For over a year now American capitalism has gone through a protracted economic malaise of proportions unseen since the Great Depression of 1929-35. There isn't a month that passes without a dramatic new event in the life of the system, from head-spinning gyrations in the stock markets, to the widespread failure of the most reputable financial institutions, yesterday's symbols of capitalism's alleged vitality. And things have just gotten worse since the summer!

In recent weeks there has been an aggravation of the economic crisis that has shaken the confidence of even the most unrepentant cheerleaders of American capitalism. The official line of the White House has gone from a self-assured defense of the "good fundamentals" of an economy that's just going through a momentary hiccup, to a hysterical call for "all hands on board" to shoulder the task of saving the sinking ship.

Without doubt the bourgeoisie is right to be concerned. What started as the infamous bursting of the housing bubble at the beginning of 2007, has become the greatest financial disaster in 70 years. The pile of failed institutions is growing by the day: the investment banks Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers; the mortgage behemoths Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; the world's biggest insurance company, AIG; Washington Mutual, America's largest savings and loan; and the commercial bank Wachovia -- just to mention the more famous cases. The whole financial system is in shambles. The air is filled with the poisonous odor of capitalism's rotting body, and amidst this agony, we are being given a window into the rarified world of high-stakes gambling that characterized the multi-trillion casino-like-economy centered around Wall Street.

Yet even though the center of the storm is the US economy, its effects are rapidly extending throughout the world. In Central Europe, Russia, Japan, Asia.... everywhere, the financial system is going bust, forcing governments to scramble to the rescue, repeating the American experience, except for the specificities of the local details.

Faced with a dramatically worsening situation, the "collective capitalist", the State, has done its best to manage the economic crisis. But the balance-sheet so far is negative. The State has proved once again unable to stop the blood-letting. And the current so-called "comprehensive bail out" of the financial system at the staggering cost of 700 billion dollars could well go the same way as other measures put in place in the last year.

Behind the financial crisis, the economic crisis of capitalism

The whole bourgeois media is having a field day covering the financial crisis. Newspaper reporters, economic columnists, TV commentators and all kinds of economic "experts" are outdoing each other in their colorful description of the storm blasting the high temples of the American financial system. The message is one of high alarm. The predominant view is that the financial system is on the brink of collapse, and credit - the lifeblood of the system - is drying up, endangering the well-being of everybody. In short, the turmoil on Wall Street, the financial system, is now menacing Main Street, the real economy. There is a lot of moral outrage expressed against the "excesses" and "greed" of the Wall Street crowd that recklessly brought this calamity to themselves and the rest of society. It's almost comical, that this condemnation is coming from the same media that not long ago servilely celebrated the seemingly unstoppable record profit making of the high-flying Wall Street financial industry and the lavish life style of investment bankers, traders, hedge fund speculators, unscrupulous mortgage brokers and other parasitic so-called entrepreneurs.

What the media is not saying - and can't say because its main function is the mystification of reality through conscious choice or self-delusion - is that the current financial crisis is clear and simple an expression of the economic crisis of capitalism, a chronic crisis that is rooted in capitalism's own contradictions and for which the dominant class has no real solution to put forward. On the contrary each remedy put forward to manage the crisis in the end winds up aggravating the malady. This is expressed in the fact that what the economists called recessions are each worse that the preceding one, while the so-called recoveries are increasingly phony.

Four decades of economic crisis

The immediate chain of events behind the current financial crisis is very well known. The American bourgeoisie got out of the recession of 2001 just the same way that it had done before during previous recessions: through state capitalist policies of cheap credit and lax fiscal policies. And just as during other "recoveries," in time these policies feed the illusion of growth and finally end by creating the conditions for a new crash. Thus, the celebrated housing boom became the current housing bust, just as the Internet "revolution" ended in the dot.com bubble being popped in 2001.

This is the basic short story of how the American economy ended up where it is today: with a financial system in total disarray, weighed down by an unstoppable wave of mortgage defaults, housing foreclosures, downward-spiraling real estate prices and mind-blowing gambling bets going bad. The bourgeoisie has yet to recognize officially that its economy is in recession, but given the extent of the carnage, that hardly seems relevant.

The "basic short story," however, is a very poor reflection of reality. Actually, what gives the present financial crisis its historical proportions is the fact that it expresses the accumulation of decades of contradictions of a decadent economic system that has become in all senses a menace to the very survival of humanity. A permanent state of war and economic crisis, with a relentless worsening of standards of living, chronic unemployment, rampant inflation and growing insecurity for the working class and other non-exploiting sectors of the population - this has been the history of capitalism for most of the last century. This is a system that has put humanity through two devastating World Wars and the Great Depression, a dreadful worldwide crisis to which the present turmoil is often being compared.

After the brief respite during the post-World War II period of reconstruction, the economic crisis came once again to the forefront, shattering the vision of unlimited, crisis-free prosperity put forward by the system's acolytes based on the record setting economic growth of the post-war period in the central countries of capitalism.

The economic malaise that started at the end of the 1960's exploded in a full blown worldwide economic crisis at the beginning of the 70's and has since persisted like a slow growing terminal cancer at the center of the body of capitalism.

It is not an accident that the US economy is today, just as it was in the ‘70s at the center of the storm. In August 1971 Richard Nixon reneged on the U.S. commitments under the American-brokered 1943 Breton Woods System that had guaranteed the dollar convertibility to gold and that had given the post-war financial and commercial systems a semblance of stability. This turnaround of the American bourgeoisie left the use of the dollar as a world currency without an economic rationale and has contributed greatly to the fragility of the world financial system showcased in today's crisis. The world's banks are awash with paper dollars. The currency reserves of most countries are held mostly in dollars. In fact there are, by far, more dollars circulating around the world that in the US economy. This insane situation is based on a simple collective delusion: that behind the dollar stands the so-called "full faith and credit" of the US government, which amounts to an overt overestimation of the U.S. creditworthiness. If the present U.S. financial turmoil does not bring a reality check to the global financial system, then nothing will.

The lack of solvent demand relative to the needs of capitalistic accumulation -- the root of the current open crisis of capitalism dating back to the end of the sixties -- is illustrated by a twin feature of the life of capitalism in recent decades: the perversion of credit and the explosion of speculation.

Faced with a lack of solvent markets to absorb its production, capitalism has found the way to square the circle: give it away on credit. Not an economically rational credit based on a reasonable expectancy of repayment of a debt with a profit -- a normal capitalist practice and a powerful tool for the development of capitalism -- but instead, credit as a way to keep the system artificially going to prevent its collapse under the weight of its historical crisis. This is the reason behind the reckless explosion in recent decades of both individual debt (credit cards, auto loans, student loans, personal loans, mortgages) and corporate and public debt (which in many cases will never be repaid). After so many years of abuse of the credit-debt mechanism, it is not surprising that the financial system is now cracking up.

Furthermore, faced with a diminishing rate of profit in the process of production, capital has been turning the world over towards the sphere of speculation, creating a virtual casino economy where - on paper - fortunes are made and lost with the mere tapping of a computer keyboard in the comfortable rooms of traders, hedge fund managers and other investment specialists. All this without the bothersome creation and sale of commodities in the process of production and circulation that defines capitalism as a mode of production! Thanks to the collapse of the real estate bubble and the current financial turmoil, a rare window has been opened into the secret world of high stakes gambling on such immaterial things as the so-called "credit default swaps," and the now radioactive "mortgage securities." It is no wonder that the global financial system is falling apart. Sure, speculation has always been a component of capitalism, but the amount of capital involved in it today, its weight on the economy as a whole, the extent to which it has managed to permeate increasing layers of society -- even the working class's future livelihood is being made dependent on pension fund investments on speculative schemes - is unprecedented and is itself a condemnation of capitalism as a viable mode of production for society.

The show must go on

Mr. Paulson, the US treasury secretary, and Mr. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, are the men of the hour, the media reporting their every word, change of mood and actions 24/7. All this for free, while McCain and Obama have to pay millions to get their electoral message across - surely, the candidates can't be happy about it!

Evidently, the men in charge of managing the economic crisis are very busy these days. But the real question is what has the State accomplished and what can be expected from the policies so far being put forward?

The first thing to note about the bourgeoisie's response to the early signs that the housing boom was over in 2007, was, judging by its actions, that it was a total underestimation of the gravity of situation that was going to unfold. Following the beginning of the housing bust and the financial system turmoil during 2007, the Federal Reserve responded with its conventional policies of monetary manipulation, sharply reducing in record time the Fed interest fund rate to lower the cost of credit and pumping in tons of money directly into the financial system, trying to shore up the deteriorating finances of banks and other financial institutions. For their part the White House and Congress also made use of their traditional fiscal tools in the management of the crisis. At the beginning of 2008, they passed a so-called "stimulus package" composed of tax rebates for consumers, tax breaks for businesses and other measures directed at reviving the slumping housing market. These measures were supposed to avert a recession. As the somewhat upbeat economic forecast of Bernanke in mid-February put it, "My baseline outlook involves a period of sluggish growth, followed by somewhat stronger pace of growth starting later this year as the effects of (Fed) and fiscal stimulus begin to be felt" (USA Today, February 15, 2008).

A few days later, the collapse of Bear Stearns, the fifth biggest investment bank in the country, would raise the stakes and foretell the current financial tsunami blasting the American and global financial system, which has already totally changed Wall Street financial landscape.

According to public declarations emanating from all corners of the State, the bourgeoisie is now truly worried about the dangers posed to its system by the present situation and has decided to bring in the big State guns to fix the situation. This is the sense of the so-called 700 billion dollar, "comprehensive" bailout program that the dominant class has finally agreed upon.

It remains to be seen what effects this new program will have in the bourgeoisie's attempts to manage the crisis of its system. Nonetheless, clearly, this program is an attempt to make the working class - both current and future generations - pay for the financial debacle.

On the other hand, this bailout, which in essence will be financed in the short term by public debt, could easily backfire, fueling inflation and further economic turmoil.

Finally, there is one more important thing to underline in relation to the bourgeoisie's policies of the last year: on the one hand they make clear the purely ideological character of the so-called American "free market" economy, and on the other, they overtly demonstrate the dominant role of the State in the economy - what revolutionaries have long characterized as state capitalism.

And the working class?!

Faced with the deepening economic crisis, the bourgeois media's message to society is that "we are all in this together". Yes, it argues, some CEO's are guilty of excess and greed, but we ALL are more or less responsible for the financial mess. "Everyone" took advantage of the good old days of easy and cheap credit of the debt functioning economy and we all have to line up in a common effort behind the State efforts to save the economy. This is nonsense. The working class has no say on how the bourgeoisie runs its decaying system. The fact is that the condition of the working class has known no improvements over the last four decades of bourgeois gimmicks aimed at keeping its economic system afloat. Unless they want to consider all matter of suffocating debts -credit cards, auto loans, student loans, sky-high mortgages, etc. - a change for the better that workers are obliged to incur in order to partake of the increasingly elusive "American dream".

Politicians, in particular those belonging to left wing, want workers to believe that they are concerned about the suffering of the working class. Both the bourgeois left and right want us to believe that the answer to rising unemployment, eroding salaries, the sorry state of the health care system and deteriorating pensions lie in the ballot box, that all is needed is the right president or congressman. However the reality is that the bourgeoisie has no solution to the crisis of its system and no future to offer society other than an increasingly devastating crisis and murderous imperialist wars.

The hard reality is that workers have been paying for years for the crisis of capitalism. And today face with a barrage of attacks from all directions they have no choice but to oppose capitalism's assault on their working and living conditions on their own terrain, the terrain of the class struggle - fighting against the logic of capitalist exploitation. Against capitalism's future of crisis and war, the working class must put forward its own perspective of a society based on human needs.

Eduardo Smith, Oct. 3, 2008.

The election media blitz is running full blast. We hear the same media messages over and over: we are supposedly witnessing the most important election in American history; we face a stark choice between sharply different candidates; this election will determine the future direction of society for generations to come.

Of course that is what they always say about presidential elections. It makes for great theater, even if it has nothing to do with reality. It's hard to remember the last time the media told us that the current presidential election is meaningless, that it offers a choice between indistinguishable opponents, or that no matter who wins nothing much will change.

And of course this year is even more historic than usual -- the first African American candidate nominated for president by a major party on one ticket and a woman running for vice president on the Republican line for the first time in history. No matter who wins, the media tells us, we will have an historic first.

For the working class, reality is quite different from the media mythology. No matter who wins, no matter who occupies the White House, the situation for the working class will be the same

- our sons and daughters will be called upon to shed their blood for American imperialism, which will be forced to resort to more and more military interventions throughout the world

- the economic crisis will continue unabated attacking our wages, our standard of living, our health care, our pensions, our housing conditions, social services

- the social divisions that exist in the U.S. will continue to worsen; the rich will get richer and the poor poorer

- unemployment will continue to grow

- the future will continue to look bleak.

Of course the big "news" in this election is Obama as an African American presidential candidate and his rhetoric about change, which is attracting millions of young people to his candidacy. However black or white or biracial he may be, Obama is just another capitalist politician like any other. Despite his early opposition to the war in Iraq, he is in fact no anti-war candidate. He made it crystal clear in his convention acceptance speech that he is as committed to using military power to defend American imperialist interests as any other capitalist politician. He doesn't want to bring the troops home from Iraq; he wants to transfer troops to the war in Afghanistan and launch military strikes into Pakistan, and to be prepared to unleash war elsewhere. His main criticism of Bush policy is that the US military is spread so thin that it leaves it unable to respond to other threats to its hegemony, like in Georgia. Obama is just as much a war monger as McCain. On the economy, none of his policies can deal with the fact that the problem with the economy is not policy mistakes by Bush, but the global crisis of capitalism, which is an historically anachronistic system, about which Obama is powerless to do anything.

For capitalism, the election campaign is a crucial element in the democratic mystification, the ideological swindle that spins the myth that in a capitalist democracy everyone is equal and has the opportunity to speak his/her mind, that everyone can participate in making the decisions on how society is to be run. The ruling class pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign, and mobilizes its mass media, its unions, its educational institutions, and its left and right political organizations to reinforce this myth and pull workers into the electoral circus. For the ruling class, the elections are a valuable tool in misleading working people, in tying them to the state, derailing them from the class struggle, and bamboozling them into thinking they are "free" -- free to choose their oppressors for the next four years.

Capitalist elections weren't always such an empty sham. In the 19th century when capitalism was still a growing, historically progressive system, capable of further developing the forces of production, elections constituted the venue where the capitalist class decided upon its "executive committee" to control the government and rule society. Various factions of the ruling class, defending different programmatic orientations, different economic interests, such as finance capital, or the railroads or the oil industry, competed with each other for control of the state. In this period, because capitalism was still expanding and it was therefore still possible to wrest significant reforms from the system, it made sense for the workers movement to participate in elections and take advantage of the factional disputes within the ruling class to win gains for the working class, such as the eight hour day and the end to child labor.

But this situation changed dramatically in the early 20th century with the completion of the world market, when capitalism reached the zenith of its historic development and became a fetter on the further development of the productive forces. With the system in decay, the possibility of wresting durable social reforms from the capitalist system no longer existed, and the orientation of the workers movement toward capitalist elections was fundamentally altered. The determination of political policy switched definitively into the hands of the executive branch, the permanent bureaucracy in particular, which rules in the interests of the national capital- Capitalist Elections Against the Working Class ism and prepares constantly for the deadly competition with rival nations.

With the disappearance of the historical circumstances that made elections relevant to the workers movement, electoralism inevitably became an instrument of political mystification, an ideological swindle perpetuating the democratic myth and obscuring the true nature of the capitalist class dictatorship and fostering the illusion that working people can participate in the determination of governmental policies.

In this context, the electoral circus represents the grand ideological maneuver of the bourgeoisie. For the greater part of the past century the American bourgeoisie has been particularly adept in controlling presidential campaigns to put in place political teams that would be capable of implementing its strategic orientations and promote the credibility of the electoral circus. The party in power in the White House was generally determined by carefully orchestrated media manipulation of the electoral process to generate the desired outcomes. Under the political discipline within the ruling class, the major parties and their candidates could be relied upon to accept the division of labor determined by the dominant fractions. The factors at play in determining the desired leftright political division of labor at the level of the national state may vary depending upon prevailing domestic or international circumstances. This ability to control the outcomes of elections and to maintain discipline within its own ranks began to deteriorate after the collapse of the bloc system on the international level, leading to the embarrassing results of the Bush administration in the stolen election of 2000, which did not serve well the interests of the ruling class.

Today there are two fundamental political objectives for the dominant fractions of the American capitalist class in the coming presidential election:

- a rectification of the Bush administration's disastrous imperialist policy blunders in order to significantly restore American authority on the international level and enable it to intervene militarily in other pats of the world,

- a total refurbishment of the democratic mystification, which has taken a terrible beating since the year 2000.

The dominant class has already made great strides in setting the stage for repairing the mess that the Bush administration has made of imperialist policy. Obama's proposed withdrawal from Iraq over two years has already been agreed to by the Iraqi regime and the Bush Administration. The groundwork is in place for a more sophisticated, "multilateral" imperialist policy, that will lessen American imperialism's growing isolation and reestablish its authority in the international arena.

In terms of resuscitating the electoral mystification, Obama clearly best serves the interests of the dominant class. His charismatic, but largely vacuous, appeals for change have triggered a rarely seen enthusiasm among young generations of voters, who have been largely apathetic to the capitalist political process, drawing them into electoral politics in large numbers for the first time in many years. Capitalist political pundits have promoted the Obama phenomenon as "a social movement," that has tapped the wellsprings of "hope" and a desire for change.

To the contrary, what we are witnessing is not a social movement, but an extremely successful ideological campaign, reviving the electoral mystification. However, the Obama candidacy ultimately risks aggravating the very problems that it's designed to redress. If he loses the general election, disillusionment will set in with millions of young people. If he wins the election, it will be impossible for him to deliver any significant change, which will also give rise to widespread disappointment and disillusionment.

For the working class the election is a complete diversion. The only way to defend our interests is the class struggle, in the streets and in the workplaces - against the pay cuts, and layoffs, against the attacks on our living conditions, against imperialist war. This daily struggle to defend working class interests against capitalism holds within it the seeds of the development of class consciousness, of a working class movement that will be capable of confronting capitalism head on and destroying this social system based on the exploitation of man by man and powered by the drive for profits with a social order controlled by working people themselves, where the fulfillment of social need is the driving force.

Internationalism, September 2008

The ruling class likes to call the period of time that goes from one recession to another a "recovery." The last such period in the U.S. began in 2002 and ended in 2007 with the bursting of the speculative real estate bubble.  What was unique about this alleged period of capitalist "prosperity" was that the living conditions of the working class actually continued to deteriorate at an alarming rate- even during the economic recovery. There was no recovery for the working class, in either employment, wages, benefits or working conditions.  Even from the ruling class's own figures, we can see clearly the dreadful conditions and increasing pauperization under which the working class in the U.S. already lives as the economy enters the depths of worsening economic crisis.

Let's take a look at health coverage, for example.  According to the Census Bureau, which released its annual report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage for the US population August 26, the number of people without health insurance decreased from 47 million in 2006 to 45.7 million last year.  While this would seem to encourage the ruling class to continue to spread its lies about the successes of capitalism in lifting people's overall conditions of existence, they cannot bask in their own glory for too long, because this drop is due to an increased number of people enrolled in Medicaid and other public programs. In other words, the number of people without health insurance dropped because there is an increasing number of people whose income has declined so significantly that they are now poor enough to qualify for Medicaid! Rather than showing progress, the Census Bureau figures prove that a higher number of Americans are becoming pauperized. In any case, uninsured Americans are today 7.2 million stronger than in 2000. 

But these numbers don't tell the whole story, because those workers who still have employer-provided health benefits have seen an erosion in the extent and quality of coverage provided.  Employer-provided health care coverage eroded from 1979 until 1993-94, when it stabilized, and then began falling again from 2000 through 2006. Coverage dropped from 69% of workers in 1979 to 55% in 2006, with a 3.9 percentage-point fall since 2000, which translates into an increasing differential in life span between rich and poor.  For example, in 1980 the rich lived on average 2.8 years longer than the poor. By 2000, despite twenty years of advances in medical science, the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor increased to 4.5 years.

The percentage of American workers covered by employer pension plans has seen a similar decline. In 1979, nearly 51 percent of American workers were covered by employer pension plans, which declined to 45.6 percent by the year 2000.  During the just-ended economic recovery, this figure dropped by another 2.8 percent; it was only 42.8% in 2006. Pension plan quality also eroded, with the percentage of workers in defined benefit pension plans,  the "traditional" type of pension that assures workers  a definite pension payment (usually based on a formula linked to years of service and average yearly pay at time of retirement) declining from 39% in 1980 to just 18% in 2004. This means that many more workers are paying for their own pension benefits or relying almost exclusively on the meager benefits from a social security check. In fact, the share of workers with a so-called "defined-contribution pension" plan who have to contribute to their pension accounts and whose benefit payments are uncertain and dependent on stock market fluctuations rose from 8% to 31% since 1980.  Increasingly, workers nearing retirement age are putting off their plans to retire. A higher percentage of Americans older than 55 are now working than at any time since 1970. While still working, they are also dipping into their 401(k) accounts and borrowing form the accounts to pay for living expenses, including credit card and mortgage debt.  

The federal government also claims that the overall poverty rate dipped slightly, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is because of the absurdity of the artificially low official poverty measure, which is $21,027 annual income for a family of four-- $404 a week for four people!    Currently, under this official measure, 36 million people lived in poverty in 2006. But other, more realistic measures put 16 million more people living in poverty - approximately 52 million or nearly 18 percent of the population. And these figures don't take into account the growing debt of families who struggle to stay out of poverty, by borrowing beyond their means to maintain their standard of living.

This pauperization of the working class in the U.S. has occurred at the same time as productivity has increased faster than in earlier periods.  As the rich grow richer, many working class households are left with little or nothing in the way of assets and often with significant debt.  Approximately 30% of households have a net worth of less than $10,000, and approximately one in six households have zero or negative net wealth.  For over a quarter of American households, income from Social Security, pensions, and personal savings are expected to replace less than half of their pre-retirement income, which is already forcing many to continue to work longer before retiring, for longer hours, thus affecting further their health and chance to live longer.  And this is happening in the midst economic "recovery"!  The only thing that "recovered" during the "recovery" was productivity, which grew by 11%, a faster growth than any recovery since the 1970's.  Yet, median hourly compensation did not grow at all during the same period.

Notwithstanding the dreariness of these figures, it is the figures on unemployment which more starkly reveal at once the suffering of the working class and the definite tendency of capitalism in decadence to reduce its own ability to secure survival for the vast majority of the masses.  Because it took longer -nearly four years-during the last "recovery" to return to the employment levels prior to the recession of 2001, because employment growth remained sluggish thereafter, because the employment-to-population ratio during the "recovery" deteriorated for the first time on record, and because there hasn't been an adequate income growth for most workers for a long time, the present recession will have tremendous repercussions on a working class already embattled by unemployment, the erosion of their living standards, and falling wages also due to inflation.  So far in 2008 alone, the economy has lost over 760,000 jobs even before the job losses stemming from September's financial industry meltdown have been counted, and  official unemployment has jumped to 6.1% from 5.5% by mid-2008, up from 4.4% in March 2007.  This adds more than 2,300.000 unemployed to the jobless rolls. There are official 9.5 million workers without jobs, 2 million unemployed for more than 6 months. Eight hundred thousand have seen their unemployment benefits expire. And this does not include the "discouraged" workers who have no job and have given up looking for jobs that do not exist and or the 6.1 million workers who are involuntarily working part-time jobs and are officially considered "employed."

The growing pauperization of the working class during the last recovery period sets the stage for an even more devastating impact of the new recessions, undoubtedly raising the stakes and increasing the pressure for workers to fight back.  In this sense, the impact of the crisis is a potential ally to the working class - it will help workers to see the dead end that this moribund system offers.  If  the working class in the U.S. is today more vulnerable than ever to the brutality of capitalism in a state of permanent crisis, if more and more are workers are laid off, more and more lose health coverage and pension benefits now, after the years of so-called "recovery," what is in store for the immediate future?   For its own survival, the working class will have to take the path of struggle.  As its discontent builds, and as the class fights back, it will develop the consciousness that it is the only force in society that has a real future to offer to the world. As the effects of the electoral circus recede in significance, the bourgeoisie will have to confront an angrier, and more combative, class. 

Ana 10/2/08

This article has already appeared in World Revolution 318. [10]

This article has already appeared in World Revolution no.318 [11] .

The following text was prepared as a contribution to a discussion on the lessons the 1960's initiated by the primarily Chicago-based Platypus group, which is involved in the revived SDS organization. In the spring issue of their publication, the Platypus comrades reported on their frustration on the cancellation of a public panel discussion on the political experiences of the 1960's after Mike Klonsky and Rick Ayers, prominent SDS leaders from 40 years ago, abruptly withdrew from the forum after seeing the questions that would be posed to the panelists. -- Internationalism

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The comrades of Internationalism1 have read with interest your report on Klonksy and Ayers' abrupt withdrawal from your scheduled panel discussion on the lessons of the 1960's. It's probably not surprising that they backed away when they realized from your prepared questions that they weren't being invited to reminisce about the "glory days" of the Sixties, but to participate in a serious reflection on the shortcomings and failures of the New Left. We salute your effort to go beyond "image" and media hype and subject the political experiences of the Sixties to critical examination.

There was indeed a mass movement in the 1960's that mobilized millions of young people who were outraged at the injustice, exploitation and oppression that they saw around them, but it is also true that  movement ultimately failed to change the world or  build an ongoing movement that could confront capitalism. The questions you posed to the panelists reflect an extremely correct and appropriate preoccupation to understand what happened in the Sixties, why the movement didn't succeed in achieving revolutionary change and what can be learned from that experience so as to avoid needlessly repeating the errors of the past in the future. We ourselves have been publishing a series of articles on 1968 in our press and our web site (www.internationalism.org [12]), which present an in depth analysis, but we would like to contribute some general comments in response to the questions posed to the panelists.

Regarding the heritage of the "Old Left," one of the worst consequences of the failure of the revolutionary workers struggles in the 1917-23 period was the virtual burial of genuine Marxism under a mountain of lies and distortions, which established Stalinism as the personification of communism, whereas it actually represented the advanced guard of the counter-revolution alongside "democratic" anti-fascism. During World War II the false "communist" parties were joined by an equally false opposition - Trotskyism which constituted more of a critical appendage to Stalinism and anti-fascism than a proletarian alternative. Since 1945, this "Old Left" constituted the left wing of capitalist politics defending various brands of state capitalist policy orientations, totally outside the revolutionary Marxist tradition. What marked them most clearly as agents of bourgeois ideology has been their defense of state capitalism by attempting to tie workers to the state, through the left parties, the trade unions, and pointless "reform" struggles that foster the illusion that capitalism can be improved.  This was essentially what the "Old Left" appeared to the emerging revolutionaries in the 1960's as irrelevant, totalitarian, reformist, and sectarian.

Unfortunately most who came of political age in the Sixties were totally unaware of the political work of the small groups of the communist left2, especially the Dutch, German and Italian communist left groups, who had detached themselves from the degenerating Communist International and critiqued the failures of the 1920's and ‘30's, elaborating theoretical analyses of capitalist decadence1, state capitalism, the changed conditions of class struggle, the integration of the unions into the state apparatus, the role of the party in relation to the class, the rejection of substitutionism, the defense of internationalism and revolutionary defeatism in the face of the second imperialist world war, and so on.

Because of this break in knowledge of the genuine continuators of revolutionary Marxism, the Sixties generation fell prey to such aberrations as empiricism, impatience for "action" without a theoretical framework, a rejection of the working class as revolutionary agent in society,  a preposterous search for new revolutionary agents (youth, minorities, students, etc.), and a host of other detours from revolutionary Marxism. The New Left failed to understand that Marxism had identified the working class as the agent of revolution based on its objective role within capitalist society, regardless of the level of its consciousness at any particular moment in history.  

Lacking an adequate Marxist perspective, it was difficult to distinguish between symptoms and causes of social injustices, so separatist politics (Black Power, feminism, identity politics, gay liberation) became predominant. There was a widespread misconception that the elimination of racism or sexism or homophobia was a precondition to develop a revolutionary movement that could change society, whereas, the precondition to eliminate these ideological poisons that capitalism uses to divide the working class against itself is the revolutionary destruction of capitalism itself. There was an inability to understand that these movements, focused on bourgeois legalisms and rights, tied the oppressed to the state, rather than building a movement that could destroy the state.

The rejection of the "labor movement" as part of the problem and not the solution, as you put it, failed to differentiate on the one hand between the working class, as an exploited and revolutionary class, and the trade unions, organizations that had once been working class in nature but had long since become integrated into the state apparatus of capitalism as a means to control workers and derail class struggle on the other. This left the Sixties generation with no effective orientation towards the working class struggle. 

Lacking a theoretical Marxist compass, the movement lurched from one confused orientation to another. Starting out with a rejection of the "Old Left" in the beginning of the Sixties, by the end of the decade "New Left" leaders came full circle and embraced the worst forms of Stalinism, (demanding support for the regimes in China, North Vietnam and North Korea as a condition for membership) and terrorist adventurism.

The "Old Left" and the "New Left" ultimately wound up in the same place - in the ideological service of state capitalism and outside the revolutionary Marxist tradition. No wonder Klonsky and Ayers chose not to confront critically the consequences of their activism. 

Jerry Grevin for Internationalism 15/10/08 

Notes

1.- Internationalism is the U.S. section of the International Communist Current.

2.- For an overview of the history of the communist left see https://en.internationalism.org/the-communist-left [13]

3.- For a description of the theory of capitalist decadence see https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/decadence [14]