotsky’s notion that the class nature of the Soviet state is determined in the last instance by its economic structure there is a deep confusion about the nature of the proletarian revolution. As an exploited class, the one and only way the working class can transform society towards socialism is by establishing and holding political power. It has no ‘property’ of its own, no economic laws functioning in its favour: its method of struggle against the laws of the capitalist economy is based entirely on its ability to impose conscious control and planning against the anarchy of the market, human needs against the needs of profit. But this ability can only derive from its organised strength and its political consciousness – from its ability to assert its programme at every level of social and economic life. There is no guarantee whatever that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the collectivisation of the means of production will automatically lead in the direction of new social relations. They are a mere starting point: the work of creating these new social relations can only be carried out through the mass social movement of the working class. Actually, Trotsky comes close to recognising this when he writes “The predominance of socialist over petty bourgeois tendencies is guaranteed, not by the automatism of the economy – we are still far from that – but by political measures taken by the dictatorship. The character of the economy as a whole thus depends upon the character of the state power” But, as with the rest of his thesis, Trotsky is unable to draw the essential conclusion – that if the proletariat no longer exerts the slightest control over the state power, then the economy will automatically go in one direction: towards capitalism. In sum, the existence of a ‘workers state’, or proletarian dictatorship to be more precise, depends not on whether the state formally owns the economy, but on whether the proletariat really holds political power.
The most serious result of Trotsky’s failure to recognise that the October revolution had indeed been definitively defeated is that it leads him to “theoretically” justify the radical apology for Stalinism, which was to be the ultimate function of the movement he founded. In The Revolution Betrayed this apologia is already explicit, in spite of all the criticisms of the real conditions facing the Russian working class: “With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface – not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity” (p 8). Thus, Trotsky insists that despite all the bureaucratic deformations, Stalinism’s “development of the productive forces” is progressive because it is laying the basis for a true socialist society; indeed, Trotsky could never escape from the idea that Stalin’s turn towards rapid industrialisation at the end of the 20s was a victory of sorts for the economic programme of the Left Opposition. But the real character of the industrialisation of the USSR must be judged within the context of the world-wide development of the productive forces. The Russian revolution of 1917 had been made on the premise that the world was already ripe for communism. The development that took place under Stalin was founded on the defeat of the first world wide attempt to create a communist society; it was predicated on the necessity to build up a war economy to prepare for the resulting imperialist re-division of the world. Seen in this light, the triumphs of Soviet industrialisation are in no way a factor of human progress, but an expression of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production; and Trotsky’s hymns to the production of concrete and steel are a justification for the ruthless exploitation of the working class.
Worse: the defence of the Soviet Union against world capitalism led to a policy of support for the imperialist appetites of Russian capital, a policy already put in practice in 1929 when Trotsky supported Russia’s dispute with China over possession of the Manchurian railway. As the world moved rapidly towards another war, and as the USSR increasingly took its part in the global imperialist arena, the official Trotskyist position of ‘defending the workers’ state’ would lead the movement closer and closer to the bourgeois camp.
As we pointed out in the article on Trotsky’s death in International Review n°103, the slide towards war led Trotsky himself to pose some very fundamental questions. Within the Trotskyist movement, he was to face further challenges to his notion of the degenerated workers’ state. This time it came not so much from the left but from the likes of Bruno Rizzi in Italy, and in particular Burnham and Schachtman in the US, all of whom developed different versions of the idea that the USSR represented an exploiting society of a new type, unforeseen by marxism. Trotsky was opposed to this conclusion, but his later writings show that he was quite strongly influenced by it, even though – because he was a marxist, and above all a far better marxist than the likes of Schachtman – he understood quite clearly that if a new system of exploitation could arise from the entrails of capitalist society, the whole marxist perspective, and above all the revolutionary potential of the working class, had to be put into question. “Taken to its historic conclusion, the historical alternative appears thus: either the Stalinist regime is an awful setback in the process of the transformation of bourgeois society into a socialist society. Or else the Stalinist regime is the first step towards a new society of exploitation. If the second forecast proved correct, then of course the bureaucracy would become a new exploiting class. However dire this second perspective may appear, should the world proletariat indeed prove itself unable to carry out the mission entrusted to it by the course of historical development, then we would be forced to recognise that the socialist programme, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, has finally turned out to be a utopia. It goes without saying that we would need a new ‘minimum programme;’ to defend the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society” (‘The USSR in the war’, 1939).
For Trotsky the outcome of the impending war would be decisive: if the bureaucracy revealed itself to be stable enough to survive the war, it would be necessary to conclude that it had indeed crystallised into a new ruling class; and if the proletariat failed to end the war by making the revolution, then this would prove that the socialist programme was indeed a utopia. Here we can see how Trotsky’s refusal to accept the capitalist nature of the USSR had led him to doubting the convictions that had inspired his whole life.
By the same token, the definition of the USSR as capitalist proved to be the only firm basis for the defence of internationalism during the second world war and its aftermath. The defence of the ‘degenerated workers’ state, coupled with the ideology of supporting democracy against fascism, led the official Trotskyist movement to capitulate directly to chauvinism and to integrate itself into the allied imperialist camp; after the war, it placed Trotskyism in the position of propagandists for the Russian imperialist bloc against its American rival. Those who put forward the theory of a new bureaucratic society soon concluded that western democracy was more progressive than the barbaric regime in Russia - or they simply ceased pretending that marxism had any further validity. By contrast, all the groups or elements which broke from Trotskyism in the 1940s because of its abandonment of internationalism had become convinced that Russia was a capitalist and imperialist state – the group around Munis, the German RKD, Agis Stinas in Greece…and of course Natalia Trotsky, who followed her husband’s political advice and had the courage to re-examine ‘Trotskyist’ orthodoxy in the light of the second world war and the preparations for a third that followed immediately afterwards.
***
The next article in this series will focus on the position of the Italian left on the Russian question, and will show why it was this current which provided the best framework for finally solving the “Russian enigma”.
1 We have adapted, for our own title, the title of an article written by the French oppositionist Albert Treint in 1933 (‘To unravel the Russian enigma: comrade Treint’s theses on the Russian question’, which was written for the 1933 conference. However, it must be said that Treint’s theory of a new exploiting system, which featured state capitalism, but no capitalist class, only succeeded in creating new mysteries.
2 It is worth noting here Miasnikov’s final statement on the question of the USSR. In 1929, Miasnikov was exiled to Turkey and began a correspondence with Trotsky: despite their deep differences, he recognised Trotsky’s importance for the whole international opposition against Stalinism. He wrote a pamphlet on the Soviet bureaucracy and sent a copy to Trotsky, asking him to contribute a preface. Trotsky declined, because the text argued that Russia was a system of state capitalism and that the bureaucracy was a ruling class. According to Avrich in his essay ‘Bolshevik opposition to Lenin: G.T. Miasnikov and the Workers’ Group’, published in The Russian Review, vol. 43, 1984, Miasnikov’s text shed little light on the process whereby the proletariat lost power and through which the Stalinist bureaucracy consolidated its rule. Avrich also says that “Insofar as state capitalism organised the economy more efficiently than private capitalism, Miasnikov considered it historically progressive”; in a footnote, he adds that Tiunov, another member of the Workers’ Group who was in jail with Ciliga, considered state capitalism to be regressive. Miasnikov’s pamphlet was eventually published in France in 1931, in the Russian language, under the title Ocherednoi obman (The Current Deception). To our knowledge it has not yet been translated into any other language, a task which could perhaps be taken up by the newly emerging proletarian milieu in Russia. The ICC can make a copy of the Russian text available if there are offers to translate it.
A question of method in the discussion
A recent article of ours 1 was devoted "to replying to the thesis of the IBRP that organisations such as ours are 'estranged from the method and perspectives of the work that leads to the formation of the future party'. In order to do so we have taken into consideration the two levels at which the organisational problem is posed: 1) how the future International should be conceived; 2) what policy should be followed for the construction of the organisation and the regroupment of revolutionaries, and in terms of both we have shown that it is the IBRP, not the ICC, that has abandoned the tradition of the Italian and the international Communist Left. In fact the eclecticism that guides the IBRP's policy of regroupment is similar to that of Trotsky when he was taken up with building the IVth International; the vision of the ICC on the other hand is that of the Italian Fraction, which always fought for regroupment with clarity and on a basis that would make it possible to salvage elements of the centre and those with hesitations".
These conclusions, which came at the end of a seven page article, are not the fruit of irrational mind-games, but are rather the expression of an attempt to defend our method of working, and to criticise firmly but fraternally a political group that we consider to be definitely on the same side of the class line as us. In criticising the IBRP our starting point has always been the texts of the IBRP itself, which we have made a great effort to reproduce as far as possible in our article, and our arguments have been based on a confrontation with the common tradition of the Communist Left, to check the validity of the one hypothesis or the other in the difficult work of building a revolutionary vanguard.
In reply, Battaglia Comunista (BC), one of the two political components of the IBRP, has published an article 2 that raises a number of problems. In fact the article is a reply to the ICC, which however is named only when it's absolutely necessary; the whole article is superficial, completely devoid of quotations from our positions, which are instead synthesised by BC in a way that clearly distorts the meaning of some of them (we want to believe that this is due to a failure of understanding and not bad faith). There is also a tendency to develop the article more in the spirit of trying to catch the sympathy of the reader with jokes intended to have a certain effect, rather than openly confronting the questions at issue. But above all, in this article BC refuses to situate itself on the only level possible, the one on which our reply was based, that is on the historical level. It rather limits itself to giving an impromptu and elusive reply which in fact remains inconclusive. The view put forward that our article is "bilious" and that it contains "attacks and slanders" against the IBRP is symptomatic of this attitude 3 and we think that it confirms our criticism in the previous article of the IBRP's opportunism since, historically, opportunism has always tended to avoid political confrontation because this would obviously show it up for what it is. Of course we can do no more than refer all our readers to our previous article for them to judge to what extent this position of BC is false, if not actually in bad faith 4. But at the same time we don't want to follow BC's contortions in this article or in future ones because we don't want to get bogged down in sterile and endless polemics. However with this article we will try to further elaborate our view of the building of the revolutionary organisation, developing two points in particular:
a ) a reply to the argumentation given by BC in its article,
b ) a reply to the IBRP's critiques on our supposed idealism, which is the IBRP's pretext for declaring us unable to build a force worthy of participating in the construction of the world party.
Once more on building the party
The second part of BC's article tries to defend their own opportunist policy on building the international party, in contrast to our way of working. So let's recall the fundamental elements previously developed. This is the IBRP's criticism of how to create national sections of an international organisation:
"We reject, on principle, as well as on the basis of different congress resolutions, the idea of creating national sections as clones of one already existing organisation, even ours. National sections of the international party of the proletariat cannot be built in a largely artificial way in a country by creating a centre for translating publications edited elsewhere and, moreover, outside the real political and social struggles of the country itself" (our emphasis) 5.
To this we replied as follows:
"Our strategy for international regroupment is of course ridiculed by referring to it as 'creating a centre for translating publications edited elsewhere' ? so as to induce in the reader an automatic distaste for the strategy of the ICC. (...) For the IBRP, if a new group of comrades appears, let's say in Canada, who are moving towards internationalist positions, this group can benefit from critical fraternal contributions, even polemics, but it must grow and develop from the political context of its own country, inside 'the real political and social struggles of the country itself'. This means that for the IBRP the current and local context of a given country is more important than the international and historical framework furnished by the experience of the workers' movement. What, on the other hand, is the strategy for the construction of the organisation at an international level (...)? Whether there are one or one hundred aspiring militants in a new country, our strategy is not to create a local group that evolves locally, through the "real political and social battle of the country itself" but to integrate these new militants immediately into the international work of the organisation, one aspect of which is centralised intervention in the country in which these comrades live. This is why, even if our resources are small, our organisation makes the effort to be present immediately with a local publication under the responsibility of the new group of comrades because we hold that this is the most direct and effective way, on the one hand to extend our influence and, on the other to proceed directly to the construction of the revolutionary organisation. What is artificial about that, what sense does it make to talk about 'clones of one already existing organisation'? This has yet to be explained".
The really surprising thing is that BC is unable to oppose a minimum of political argument to this reasoning of ours except that... they don't believe it. This in fact is their position:
"Can a stronger and representative multi-national 'expansion' of the organisations be conceived? No.
Because revolutionary politics is a serious thing: you can't imagine that a 'section' of a few comrades in a country other than the 'mother' one can concretely constitute an element of real organisation [Why not?, we would like to know].
We must have the courage to recognise the difficulty in making an organisation really function on a national scale; the co-ordination of a 'campaign' on a national scale isn't always complete; the distribution of the press, given our organisational conditions of being 'few in number' reflects the smallest variation in the availability of militants and we could give other concrete organisational examples".
So that's the truth of the matter! BC doesn't believe in the possibility of putting together an international organisation simply because it's not even able to control its own organisation at a national level! But the fact that BC can't do it doesn't mean that it can't be done. The existence of the ICC clearly gives the lie to this way of arguing. BC talks of the difficulty distributing the press at a national level but doesn't take into account - just to give one example - that the English and Spanish language press of the ICC (the International Review in particular) is distributed in about twenty countries in the world. It doesn't take into account either that, when necessary, our organisation is able, and has demonstrated this whenever it has been necessary, to distribute the same leaflet immediately and simultaneously in every country in which it has a presence and also in others! Once more BC doesn't take into account a reality that is in front of its eyes, if only it made the effort to keep them open, which shows that the ICC really is a single international organisation, whatever the size of the sections existing in this or that country.
All this gives rather the impression that BC's argument that "We must have the courage to recognise the difficulty making an organisation really function" is developed merely to deny the possibility of constructing an international organisation today, without any scientific basis. But unfortunately there's more. In BC's article another unhealthy idea emerges of how a revolutionary organisation must be developed in a country:
"Moreover, a mini-section parachuted into a country doesn't have the possibility of implanting itself within that country's political scene, as does an organisation which - however small - arises from the political scene itself, orienting itself around revolutionary positions. (...) He who doesn't understand, or pretends not to understand, that political identity isn't enough to form a revolutionary organisation, either has no sense of organisation or is so lacking in organisational experience that he thinks that the topic is irrelevant. (...) You're not qualified for this task if you don't carry out the primordial task of putting down roots within the class, even if today they're unfortunately limited" 6.
The meaning of this passage is frankly worrying. What emerges from BC's exposition is that it's better to have a group that "arises from the political scene itself [ie locally, ed.), orienting itself around revolutionary positions", no matter how confused it is at the beginning, than to have in the same locality "a mini-section parachuted into a country". But the real "roots" of an organisation in the class are not to be judged on the basis of the momentary popularity of their positions among the workers. That is the immediatist and opportunist approach. The real laying down of roots is to be judged at an historic level (related to the past experience of the class and to its becoming). The main criteria for "putting down roots" is clarity at the level of the programme and the analyses, which makes it possible:
- to make a real contribution in the face of whatever confusions may exist among the workers,
- to build solidly for the future.
This was the whole point of the debate between Lenin and the Mensheviks, who wanted to have a bigger impact by opening the door of the party to confused and hesitant elements. It is also the point of the debate between the Italian Left and the majority of the Communist International (CI) on the constitution of the Communist Parties (on a "tight" or "loose" basis, since the CI wanted to have "roots" in the working masses as rapidly as possible). The Fraction argued the same position against the Trotskyists in the 1930s. The organisation can never root itself in the class by balancing its principles and watering them down. This is one of the great lessons of the Left's fight that the IBRP has forgotten today, just as the PCInt forgot it in 1945.
The inconsistency of BC's argumentation is a consequence of the fact that the group refuses to reply to the questions raised in our previous article, which are:
a) Does BC think that the position on the organisational question elaborated by the workers' movement is wrong, and why?
b) Or does it think that in relation to the period of Lenin, of Bilan, the historic period has changed and so requires a different type of organisation? And if so, why?
We're still waiting for a reply!
On our supposed idealism
It is well known that BC accuses us of being idealist and of having an analysis of the current situation that reflects this vision. Just recently, during a public meeting held by Battaglia Comunista in Naples, in reply to a request to explain our presumed idealism, BC replied thus:
"There are three points that characterise the idealism of the ICC.
The first is the concept of decadence: this is a concept that we too employ but it isn't possible to explain the economic concept of decadence on the basis of sociological factors alone. The question is that decadence can be explained by starting from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. We say that capitalism undergoes decadence not because of the existence of the crisis (there have always been cyclical crises) but because there is a particularly serious crisis. We say that the ICC is idealist because the concept of decadence is abstract, idealist.
The second is on the analysis of imperialism: when the USSR existed we were used to seeing imperialism with two faces: the USSR and the USA. With the diminishing of one of the two imperialist poles, the other dominates on the military, economic level etc. But within this new situation there's an attempt at an imperialist regroupment in Europe. How can the ICC explain this new phase by speaking only of chaos? The ICC confuses the lucid intention to dominate on the imperialist scene with chaos.
The third reason is in relation to the question of consciousness, and it is the most important one. We've heard some incredible things, such as that the working class has a level of consciousness that can prevent the 3rd World War".
We suppose that by criticising us for idealism BC intends to accuse our organisation of not following the real problems and of giving way to fantasies, to idealism in fact. We hold that on the contrary, as we will try to demonstrate, this critique on the part of BC is founded on a lazy and incorrect understanding of our political analyses that can be justified only by an uncontrollable desire to demarcate themselves from our organisation.
So we will try to give some elements in reply even if we obviously can't develop such broad topics in depth.
The decadence of capitalism: it is true that the ICC's analysis is different from that of BC but it's absolutely false to say that for us the "economic concept of decadence" can be explained "on the basis of sociological factors alone" The comrades of BC know quite well that, whereas their framework is based on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the ICC makes reference to the later theoretical developments of Luxemburg 7 on the saturation of extra-capitalist markets, which doesn't however exclude the variable of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. So our framework too has an economic basis and certainly not a sociological one and anyway, over and above the two different economic explanations, the fundamental aspect is that both analyses attempt to explain the same situation, that of the decadence of capitalism, on which we're completely agreed. So where is the idealism?
Imperialism and chaos: if the ICC did indeed defend the position described by BC, then it would not be very credible. But the question of chaos is not a phenomenon in itself: it is a consequence of the collapse of the two imperialist blocs in 1989 and the weakening of the discipline that they managed to impose on their member countries, which during the period of the cold war guaranteed on the whole and in spite of the danger of world war, a certain "pacification" within each individual bloc and on the international scene itself. "The ICC confuses the lucid intention to dominate on the imperialist scene with chaos"? Not at all! By starting from the lucid intention not only of the great, but also of the smaller powers to dominate on the world imperialist scene, the ICC sees in the present situation a tendency to increasingly diffuse and multi-directional conflicts, a tendency in which each one tends to come into conflict with all the others, in which there are no longer, or at least not for the moment, new imperialist blocs that could cohere and orient the imperialist ambitions of the individual countries; indeed, we have difficulty envisaging the prospect of their formation in the short term 8.
In this new situation, in which the aforesaid discipline diminishes, the individual countries leap into imperialist adventures coming increasingly into conflict with one another: this is what gives rise to chaos, that is, a situation without the previous control and discipline but whose basic dynamic is very clear. Is this position of ours really so foolish and ? idealist?
Lastly on the working class preventing war: we repeat yet again that when we say that the historic resurgence of the class struggle has prevented the bourgeoisie from imposing its outcome to the capitalist crisis, that is the Third World War, we certainly don't mean that the working class is aware of the danger of war and so consciously opposes it. If this were the case we would certainly be in a pre-revolutionary situation and the evidence shows that this isn't so. What we do say however, is that the resurgence of the struggle has made the class more sensitive and less malleable than it was in the 1940s and 50s. The fact that they can't count on the complete control and support of the proletariat raises problems for the bourgeoisie and inhibits them from launching an imperialist conflict.
In fact, in the present period, even if the class' combativeness and consciousness are at a low level, the bourgeoisie does not have the capacity to mobilise the workers of the developed countries behind a war ideology (whether this be the nation, anti-fascism or anti-imperialism, etc). In order to wage war it's not enough to have workers who aren't very combative, it needs workers who are ready to risk their lives for some bourgeois ideal.
Although the IBRP now pretend to be very wise, they themselves have had (and have!) difficulties analysing the international situation. For example, at the time of the fall of the Eastern bloc, BC didn't have very clear ideas at the beginning and attributed the "collapse" to a process that had been piloted by Gorbatchev in order to re-shuffle the cards between the blocs and score points against American imperialism.
"What is exploding, or has already exploded, is the Yalta accord. The cards are being re-shuffled at the scene of a crisis which, although it's shattering the rouble zone dramatically, certainly hasn't hesitated to insinuate itself into the dollar zone (...). Gorbatchev is playing competently on both European tables and in his dealings with the other super power. The steps towards the rapprochement of Eastern and Western Europe isn't a phenomenon that contributes to the tranquillity of the US and Gorby knows it" (from "The cards between the blocs are re-shuffled: the illusions in existing socialism collapse" in Battaglia Comunista n°12, December 1989) 9.
At the same time, they talked of the opening up of new markets in the eastern countries which would be able to give a puff of oxygen to these countries.
"The collapse of the markets on the periphery of capitalism, Latin America for example, has created new problems of insolvency for the payment of capital? The new opportunities opened up in Eastern Europe could represent a safety valve for investment needs? If this great process of East-West collaboration is concretised it will act as a whiff of oxygen for international capital" (from "The western bourgeoisie applauds the opening up of the eastern countries" in Battaglia Comunista of October 1989) 10. When at the beginning of 1990, the Rumanian bourgeoisie decided to get rid of the dictator Ceaucescu, putting on an incredible drama to whet the appetite of the people for democracy (the worst form of bourgeois dictatorship) BC went so far as to speak of Rumania as a country in which there were "all the objective and almost all the subjective conditions to enable the insurrection to develop into a real social revolution but the absence of an authentic class force has left the terrain free for those forces that stand for the maintenance of bourgeois relations of production" (Battaglia Comunista n°1, January 1990) .
Finally, what are we to say about the article of the sympathisers in Colombia, which Battaglia publishes on its front page without so much as a comment or a criticism and which presents that country as being almost in a state of insurrection:
"In recent years the social movement in Colombia (...) has acquired a particular radicality and breadth. (...) Today the strikes are transformed into tumult; the cities are paralysed by revolt, the protest of the urban masses end in violent clashes on the streets. (...) To sum up: in Colombia there's an insurrectionary process taking place that is sparked off by capitalist mechanisms and by the exacerbation and extension of the conflict between the two bourgeois military fronts" (from Battaglia Comunista n°9, September 2000, our emphasis).
At this point we might ask where the idealism is really to be found, in our articles or in the fanciful analyses of the IBRP 11?
Unfortunately there's more. For some time now, despite their contemptuous judgements on a proletarian political camp that has failed to come up to the needs of the period, it's actually BC that has more and more been questioning its (and our) basic analysis of the historic period. Their evaluation of reality is increasingly dependent on the impromptu interpretation of whoever happens to draft the article. Just recently we have criticised BC to correct a serious slip on the role of the unions in the present period 12 which is in contradiction with the BC's own historic position. But in the same article in Prometeo n°2 we find a series of passages which go back to the question (we won't quote our previous polemic) and which cast doubt on the concept of the decadence of capitalism itself, a position that unites the two organisations, the IBRP and the ICC, and which is a legacy of the workers' movement, from Marx and Engels, from the IIIrd International, to Rosa Luxemburg AND LENIN! (whom they follow), and to the Communist Left that emerged from the International after its degeneration following the revolutionary wave of the 1920s. The article in fact characterises the current situation by means of "ascending phases in the accumulation cycle" and "phases of decadence in the cycle" of accumulation rather than treating it as the historic period of the irreversible decadence of capitalism in contrast to a preceding historic phase which is generally one of development even though accompanied by crises.
"There (...) is a schema, that is, the division of capitalism's history into two main epochs: its ascendance and its decadence. Almost everything that was valid for communists during the former, is no longer so during the latter for the simple reason that there is no longer growth but rather decadence. An example? The unions: they were useful and it was right for revolutionaries to work inside them and try to control them previously but it's no longer valid. Not even the hint of reference to the unions' historic, institutional role of mediation; nor of the relationship between this role and the different phases of capitalism or of the objective relationship between the rate of profit and the room to bargain. (...) In the ascending phase of the accumulation cycle, the union, as 'lawyer' can get concessions on wages and conditions (which are however immediately reabsorbed by capital); in the decadent phase of the cycle the room for mediation is reduced to zero and the unions, continuing their historic function, are reduced to mediating indeed but in favour of conservation, functioning as agents of capitalist interests within the working class.
The ICC on the other hand divides history into two parts: when the unions are positive for the working class - without specifying how and on what ground - and when they become negative.
We see similar schematism on the question of wars of national liberation.
So the formal proposal of positions that are indubitable and so apparently shared, is accompanied by a substantial divergence, if not alienation, from historical materialism and an inability to examine the objective situation" 13.
As this part of the article is explicitly developed as a reply to the ICC, we must point out that BC really has a very short memory if it doesn't even remember the basic positions of the ICC on the unions developed in dozens and dozens of articles and in particular in a pamphlet specifically dedicated to the union question 14 which makes extensive "reference to the unions' historic, institutional role of mediation" and to "the relationship between this role and the different phases of capitalism". We invite comrades to read or re-read our pamphlet to check the inaccuracy of BC's assertions.
But we think it's useful to bear in mind what Marx and Engels said one and a half centuries ago: "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 the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution" (Marx-Engels, Introduction to A contribution to the critique of political economy, Progress Publishers, pg 21.).
We want to believe that BC simply made a slip of the pen, that it used terms that are inappropriate in trying to reply to our arguments. Because if this isn't the case we have to ask what BC means by these phrases. Perhaps that, after a phase of recession and with the recovery of an accumulation cycle, the working class can go back to trusting in the unions to "get concessions on wages and conditions"? If this is the case we want BC to tell us what were, in its opinion, "the ascendant phases of the accumulation cycle" in recent decades and what have been the corresponding "concessions on wages and conditions" on the part of the unions to the working class.
Moreover, on national liberation struggles, on which the ICC expresses "similar schematism", what do the comrades of BC mean, that in this case too we can support Arafat or his like because the accumulation cycle of capital is assured and it's not in recession? If this isn't the correct interpretation, what does BC mean?
In conclusion
In this article we have shown that it isn't the ICC that has an idealist vision of reality but rather BC that lives in theoretic confusion and has an opportunist approach in its intervention. We have the strong impression that all the arguments developed by BC in polemic with "a proletarian political camp that is no longer up to its tasks and so has been superseded by the times" are no more than a smoke screen to hide its own opportunist slidings and also a certain deviation on a programmatic level, that is beginning to worry us. In particular, given the current tendency of the IBRP to see itself as "alone in the world" in the face of a proletarian political camp that is no longer up to its tasks, it would be opportune for the comrades to go back to the brochure and to the numerous texts that they've written in polemics against the Bordigists, where they rightly criticise the fact that each Bordigist group considers itself to be THE PARTY and rejects the others as worthless. For this reason we invite BC (and the IBRP) to take our criticisms seriously and not to hide themselves behind ridiculous accusations of biliousness or dishonesty. Let's try to be up to our tasks.
9th March 2001 Ezechiele
1 "The marxist and opportunist visions in the policy of building the party", International Review no.103, 4th quarter 2000.
2 "The New International will be the international party of the Proletariat" in Prometeo n°2, December 2000.
3 We should note that in the workers' movement accusations of "slander", "biliousness", etc were typically used by centrist and opportunist elements against the polemics directed at them by left currents (Lenin was seen as a "wicked slanderer" when he took up the fight against the Mensheviks, Rosa too was accused of being "hysterical" when she fought against Bernstein and later against Kautsky on the question of the mass strike). Rather than making this type of accusation, the IBRP should explain why our criticisms are false and even "slanderous". It's not enough to assert it as a fact, it must be demonstrated. On the other hand the IBRP is ill placed to level this kind of reproach at us as they're not backward in the use of such descriptions themselves, in particular the assertion, without any proof, that we are not part of the proletarian camp. This is a case of seeing the straw in your neighbour's eye while not seeing the beam in your own.
4 It's important to note that the comrades of BC reacted with particular rancour to our first reply in as far as they identified the description "opportunist" with that of "counter-revolutionary". This identification can be seen to be wrong and unfounded to anyone who knows the history of the workers' movement. Opportunism has always been understood as a deformation of revolutionary positions existing within the workers' movement. It's only the ambiguity and the lack of clarity of Bordigism (and of BC itself) that has allowed them to go on denoting as opportunist, political formations that have already gone over to the counter-revolution, such as the various Stalinist CPs, and so to identify opportunism with the counter-revolution.
5 IBRP; "Towards the new International"
6 From "The New International will be ?", pg 10.
7 See in particular the two main works of Rosa Luxemburg in which this theory is developed: The accumulation of capital and The accumulation of capital - an anti-critique, published by Monthly Review Press.
8 One of the main reasons why the reconstitution of the blocs isn't on the agenda today is that there is no country even remotely capable of challenging the United States in military terms. A country like Germany needs many long years (certainly more than a dozen) before it can possess a credible military potential.
9 For more details on this "swerve" see our aticle "The wind from the Eastern and the response of revolutionaries" in International Review n°61.
10 Idem.
11 We will mention again that, at the time of the strikes in Poland in August '80, the CWO raised the slogan "Revolution now!" in its paper, when the situation wasn't in fact a revolutionary one. The comrades of the CWO have told us that this was an accident, that the title and the article was produced by one militant, who hadn't got the agreement of the other members and that the paper was immediately withdrawn from circulation. We accept the explanation but even so it must be admitted that there wasn't great political or organisational clarity at the time if one of its members could think and write such a stupid thing and the organisation couldn't prevent it from being published. The militant concerned probably wasn't just anyone as the CWO gave him the responsibility to publish the paper without it first being controlled by the organisation or by a publications committee. It's only in anarchist circles that this type of serious individual error is possible or else in the Italian Socialist Party in 1914-15, when Mussolini published an article in Avanti calling for participation in the war, without informing anyone beforehand. But at the time Benito was at least the director of the paper (and had been bought secretly by Cachin with money from the French government). Anyway the internal organisation of the CWO at the time left a lot to be desired. We hope that it has improved since then.
12 See the article "I sindacati hanno cambiato ruolo con la decadenza del capitalismo?" in Rivoluzione Internazionale n°116
13 From "The New International will be?", pg 8-9.
14 Unions against the working class, now published in all the major European languages.
Links
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[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn1
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn2
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn3
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[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn5
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn6
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn7
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn8
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn9
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn10
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn11
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn12
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn13
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn14
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftn15
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[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftnref2
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftnref3
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftnref4
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[35] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm#_ftnref16
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/readers-letters
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/324/crisis-theories
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01_reply.htm#_ftn1
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01_reply.htm#_ftn2
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01_reply.htm#_ftn3
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[53] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/german-and-dutch-left
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/17/stalinism-eastern-bloc
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[59] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/trotsky
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[68] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/international-bureau-revolutionary-party
[69] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction