This summer has witnessed yet another outburst of military barbarism. Just as the principal countries were counting their medals at the Olympic Games, terrorist attacks hit the Middle East, Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Turkey and India. In less than two months, 16 such attacks followed each other in a macabre dance that left scores of dead among the urban populations. In Iraq and Afghanistan, there is full-scale war.

But this militarist barbarism was at its height in Georgia.

Once again, the Caucasus was aflame. At the very moment that Bush and Putin were taking part in the opening of the Olympics, so-called symbol of peace and reconciliation between nations, the Georgian president Saakashvili, the protégé of the White House, and the Russian bourgeoisie, sent their troops off to slaughter the civilian population.

This war between Russia and Georgia resulted in a veritable ethnic cleansing on each side, with several thousands deaths, mostly civilians.

As ever, it was the local populations (whether Russian, Ossetian, Abkhazian or Georgian) who were taken hostage by all the national factions of the ruling class.

On both sides, the same scenes of killing and horror. Throughout Georgia, the number of refugees, stripped of everything they owned, reached 115,000 in one week.

And as in all wars, each camp accused the other of being responsible for the outbreak of hostilities.

But it is not just the direct protagonists who are responsible for this new war and these new massacres. The other states who are now shedding hypocritical tears about the fate of Georgia have their hands soaked with blood from the worst kinds of atrocities, whether we're talking about the US in Iraq, France in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, or Germany, which, by backing the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, helped unleash the terrible war in ex-Yugoslavia in 1992.

If today the US is sending warships to the Caucasus region, in the name of ‘humanitarian aid', this is certainly not out of any concern for human life, but simply to defend its imperialist interests.

Are we heading towards a third world war?

The most striking thing about the conflict in the Caucasus is the increasing military tension between the great powers. The two former bloc leaders, Russia and the US, once again find themselves in a dangerous head-to-head: the US Navy destroyers who have come with ‘food aid' for Georgia are only a short distance away from the Russian naval base of Gudauta in Abkhazia and the Georgian port of Poti which is occupied by Russian tanks.

This is all very nerve-wracking and one might legitimately ask not just what is the aim of this war But even whether it could unleash a third world war?

Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the Caucasus region has been an important geostrategic bone of contention between the great powers. The present conflict has been building up for some time. The Georgian president, an unconditional partisan of Washington, took over a state which from its creation in 1991 had been supported by the US as a bridgehead for Bush Senior's ‘New World Order'.

By laying a trap for Saakashvili, into which he duly fell, Putin has used the occasion to re-establish his authority in the Caucasus; but this was in response to the encirclement of Russia by NATO forces which has been under way since 1991.

Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, Russia has been more and more isolated, especially since a number of former Eastern bloc countries (like Poland) joined NATO.

But the encirclement became intolerable for Moscow when Ukraine and Georgia also asked to join NATO.

Above all, Russia could not accept the plan to set up an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Moscow knew perfectly well that behind this NATO programme, supposedly directed against Iran, Russia itself was the real target.

The Russian offensive against Georgia is in fact Moscow's first stab at breaking the encirclement.

Russia, having just re-established its authority in the Caucasus thanks to the costly and murderous war in Chechnya, has taken advantage of the fact that the US, with its troops bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, had its hands too full to launch a military counter-offensive.

However, despite the worsening military tension between Russia and the USA, the perspective of a third world war is not on the agenda today.

There are today no imperialist blocs, no stable military alliances as was the case before the two world wars of the 20th century or during the Cold War.

By the same token, the face-off between the US and Russia does not mean that we are entering a new Cold War. There's no going back and history does not repeat itself.

In contrast to the dynamic of imperialist tensions between the great powers during the Cold War, this new head-to-head between Russia and the US is marked by the tendency towards ‘every man for himself', towards the dislocation of alliances, characteristic of the phase of the decomposition of the capitalist system.

Thus the ‘ceasefire' in Georgia can only legitimate the victory of the masters of the Kremlin and Russia's superiority on the military level, involving a humiliating capitulation by Georgia to the conditions dictated by Moscow.

And Georgia's ‘patron', the US, has also suffered a major reverse here. While Georgia has already paid a heavy price for its allegiance to the US (a contingent of 2000 troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan), in return Uncle Sam has been able to offer no more than moral support to its ally, issuing vain and purely verbal condemnations of Russia without being able to raise a finger to offer practical help.

But the most significant aspect of this weakening of US leadership resides in the fact that the White House had to swallow the ‘European' plan for a ceasefire - worse still, a plan dictated by Moscow.

While the USA's impotence was evident, Europe's role shows the level that ‘every man for himself' has reached. Faced with the paralysis of the US, European diplomacy swung into action, led by the French president Sarkozy who once again represented no one but himself in all his comings and goings, following a policy that was entirely short-term and devoid of any coherence.

Europe once again looked like a snake pit with everyone in it pursuing diametrically opposed interests. There was not an ounce of unity in its ranks: on one side were Poland and the Baltic states, fervent defenders of Georgia (because they suffered over half a century of Russian domination and have much to fear from a revival of the latter's imperialist ambitions) and on the other was Germany, which was one of the most fervent opponents of Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO, above all because it wants to block the development of American influence in this region.

But the most fundamental reason that the great powers cannot unleash a third world war lies in the balance of forces between the two main social classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Unlike the periods which preceded the two world wars, the working class of the most decisive capitalist countries, notably in Europe and America, is not ready to serve as cannon fodder and sacrifice itself on the altar of capital.

With the return of the permanent crisis of capitalism at the end of the 1960s and the historic resurgence of the proletariat, a new course towards class confrontations was opened up: in the most important capitalist countries the ruling class can no longer mobilise millions of workers behind the defence of the nation.

However, although the conditions for a third world war have not come together, this is no reason to underestimate the gravity of the present situation.

The war in Georgia has increased the risk of destabilisation, of things running out of control, not only on the regional level, but also on the world level, where it will have inevitable implications for the balance of imperialist forces in the future. The ‘peace plan' is just a bluff. It contains all the ingredients of a new and dangerous military escalation, threatening to create a series of flash-points from the Caucasus to the Middle East.

With the oil and gas of the Caspian Sea and the central Asian countries, some of which are Turkish-speaking, Iran and Turkey have interests in this region, but the whole world is involved in the conflict. Thus, one of the objectives of the USA and some Western European countries in supporting a Georgia independent from Moscow is to deprive Russia of the monopoly of Caspian Sea oil supplies towards the west thanks to the Baku-Tbilissi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that runs from Azerbaijan, through Georgia to Turkey. There are thus major strategic interests at stake in this region. And the big imperialist brigands can all the more easily use people as cannon fodder in the Caucasus given that the region is a mosaic of different ethnicities. This makes it easy to fan the fire of nationalist war.

At the same time, Russia's past as a dominant power still exerts a very heavy weight and contains the threat of even more serious imperialist tensions. This is what lies behind the anxiety of the Baltic states, and above all of Ukraine which is a nuclear-armed military power of quite another stature to Georgia.

Thus although the perspective is not of a third world war, the dynamic of ‘every man for himself' is just as much the expression of the murderous folly of capitalism: this moribund system could, in its decomposition, lead to the destruction of humanity by plunging it into bloody chaos.

Faced with the bankruptcy of capitalism, what is the alternative?

In the face of all this chaos and military barbarism, the historical alternative is more than ever ‘socialism or barbarism', world communist revolution or the destruction of humanity. Peace is impossible in capitalism; capitalism carries war within itself. And the only future for humanity lies in the proletarian struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.

But this perspective can only become a reality if the workers refuse to serve as cannon-fodder for the interests of their exploiters, and firmly reject nationalism.

Everywhere the working class must put into practice the old slogan of the workers' movement: ‘The workers have no country. Workers of all countries unite!'

It is obvious that the proletariat cannot remain indifferent to the massacre of civilians and the unleashing of military barbarism,.It must show its solidarity with its class brothers in the countries at war, first of all by refusing to support one camp against the other, and secondly by developing its own struggles against its own exploiters in all countries. This is the only way it can really fight against capitalism, prepare the ground for its overthrow and for the construction of a new society without national frontiers and wars.

This perspective of the overthrow of capitalism is no utopia because everywhere capitalism is proving itself to be a bankrupt system.

When the Eastern bloc collapsed, Bush Senior and the whole of the ‘democratic' Western ruling class promised us a ‘New World Order' (to be set up under the aegis of the USA), a new era of peace and prosperity.

The entire world bourgeoisie engaged in gigantic campaigns about the so-called ‘failure of communism', trying to make the workers believe that the only possible future was Western-style capitalism with its ‘market economy'.

Today it is becoming more and more evident that it is capitalism that is failing, notably the world's leading power which has now become the locomotive dragging the whole capitalist economy towards the abyss (see our editorial in International Review n°133).

This failure is visible day after day in the increasing degradation of working class living standards, not only in the ‘poor' countries but also in the ‘rich' ones.

Just to take the USA as an example, unemployment there is rising rapidly and today 6% of the population is without work. Since the beginning of the ‘subprime' crisis, two million workers have been evicted from their houses because they can no longer keep up with their mortgage payments (and between today and the beginning of 2009, another million are facing the same threat).

And this is not even to mention the poor countries: with the increase in the price of basic foodstuffs, the most deprived strata are faced with the horror of famine. This is why hunger riots have broken out world wide this year - in Mexico, Bangladesh, Haiti, Egypt, the Philippines....

Today, with the facts staring them in the face, the spokesmen of the bourgeoisie can no longer conceal the truth. The shops are full of new books with alarmist titles. And above all, the declarations of the people in charge of the main economic institutions can no longer hide their anxiety:

"We are faced with one of the most difficult economic and fiscal environments we have ever seen" (the President of the US Federal Reserve, 22nd August).

"For the economy, the crisis is a tsunami on the horizon" (Jacques Attali, French economist and politician, Le Monde, 8th August).

"The present conjuncture is the most difficult for several decades" (according to HSBC, one of the world's biggest banks, cited in Libération 5th August).

The perspective for the development of the class struggle

In reality, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes did not show the failure of communism, but its necessity.

The collapse of state capitalism in the USSR was in fact the most spectacular demonstration of the historic failure of world capitalism. It was a first great shockwave expressing the whole system's bankruptcy. Today a second shockwave is hitting the world's most powerful ‘democratic' power, the United States.

With the aggravation of the economic crisis and of military conflicts, we are witnessing an acceleration of history.

But this acceleration is also being expressed at the level of the workers' struggle, even if this does not appear in such a spectacular way.

If you took a still photograph of the situation, you might think that nothing was happening and that the workers were not moving. The workers' struggles don't seem to be adequate to the task at hand and the future looks grim.

But this is only the visible part of the iceberg.

In reality, as we have emphasised many times in our press, the struggles of the world proletariat have taken on a new dynamic since 2003[1].

The struggles that have been developing in the four corners of the world have been marked in particular by the search for active solidarity and the entry of the younger generation into the proletarian combat (as we saw in particular with the struggle of the French students against the CPE in the spring of 2006).

This dynamic shows that the working class has rediscovered the path of struggle, a path that was momentarily erased by the huge campaigns about the ‘death of communism' following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes.

Today the aggravation of the crisis and the deterioration of working class living standards can only push the workers to develop their struggles, to seek for solidarity, to unify across the world.

In particular, the spectre of inflation which is once again haunting capitalism, with the dizzying increase in prices accompanied by a fall in incomes (wages, pensions, etc) can only contribute to the unification of workers' struggles.

But two questions in particular will play a part in the proletariat becoming conscious of the bankruptcy of the system and the necessity for communism.

The first question is hunger and the generalisation of food shortages, which reveals beyond the shadow of a doubt that capitalism can no longer feed humanity and that we therefore have to move on to a new mode of production.

The second fundamental question is the absurdity of war, the murderous folly of capitalism which is destroying more and more human lives in endless slaughter.

It is true that, in an immediate sense, war creates fear and the bourgeoisie does all it can to paralyse the working class, to inject into it a feeling of powerlessness and to make it believe that war is just a fatality you can do nothing about. But at the same time the involvement of the great powers in military conflicts (especially in Iraq and Afghanistan) is provoking more and more discontent.

With American forces bogged down in Iraq, there is a growing anti-war feeling in the US population. We have seen this expressed in ‘public opinion' surveys, and it was the same in France after the French bourgeoisie paid homage to the 10 French troops killed in an ambush in Afghanistan on 18th August.

But alongside the discontent within the population at large, there is a deep process of reflection going on within the working class.

The clearest sign of this is the emergence of a new proletarian political milieu which has developed around the defence of internationalist positions against war (notably in Korea, the Philippines, Turkey, Russia and Latin America).[2]

War is not a fatality that leaves humanity powerless. Capitalism is not an eternal system. War is not all that capitalism bears within itself. It also bears the conditions for going beyond it, the germs of a new society without national frontiers and thus without wars.

By creating a world working class, capitalism has given birth to its own gravedigger. Because the exploited class, unlike the bourgeoisie, has no antagonistic interests to defend, it is the only force in society which can unify humanity by building a world based on solidarity and the satisfaction of human need.

There is still a long way to go before the world proletariat will be able to raise its struggles to the level demanded by the gravity of the present situation. But in the context of the acceleration of the world economic crisis, the dynamic of the class struggle today, as well as the entry of new generations into the movement, show that the proletariat is on the right road.

Today internationalist revolutionaries are still a small minority. But they have the duty to carry on a debate to overcome their differences and make their voices heard as clearly as possible wherever they can. It is precisely by being able to carry out a clear intervention against the barbarity of war that they will be able to regroup their forces and contribute to the proletariat becoming aware of the necessity to wage an offensive against the fortress of capital.

SW (12.9.08)

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[1] See in particular the following articles ‘Against the world wide attacks of crisis-ridden capitalism: one working class, one class struggle' (International Review n°132) and ‘17th Congress of the ICC: resolution on the international situation' (International Review n°130)

[2] As well as the resolution on the international situation from the 17th ICC Congress, the reader can also consult, also in International Review n°130, ‘17th Congress of the ICC: the proletarian camp reinforced worldwide'

"In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society".[1]

This brief passage, spanning virtually the whole of written history, could give rise to several books worth of interpretation. For our purposes, we will look at two aspects: the general question of historical progress, and the features of ascendancy and decadence in social formations prior to capitalism.

Is there any progress?

We have noted that one of the effects of the catastrophes of the 20th century has been a general scepticism about the idea of progress, a notion which had seemed much more self-evident in the 19th century. This has led some ‘radical' souls to conclude that the marxist vision of historical progress is itself just one of these 19th century ideologies which serve as an apology for capitalist exploitation. Although often presenting themselves as new, such criticisms often dredge up the rather worn arguments of Bakunin and the anarchists, who demanded that revolution be possible at any time, and accused the marxists of being vulgar reformists for arguing that the epoch of revolution had not yet dawned, requiring the working class to organise itself in the long term for the defence of its living conditions inside the existing social order. The anti-progressivists sometimes begin as ‘marxist' critics of the notion that capitalism is decadent today, insisting that very little has changed in the life of capital since the days Marx was writing about it, except perhaps on a purely quantitative level - bigger economy, bigger crises, bigger wars. But the more consistent ones quickly get rid of the whole burden of historical materialism altogether, insisting that communism could have come about in any previous epoch of history. Indeed the most consistent of all are the primitivists who argue that there has been no progress in history at all since the emergence of civilisation, and indeed since the discovery of agriculture which made it possible: all this is seen as a terrible wrong turn given that the happiest epoch of human life was the nomadic hunter-gatherer stage. Such currents can only logically anticipate with yearning the final collapse of civilisation and the culling of humanity so that a return to hunting and gathering could once again be practicable for the few survivors.

Marx was certainly ‘rigid' about the idea that it was capitalism alone which had paved the way for the overcoming of social antagonisms and the creation of a society which allowed humanity to develop to the full. As he goes on to say in the Preface: "The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence - but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism".

Capitalism was for the first time creating the preconditions for a world communist society: by unifying the entire globe around its system of production; by revolutionising the instruments of production to the point where a society of abundance was finally possible; and by giving birth to a class whose own emancipation could only come through the emancipation of the whole of humanity - the proletariat, the first exploited class in history to contain the seeds of a new society within itself. For Marx it was inconceivable that mankind could have overleaped this stage in history and given rise to a durable, global communist society in the epochs of despotism, slavery or serfdom.

But capitalism did not appear out of nowhere: the succession of modes of production prior to capitalism had in turn paved the way for it, and in this sense the whole development of these antagonistic, i.e class-divided, social systems had represented a progressive movement in human history, resulting at last in the material possibility of a classless world community. There is thus no basis for reclaiming the heritage of Marx and simultaneously rejecting the notion of progress as bourgeois.

However, there is indeed a bourgeois version of progress, and, opposed to it, a marxist one.

To begin with, whereas the bourgeoisie tended to see all history leading inexorably towards the triumph of democratic capitalism, an upward, linear march in which all previous societies were in all respects inferior to the present order of things, marxism affirmed the dialectical character of the historical movement. In fact, the very notion of ascent and decline of modes of production means that there can be regressions as well as advances in the historical process. In Anti-Duhring, talking about Fourier and his anticipation of historical materialism, Engels draws attention to the link between the dialectical view of history and the notion of ascent and decline: "Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society (...) Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against the talk about illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race" ("Socialism: utopian and scientific").

What Engels is saying here is that there is nothing automatic about the process of historical evolution. Like the process of natural evolution itself, "human perfectibility" is not programmed in advanced. As we will see, there can in fact be social dead-ends, analogous to the dinosaurs - societies which not only decline, but disappear utterly, giving rise to nothing new from within themselves.

Furthermore, even when progress does take place, it generally has a profoundly contradictory character. The destruction of artisan production, in which the producer is still capable of gaining satisfaction both from the process of production and the end product of it, and its replacement by the factory system with its mind-numbing routines, is a clear case in point. But Engels explains this most forcefully when describing the transition from primitive communism to class society. In Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, having shown both the immense strengths and inherent limitations of tribal life, Engels comes to the following conclusions about how we should view the advent of civilisation:

"The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests - base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth - inaugurate the new, civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means - theft, violence, fraud, treason - that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before".

This dialectical view is also directed towards the future communist society, which in Marx's beautiful passage in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, is described as "a return of man to himself, but a return become conscious and accomplished with all the wealth of previous development". In the same way, the communism of the future is seen as a rebirth, on a higher level, of the communism of the past. Engels thus concludes his book on the origins of the state with an eloquent phrase taken from the anthropologist Lewis Morgan, anticipating a communism that "will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes".

But with all these qualifications, it is evident from the Preface that the notion of progress, of "progressive epochs", is fundamental to marxist thought. In the grandiose vision of marxism, beginning (at least!) from the emergence of mankind, to the appearance of class society, to the development of capitalism, and to the great leap into the realm of freedom that awaits us in the future, "the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of readymade things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidentally and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end" (Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy). Seen from this distance, as it were, it becomes evident that there is a real process of development: at the level of man's capacity to transform nature through the development of more sophisticated tools; at the level of mankind's subjective understanding of himself and the world around him; and thus, at the level of man's capacity to release his slumbering powers and live a life in accord with his deepest needs.

The succession of modes of production

Primitive communism to class society

When Marx provides a "broad outline" of the principal modes of production which have succeeded each other in history, it is by no means meant to be exhaustive. To begin with it only mentions "antagonistic" social forms, i.e the main forms of class society, and does not mention the various forms of non-exploiting society which preceded them. Furthermore, the study of pre-capitalist social forms in Marx's day was in its infancy, so that it was simply not possible to provide an inclusive list of all hitherto existing societies. Indeed, even in the state of present-day historical knowledge, this task remains extremely difficult to complete. In the long period between the dissolution of the original primitive communist social relations, which had their clearest shape among the nomadic hunters of the palaeolithic, and the fully formed class societies which make up the historical civilisations, there were numerous intermediate and transitional forms, as well as forms that simply ended in a historical dead-end, but our knowledge of them remains very limited[2].

The non-inclusion of primitive communist and pre-class societies in the Preface does not at all mean that Marx did not consider it important to study them, on the contrary. From the very beginning, the founders of the historical materialist method recognised that human history begins not with private property, but with communal property: "The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership. It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture. In the latter case it presupposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour existing in the family (The German Ideology, written in 1847).

When these insights were confirmed by later research - notably the work of Lewis Henry Morgan on the tribes of North America - Marx was extremely enthusiastic, and indeed spent a large part of his later years delving into the problem of primitive social relations, specifically in relation to the questions posed to him by the revolutionary movement in Russia (see the chapter ‘Past and future communism' in our book Communism is not a nice idea but a material necessity). For Marx, Engels and also Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote extensively about this in her Introduction to Political Economy (1907), the discovery that the original forms of human relations were based not on egoism and competition but on solidarity and cooperation, and that centuries and even millennia after the advent of class society there was still a profound and persistent attachment to communal social forms, particularly among the oppressed and exploited classes, was for them a ringing confirmation of the communist outlook and a powerful weapon against the mystifications of the bourgeoisie, for whom the lust for power and property are inherent in human nature.

In Engels' Origins of the Family Private Property and the State, in Marx's Ethnographic Notebooks and Luxemburg's Introduction to Political Economy there is thus a profound respect for the courage, morality and artistic creativity of the "savage" and "barbarian" peoples. But there is no idealisation of these societies. The communism practised in the earliest forms of human society was not engendered by the idea of equality, but out of necessity. It was the only possible form of social organisation in conditions where man's productive capacities had not yet given rise to a sufficient social surplus to support a privileged elite, a ruling class.

Primitive communist relations in all probability emerged with the development of mankind, a species whose capacity to transform his environment to satisfy his material needs marked him off as distinct from all other inhabitants of the animal kingdom. They allowed human beings to become the dominant species on the planet. But if we can generalise from what we know of the most archaic form of primitive communism, found among the Aborigines of Australia, the forms of appropriation of the social product, being entirely collective[3], also held back the development of individual productivity, with the result that the productive forces remained virtually unchanged for millennia. In any case, changing material and environmental conditions, such as the increase in population, at some point made the extreme collectivism of the first forms of human society increasingly untenable, an obstacle to the development of techniques of production (such as pastoralism and agriculture) that could feed larger populations or populations now living in changed social and environmental conditions[4].

As Marx notes "the history of the decline of primitive communities has yet to be written. All we have so far are some rather meagre outlines...(but) the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development" (First draft of letter to Vera Zasulich, 1881). The passing of primitive communism and the rise of class divisions does not escape the general rules outlined in the Preface: the relations that human beings created to satisfy their needs become increasingly unable to fulfil their original function, and are therefore plunged into a fundamental crisis, with the result that the communities they sustain either disappear altogether or replace the old relations with new ones better able to develop the productivity of human labour. We have already seen that Engels insisted that, at a certain historical moment, "The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken". Why? Because "Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens, and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community".

In the light of anthropological evidence we may well contest Engels' affirmation that the people of tribal societies are so entirely lacking in individuality. But the insight behind this passage remains valid: that in number of key moments and key regions, the old communal methods and relations proved became a fetter on development, and, however contradictory it may seem, the gradual rise of individual property, class exploitation, and a new phase in man's self-alienation, all became "factors of development".

The ‘Asiatic' mode of production

The term ‘Asiatic mode of production' is controversial. Engels unfortunately omits to include the concept in his seminal work on the rise of class society, Origins of the Family, even though Marx's work already contained numerous references to it. Later on, Engels' error was compounded by the Stalinists who virtually outlawed the concept altogether, advancing a very mechanistic and linear view of history as everywhere moving through phases of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. This schema had distinct advantages for the Stalinist bureaucracy: on the one hand, long after the bourgeois revolution had passed from the agenda of world history, it enabled them to discern the rise of a progressive bourgeoisie in countries like India and China once they had been baptised ‘feudal'; and on the other, it allowed them to avoid embarrassing criticisms of their own form of state despotism, since in the concept of Asiatic despotism, the state, and not a class of individual property owners, directly ensures the exploitation of labour power: the parallels with Stalinist state capitalism are evident.

However, more serious researchers, such as Perry Anderson in an appendix to his book Lineages of the Absolutist State argues that Marx's characterisation of Indian and other contemporary societies as forms of a definite ‘Asiatic mode' was based on faulty information and that the concept has in any case been made so general as to lack any precise meaning.

Certainly, the epithet ‘Asiatic' is confusing in itself. To a greater or lesser extent, all the first forms of class society took on the forms analysed by Marx under this heading, whether in Sumeria, Egypt, India, China, or in more remote regions such as Central and South America, Africa and the Pacific. It is founded on the village community inherited from the epoch prior to the emergence of the state. The state power, often personified by a priestly caste, is based on the surplus product drawn from the village communities in the form of tribute, or, in the case of major construction projects (irrigation, temples, etc) of obligatory labour dues (the ‘corvee'). Slavery may exist but it is not the dominant form of labour. We would argue that while these societies displayed many significant differences, they are united at the level which is most crucial in the classification of an "antagonistic" mode of production: the social relations through which surplus labour is extracted from the exploited class

When we turn to examining the phenomenon of decadence in these social forms, there are, as with ‘primitive' societies, a number of specific characteristics, in that these societies seem to display an extraordinary stability and rarely if ever ‘evolved' into a new mode of production without being battered from the outside. It would however be a mistake to see Asiatic society as lacking in history. There is a vast difference between the first despotic forms that emerged in Hawaii or South America, which are much closer to their original tribal roots, and the gigantic empires that developed in India or China, which gave rise to extremely sophisticated cultural forms.

Nevertheless the underlying characteristic - the centrality of the village community - remains, and provides the key to the ‘unchanging' nature of these societies.

"Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of which have continued down to this day, are based on possession in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour, which serves, whenever a new community is started, as a plan and scheme ready cut and dried. Occupying areas of from 100 up to several thousand acres, each forms a compact whole producing all it requires. The chief part of the products is destined for direct use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity. Hence, production here is independent of that division of labour brought about, in Indian society as a whole, by means of the exchange of commodities. It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity; and a portion of even that, not until it has reached the hands of the State, into whose hands from time immemorial a certain quantity of these products has found its way in the shape of rent in kind.... The simplicity of the organisation for production in these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name-this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economical elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky". [5]

In this mode of production, the barriers to the development of commodity production were far stronger than in ancient Rome or feudalism, and this is certainly the reason why in regions where it dominated, capitalism appears not as an outgrowth of the old system but as a foreign invader. It is equally noticeable that the only ‘eastern' society which to some extent developed its own independent capitalism was Japan, where a feudal system was already in place.

Thus in this social form, the conflict between the relations of production and the evolution of the productive forces often appears as stagnation rather than decline, since while dynasties rose and fell, consuming themselves in incessant internal conflicts, and crushing society under the weight of vast, unproductive, ‘Pharaonic' state projects, still the fundamental social structure remained; and if new relations of production did not emerge, then strictly speaking periods of decline in this mode of production do not actually constitute epochs of social revolution. This is quite consistent with Marx's overall method, which does not posit a unilinear or predetermined path of evolution for all forms of society, and certainly envisages the possibility of societies reaching a dead-end from which no further evolution is possible. We should also recall that some of the more isolated expressions of this mode of production collapsed completely, often because they reached the limits to growth in a particular ecological milieu. This seems to have been the case with the Mayan culture, which destroyed its own agricultural base through excessive deforestation. In this case, there was even a deliberate ‘regression' on the part of a large part of the population, who abandoned the cities and returned to hunting and gathering, even though a memory of the old Mayan calendars and traditions was still assiduously preserved. Other cultures, such as the one on Easter Island, seem to have disappeared entirely, in all probability through irresolvable class conflict, violence and starvation.

Slavery and feudalism

Marx and Engels never denied that their familiarity with the primitive and Asiatic social formations was extremely limited by the state of contemporary knowledge. They were much more confident in writing about ‘ancient' society (ie the slave societies of Greece and Rome) and European feudalism. Indeed, the study of these societies played a significant role in the elaboration of their theory of history, since they provided very clear examples of the dynamic process through which one mode of production succeeded another. This was evident in Marx's early writings (The German Ideology) where he locates the rise of feudalism precisely in the conditions brought about by the decline of Rome

"The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset, therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with it. The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry".

The very term decadence frequently evokes images of the later Roman empire - of orgies and emperors drunk with power, of gladiatorial combats witnessed by huge crowds baying for blood. Such pictures certainly tend to focus on the ‘superstructural' elements of Roman society but they do reflect a reality unfolding at the very foundations of the slave system; and thus revolutionaries like Engels and Rosa Luxemburg felt justified in pointing to the decline of Rome as a kind of portent of what lay in store for humanity if the proletariat did not succeed in overthrowing capitalism: "the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery" (Junius Pamphlet).

Ancient slave society was a far more dynamic social formation than the Asiatic mode, even if the latter did make its own contribution to the rise of ancient Greek culture and thus to the slave mode of production in general (Egypt in particular being looked up to as a venerable repository of wisdom). This dynamism flowed to a large extent from the fact that, as the contemporary saying had it, "everything is for sale in Rome": the commodity form had advanced to the point where the old agrarian communities were more and more a fond memory of a lost golden age, and a mass of human beings had themselves become commodities to be bought and sold in the slave markets. Production by large armies of slaves, even when there remained large areas of the economy where productive work was still carried out by small peasants or artisans, more and more assumed a key role in the central foci of the ancient economy - the great landed estates, public works, and the mines. This great ‘invention' of the ancient world was, for a considerable period of time, a formidable ‘form of development', allowing the free citizens to be organised into mighty armies which, by conquering new lands for the empire, added fresh supplies of slave labour. But by the same token there clearly came a point at which slavery was transformed into a definite fetter on further development. Its inherently unproductive nature lay in the fact that it gave the producer absolutely no incentive to give the best of his productive capacities, nor the slave-owner any incentive to invest in developing better techniques of production, since a supply of fresh slaves was always a cheaper option. Hence the extraordinary gap between the philosophical/scientific advances made by the class of thinkers whose leisure was founded on a platform held up by slaves, and the extremely limited practical application of the theoretical or technical advances that were made. This was the case, for example, with the water-mill, which played such a crucial role in the development of feudal agriculture. It was actually invented in Palestine at the turn of the first century AD, but its use was never generalised throughout the Empire. At a certain point, therefore, the incapacity of the slave mode of production to radically augment the productivity of labour made it increasingly impossible to maintain the vast armies required to fuel it. Rome overreached itself, caught into an insoluble contradiction that expressed itself in all the familiar features of its decline.

In Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, the historian Perry Anderson enumerates some of economic, political and military expressions of this clogging up of Roman society's productive force by the slave relation in the early 3rd century: "by mid century, there was a complete collapse of the silver coinage, while by the end of the century, corn prices had rocketed to levels 200 times over their rates in the early Principiate. Political stability degenerated apace with monetary stability. In the chaotic fifty years from 235 to 284, there were no less than 20 Emperors, eighteen of whom died violent deaths, one a captive abroad, the other a victim of the plague - all fates expressive of the times. Civil wars and usurpations were virtually uninterrupted, from Maximus Thrax to Diocletian. They were compounded by a devastating sequence of foreign invasions and attacks along the frontiers, stabbing deep into the interior (...) Domestic political turmoil and foreign invasions soon brought successive epidemics in their train, weakening and reducing the populations of the Empire, already diminished by the destruction of war. Lands were deserted, and supply shortages in agrarian output developed. The tax system disintegrated with the depreciation of the currency, and fiscal dues reverted to deliveries in kind. City construction came to an abrupt halt, archeologically attested throughout the Empire; in some regions, urban centres withered and contracted" (p 83-84).

Anderson goes on to show how, in response to this profound crisis, the Roman state power, based fundamentally upon a reorganised and expanded army, swelled to vast proportions and achieved a certain stabilisation that lasted up to a hundred years. But since "the swelling of the state was accompanied by a shrinkage of the economy...." (p 92), this revival merely paved the way to what he calls "the final crisis of Antiquity", imposing the necessity to progressively abandon the slave relation. An equally key factor in the demise of the slave mode of production was the generalisation of revolts by slaves and other exploited and oppressed classes throughout the Empire in the 5th century AD (such as the so-called ‘Bacuadae' uprisings), which took place on a far wider scale than the Spartacus rebellion of the first century - although the latter is justly remembered for its incredible audacity and the profound yearning for a better world which inspired it.

The decadence of Rome thus corresponded precisely to the formula of Marx, and took on a clearly catastrophic character. Despite recent efforts of bourgeois historians to present it as a gradual and imperceptible process, it manifested itself as a devastating crisis of under-production in which society was less and less able to produce the basic necessities of life - a veritable regression in the productive forces, in which numerous areas of knowledge and technique were effectively buried and lost for centuries. This was not a one-way slide - as we have noted the great crisis of the third century was followed by a relative revival that was not ended until the final wave of barbarian invasions - but it was inexorable.

The collapse of the Roman system was the precondition for the emergence of new relations of production as a major stratum of landowners took the revolutionary step of eliminating slave labour in favour of the colonus system - the forerunner of feudal serfdom, in which the producer, while being directly compelled to work for the landowning class, is also given his own plot of land to cultivate. The second ingredient of feudalism, mentioned by Marx in the passage from The German Ideology, was the barbarian, ‘Germanic' element, combining the emerging hierarchy of a warrior aristocracy with the remnants of communal ownership, which was stubbornly maintained by the peasantry. A long period of transition ensued, in which slave relations had not yet entirely disappeared and the feudal system gradually asserted itself, reaching its true ascent only in the first centuries of the new millennium. And while as we have noted in various areas (urbanisation, the relative independence of art and philosophical thought from religion, medicine, etc) the rise of feudal society represented a marked regression with regard to the achievements of Antiquity, the new social relations gave both lord and serf a direct interest in increasing the yield of their share of the land and permitted the generalisation of a number of important technical advances in agriculture: the iron plough and the iron harness that allowed it to be horse-drawn, the water mill, the three field system of crop rotation, etc. The new mode of production thus permitted a revival of the cities and a new flourishing of culture, expressed most graphically in the great cathedrals and universities that emerged in the 12th and 13th centuries.

But like the slave system before it, feudalism also began to reach its ‘external' limits:

"Within the next hundred years (of the 13th century), a massive general crisis struck the whole continent...The deepest determinant of this general crisis probably lay...in a ‘seizure' of the mechanisms of reproduction of the system at a barrier point of its ultimate capacities. In particular, it seems clear that the basic motor of rural reclamation, which had driven the whole feudal economy forwards for three centuries, eventually over-reached the objective limits of both terrain and social structure. Population continued to grow while yields fell on the marginal lands still available for conversion at the existing levels of technique, and soil deteriorated through haste or misuse. The last reserves of newly reclaimed land were usually of poor quality, wet or thin soil that was more difficult to farm, and on which inferior crops such as oats were sown. The oldest lands under plough were, on the other hand, liable to age and decline from the very antiquity of their cultivation...." (Anderson, p 197).

As the expansion of feudal agrarian economy came up against these barriers, disastrous consequences ensued in the life of society: crop failure, famines, collapse of grain prices combined with soaring prices of goods produced in the urban centres:

"This contradictory process affected the noble class drastically, for its mode of life had become ever more dependent on the luxury goods produced in the towns...while demesne cultivation and servile dues from its estates yielded progressively decreasing incomes. The result was a decline in seigneurial revenues, which in turn unleashed an unprecedented wave of warfare as knights everywhere tried to recoup their fortunes with plunder. In Germany and Italy, this quest for booty in a time of dearth produced the phenomenon of unorganised and anarchic banditry by individual lords...In France, above all, the Hundred years' War - a murderous combination of civil war between the Capetian and Burgundian houses and an international struggle between England and France, also involving Flanders and the Iberian powers - plunged the richest country in Europe into unparalleled disorder and misery. In England, the epilogue of final continental defeat in France was baronial gangsterism of the Wars of the Roses...To complete a panorama of desolation, this structural crisis was over-determined by a conjunctural catastrophe: the invasion of the Black Death from Asia in 1348".

The Black Death, wiping out up to a third of the European population, hastened the final demise of serfdom. It brought about a chronic shortage of labour in the countryside, forcing the noble class to shift from traditional feudal labour dues to the payment of wages; but at the same time the nobility tried to hold the clock back by imposing draconian restrictions on wages and the movement of labourers, a Europe-wide tendency classically codified in the Statute of Labourers decreed in England immediately after the Black Death. The further result of this noble reaction was to provoke widespread class struggle, again most famously given shape by the huge Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381. But there were comparable uprisings all over Europe during this period (the French ‘Jacquerie', labourers' revolts in Flanders, the rebellion of the Ciompi in Florence, and so on).

As in the decline of ancient Rome, the mounting contradictions of the feudal system at the economic level thus had their repercussions at the level of politics (wars, social revolts) and in the relationship between man and nature; and all of these elements in turn accelerated and deepened the general crisis. As in Rome, the general decline of feudalism was the result of a crisis of underproduction, the inability of the old social relations to allow the production of the basic necessities of daily existence. It is important to note that although the slow emergence of commodity relations in the towns acted as a dissolving factor on feudal bonds, and were further accelerated by the effects of the general crisis (wars, famines, the Black Death), the new social relations could not really take wing until the old system had entered into a state of self-contradiction which resulted in a grave decline in the forces of production:

"One of the most important conclusions yielded by an examination of the great crash of European feudalism is that - contrary to widely received beliefs among Marxists - the characteristic ‘figure' of a crisis in a mode of production is not one in which vigorous (economic) forces of production burst triumphantly through retrograde (social) relations of production, and promptly establish a higher productivity and society on their ruins. On the contrary, the forces of production typically tend to stall and recede within the existent relations of production; these must then first be radically changed and reordered before new forces of production can be created and combined for a globally new mode of production. In other words, the relations of production generally change prior to the forces of production in an epoch of transition, and not vice versa" (p 204). As with the decline of Rome, a period of regression in the old system was a precondition for the flourishing of a new mode of production.

Again, as in the period of Roman decadence, the ruling class sought to preserve its tottering system by increasingly artificial means. The passing of savage laws to control the mobility of labour and the tendency of rural labourers to escape to the towns, the attempt to rein in the centrifugal tendencies of the aristocracy through the centralisation of monarchical power, the use of the Inquisition to impose a rigid ideological control over all expressions of heretical and dissident thought, the debasing of the coinage to ‘solve' the problem of royal indebtedness... all these trends represented the attempt of a dying system to postpone its final demise, but they could not prevent it. Indeed, to a large extent, the very means used to preserve the old system were transformed into bridgeheads of the new system: this was the case, for example, with the centralising monarchies of Tudor England, who were in great part creating the necessary conditions for the emergence of the modern capitalist nation state

Much more clearly than in the decadence of Rome, the epoch of feudal decline was also an epoch of social revolution in the sense that that a genuinely new and revolutionary class came out of its entrails, a class with a world outlook that challenged the old ideologies and institutions, and a mode of economy that found the feudal relation an intolerable obstacle to its expansion. The bourgeois revolution made its triumphant entry onto the stage of history in England in the 1640s, even if had to wait over a century and a half before its subsequent and even more spectacular victories in France in the 1790s. This long time-frame was a possibility for the bourgeois revolution because it is the crowning political point of a long process of economic and social development inside the shell of the old system, and because it followed different rhythms in different nations.

The transformation of ideological forms

"In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out".

All class societies are maintained by a combination of outright repression and the ideological control exerted by the ruling class through its numerous institutions: family, religion, education, and so on. Ideologies are never a purely passive reflection of the economic base, but contain their own dynamic which at certain moments can actively impact on the underlying social relations. In affirming the materialist conception of history, Marx was obliged to "distinguish" between the "material transformation of the economic conditions" and the "ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict" because hitherto the prevailing approach to history had been to emphasise the latter at the expense of the former.

When analysing the ideological transformations that take place in an epoch of social revolution, it is important to remember that while they are ultimately determined by the economic conditions of production, this does not happen in a rigid and mechanical way, not least because such a period is never one of pure descent or debasement, but is marked by an increasing clash between contradictory social forces. It is characteristic of such epochs that the old ruling ideology, corresponding less and less to a changing social reality, tends to decompose and give way to new world-outlooks which can serve to actively inspire and mobilise the social classes opposed to the old order. In the process of decomposing, the old ideologies - religious, philosophical, artistic - frequently succumb to pessimism, nihilism, and an obsession with death, while the ideologies of rising or rebellious classes are more often optimistic, life-affirming, looking forward to the dawn of a world radically transformed.

To take one example: in the dynamic period of the slave system, philosophy tended, within the limits of the day, to express mankind's efforts to "know thyself" in Socrates immortal phrase - to grasp the real dynamic of nature and society through rational thought, without the intermediary of the divine. In its period of descent, philosophy itself tended to retreat into the justification of despair or of irrationality, as in Neoplatonism and its links to the numerous mystery cults that flourished in the later Empire.

This tendency cannot be grasped in a one-sided manner however: in periods of decadence the old religions and philosophies were also confronted with the rise of new revolutionary classes or the rebellion of the exploited, and these generally also took on a religious form. Thus, in ancient Rome, the Christian religion, though certainly influenced by the eastern mystery cults, began as a protest movement of the dispossessed against the dominant order, and later, as an established power in its own right, provided a framework for the preservation of many of the cultural acquisitions of the ancient world. This dialectic between the old order and the new was a feature of ideological transformations during the decline of feudalism as well. On the one hand:

"The period of stagnation saw the rise of mysticism in all its forms. The intellectual form with the ‘Treatise on the Art of Dying', and above all, ‘The Imitation of Jesus Christ'. The emotional form with the great expressions of popular piety exacerbated by the influence of the uncontrolled elements of the mendicant clergy: the ‘flagellants' wandered the countryside, lacerating their bodies with whips in village squares in order to strike at human sensibility and call Christians to repent. These manifestations gave rise to imagery of often dubious taste, as with the fountains of blood that symbolised the redeemer. Very rapidly the movement lurched towards hysteria and the ecclesiastical hierarchy had to intervene against the troublemakers, in order to prevent their preaching from increasing the number of vagabonds (...) Macabre art developed... the sacred text most favored by the more thoughtful minds was the Apocalypse." (J. Favier, From Marco Polo to Christopher Columbus, p152f).

On the other hand, the demise of feudalism also saw the rise of the bourgeoisie and its world view, expressing itself in the magnificent flowering of art and science in the period of the Renaissance. And even mystical and millenarian movements like the Anabaptists were, as Engels pointed out, often intimately linked to the communist aspirations of the exploited classes. Such movements could not yet provide a historically viable alternative to the old system of exploitation, and their millenarian dreams were more often fixated on a primitive past than a more advanced future, but they nevertheless played a key role in the processes bringing about the destruction of the decaying mediaeval hierarchy.

In a decadent epoch, the general cultural decline is never absolute: at the artistic level, for example, the stagnation of the old schools can also be countered by new forms which above all express a human protest against an increasingly inhuman order. The same can be said at the level of morality. If morality is ultimately an expression of the social nature of mankind, and if periods of decadence are expressions of the break-down of social relations, then they will tend to be characterised by a concomitant break-down in morality, a tendency towards the collapse of basic human ties and the triumph of the anti-social impulses. The perversion and prostitution of sexual desire, the flourishing of casual murder, robbery and fraud, and above all the suspension of the moral order in warfare become the order of the day. But again, this should not be seen in a rigid and mechanical way, in which periods of ascent are marked by superior human behaviour and periods of decline by a sudden plunge into wickedness and depravity. The undermining and shattering of old moral certainties can equally express the rise of a new system of exploitation, in comparison to which the old order may seem comparatively benign, as noted in the Communist Manifesto with regard to the rise of capitalism:

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade".

And yet, such is the understanding of Hegel's ‘Cunning of Reason' in the thinking of Marx and Engels that they were able to recognise that this moral ‘decline', this commodification of the world, was in fact a force for progress which was helping to sweep away the static feudal order that lay behind it and pave the way for the genuinely human moral order that lay in front of it.

---

[1] Preface to A contribution to the critique of political economy.

[2] For example, the settled and already quite hierarchical hunting societies which were able to hold extensive food stocks, the various semi-communist forms of agrarian production, the ‘tributary empires' formed by semi-barbarian pastoralists like the Huns and the Mongols, etc

[3] Among the Australian tribes when the traditional way of life was still in force, the hunter who brought in the game kept nothing for himself, but immediately handed over the product to the community in the shape of certain complex kinship structures. According to the work of the anthropologist Alain Testart, Le Communisme Primitif, 1985, the term primitive communism should only be applied to the Australians, which he sees as the last remnant of a social relationship which had probably been general during the palaeolithic period. This is a matter for debate. Certainly even among the nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples, there are wide differences in the way that the social product is distributed, even though all of them give priority to the maintenance of the community, and as Chris Knight points out in his Blood Relations, Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, 1991, what he calls the ‘own-kill rule' (ie prescribed limits on what the hunter may consume of his kill) is extremely widespread among hunting peoples.

[4] It must of course be borne in mind that the dissolution of primitive social relations was not a one-off event but followed very different rhythms in different parts of the globe; it is a process spanning millennia and it is only now reaching its last tragic chapters in the remotest regions of the globe, such as the Amazon and Borneo.

[5] Capital, 1, Part IV, Chapter XIV

When World War I broke out, the socialists met on 4th August 1914 to engage the struggle for internationalism and against the war: there were seven of them in Rosa Luxemburg's apartment. This reminiscence, which reminds us that the ability to swim against the current is one of the most important of revolutionary qualities, should not lead us to conclude that the role of the proletarian party was peripheral to the events which shook the world at that time. The contrary was the case, as we have tried to show in the first two articles of this series to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the revolutionary struggles in Germany. In the first article, we put forward the thesis that the crisis in the Social-Democracy, in particular in the German SPD[1] - the leading party of the Second International - was one of the most important factors making it possible for imperialism to march the proletariat to war. In Part 2 we argued that the intervention of revolutionaries was crucial in enabling the working class, in the midst of war, to recover its internationalist principles, thus making possible the ending of the imperialist carnage by revolutionary means (the November Revolution of 1918). In so doing, they set down the foundations for a new party and a new International.

And in both of these phases, we pointed out, the capacity of revolutionaries to understand the priority of the moment was the precondition to their playing such an active and positive role. After the breaking up of the international in face of war, the task of the hour was to understand the causes of this fiasco, and to draw the lessons. In the struggle against war, the responsibility of true socialists was to be the first to raise the banner of internationalism, to light up the path towards revolution.

The councils and the class party

The workers' uprising of 9th November 1918 brought the war to an end on the morning of November 10th 1918. The German Emperor and countless German princelings were overthrown - a new phase of the revolution was beginning. Although the November uprising was led by the workers, Rosa Luxemburg called it the "revolution of the soldiers". This was because the spirit which dominated it was that of a profound longing for peace. A desire which the soldiers, after four years in the trenches, embodied more than any other social group. This was what gave that unforgettable day its specific colour and its glory, and which fed its illusions. Since even parts of the bourgeoisie were relieved that the war was finally over, general fraternisation was the mood of the day. Even the two main protagonists of the social struggle, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, were affected by the illusions of 9th November. The illusion of the bourgeoisie was that it could still use the soldiers coming from the front against the workers. In the days which followed, this illusion dissipated. The "grey coats"[2] wanted to go home, not to fight the workers. The illusion of the proletariat was that the soldiers were already on their side and wanted revolution. During the first sessions of the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils which were elected in Berlin on November 10th, the soldiers' delegates nearly lynched those revolutionaries who spoke of the necessity to continue the class struggle, and who identified the new Social Democratic government as the enemy of the people.

These workers' and soldiers' councils were, in general, marked by the weight of human inertia which curiously marks the beginning of every great social upheaval. Very often, soldiers elected officers as their delegates, and workers appointed the same Social-Democratic candidates they had voted for before the war. Thus, these councils found nothing better to do than appoint a government led by the warmongers of the SPD, and to decide their own suicide in advance by calling general elections to a parliamentary system.

Despite the hopelessness of these first measures, the workers' councils were the heart of the November Revolution. As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, it was above all the appearance of these organs which proved and embodied the essentially proletarian character of this upheaval. But now a new phase of the revolution was opened up, in which the central question was no longer that of the councils but of the class party. The phase of illusions was coming to an end, the moment of truth, the outbreak of civil war was approaching. The workers' councils, through their very function and structure as organs of the masses, are capable of renewing and revolutionising themselves from one day to the next. The central question now was: would the determined revolutionary, proletarian outlook gain the upper hand within the councils, within the working class?

In order to be victorious, the proletarian revolution needs a unified, centralised political vanguard in which the class as a whole has confidence. This was perhaps the most important lesson of the October Revolution in Russia the previous year. The task of this party, as Rosa Luxemburg had argued in 1906 in her pamphlet about the Mass Strike, is no longer to organise the masses, but to give the class a political leadership, and a real confidence in its own capacities.

The difficulties in the regroupment of revolutionaries

But at the end of 1918 in Germany there was no such party in sight. Those socialists who opposed the pro-war policies of the SPD were mainly to be found in the USPD, the former party opposition subsequently excluded by the SPD. A mixed bunch with tens of thousands of members, from pacifists and those who wanted a reconciliation with the warmongers, to principled revolutionary internationalists. The main organisation of these internationalists, the Spartakusbund, was an independent fraction within the USPD. Other, smaller internationalist groups, such as the IKD[3] (which emerged from the left opposition in Bremen) were organised outside the USPD. The Spartakusbund was well known and respected among the workers. But the recognised leaders of the strike movements against the war were not these political groups, but the informal structure of factory delegates, the "revolutionäre Obleute". By December 1918 the situation was becoming dramatic. The first skirmishes leading to open civil war had already taken place. But the different components of a potential revolutionary class party - the Spartakusbund, the other left elements in the USPD, the IKD, the Obleute were still separate entities, and still mainly hesitant.

Under the pressure of events, the question of the foundation of the party began to be posed more concretely. In the end, it was dealt with in a great hurry.

The first national congress of the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils had come together in Berlin on 16th December. While 250,000 radical workers demonstrated outside to put pressure on the 489 delegates (of whom only 10 represented Spartakus, 10 the IKD), Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were not allowed to address the meeting (under the pretext that they had no mandate). When this congress concluded by handing over its power to a future parliamentary system, it became clear that revolutionaries would have to reply to this in a unified manner.

On 14th December 1918, the Spartakusbund published a programmatic declaration of principles: What does the Spartakusbund want?

On 17th December, a national conference of the IKD in Berlin called for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and for the formation of a class party through a process of regroupment. The conference failed to reach agreement on whether or not to participate in the coming elections to a national parliamentary assembly.

Around the same time, leaders within the left of the UPSD, such as Georg Ledebour, and among the factory delegates, such as Richard Müller, began to raise the question of the need of a united workers' party.

At the same moment, delegates of the international youth movement were meeting in Berlin, where they set up a secretariat. On 18th December, an international youth conference was held, followed by a mass meeting in Berlin Neukölln, where Karl Liebknecht and Willi Münzenberg spoke.

It was in this context that a meeting in Berlin of Spartakusbund delegates decided on 29th December to break with the USPD and form a separate party. Three delegates voted against this decision. The same meeting called for a joint conference of Spartakus and the IKD, to begin in Berlin the following day, at which 127 delegates from 56 cities and sections participated. This conference was partly made possible through the mediation of Karl Radek, delegate of the Bolsheviks. Many of these delegates did not realise until their arrival that they had been summoned to form a new party[4]. The factory delegates were not invited to participate, since it was felt that it would not yet be possible to unite them with the very decided revolutionary positions defended by a majority of the often very young members and supporters of Spartakus and the IKD. Instead, it was hoped that the factory delegates would join the party once it had been formed.[5]

What became the founding congress of the KPD brought together leading figures of the Bremen Left (including Karl Radek, althought he represented the Bolsheviks at this meeting), who felt that the foundation of the party was long overdue, and of the Spartakusbund, such as Rosa Luxemburg and above all Leo Jogiches, whose principle worry was that this step might be premature. Paradoxically, both sides had good arguments to justify their stances.

The Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) sent six delegates to the conference, two of whom were prevented from participating by the German police.[6]

 

The founding congress: a great programmatic advance

Two of the main discussions at what became the founding congress of the KPD concerned the question of parliamentary elections and the trade unions. These were issues which had already played an important role in the debates before 1914, but which had become secondary in the course of the war. Now they returned to centre stage. Karl Liebknecht already took up the parliamentary issue in his opening presentation on the "Crisis in the USPD". The first national Congress of the Workers' Councils in Berlin had already posed the question which would inevitably split the USPD: National Assembly or Council Republic? It was the responsibility of all revolutionaries to denounce the bourgeois elections and its parliamentary system as counter-revolutionary, as the death of the rule of the workers' councils. But the leadership of the USPD had refused the calls both of the Spartakusbund and of the Obleute in Berlin for an extraordinary congress to debate and decide this question.

Speaking for the Bolshevik delegation, Karl Radek further developed this understanding that it was historical development itself which determined not only the need for a founding congress, but even its agenda. With the end of the war, the logic of the revolution in Germany would necessarily be different to that in Russia. The central question was no longer peace, but food supplies and their price, and the question of unemployment.

In putting the question of the National Assembly and "economic struggles" on the agenda the during first two days of the congress, the leadership of the Spartakusbund hoped for a clear position for the workers' councils against the bourgeois parliamentary system and against the outdated trade union form of struggle, as a solid programmatic basis for the new party. But the debates went further than this. The majority of delegates came out against any participation in bourgeois elections, even as a means of agitation against them, and against working within the trade unions. At this level, the congress was one of the strong moments in the history of the workers' movement. It helped to formulate, for the first time ever in the name of a revolutionary class party, these radical positions corresponding to the new epoch of decadent capitalism. These ideas were to strongly influence the formulation of the Manifesto of the Communist International, written some months later by Trotsky. And they were to become basic positions of the Communist Left - as they are to this day.

The interventions of the delegates who defended these positions were often marked by impatience and a certain lack of argumentation, and were criticised by the experienced militants including Rosa Luxemburg, who did not share their most radical conclusions. But the minutes of the meeting illustrate well that these new positions were not the product of individuals and their weaknesses, but of a profound social movement involving hundreds of thousands of class conscious workers[7]. Gelwitzki, delegate from Berlin, called on the party, instead of participating in the elections, to go the barracks to convince the soldiers that the assembly of the councils is the "government of the world proletariat", the national assembly that of the counter revolution. Levine, delegate from Neukölln (Berlin), pointed out that the participation of Communists in the elections could not but reinforce the illusions of the masses.[8] In the debate on the economic struggles, Paul Frölich, delegate from Hamburg, argued that the old trade union form of struggle was now out of date, since it was based on a separation between the economic and the political dimensions of the class struggle.[9] Hammer, delegate from Essen, reported how the miners in the Ruhr area were throwing away their trade union membership books. As for Rosa Luxemburg herself, who still favoured working within the trade unions for tactical purposes, she declared that the struggle of the proletariat for its liberation is identical with the struggle for the liquidation of the trade unions.

 

Mass strike and insurrection

The programmatic debates at the founding congress were of great historic importance, above all for the future.

But at the moment of the foundation congress itself, Rosa Luxemburg was profoundly right in saying that both the question of parliamentary elections and the trade unions were secondary. On the one hand, the question of the role of these institutions in what had become the epoch of imperialism, of war and revolution, was still too new in the workers' movement Both the debate and practical experience were still insufficient to fully clarify the issue. For the moment it was enough to know and agree that the mass unitary organs of the class, the workers' councils, and not parliament or the trade unions, are the means of the workers' struggle and of the proletarian dictatorship.

On the other hand, these debates tended to divert from the main task of the congress, which was to identify the next steps of the class on the road to power. This question, tragically, the congress failed to clarify. The key discussion on this issue was opened by a Rosa Luxemburg's presentation on "Our Programme" on the afternoon of the second day (31st December 1918). Here she explored the nature of what had been called the second phase of the revolution. The first phase, she said, had been immediately political, since directed against the war. During the November Revolution, the question of the specific economic class demands of the workers had been sidelined. This in turn helped to explain the relatively low level of class consciousness which accompanied these events, expressed in a general wish for reconciliation and for a "reunification" of the "socialist camp". For Rosa Luxemburg, the main characteristic of the second phase of the revolution would be the return of the class' economic demands to centre stage.

Here, she was not forgetting that the conquest of power is above all a political act. Instead she was highlighting another important difference between the revolutionary process in Russia and in Germany. In 1917 the Russian proletariat came to power without much deployment of the strike weapon. But, Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, this was possible because the revolution in Russia began, not in 1917, but in 1905. In other words, the Russian proletariat had already gone through the experience of the mass strike before 1917.

At the congress, she did not repeat the main ideas developed by the left of Social Democracy about the mass strike after 1905. She could safely assume that these were still present in the minds of the delegates. Here we will briefly recall: the mass strike is the precondition for the seizure of power, precisely because it explodes the separation between the economic and political struggles. And whereas the trade unions, even at their strongest moment as instruments of the workers, only organise minorities of the class, the mass strike activates the "knotted up mass of the helots" of the proletariat, the unorganised masses untouched by the light of political education. The workers' struggle is directed not only against material poverty. It is an insurrection against the existing division of labour itself, led by its main victims, the wage slaves themselves. The secret of the mass strike is the striving of the proletarians to become full human beings. Last but not least: the mass strike would be led by rejuvenated workers' councils, giving the class the organisational means to centralise its struggle for power.

This is why Rosa Luxemburg, in her congress speech, insisted that the armed insurrection is the last, not the first act of the struggle for power. The task of the hour, she said, is not to topple the government, but to undermine it. The main difference to the bourgeois revolution, she argued, is its mass character, coming from "below".[10]

 

The immaturity of the Congress

But precisely this was not understood at the congress. For many of the delegates, the next phase of the revolution was characterised, not by mass strike movements, but by the immediate struggle for power. This confusion was expressed particularly clearly by Otto Rühle[11], who claimed that it would be possible to seize power within 14 days. Even Karl Liebknecht, while admitting the possibility of a long drawn-out revolution, did not want to exclude the possibility of an "extremely rapid victory" in the "coming weeks."[12]

We have every reason to believe the eye witness accounts, according to which Rosa Luxemburg in particular was shocked and alarmed by the results of this congress. As for Leo Jogiches, his first reaction is said to have been to advise Luxemburg and Liebknecht to leave Berlin and go into hiding for a while[13]. He feared that the party and the proletariat were heading towards a catastrophe.

What alarmed Rosa Luxemburg most were not the programmatic positions adopted, but the blindness of most of the delegates to the danger represented by the counter-revolution, and the general immaturity with which the debates were conducted. Many interventions were characterised by wishful thinking, giving the impression that a majority of the class already stood behind the new party. The presentation of Rosa Luxemburg was greeted with jubilation. A motion of 16 delegates was immediately passed, to publish it as quickly as possible as an "agitation pamphlet". As opposed to this, the congress itself failed to discuss it seriously. In particular, hardly any intervention took up its main idea: that the struggle for power was not yet on the agenda. One laudable exception was the contribution of Ernst Meyer, who spoke about his recent visit to the provinces east of the river Elbe. He reported that large sectors of the petty bourgeoisie were speaking of the necessity to teach Berlin a lesson. He continued: "I was even more shocked by the fact that even the workers in the cities have not yet understood the necessities of the situation. This is why we have to develop with all our might our agitation not only in the countryside, but also in the small and middle size towns." Meyer also replied to Paul Frölich's idea of encouraging the creation of local council republics. "It is absolutely typical of the counter-revolution that it propagates the possibility of independent republics, expressing nothing but the desire to split up Germany into zones of social differentiation, removing the socially backward regions from the influence of the socially progressive ones."[14]

Particularly significant was the intervention of Fränkel, delegate from Königsberg, who proposed that there should be no discussion about the presentation at all. "I am of the opinion that a discussion about the magnificent speech of comrade Luxemburg would only weaken it" he declared.[15]

This contribution was followed up by an intervention of Bäumer, who declared that the proletarian position against any participation in elections was so evident, that he "bitterly regretted" that there had been any discussion on the subject at all[16].

Rosa Luxemburg was supposed to make the conclusion to this discussion. In the end, no conclusion was made. The chairman announced: "Comrade Luxemburg is unfortunately not able to make a conclusion, she is not feeling well.[17]"

What Karl Radek was later to describe as the "youthful immaturity" of the founding congress[18] was thus characterised by impatience and naivety, but also by a lack of culture of debate. Rosa Luxemburg had spoken about this problem the previous day. "I have the impression that you are taking your radicalism too lightly. Specifically the call for ‘rapid voting' proves this. That is not the maturity and the earnest spirit which belongs in this hall (...) We are called upon to accomplish the greatest tasks in world history, and we cannot be mature and thorough enough in thinking about which steps we have ahead of us in order to safely reach our goal. Decisions of such importance cannot be taken lightly. What I miss here is an attitude of reflection, the seriousness which by no means excludes revolutionary élan, but needs to be coupled with it."[19]

 

 

The negotiations with the "factory delegates"

 

The revolutionäre Obleute of Berlin sent a delegation to the congress to negotiate their possible adherence to the new party. A peculiarity of these negotiations was that the majority of the seven delegates considered themselves as the representatives of the factories where they worked, casting their votes on specific issues on the basis of some kind of proportional system, only after consultation with "their" workforce, who seem to have assembled for the occasion. Liebknecht, who led the negotiations for Spartakus, reported back to the congress that, for instance on the question of participation in the elections to the National Assembly, 26 votes had been cast in favour, and 16 votes against. Liebknecht adds: "But among the minority there are the representatives of the extremely important factories in Spandau, who have 60,000 workers behind them." Däumig and Ledebour, who were representatives of the left of the USPD, not Obleute, did not participate in the voting.

Another bone of contention was the demand of the Obleute for parity in the programme and the organisational commissions nominated by the congress. This was turned down on the grounds that the delegates represented a large part of the working class of Berlin, whereas the KPD represented the class in the whole country.

But the main dispute, which seems to have poisoned the atmosphere of negotiations which had begun very constructively, concerned the strategy and tactics for the coming period i.e. the very question which should have been at the heart of the congress deliberations. Richard Müller demanded that the Spartakusbund abandon what he called its "putschist tactic." He seemed in particular to be referring to the tactic of daily armed demonstrations through Berlin, led by the Spartakusbund, at a moment when, according to Müller, the bourgeoisie was trying to provoke a premature confrontation with the political vanguard in Berlin. To which Liebknecht replied: "You sound like a mouthpiece of Vorwärts"[20] (the counter-revolutionary paper of the SPD).

As Liebknecht describes it to the congress, this seems to have been the negative turning point of the negotiations. The Obleute, who until then were satisfied to have five representatives in the above mentioned commissions, now reverted to demanding eight etc. The factory delegates even began threatening to form a party of their own.

The congress went on to pass a resolution blaming "pseudo radical elements from the bankrupt USPD" for the failure of the negotiations. Under different "pretexts" these elements were trying to "capitalise on their influence over the revolutionary workers."[21]

The article about the congress, which appeared in the January 3rd 1919 issue of Die Rote Fahne, which was written by Rosa Luxemburg, expressed a different spirit. This article speaks of the beginning of negotiations towards unification with the Obleute and the delegates of the big Berlin factories, the beginning of a process which "as a matter of course, irresistibly, will lead to a process of unification of all true proletarian and revolutionary elements in a single organisational framework. That the revolutionary Obleute of Greater Berlin, the moral representatives of the vanguard of the Berlin proletariat, will join up with the Spartakusbund, is proven by the cooperation of both sides in all the revolutionary actions of the working class in Berlin to date."[22]

 

The alleged "Luxemburgism" of the young KPD

How to explain these flawed birth marks of the KPD?

After the defeat of the revolution in Germany, a series of explanations were put forward, both within the KPD and the Communist International, which emphasised specific weaknesses of the movement in Germany, in particular in comparison with Russia. The Spartakusbund was accused of having defended a "spontaneous" and so-called Luxemburgist theory of the formation of the party. One sought here the origins of everything from the alleged hesitation of the Spartakists to separate from the war mongers in the SPD, to the so-called leniency of Rosa Luxemburg towards the young "radicals" in the party.

The origins of the alleged "spontaneist theory" of the party is habitually traced back to Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet about the 1905 revolution in Russia - The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions - where she allegedly calls for the intervention of the masses in the struggle against the opportunism and reformism of Social Democracy as an alternative to the political and organisational struggle within the party itself. In reality, the recognition that the progress of the class party depends on a series of "objective" and "subjective" factors, of which the evolution of the class struggle is one of the most important, was a basic thesis of the Marxist movement long before Rosa Luxemburg.[23]

Above all, Rosa Luxemburg did propose a very concrete struggle within the party: The struggle to re-establish the political control of the party over the social democratic trade unions. It is a common belief, in particular among syndicalists, that the organisational form of the political party is much more prone to capitulate to the logic of capitalism than the trade unions who directly organise the workers in struggle. Rosa Luxemburg understood very well that the opposite is the case, since the trade unions mirror the reigning division of labour which is the most profound basis of class society. She understood that the trade unions and not the SPD were the main carriers of opportunist and reformist ideology in pre-war Social Democracy, and that under cover of the slogan of their "autonomy" the trade unions were in reality taking over the workers' political party. It is true that this strategy proposed by Luxemburg proved insufficient. But this does not make it "spontaneist" or syndicalist (!) as is sometimes alleged! Similarly, the orientation of Spartakus during the war to form an opposition first within the SPD and then the USPD, expressed not an underestimation of the party, but an unswerving determination to fight for the party, to prevent its best elements falling into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

In an intervention at the fourth congress of the KPD, in April 1920, Clara Zetkin claimed that Rosa Luxemburg, in her last letter to Zetkin, had written that the foundation congress had been mistaken in not making the acceptance of participation in the elections a condition for membership in the new party. There is no need to doubt the sincerity of Clara Zetkin in making this claim. The capacity to read what other people really write, and not what you would want or expect them to, is probably rarer than is generally assumed. The letter of Luxemburg to Zetkin, dated January 11, 1919, was later published. What Rosa Luxemburg wrote is as follows: "But above all, as far as the question of the non participation in the elections is concerned: You enormously overestimate the importance of this decision. There were no ‘Rühlists" present, Rühle was not a leader at the Conference. Our ‘defeat' was only the triumph of a somewhat childish, immature, unswerving radicalism (...) We all decided unanimously not to make of this casus a cabinet question, not to take it tragically. In reality, the question of the National Assembly will be pushed right into the background by the stormy developments, and when things proceed as they are doing, it appears questionable enough if the elections to the National Assembly will even take place"[24].

The fact that the radical positions were often put forward by those delegates who most clearly expressed the impatience and immaturity of that Conference, helped to give the impression that this immaturity was the product of the refusal to participate in bourgeois elections or in the trade unions. This impression was to have tragic consequences about a year later when the leadership, at the Heidelberg Conference, excluded the majority on account of their position on the elections and the trade unions.[25] This was not the attitude of Rosa Luxemburg, who knew that there is no alternative to the necessity for revolutionaries to pass on their experience to the next generation, and that a class party cannot be founded without the participation of the young generation.

 

The alleged "déclassé" character of the "young radicals"

After the exclusion of the radicals from the KPD, and of the KAPD from the Communist International, there was the beginning of a theorisation of the role of the "radicals" within the young party as an expression of the weight of "uprooted" and "déclassé" elements. It is certainly true that, among the young supporters of the Spartakusbund during the war, more particularly within the ranks of the groupings of "red soldiers", the war deserters, the invalids etc. there were currents who dreamt of destruction and "total revolutionary terror". Some of these elements were highly dubious, and the Obleute were rightly suspicious of them. Others were hotheads, or simply young workers politicised by the war, who had learnt of no way of articulating their ideas other than fighting with a gun, and who longed for the kind of "guerrilla" campaigns as were soon to be practised by Max Hoelz[26].

This interpretation was taken up again in the 1970s by authors such as Fähnders and Rector in their book Linksradikalismus und Literatur.[27] They attempted to illustrate their thesis of the link between Left Communism and "lumpenisation" through the example of the biographies of radical artists and writers of the left, rebels who, like the young Maxim Gorki or Jack London, had rejected existing society by placing themselves outside of it. Referring to one of the most influencial leaders of the KAPD, they wrote: "Adam Scharrer was one of the most radical representatives of international rebelliousness (...) leading him to the extreme rigid positions of the Communist Left."[28]

In reality, most of the young militants of the KPD and the Communist Left were politicised in the socialist youth movement before 1914. Politically they were not a product of the "uprooting" and "lumpenisation" caused by the war. But their politicisation did gravitate around the question of war. As opposed to the older generation of socialist workers, who suffered the weight of decades of political routine in the epoch of the relative stability of capitalism, the socialist youth was directly mobilised by the spectre of approaching war, developing a strong "anti-militarist" tradition[29]. And whereas the Marxist Left became an isolated minority within Social Democracy, their influence within the radical youth organisations was much stronger[30].

As for the accusations that the "radicals" had been tramps in their youth, this fails to take into account that these years of "wandering" were a typical part of proletarian biographies at that time. Partly a leftover of the old tradition of the wandering journeyman which still characterised the first socialist political organisations in Germany like the Communist League, this tradition was above all a fruit of the workers' struggle to ban child factory work. Many young workers would set out to "see the world" before having to submit to the yoke of wage slavery. Going on foot, they would explore the German speaking countries, Italy, the Balkans and even the Middle East. Those connected to the workers' movement would find free or cheap accommodation in the trade union houses in the big cities, political and social contacts and support in the local youth organisations. In this way hubs of international exchange appeared around political, cultural, artistic and scientific developments[31]. Others went to sea, learning languages and establishing socialist links across the globe. No wonder this youth became a vanguard of proletarian internationalism throughout Europe![32]

 

Who were the "revolutionäre Obleute"?

The counter-revolution accused the Obleute of being paid agents of foreign governments, of the Entente and then of "World Bolshevism". In general they have gone down in history as a kind of grass roots trade unionist, localist and factory oriented, anti-party current. Within "operaist" circles they have been considered with admiration as a kind of revolutionary conspiracy out to sabotage the imperialist war. How else to explain the way they "infiltrated" the key sectors and plants of the German arms industry?

Let's stick to the facts. The Obleute began as a small circle of Social-Democratic party functionaries and militants, who had gained the confidence of their colleagues through their unswerving opposition to the war. They were particularly strongly based in the capital, Berlin, and in the metal industry, above all among the turners. They belonged to the most intelligent, educated workers with the highest wages. But they were renowned for their sense of support and solidarity towards other, weaker sectors of the class, such as the women mobilised to replace male workers sent to the front. In the course of the war a whole network of politicised workers grew up around them. Far from being an anti-party current, they were almost exclusively composed of former Social-Democrats, who were now members or sympathisers of the left wing of the USPD, including the Spartakusbund. They participated passionately in all the political debates which took place in the revolutionary underground throughout the war.

The particular form this politicisation took was to a large degree determined by the conditions of clandestine activity, making mass assemblies rare and open discussion impossible. In the factories, the workers protected their leaders from repression, often with remarkable success. The extensive spy system of the trade unions and the SPD regularly failed to even find out the names of the "ringleaders". In case of arrest, each of these delegates had named a substitute who immediately filled the gap.

The "secret" of their capacity to "infiltrate" the key sectors of industry was very simple. They belonged to the "best" workers, so that the capitalists competed with each other to sign them up. In this way, the employers themselves, without knowing it, put these revolutionary internationalists in key positions of the war economy.

 

The absence of the International

It is no peculiarity of the situation in Germany that the three above mentioned forces within the working class played crucial roles in the drama of the formation of the class party. One of the characteristics of Bolshevism during the revolution in Russia was the way it united basically the same forces within the working class: the pre-war party representing the programme and the organisational experience; the advanced, class conscious workers in the factories and work places, who anchored the party in the class, played a decisive, positive role in resolving the different crises in the organisation; and revolutionary youth politicised by the struggle against war.

Compared with this, what is striking in Germany is the absence of a similar degree of unity and mutual confidence between these essential components. This, and not any inferior quality of these elements themselves, was crucial. Thus, the Bolsheviks possessed the means to clarify their confusions while maintaining and enforcing their unity. In Germany this was not the case.

The revolutionary vanguard in Germany suffered from a more deeply rooted lack of unity and of confidence in its own mission.

One of the main explanations for this is that the German revolution faced a much more powerful enemy. The bourgeoisie in Germany was certainly more ruthless than in Russia. Moreover, the phase of history inaugurated by the world war had delivered a new and mighty weapon into its hands. Germany before 1914 was the country with the most developed organisations of the workers' movement worldwide. In a new era, when the trade unions and the mass social democratic parties could no longer serve the cause of the proletariat, these instruments because enormous obstacles. Here the dialectics of history were at work. What had once been a strength of the German working class now became its weakness.

It takes courage to attack such a formidable fortress. The temptation can be very strong to ignore the strength of the enemy in order to reassure yourself.

But the problem was not only the strength of the German bourgeoisie. When the Russian proletariat stormed the bourgeois state in 1917, world capitalism was still divided by the imperialist war. It is a well known fact that the German military actually helped Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders to return to Russia, since they hoped that this would in some way weaken the military resistance of their opponent on the Eastern front.

Once the war was over the world bourgeoisie united against the proletariat. One of the strong moments of the first congress of the KPD was the adoption of a resolution identifying and denouncing the military collaboration of the British and German military with the local landlords in the Baltic states in the training of counter-revolutionary paramilitary units directed against "the Russian Revolution today" and the "German revolution tomorrow".

In such a situation, only a new International could have given revolutionaries and the whole proletariat in Germany the necessary confidence and self-confidence. The revolution could still be victorious in Russia without the presence of a world class party, because the Russian bourgeoisie was relatively weak and isolated - but this was not true in Germany. The Communist International was not yet founded when the decisive confrontation of the German revolution took place in Berlin. Only such an organisation, by bringing together the theoretical acquisitions and the experience of the whole proletariat, could have been equal to the task of leading a world revolution.

It was only the outbreak of the Great War itself which made revolutionaries realise the need for a truly united and centralised international left opposition. But under the conditions of war it was extremely difficult either to link up organisationally or to clarify the political divergences which still separated the two most important currents of the pre-war left: the Bolsheviks around Lenin, and the German and Polish Lefts around Rosa Luxemburg. This absence of unity before the war made it all the more difficult to make the political strengths of currents in different countries the common heritage of all, and to attenuate the weaknesses of each.

In no country was the shock of the collapse of the Socialist International as profound as in Germany. There, the confidence in such qualities as theoretical formation, political leadership, centralisation or party discipline was profoundly shaken. The conditions of war, the crisis of the workers' movement, made it difficult to restore such confidence.[33]

Conclusion

In this article we have concentrated on the weaknesses which appeared in the formation of the party. This was necessary in order to understand the defeat at the beginning of 1919, the subject of the next article. But despite these weaknesses, those who came together at the moment of the foundation of the KPD were the best representatives of their class, embodying all that is noble and great-hearted in humanity, the true representatives of a better future. We will return to this question at the end of this series.

The unification of revolutionary forces, the formation of a political leadership of the proletariat worthy of the name, had become the central question of the revolution. Nobody understood this better than the class directly threatened by this process. From the November 9 Revolution on, the main thrust of the political life of the bourgeoisie was directed towards the liquidation of the Spartakusbund. The KPD was founded in the midst of this pogrom atmosphere, preparing the decisive blows against the revolution which were soon to follow.

This will be the subject of the next article.

 

Steinklopfer.

---

[1] Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social-Democratic Party).

[2] German soldiers in "feldgrau" uniform.

[3] Internationale Kommunisten Deutschlands (International Communists of Germany).

[4] The agenda announced in the invitation letter was:

1. The crisis in the USPD
2. Programme of Spartakusbund
3. National Assembly
4. International Conference.

[5] Jogiches on the other hand seems to have wanted the Obleute to take part in founding the party.

[6] Six of the militants present at this conference were murdered by the German authorities in the following months.

[7] Der Gründungsparteitag der KPD. Protokoll und Materalien. Herausgegeben (Founding Congress of the KPD. Minutes and Documents), Hermann Weber.

[8] Eugen Levine was executed a few months later as a leader of the Bavarian Council Republic.

[9] Frölich, a prominent representative of the Bremen Left, was later to write a famous biography of Rosa Luxemburg.

[10] Protokoll und Materalien, pp 196-199.

[11] Although he soon was to reject completely any class party as bourgeois, and to develop a rather individual vision of the development of class consciousness, Otto Rühle was to remain true to Marxism and the cause of the working class. At the congress, he was already a partisan of the "Einheitsorganisationen" (political-economic groups), which in his opinion should replace both the party and the trade unions. In the debate on the "economic struggles" Luxemburg replies to this point of view, saying that the alternative to the trade unions is the workers' councils and mass organs, not the Einheitsorganisationen.

[12] Protokoll und Materalien, p222.

[13] According to Clara Zektin, Jogiches, in reaction to the discussions, wanted to end the congress in failure i.e. postpone the foundation of the party.

[14] Ibid p214.

[15] Ibid p206. According to the minutes, this suggestion was greeting with shouts of: "Quite right!" Fortunately, Fränkel's motion was voted down.

[16] Ibid p209. For the same reason Gelwitzki, the previous day, said it had been "shameful" even to have discussed this question. And when Fritz Heckert, who did not have the same revolutionary reputation as Luxemburg or Liebknecht, tried to defend the position of the central committee on participation in the elections, he was interrupted by a shout from Jakob: "here speaks the spirit of Noske" p117). Noske, the Social Democratic minister of the interior of the bourgeois government of the hour, went down in history as the "bloodhound of the counter-revolution".

[17] Ibid p224

[18] "The congress demonstrated sharply the youth and inexperience of the party. The link to the masses was extremely weak. The congress adopted an ironic attitude towards the left Independents. I did not have the feeling of already having a party in front of me." Ibid p47.

[19] Ibid P. 99.100.

[20] Ibid., p271.

[21] Ibid., p290.

[22] Ibid., p302.

[23] See the arguments of Marx and Engels within the Communist League after the defeat of the 1848-49 revolution.

[24] Protokoll und Materalien, pp42,43.

[25] A large part of this excluded majority went on to found the KAPD. Suddenly, there were two communist parties in Germany, a truly tragic division of revolutionary forces!

[26] Max Hoelz, sympathiser of the KPD and the KAPD, whose armed supporters were active in central Germany at the beginning of the 1920s.

[27] Walter Fähnders, Martin Rector: Linksradikalismus und Literatur, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der sozialistischen Literatur in der Weimarer Republik (Left Radicalism and Literature, Studies of the History of Socialist Literature in the Weimar Republic).

[28] P. 262. Adam Scharrer, a leading figure of the KAPD, continued to defend the need for a revolutionary class party until the crushing of the Left Communist organisations in 1933.

[29] The first appearance of a radical socialist youth movement was in Belgium in the 1860s, when young militants agitated (with some success) the soldiers in the barracks to prevent their use against striking workers.

[30] See Scharrer's novel Vaterlandslose Gesellen (which translates roughly as "unpatriotic rabble"), written in 1929, as well as the biography and commentary of the "Arbeitskollektiv proletarisch-revolutionärer Romane" republished by Oberbaumverlag Berlin.

[31] One of the most important witnesses of this chapter of history is Willi Münzenberg, for instance his book Die Dritte Front ("The Third Front"): "Reminiscences from 15 years in the proletarian youth movement" first published 1930.

[32] The acknowledged leader of pre-war socialist youth was in Germany Karl Liebknecht, in Italy Amadeo Bordiga.

[33] The example of the maturation of socialist youth in Switzerland under the influence of regular discussions with the Bolsheviks during the war shows what was possible under more favourable circumstances. "With great psychological ability, Lenin drew the young people towards him, went to their discussion evenings, praising and criticising always in a spirit of empathy. Ferdy Böhny later recalled: ‘The way he discussed with us resembled the Socratic dialogue'". (Babette Gross: Willi Münzenberg, Eine politische Biografie p93).

In International Review n°133 we began the publication of a debate within the ICC on the underlying causes of the period of post-war prosperity during the 1950s-60s, which has proven to be an exceptional one in the history of capitalism since World War I. In that article, we posed the terms and framework of the debate, and presented briefly the main positions around which it has turned. We are publishing below a new contribution to the discussion.

This contribution supports the thesis presented in n°133 under the title "Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism", and attributes the creation of solvent demand during the post-war boom essentially to the Keynesian mechanisms set up by the bourgeoisie.

In future issues of the Review we will publish articles presenting the other positions in the debate, as well as a reply to this position in particular as regards the nature of capitalist accumulation and the factors determining capitalism's entry into its decadent phase.

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The origins, dynamics, and limits of Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism

In 1952, our predecessors of the GCF[1] brought their group's activity to an end because "The disappearance of the extra-capitalist market leads to a permanent crisis of capitalism (...) We can see here the striking confirmation of Rosa Luxemburg's theory (...) In fact, the colonies are no longer an extra-capitalist market for the colonial homeland (...) We are living in a state of imminent war...".[2] Written on the eve of the post-war boom, these repeated mistakes reveal the need to go beyond "the striking invalidation of Rosa Luxemburg's theory", and to return to a more coherent understanding of the functioning and limits of capitalism. Such is the aim of this article.

I. Capitalism's motive forces and internal contradictions

1) The constraints on extended reproduction and its limits

The appropriation of surplus labour is fundamental to capitalism's survival.[3] Unlike previous societies, capitalist appropriation has its own inbuilt, permanent dynamic towards the expansion of the scale of production which goes far beyond simple reproduction. It generates a growing social demand through the employment of new workers and reinvestment in extra means of production and consumption: "These limits of consumption are extended by the exertions of the reproduction process itself. On the one hand, this increases the consumption of revenue on the part of labourers and capitalists, on the other hand, it is identical with an exertion of productive consumption".[4] This dynamic of extension takes form in a succession of cycles, roughly every decade, when the increasing weight of fixed capital tends to reduce the rate of profit and provoke crises.[5] During these crises, bankruptcies and the depreciation of capital create the conditions for a recovery which expands the markets and productive potential: "The crises are always but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions. They are violent eruptions which for a time restore the disturbed equilibrium (...)The ensuing stagnation of production would have prepared - within capitalistic limits - a subsequent expansion of production. And thus the cycle would run its course anew. Part of the capital, depreciated by its functional stagnation, would recover its old value. For the rest, the same vicious circle would be described once more under expanded conditions of production, with an expanded market and increased productive forces."[6] Graph n°1 perfectly illustrates all the elements of this theoretical framework established by Marx: each of the ten cycles of rising and falling profit rates ends in a crisis (recession).

Graph n°1: Quarterly rate of profit and recessions, USA 1948-2007 (the nine recessions which marked the ten cycles are indicated by the lines from top to bottom: 1949, 1954, 1958, 1960, 1970-71, 1974, 1980-81, 1991, 2001)

Capitalist accumulation for more than two centuries has lived to the rhythm of some thirty cycles and crises. Marx identified seven during his lifetime, the Third International sixteen,[7] and the left in the International completed the picture for the inter-war period.[8] This is the recurring material basis for the cycles of over-production whose origins we will now examine.[9]

2) The circuit of accumulation, a play in two acts: production of profit and the realisation of commodities

The extraction of a maximum of surplus labour, crystallised in a growing quantity of commodities, constitutes what Marx calls "the first act in the process of capitalist production". These commodities must then be sold in order to transform the material surplus labour into surplus value in the form of money for reinvestment: this is "the second act of the process". Each of these two acts contains its own contradictions and limits. Although they influence each other, the first act is driven above all by the rate of profit, while the second is a function of the various tendencies limiting the market.[10] These two limits engender periodically a final demand which is unable to absorb production: "Over-production is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay".[11]

What is the origin of this inadequate solvent demand?

a) Society's limited capacity for consumption, which is reduced by the antagonistic relations in the division of surplus labour (class struggle): "The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit".[12]

b) The limits resulting from the process of accumulation which reduce consumption as the rate of profit declines: the inadequate surplus value extracted relative to invested capital puts a break on investment and the employment of new labour power: "The limitations of the capitalist mode of production come to the surface: 1) In that the development of the productivity of labour creates out of the falling rate of profit a law which at a certain point comes into antagonistic conflict with this development and must be overcome constantly through crises...".[13]

c) An incomplete realisation of the total product when the proportions between the sectors of production are not respected.[14]

3) A threefold conclusion on capitalism's internal dynamic and contradictions

Throughout his work, Marx constantly underlines this dual root cause of crises, whose determinations are fundamentally independent: "The foundation of modern overproduction is on the one hand, the absolute development of the productive forces and consequently the mass production of producers shut up in the circle of life's necessities, and on the other its limitation by capitalist profit".[15] In fact, if the level and the recurrent fall in the rate of profit mutually influence the way in which surplus value is shared out, Marx nonetheless insists that these two root causes are fundamentally "independent", "logically divergent", "not identical".[16] Why is this? Simply because the production of profit and the markets are, for the most part, subjected to different conditions. This is why Marx categorically rejects any theory which attributes crises to a single cause.[17] It is thus theoretically incorrect either to make the evolution of the rate of profit dependent on the size of the market, or the reverse. The time-scales of these two underlying root causes are thus necessarily different. The first contradiction (the rate of profit) has its roots in the need to increase constant capital at the expense of variable capital, and its timescale is thus tied essentially to the cycles of rotation of fixed capital. Since the second contradiction turns around the distribution of surplus labour, its timescale is determined by the balance of forces between the classes which evolves over longer periods.[18] While these two timescales may come together (the process of accumulation influencing the balance of forces between the classes and vice versa), they are fundamentally "independent", "not identical", "logically divergent", for the class struggle is not strictly tied to the ten-year cycles, nor are the latter tied to the balance of class forces.

II. An empirical validation of the marxist theory of the crises of overproduction

The period from the end of World War II to the present day is a good example confirming Marx's analysis of the crises of overproduction, and of its three main implications. In particular, it allows us to disprove all the single-cause crisis theories, whether they be the theory based solely on the falling rate of profit which is incapable of explaining why accumulation and growth do not start up again despite the fact that the rate of profit has been rising for a quarter-century, or that based on the saturation of solvent demand which cannot explain the rise in the rate of profit since the markets are totally exhausted (which logically should be expressed in a zero rate of of profit). All this can readily be understood from the two graphs (n°1 and n°3) which show the evolution of the rate of profit.

The exhaustion of post-war prosperity and the worsening economic climate during 1969-82 are fundamentally the product of a downturn in the rate of profit,[19] despite the fact that consumption was maintained by the indexation of wages and measures to support demand.[20] The gains of productivity declined by the end of the 1960s,[21] cutting the rate of profit in half by 1982 (see Graph n°3). Since then, a recovery in the rate of profit has only been possible by increasing the rate of surplus value (lowering wages and increasing exploitation). This has implied an inevitable deregulation of the key mechanisms which ensured a growth in final demand during the post-war boom (see below). This process began at the beginning of the 1980s and can be seen in particular in the constant decline in wages as a proportion of total wealth produced.

Graph n°2 Wages in relation to total wealth produced: G7, Europe, France

Overall then, during the 1970s the "rate of profit" contradiction weighed on capitalism, while final demand was maintained. The situation was reversed from 1982 onwards: the rate of profit has been spectacularly restored, but at the price of a drastic compression of final demand (the market): essentially of wage earners (see Graph n°2), but also (to a lesser extent) of investment, since the rate of accumulation has remained at its low-water mark (see Graph n°3).

Hence, we can now understand why the economic decline is continuing despite a restored rate of profit: the failure of growth and accumulation to take off again, despite a spectacular improvement in company profitability, is explained by the compression of final demand (wages and investment). This drastic reduction in final demand leads to listless investment for enlarged accumulation, continued rationalisation through company take-overs and mergers, unused capital pouring into financial speculation, delocalisation of industry in search of cheap labour... all of which further depresses overall demand.

Graph n° 3 Profit, accumulation and economic growth, USA, Europe, Japan: 1961-2006

As for the recovery of final demand, this is hardly possible under present conditions since the increase in the rate of profit depends on keeping it low! Since 1982, in a context of improved company profitability, it is thus the "restriction of solvent markets" timescale which plays the leading role in explaining the continued listlessness of accumulation and growth, even if fluctuations in the rate of profit can still play an important part in the short term in sparking off recessions, as we can readily see in Graphs n°1 and n°3.

III. Capitalism and its surrounding world

Capitalism's dynamic towards enlargement necessarily gives it a fundamentally expansive character: "The market must, therefore, be continually extended, so that its interrelations and the conditions regulating them assume more and more the form of a natural law working independently of the producer, and become ever more uncontrollable. This internal contradiction seeks to resolve itself through expansion of the outlying field of production. But the more productiveness develops, the more it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest".[22] That said, when Marx pointed out all the dynamics and limits of capitalism, he did so in abstraction from its relationships with the external (non-capitalist) sphere. We now need to understand what is the latter's role and importance during capitalism's development. Capitalism was born and developed within the framework of feudal, then mercantile social relations, with which it inevitably developed important ties to obtain the means of its own accumulation (import of precious metals, looting, etc.), for the sale of its own commodities (direct sale, triangular trade, etc.), and as a source of labour.

Once capitalism's foundation was assured after three centuries of primitive accumulation (1500-1825), this environment continued to supply a whole series of opportunities throughout the ascendant period (1825-1914) as a source of profit, an outlet for the sale of commodities suffering from overproduction, and as an extra source of labour power. All these reasons explain the imperialist rush for colonies between 1880 and 1914.[23] However, the existence of an external regulation of a part of capitalism's internal contradictions does not mean either that the former were more effective for its development, nor that capitalism is incapable of creating internal modes of regulation. It is first and foremost the extension and domination of wage labour on its own foundations which progressively allowed capitalism to make its growth more dynamic, and while the various relations between capitalism and the extra-capitalist sphere gave it a whole series of opportunities, the size of this milieu and the overall balance-sheet of its exchanges with it, were nonetheless a brake on its growth.[24]

IV. The historical obsolescence of the capitalist mode of production and the basis for going beyond it

This formidable dynamism of capitalism's internal and external expansion is nonetheless not eternal. Like every mode of production in history, capitalism also undergoes a phase of obsolescence where its social relationships become a brake on the development of its productive forces.[25] We must therefore seek for the historical limits to the capitalist mode of production within the transformation and generalisation of the social relations of wage labour production. Once it reaches a certain stage, the extension of wage labour and its domination through the formation of the world market constitute capitalism's apogee. Instead of continuing to eradicate old social relationships and develop the productive forces, the henceforth obsolete character of the wage-labour relationship tends to freeze the former and put a brake on the latter: it remains incapable of integrating a large part of humanity, it engenders crises, wars and disasters of ever-growing magnitude, to the point where it threatens humanity with extinction.

1) Capitalism's obsolescence

The progressive generalisation of wage labour does not mean that it has taken root everywhere, far from it, but it does mean that its domination of the world creates a growing instability where all the contradictions of capitalism find their fullest expression. World War I opens this era of major crises whose dominant feature is that they are world-wide and anchored in the wage-labour relationship: a) the national framework has become too narrow to contain the onslaught of capitalism's contradictions; b) the world no longer offers enough opportunities and shock-absorbers providing capitalism with an external regulation of its internal contradictions; c) with hindsight, the failure of the regulation set up during the post-war boom reveals capitalism's historical inability to adjust internally in the long term to its own contradictions, which consequently explode with increasingly barbaric violence.

Inasmuch as it was a world conflict, not for the conquest of new spheres of influence, zones for investment, and markets, but to share out those that already existed, World War I marked the capitalist mode of production's definitive entry into its phase of obsolescence. The two, increasingly violent, world wars, the greatest crisis of overproduction ever (1929-1933), the severe restriction on the growth of the productive forces between 1914 and 1945, capitalism's inability to integrate a large part of humanity, the development of militarism and state capitalism throughout the planet, the increasing growth of unproductive expenditure, and capitalism's historic inability to stabilise internally its own contradictions - all these phenomena are material expressions of this historical obsolescence of the social relations of production based on wage labour which have nothing to offer humanity but a perspective of growing barbarism.

2) Catastrophic collapse, or a historical, materialist and dialectical vision of history?

Capitalism's obsolescence does not imply that it is condemned to catastrophic collapse. there are no predefined quantitative limits within capitalism's productive relations (whether it be a rate of profit, or a given quantity of extra-capitalist markets) which determine a single point beyond which capitalist production would die. The limits of modes of production are above all social, the product of their internal contradictions and the collision between these now-obsolete relations and the productive forces. Henceforth it is the proletariat which will abolish capitalism, capitalism will not die of itself as a result of its "objective" limits. During capitalism's obsolescence, the same tendencies and dynamics that Marx analysed continue to operate, but they do so within a profoundly modified general context. All the economic, social, and political contradictions inevitably appear on a higher level, either in social struggles which regularly pose the question of revolution, or in imperialist conflicts which threaten humanity's very future. In other words, the world has entered the "epoch of wars and revolutions" announced by the Third International.

V. Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism: the foundation of the post-war boom

Marxists have no reason to be surprised at recoveries that take place during a mode of production's obsolescence: we can see these for example in the reconstitution of the Roman Empire under Charlemagne, or in the formation of the great monarchies during the Ancien Régime. However, it is not because we are standing at a bend in the river that we can conclude that it is flowing uphill and away from the sea! The same is true of the post-war boom: the bourgeoisie proved capable of creating a brief phase of strong growth in a general course of obsolescence.

The Great Depression of 1929 in the United States showed how violently capitalism's contradictions could break out in an economy dominated by wage labour. One might therefore have expected that it would be followed by increasingly violent and frequent economic crises, but this was not the case. The situation had evolved considerably, both in the process of production (Fordism) and in the balance of forces between the classes (and within them). Moreover, the bourgeoisie had learned certain lessons. The years of crisis and the barbarism of World War II were thus followed by a good thirty years of strong growth, a quadrupling of real wages, full employment, the creation of a social wage, and an ability by the system not to avoid, but to react to its cyclical crises. How was all this possible?

1) The foundations of Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism

Henceforth, in the absence of adequate external outlets for its contradictions, capitalism had to find an internal solution to its dual constraint at the level of profits and markets. The high rate of profit was made possible by the strong gains in labour productivity thanks to industrial Fordism (assembly-lines combined with shift work). Meanwhile, the markets on which to sell this enormous mass of commodities were guaranteed by the expansion of production, state intervention, and various systems indexing real wages to productivity. This made it possible to increase demand in parallel with production (see Graph n°4). By stabilising the share of wages in total wealth produced, capitalism was thus able for a while to avoid "Over-production [which] arises precisely from the fact that the mass of the people can never consume more than the average quantity of necessaries, that their consumption therefore does not grow correspondingly with the productivity of labour".[26]

This was the analysis that Paul Mattick and other revolutionaries of the time were to adopt to analyse post-war prosperity: "It is undeniable that wages have risen in the modern epoch. But only in the framework of the expansion of capital, which presupposes that the relationship of wages to profits should remain in constant in general. Labour productivity should therefore rise with a rapidity which would make it possible both to accumulate capital and to raise the workers' living standards".[27] This is the main economic mechanism of Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism. This is attested empirically by the parallel evolution of wages and labour productivity during this period.

Graph n° 4 US wages and productivity A comment on this graph: the increase in productivity and wages remains almost identical from World War II onwards. From the 1980s onwards, the two increasingly diverge. Ever since capitalism began, this divergence has been the rule, and their parallel development during the post-war boom the exception. In effect, this divergence is the material expression of capitalism’s permanent tendency to increase production (the upper line of productivity) beyond the growth of the most important element of solvent demand: real wages (the lower line).

Given the spontaneous dynamics of capitalism (competition, pressure on wages, etc.), such a system could only be viable with the straitjacket of a state capitalism which contractually guaranteed a threefold division of increased productivity between profits, wages, and state revenues. A society dominated henceforth by wage labour imposes de facto a social dimension on all the policies adopted by the ruling class. This presupposes setting up multiple social and economic controls of the working class, social shock-absorbers, etc. The purpose of this unprecedented explosion of state capitalism was to contain the system's explosive social contradictions within the limits of capitalist order: predominance of the executive over the legislative, the significant growth of state intervention in the economy (almost half of GNP in the OECD countries), social control of the working class, etc.

2) Origins, contradictions and limits of Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism

Following the German defeat at Stalingrad (January 1943), the political, employer, and trade union representatives in exile in London began intense discussions on the reorganisation of society following the now inevitable collapse of the Axis powers. The memory of the Depression years and the fear of social movements at the end of the war, the lessons learned from the crisis of 1929, the increasingly widespread acceptance of the necessity of state intervention, and the bipolarisation created by the Cold War, were to be the elements that pushed the bourgeoisie to modify the rules of the game and to work out more or less consciously this Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism which was to be pragmatically and progressively implanted in all the developed countries (OECD). The sharing out of gains in productivity was all the more easily accepted by all inasmuch as: a) they were increasing strongly, b) this redistribution guaranteed the increase in solvent demand in parallel with production, c) it offered social peace, d) social peace was all the easier to obtain in that the proletariat in reality emerged defeated from World War II, under the control of parties and unions in favour of reconstruction within the framework of the system, e) but at the same time long term it guaranteed long-term profitability of investments, f) as well as a high rate of profit.

The system was thus able temporarily to square the circle of increasing the production of profit and markets in parallel, in a world where demand was henceforth largely dominated by that coming from wage labour. The guaranteed growth in profits, state spending and the rise in real wages, were able to guarantee the final demand so vital if capital were to continue its accumulation. Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism is the response that the system has been able to find temporarily to the crises of capitalism's obsolescent phase, whose dominant features are their world-wide nature and their basis in wage labour. It allowed a self-centred functioning of capitalism, without the need to have recourse to delocalisations despite high wages and full employment, while at the same time enabling it to get rid of its colonies which henceforth had only minor usefulness, and eliminating the internal extra-capitalist farming activity whose activity had now to be subsidised.

From the end of the 1960s until 1982, all the conditions which had allowed these measures to succeed deteriorated, beginning with a progressive slowing in the rise of productivity which overall was cut to a third, and drew all the other economic variables down with it. The internal regulation temporarily discovered by Keynesiano-Fordist state capitalism thus had no lasting foundation.

However, the reasons which had demanded the creation of this system were still there: wage labour is dominant in the working population, and capitalism was therefore forced to find a means of stabilising final demand in order to avoid its decline leading to a depression. Since company investments are conditioned by demand, it was necessary to find other means of maintaining consumption. The answer inevitably was found in the twin factors of declining saving and rising debt. This created a formidable machine for producing financial bubbles and feeding speculation. The constant aggravation of the imbalances in the system is thus not the result of errors in the conduct of economic policy, it is an integral part of the model.

3) Conclusion: and tomorrow?

This descent into hell is all the more inevitable in the present situation inasmuch as the conditions for a recovery in productivity gains and a return to their three-way redistribution are socially absent. There is nothing tangible in economic conditions, in the present balance of forces between the classes, and inter-imperialist competition at the international level which leaves open any way out: all the conditions are there for an inexorable descent into hell. It is up to revolutionaries to contribute to the consciousness of the class struggles which will inevitably arise from capitalism's deepening contradictions.

C Mcl.

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[1] Gauche Communiste de France (French Communist Left).

[2] Internationalisme n°46, 1952.

[3] This is the motor of "the tendency to accumulate, the drive to expand capital and produce surplus-value on an extended scale. This is law for capitalist production, imposed by incessant revolutions in the methods of production themselves, by the depreciation of existing capital always bound up with them, by the general competitive struggle and the need to improve production and expand its scale merely as a means of self-preservation and under penalty of ruin." (Marx, Capital, Vol. III Part III). The quotes from Capital can all be found on https://marxists.org [22]

[4] Marx, Capital, Vol. III Part V

[5] "As the magnitude of the value and the durability of the applied fixed capital develop with the development of the capitalist mode of production, the lifetime of industry and of industrial capital lengthens in each particular field of investment to a period of many years, say of ten years on an average (...) the cycle of interconnected turnovers embracing a number of years, in which capital is held fast by its fixed constituent part, furnishes a material basis for the periodic crises." (Marx, Capital, Vol. II Part II).

[6] Marx, Capital, Vol. III Part III, our emphasis.

[7] "Crisis and boom blend with all the transitional phases to constitute a cycle or one of the great circles of industrial development. Each cycle lasts from 8 to 9 or 10 to 11 years (...) In January of this year the London Times published a table covering a period of 138 years - from the war of the 13 American colonies for independence to our own day. In this interval there have been 16 cycles, i.e., 16 crises and 16 phases of prosperity. Each cycle covers approximately 8 2/3, almost 9 years" (Trotsky, Report on the World crisis and the new tasks of the Communist International).

[8] "...beginning a new cycle to produce new surplus value remains the capitalist's supreme goal (...) this almost mathematical periodicity of crises is one of the specific traits of the capitalist system of production" (Mitchell, Bilan n°1°, "Crises et cycles dans le capitalisme agonisant".

[9] In Graph n°1, the nine recessions which punctuated the ten cycles are indicated by groups of lines from top to bottom of the graph: 1949, 1954, 1958, 1960, 1970-71, 1974, 1980-81, 1991, 2001.

[10] "As soon as all the surplus-labour it was possible to squeeze out has been embodied in commodities, surplus-value has been produced. But this production of surplus-value completes but the first act of the capitalist process of production - the direct production process. Capital has absorbed so and so much unpaid labour. With the development of the process, which expresses itself in a drop in the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced swells to immense dimensions. Now comes the second act of the process. The entire mass of commodities, i.e. , the total product, including the portion which replaces the constant and variable capital, and that representing surplus-value, must be sold. If this is not done, or done only in part, or only at prices below the prices of production, the labourer has been indeed exploited, but his exploitation is not realised as such for the capitalist, and this can be bound up with a total or partial failure to realise the surplus-value pressed out of him, indeed even with the partial or total loss of the capital." (Marx, Capital, Vol. III Part III).

[11] Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Ch.XVII

[12] This analysis by Marx obviously has nothing to do with the theory of under-consumption as the cause of crises - a theory which he in fact criticised: "It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system does not know any other modes of consumption than effective ones, except that of sub forma pauperis or of the swindler. That commodities are unsaleable means only that no effective purchasers have been found for them, i.e., consumers (since commodities are bought in the final analysis for productive or individual consumption). But if one were to attempt to give this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification by saying that the working-class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption" (Marx, Capital, Vol. II Part III).

[13] Marx, Capital, Vol. III Part III.

[14] Each of these three factors is identified by Marx in the following passage: "The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realising it, are not identical. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically. The first are only limited by the productive power of society, the latter by [c)] the proportional relation of the various branches of production and [a)] the consumer power of society. But this last-named is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or by the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits. [b)] It is furthermore restricted by the tendency to accumulate, the drive to expand capital and produce surplus-value on an extended scale" (Marx, Capital, Vol. III Part III).

[15] Marx, Theories of surplus value (our translation from the French edition).

[16] "Since the market and production are independent factors, the extension of one does not necessarily correspond to the growth of the other" (our translation from the French version of Marx's Grundrisse, La Pléiade, Economie II, p489). Or again: "The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realising it, are not identical. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically." (Marx, Capital, Book III).

[17] It is all the more important to reject the idea that crises of overproduction have a sole cause in that their causes, both for Marx and in reality, are far more complex: the anarchy of production, disproportion between the two main sectors of the economy, opposition between "loaned capital" and "productive capital", the disjunction between purchase and sale due to hoarding, etc. Nonetheless, the two root causes most fully analysed by Marx, and also the most important in reality, are the two that we have insisted on here: the fall in the rate of profit and the laws governing the distribution of surplus labour.

[18] Such as, for example, the long period of rising real wages during the second half of capitalism's ascendancy (1870-1914), during the post-war boom (1945-82), or of their relative and even absolute decline since then (1982-2008).

[19] It goes without saying that a crisis of profitability leads inevitably to an endemic state of overproduction of both capital and commodities. However, these phenomena of overproduction followed and were the target of policies of reduction of production both by the state (production quotas, restructuring, etc.) and private (mergers, rationalisation, take-overs, etc.).

[20] During the 1970s, the working class suffered from the crisis essentially through a decline in working conditions, restructuring and redundancies, and hence in a spectacular increase in unemployment. However, unlike the crisis of 1929 this unemployment did not lead to a spiral of recession thanks to the use of Keynesian social shock-absorbers: unemployment benefit, retraining measures, planned lay-offs, etc.

[21] For Marx, the productivity of labour is the real key to capitalism's evolution, since it is nothing other than the inverse of the law of value, in other words of the average socially necessary labour time for the production of commodities. Our article on the crisis in International Review n°115 includes a graph showing the productivity of labour from 1961-2003 for the G6 (USA, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy). It shows clearly that the decline of labour productivity predates all the other variables which were to follow it afterwards, as well as its continuing low level since then.

[22] Marx, Capital, Vol. III Part III.

[23] Each regime of accumulation that has marked capitalism's historical development has engendered specific relations with its external sphere: from the mercantilism of the countries of the Iberian peninsula, to the self-centred capitalism of the post-war boom, via the colonialism of Victorian Britain, there is no uniformity in the relations between capitalism's heart and its periphery, as Rosa Luxemburg thought, but a mixed succession of relationships which are all driven by these different internal necessities of capital accumulation.

[24] During the 19th century, when colonial markets were most important, ALL the NON-colonial capitalist countries grew more rapidly than the colonial countries (71% more rapidly on average). This observation is valid throughout the history of capitalism. Sales outside pure capitalism certainly allow individual capitalists to realise their commodities, but they hinder the global accumulation of capitalism since, as with armament, they correspond to material means leaving the circuit of accumulation.

[25] "...the capital relation becomes a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour. When it has reached this point, capital, ie wage labour, enters into the same rlation towards the development of social wealth and of the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom, slavery, and is necessarily stripped off as a fetter" Grundrisse, "The chapter on capital, notebook 7", p 749 in the Penguin edition 1973.

[26] Marx, Theories of surplus value.

[27] Paul Mattick, Intégration capitaliste et rupture ouvrière, EDI, p151, our translation.

"Famines are developing in the Third World, and will soon reach the once so-called "socialist" countries, while in Western Europe and North America food stocks are being destroyed, and farmers are paid to cultivate less land or being penalised if they produce more than their quotas. In Latin America, killer diseases like cholera, once eradicated, have returned and reached epidemic levels. All over the world, floods and earthquakes have killed tens of thousands, even though the means exist to build dykes and houses which could prevent such holocausts. At the same time, it is not even possible to accuse "fate" or "nature" of provoking disasters such as Chernobyl where in 1986 the explosion of a nuclear power station killed hundreds (if not thousands) of people and contaminated whole regions, or in the more developed countries, of causing mortal catastrophes in the great cities: 60 dead in a Paris railway station, more than 31 killed at the Kings Cross Underground fire in London. The system is also proving incapable of preventing the destruction of the environment, acid rain, nuclear and other pollution, the greenhouse effect, or the spread of the desert, all of which threaten the continued survival of humanity itself" (Manifesto of the 9th ICC Congress, July 1991)

The question of the environment has been present in revolutionary propaganda since Marx and Engels denounced the unbearable conditions of London in the mid-19th century, taking in Bordiga's exposure of environmental disasters as the result of the irresponsibility of capitalism. Today this question is even more crucial and demands added effort on the part of revolutionary organisations, in order to show that the historic alternative facing humanity - socialism or barbarism - is not only a choice between socialism and the barbarism of war, local or generalised. The danger of barbarism also includes the threat of an ecological catastrophe which is appearing more and more clearly on the horizon.

With this series of articles[1], the ICC aims to develop the question of the environment by dealing with the following aspects:

This first article will examine the present state of affairs and try to highlight the threat weighing on humanity, in particular the most destructive phenomena on a planetary level, such as:

• the development of the greenhouse effect
• the management of waste
• the accelerating spread of pollutants and the processes which amplify this on the biological level
• the exhaustion of natural resources and/or their alteration through pollution.

In the second article, we will seek to show how the problems of the environment cannot be attributed to individuals - even though individual responsibilities certainly do exist - to the extent that it is capitalism and its logic of maximising profit which are really responsible. Here we will see how the very evolution of science and scientific research doesn't happen by chance, but is subjected to the capitalist imperative of maximum profit.

In the third article, we will analyse the responses put forward by the various green and ecological movements, in order to show that despite the good intentions and good will of many of those who participate in them, not only are they totally ineffective but serve to feed illusions in the possibility of solving these problems within capitalism, when the only solution is the international communist revolution.

The harbingers of catastrophe

There is more and more talk about environmental problems, if only because in recent years, in various countries, we have seen the rise of parties whose banner is the defence of the environment. Is this reassuring? Not at all! All the noise around this issue only serves to further fog our ideas. This is why we have decided to begin by describing the particular phenomena which, by combining together, are increasingly leading society towards environmental catastrophe. As we will see - and contrary to what is being piped to us through the television or more or less specialised glossy magazines - the situation is much worse and more threatening than they would have us believe. And it's not this or that greedy and irresponsible capitalist, this or that Mafiosi or Camorra clan which bears the responsibility, but the capitalist system as a whole.

The development of the greenhouse effect

The greenhouse effect is something that everyone talks about, but they don't always know what they are talking about. In the first place, we have to be clear that the greenhouse effect is a highly beneficial fact for life on the earth - at least for the kind of life that we know about - to the extent that it makes it possible for the average temperature on the surface of our planet (average taking into account the four seasons and the different latitudes) of around 15°C instead of -17°C, the estimated temperature in the absence of the greenhouse effect. We have to imagine what the world would be like if the temperature was permanently below 0°C, with the seas and rivers frozen. To what do we owe this extra 32 degrees? To the greenhouse effect: the light of the sun penetrates the lower layers of the atmosphere without being absorbed (the sun does not heat up the air), and feeds the energy of the earth. The radiation which emanates from the latter (as from any celestial body), being composed essentially of infrared waves, is then intercepted and abundantly absorbed by certain constituents of the air such as carbon anhydride, water vapour, methane and other parts of the synthesis such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The thermal balance of the earth profits from the warmth produced in the lower reaches of the atmosphere, and this has the effect of increasing the temperature of the earth's surface by 32°C. The problem is not therefore the greenhouse effect in itself, but the fact that with the development of industrial society many ‘greenhouse' substances have been introduced into the atmosphere, the concentration of which is clearly growing, with the result that the greenhouse effect is increasing. It has been shown, for example, thanks to studies of the air trapped in the polar ice, which goes back 650,000 years, that the present concentration of CO² has gone from 380 ppm (parts per million or milligrams per cubed decimetre) is the highest throughout this entire period, and perhaps the highest over the past 20 million years. Furthermore, the temperatures registered during the 20th century have been the highest for 20,000 years. The frenetic resort to fossil fuels as a source of energy and the growing deforestation of the earth's surface have, since the beginning of the industrial era, compromised the natural balance of carbon gases in the atmosphere. This balance is the product of the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on the one hand, via the combustion and decomposition of organic matter, and, on the other hand, of the fixation of this same carbon gas through photosynthesis, a process which transforms it into glucose and thus into complex organic matter. The imbalance between the release (combustion) and fixation (photosynthesis) of CO², to the advantage of release, is at the basis of the current accentuation of the greenhouse effect.

As we said earlier, it's not only carbon gas but also water vapour and methane which enter into the picture. Water vapour is both a factor in and product of the greenhouse effect since, being present in the atmosphere, it is all the more abundant the higher the temperature, because of the increased evaporation of water that results. The increase in the quantity of methane in the atmosphere, for its part, derives from a whole series of natural sources, but is also caused by the growing use of this gas as a combustible and from the leaks of the various gas pipes distributed around the earth. Methane, also known as ‘swamp gas', is a type of gas which derives from the fermentation of organic matter in the absence of oxygen. The flooding of wooded valleys by the construction of hydroelectric dams is at the origin of the growing local production of methane. But the problem of methane, which today contributes towards one third of the increase of the greenhouse effect, is much more serious than may appear from the elements we have just mentioned. First and foremost, methane has a capacity for absorbing infrared 23 times greater than CO², which is quite considerable. But there is worse! All the current predictions, which are already fairly catastrophic, don't take into account the scenario which could unfold from the liberation of methane from its natural reservoirs. These are made up of the gas trapped at around 0°C and under several atmospheres of pressure, in the particular structures of the ice (hydrated gas): a litre of ice crystal is capable of holding some 50 litres of methane gas. Such layers are found above all in the sea, along the continental shelf, and within the permafrost in the various zones of Siberia, Alaska and Northern Europe. Here is the view of some of the experts on this subject:  "if global warming goes past certain limits (3-4°C) and if the temperature of the coastal waters and the permafrost goes up, there could be an enormous emission in a short period of time (a few dozen years) of methane released by hydrates that have become unstable, and this would result in a catastrophic increase in the greenhouse effect.....over the last year, methane emissions from the Swedish soil to the north of the Arctic circle have increased by 60%, and while the increase in temperature over the last 15 years is on a global average fairly limited, it is much more intense (by several degrees) in the northern regions of Eurasia and America (in the summer, the mythical north west passage which makes it possible to go by boat from the Atlantic to the pacific, was actually opened up)"[2]

Even without this cherry on the icing, the predictions elaborated by recognised international bodies like the UN's IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of technology) in Boston, already announce, for the new century, an increase in average temperature from between 0.5°C to a maximum of 4.5°C, assuming that, as is happening now, nothing is going to change very much in terms of the measures human beings may take. Furthermore, these predictions don't take into account the emergence of two new industrial powers, gluttons for energy, China and India.      

"an additional warming of a few degrees centigrade would provoke a more intense evaporation of the ocean waters, but the most sophisticated analyses suggest that there would be an accentuation of the disparity in rainfall in different regions. Arid zones would extend and become even more arid. The ocean areas with surface temperatures above 27°C, a critical point in the formation of cyclones, would go up by 30 or 40%. This would create a succession of catastrophic meteorological events resulting in recurrent floods and disasters. The melting of a large part of the glaciers in the Antarctic and Greenland, the increasing temperature of the oceans, would raise the level of the latter, with salt water penetrating many fertile coastal regions and whole regions being submerged (part of Bangladesh, many ocean islands)" (ibid)

We haven't got the space here to develop this theme but it is at least worthwhile underlining the fact that climate change, provoked by the increase in the greenhouse effect, even without reaching the feed-back effect produced by the release of the earth's methane, still threatens to be catastrophic since it would lead to:

• more intense meteorological events, much greater rainfall resulting in a reduction in the fertility of the soil, and a growing process of desertification even in temperate zones, as is already happening in Piedmont in Italy
• the creation, in the Mediterranean and other formerly temperate seas, of environmental conditions favourable to the survival of tropical marine species, and thus the migration of non-native species, resulting in disturbances in the ecological balance
• the return of diseases which have been all but eradicated, such as malaria, owing to the development of climatic conditions favourable to the spread of vector organisms such as mosquitoes.

 

The problem of the production and management of waste

A second kind of problem, typical of this phase of capitalist society, is the excessive production of waste and the difficulty of dealing with it adequately. In recent months the news of mountains of rubbish piling up in all the streets of Naples and Campania has been widely covered in the international media; but this is only because this region of the world is still considered as being an industrial and therefore an advanced country. But the fact that the peripheries of many big cities in the Third World have become open air rubbish dumps has been evident for a long time now.

This enormous accumulation of waste is the result of the logic of capitalism. While it is true that human beings have always produced waste, in the past this was always reintegrated, recuperated and re-used. It is only today, with capitalism, that waste has become a problem because of the specific way this society operates, given that is based on the fundamental principle that every kind of human activity is seen as a commodity, i.e. something that is destined to be sold in order to realise a profit on a market where the only law is the law of competition. This cannot fail to have a series of pernicious consequences:

1. The production of commodities cannot be planned in space and time because of competition between capitalists; it therefore follows an irrational logic, according to which each capitalist tends to enlarge his own production in order to sell at a lower price and realise his profit, which leads to an excess of unsold commodities. It is moreover precisely this necessity to outdo the competition and lower prices which leads the producers to lower the quality of manufactured products, which drastically reduces their lifetime and rapidly reduces them to items of waste
2. An aberrant production of wrapping and packaging, often made of toxic and non-degradable substances is accumulating in the environment. These wrappings, which often have no other function than to make the commodity more attractive to potential buyers, make up an increasingly large part, at the level of volume and weight, of the content of the commodity being sold. It has been estimated today that at least half of any rubbish bag in any city is filled with the remains of wrapping.     
3. The production of waste is accentuated by the new lifestyles inherent in modern life. Eating out, in a self-service restaurant, on plastic plates and drinking from plastic bottles, has now become a daily habit for hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. Similarly, using plastic bags to put the shopping in is a convenience that hardly anyone does without. All this does not suit the environment of course, but it does suit the owners of the self-service who save on the labour-power needed to wash cutlery and crockery that is not made to be thrown away. The supermarket owner or even the local shopkeeper benefit from the fact that a customer can buy what he wants, even if he hadn't planned to buy it, knowing that he can put everything into free plastic bag. All this results in a considerable increase in the production of waste all over the world, nearing a kilo per day per citizen, or millions of tons of waste every day!

It has been estimated that, in Italy alone, over the last 25 years, with the population more or less stable, the amount of waste has more than doubled because of packaging.  The problem of waste is one of the problems the politicians think they can resolve, but in fact it encounters insurmountable obstacles in capitalism. Such obstacles are not the result of a lack of technology, but once again to the logic which governs this society. In reality, the management of waste, whether making it disappear or reducing the amount generated, is also subject to the laws of profit. Even when the recycling and reutilisation of material is possible, all this requires the political capacity to coordinate it, which is generally lacking in the weakest economies. This is why in the poorest countries and where enterprises are in decline owing to the galloping crisis of the last few decades, managing waste is a real supplementary expense.

But some would object: if in the advanced countries the management of waste does function, that means it's just a question of the right intentions, of the civic sense and the good practice of enterprises. The problem is that, as in all sectors of production, the strongest countries burden the weakest ones (or, within a country, the most economically deprived regions) with a good part of their waste.

"Two groups of American environmentalists, Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics, recently published a report which affirms that 50 to 80% of waste products from the electronics industry in the western states of the USA are taken away in containers by boats bound for Asia (above all India and China) where the costs of eliminating them are much lower and environmental laws always much less strict. This is no aid project, but a trade in toxic rejects which the consumers have decided to throw away. The report by the two associations refers for example to the Guiyu dumping area, which receives mainly screens and printers. The workers of Guiyu use very rudimentary working tools to extract the components that can be sold. A striking quantity of electronic waste is not recycled but simply dumped in the open in the fields, on riverbanks, in lakes, in swamps, rivers and canals. Men, women and children all do this work without any protection"[3]

"In Italy it has been estimated that the eco-mafias have a business running into 26,000 billion (euro) a year, 15,000 of which from the traffic and illegal elimination of waste (Report on the Ecomafia 2007, by the Lega Ambienta). The customs office confiscated around 286 containers with more than 9000 tons of waste in 2006. The legal treatment of a container of 15 tons of dangerous waste costs around 60,000 euros; for the same quantity, the illegal market in the east only asks 5000 euros. The main destinations of this illegal traffic is a number of developing Asian countries; the exported materials are first worked on then reintroduced into Italy or other western countries as derivatives of the same waste, aimed particularly at factories producing plastics.

In June 1992, the Food and Agricultural Organisation announced that the developing countries, especially in Africa, had become the west's dustbin. Somalia seems today to be the African state most ‘at risk', a real crossroads for traffic and trade of this kind; in a recent report. The United Nations Environment Programme noted the constant increase in the number of polluted underground waters in Somalia, which is the cause of incurable diseases in the population. The port of Lagos in Nigeria is the most important stopping-off point for the illegal traffic in obsolete technological components sent to Africa.

Last May the Panafrican Parliament demanded compensation from the western countries for the damages provoked by the greenhouse effect and the dumping of waste on the African continent, two problems which, according to the African authorities, are the responsibility of the most industrialised countries.

Every year over the world, 20 to 50 millions tons of electronic junk is produced; in Europe, up to 11 millions of this produced, 80% of which is thrown away. It has been estimated that around 2008 there were around a billion computers (one for every six inhabitants); around 2015, there will be more than two billion. These figures represent a new and grave danger at the level of the elimination of the products of obsolete technology"[4]

As we said earlier, the report on the problem of waste being dumped on deprived regions also exists inside the same country. This is precisely the case in Campania, in Italy, which has hit the international headlines as a result of the piles of rubbish that have lain on the streets for months on end. But few know that Campania, like China, India or the northern African countries on the international level, is the receptacle for all the toxic waste from the northern industries, which has transformed fertile and pleasant agricultural regions, like Caserta, into some of the most polluted areas of the planet. Despite the various legal actions that have taken place, this massacre continues unabated. It is not the Camorra, the mafia, common criminals who are the ultimate cause of all this damage, but the logic of capitalism. Whereas the official procedure for properly eliminating a kilo of toxic waste can cost over 60 centimes, the same service costs around ten when illegal channels are used. Thus each year, each abandoned cave becomes an open rubbish tip. In a small village in Campania, where an incinerator is going to be built, these toxic materials, covered over with earth to hide them, have been used to build the foundations of a long boulevard of beaten earth. As Saviano says in his book, now quite a cult in Italy, "if the illegal waste managed by the Camorra was all put together, this would make a mountain 14,600 meters high, on a base of three hectares: the biggest mountain that had ever existed on Earth"[5].   

What's more, as we shall see in more detail in the next article, the problem of waste is above all linked to the kind of production that takes place in the present society. Apart from the idea of the ‘throw away' item, the problem often derives from the materials used to make things with. The use of synthetic materials, particularly plastics, which are practically indestructible, poses immense problems for tomorrow's humanity. And this time it's not about poor or rich countries because plastic is non-degradable in every country in the world, as this extract shows:

"Called the Trash Vortex, the island of rubbish in the Pacific Ocean, which has a diameter of nearly 25,000 km, a depth of 30 meters and which is composed 80% of plastic, the rest by other forms of waste arriving from all directions. It is as though there was a vast island in the middle of the Pacific, made up of rubbish instead of rock. In recent weeks, the density of this material has reached such a level that the total weight of this ‘island' of trash has reached 3.5 million tons, as explained by Chris Parry of the Californian Coastal Commission in San Francisco (...) This incredible and little-known island began to form in the 1950s, following the existence of the north Pacific subtropical gyre, a slow oceanic current which moves clockwise and spirally under the effect of a system of high pressure currents (...) the greater part of the plastic arrives from the continents, around 80%; the rest comes from boats, private commercial or fishing craft. Around the world around 100 billion kilos of plastic are produced a year, roughly 10% of which ends up in the sea. 70% of this ends up at the bottom of the ocean, causing huge damage to sea life. The rest carries on floating. The major part of this plastic is not very biodegradable and end up fragmenting into tiny grains which end up in the stomachs of many sea animals, resulting in death. What remains takes hundreds of years to decompose, meanwhile causing all sorts of damage to sea life".[6]    

A mass of rubbish which is two times the size of the USA! Has this only just been discovered? No, it was actually discovered in 1997 by an oceanographic research officer who was returning from a yacht race, and a UN report in 2006 "calculates that a million sea birds and more than 100,000 marine fish and mammals die each year as a result of plastic detritus, and that every square mile of the ocean contains at least 46,000 fragments of floating plastic".[7]  

But what has been done these past 10 years by those who hold the reins of society? Absolutely nothing! Similar situations, even if they are not quite so dramatic, also exist in the Mediterranean, where each year 6.5 million tons of detritus are hurled, 80% of it plastics; it is estimated that on the bottom of the Mediterranean there are around 2000 bits of plastic to every square kilometre.[8]

And yet solutions do exist. When plastic is made up of 85% of maize starch it is completely biodegradable, for example. This is already a reality today: bags, crayons and various other objects are being made out of this material. But under capitalism industry does not normally take a particular path if it is not profitable, and since plastic made from maize starch costs more, no one wants to pay the price for it because they risk losing their place on the market.[9]  The problem is that the capitalists are used to drawing up economic balance sheets which systematically exclude everything which can't be put in the profit or loss column, because that's something that can't be bought or sold, even if it's to do with the health of the population and the environment. Each time an industry produces a material which, at the end of its life, becomes waste, the expense involved in eliminating this waste is hardly ever taken into account, and what is never taken into account above all is the harm that the permanent nature of the material can do to the Earth.

We should note something else about rubbish: the resort to dumps or even incinerators represents a waste of energy values and of the useful materials contained in rubbish. It has been proved for example that producing materials like copper or aluminium on the basis of recycled material represents a reduction in the costs of production which can exceed 90%. As a result, in the peripheral countries, rubbish has become a real source of subsistence for the thousands of people who have left the countryside but who haven't managed to integrate themselves into the economic tissue of the cities. People sift through rubbish to se what can be sold:

"Veritable ‘rubbish dump cities' have appeared. In Africa, the Korogocho slum in Nairobi - which has been described many times by Father Zanotelli - and lesser known ones in Kigali in Rwanda or Zambia, where 90% of rubbish is not collected and just piles up in the streets, while the Olososua dump in Nigeria receives a thousand truckloads of rubbish every day. In Asia, near Manilla, Payatas in Quezon City is infamous: this slum inhabited by 25,000 people appeared on the slopes of a hill of trash, the ‘smoking mountain' where adults and children vie with each other to find stuff to re-sell. There is also Paradise Village, which is not a tourist village, but a slum which has arisen on a swamp, where floods are as regular as the monsoon rains. There is also Catmon Dumpsite, the dump on which a slum overhanging Paradise Village was built. In China, in Beijing, dumps are inhabited by thousands of people who recycle unauthorised waste, whereas India, with its metropolitan slums, is the country with the greatest density of people who ‘survive' thanks to rubbish".[10]

The spread of contamination 

Contaminants are substances, natural or synthetic, which are toxic for man and other living things. Alongside natural substances which have always been present on our planet and have been used in different ways by industrial technology, such as heavy metals, the chemical industry has produced tens of thousands of them and in...industrial quantities. Lack of knowledge about the dangers of a whole series of substances and, above all, the cynicism of capitalism, have provoked unimaginable disasters, creating an environmental situation which will be difficult to restore once the present ruling class has been eliminated.

One of the most catastrophic episodes in the chemical industry was without doubt Bhopal in India, which took place on 2-3 December 1984 in a factory owned by Union Carbide, an American multinational chemical company. A toxic cloud of 40 tons of pesticide killed at least 16,000 people, either straight away or over the next few years, and caused irreparable physical damage to a million others. Successive inquiries then revealed that, unlike the same kind of enterprise in Virginia, in Bhopal there was no effective measure of gauging pressure or of refrigeration. The cooling tower was temporarily closed and the safety systems were not adapted to the scale of the factory. The truth was that this was a factory in India, using cheap labour power, and for its American owners it was far more profitable to make the savings on fixed and variable capital...

Another historic event was what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986. "It has been estimated that the radioactive emissions of Reactor Number 4 at Chernobyl was around 200 times higher than the explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. In all, the zones that were most seriously affected in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were home to 9 million people. 30% of the territory of these zones was contaminated by caesium 137. In the three countries, around 400,000 people were evacuated, while 270,000 others live in areas where there are restrictions on the use of locally produced food"[11]

There are obviously numerous other environmental disasters resulting from the bad management of factories or from incidents like the innumerable black seas, such as the ones caused by the oil tanker Exxon Valdez on 24 March 1989. When it sank on the Alaskan coast, this led to a leak of at least 30,000 tons of oil; or again, the first Gulf War which ended with the burning of various oil wells and an ecological disaster resulting from the discharge of oil into the Persian Gulf, the most serious in history up to now. More generally, according to the US National Academy of Science, the quantity of hydrocarbons lost in the sea every year is around 3-4 million tons, with a tendency to get bigger, despite the various preventative interventions, as a result of the continuing increase in the demand for oil. 

As well as the action of contaminants, which at high doses have extremely toxic effects on the environment, there are also slower, more discrete forms of poisoning. A toxic substance absorbed slowly and in small doses, while it is chemically stable, can accumulate in the organs and tissues of living organisms, until they reach lethal levels of concentration. This is what in ecotoxicology is called bioaccumulation. There is also another mechanism through which a toxic substance is transmitted through the food chain from lower stages to the higher ones, each time increasing in concentration by two or three times. To be more explicit, we will refer to a concrete case which took place in 1953 in the bay of Minamata in Japan, inhabited by a community of poor fishermen who lived essentially from what they caught. Near this bay there was an industrial complex which produced acetaldehyde, a chemical composite which required the use of a product derived from mercury. The waste from this plant, dumped into the sea, was slightly contaminated by mercury, with a level of concentration of no more than 0.1 micrograms per litre of seawater, i.e. a concentration which, even with the much more sophisticated instruments available today, is still difficult to detect. What was the consequence of this apparently undetectable contamination? Forty-eight people died in a few days, 156 were severely poisoned with grave consequences and even the fishermen's cats, who had been fed on the remains of the fish, ended up ‘committing suicide' in the sea, a behaviour completely untypical for a feline. What had happened? The mercury present in the sea water had been absorbed and fixed by phytoplankton, was then taken up by zooplankton, then by small molluscs, then by small and medium fish, growing through the whole food chain in which the same contaminant, chemically indestructible, is transmitted to a new host at a growing concentration and inversely proportional to the relationship between the size of the predator and the mass of food ingested during its life. It was thus discovered that, among fishes, this metal had reached a concentration of 50mg per kilo, which represents a growth in concentration by a factor of 500,000. It was also discovered that in certain fishermen exhibiting the ‘Minamata syndrome' there had been an increase in the concentration of the metal in their organs and notably their hair to almost half a gram per kilo.

Although from the beginning of the 1960s the scientific world has been conscious of the fact that, in the matter of toxic substances, it's not good enough to use methods of dilution in nature because, as the above case shows, biological mechanisms are capable of concentrating what man dilutes, the chemical industry has continued to contaminate our planet without the excuse that they ‘didn't know this would happen'. Thus a second Minamata was produced more recently at Priolo (Sicily), where a layer of soil was poisoned over a distance of some square kilometres by at least five refineries. It turned out that Enichem was illegally discharging mercury from a factory producing chlorine and caustic soda. Between 1991 and 2001, around 1000 children were born with severe mental handicaps and serious malformations of the heart and the urogenital organs; entire families were stricken with tumours and many desperate women were forced to have abortions to avoid having the monstrous children they had conceived. And yet the Minamata episode had already shown all the danger that mercury represents to human health. Priolo was thus not an unforeseen event, a tragic error, but an act of banditry pure and simple, perpetuated by Italian capitalism and what's more by a ‘state capitalism' which some people like to present as being more ‘left wing' than private capitalism. In fact it was revealed that the bosses of Enichem had behaved like the worst ecomafia: to save on the costs of ‘decontamination' (we're talking about a saving of several million euros), the waste containing the mercury was mixed with other used water and thrown into the sea or buried. On top of this, by making false certificates, double-bottomed cisterns were used to camouflage this traffic in dangerous waste! When all this came out and the managers of this industry were arrested, Enichem's responsibility was so obvious that it decided to reimburse the affected families by 11000 euros, a figure equivalent to what it would have to pay if had been condemned by a court.

Alongside accidental sources of contamination, it's the whole society which, because of the way it functions, continuously produces contaminants which are accumulating in the air, water and soil and - as we have already said - in the whole biosphere, including in us humans. The massive use of detergents and other products have resulted in the phenomenon of the excessive enrichment of rivers, lakes and seas, In the 90s, the North Sea received 6000-11000 tone of lead, 22,000-28,000 of zinc, 4200 of chrome, 4000 of copper, 1450 of nickel, 530 of cadmium, 1.5 million tons of combined nitrogen and some 100,000 tons of phosphates. This waste, so rich in polluting material, is particularly dangerous in the seas which are characterised by the extent of their continental plate (i.e. they are not that deep), which is precisely the case with the North Sea, the Baltic, the south Adriatic and the Black Sea. In effect, the reduced mass of marine water combined with the difficulty of dense, salty sea water mixing with the soft water of rivers does not allow for an adequate dilution of contaminants.

Synthesised products like the famous insecticide DDT, which has been banned in the industrialised countries for 30 years, or PCBs (polychlorides of biphenyl) formerly used in the electrical industry, also banned from production because they no longer conform to current norms - all of them however based on a very strong chemical solidity - can today be found almost everywhere, unaltered, in water, soil and... in the tissue of living organisms. Thanks again to bioaccumulation, these materials are dangerously concentrated in a few animal species, leading to death or the disruption of reproduction, and thus to declining populations. It is in this context that we have to consider what was said earlier about the traffic in dangerous waste, which, often stored in ways that avoid any protection for their surrounding milieu, cause incalculable damage to the ecosystem and the human population.     

To finish this part - although we could add hundreds of other cases from all over the world - we also have to remember that it is precisely this diffuse contamination of the soil which is responsible for a new and dramatic phenomenon: the creation of dead zones, like for example in Italy in the triangle between Priolo, Mellili and Augusta in Sicily -  a zone where the percentage of babies with congenital malformations is 4 times higer than the national average, or again the other triangle of death near Naples between Giuliano, Qualiano and Villaricca, a zone where the number of cases of tumour is far higher than the national average.

The exhaustion of natural resources and/or the menace of pollution

The last example of global phenomena which are leading the world towards catastrophe is the one related to natural resources, which are in part being used up and in part are threatened by the problem of pollution. Before developing on this phenomenon in detail, we want to underline that problems of this kind have already been encountered by the human species on a more limited scale, and with disastrous consequences. If we are still here to talk about this, it's because only because the region concerned only represented a very small part of the Earth. We are going to cite extracts from a work by Jared Diamond, Collapse, which deals with the history of Rapa Nui, Easter Island, famous for its huge stone statues. We know that the island was discovered by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Day 1772 (hence its name), and it is now been scientifically proved that the island was "once covered in a thick subtropical forest, rich in huge trees and vine trees" and that it was also rich in birds and wild animals. But the impression given to the colonists on their arrival was very different:

"Roggeveen was puzzled to understand how the islanders had erected their statues. To quote his journal again, ‘The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment, because we could not comprehend how it was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes, had nevertheless been able to erect such images (...) We originally, from a further distance, considered the said Easter Island as sandy, the reason for that is this, that we counted as sand the withered grass, or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because its wasted appearance could give no other impression that could give no other impression than of a singular poverty and barrenness'. What had happened to all the other trees that must have stood there?

Organising the carving, transport and erection of the statues required a complex populous society living in an environment rich enough to support it (...)

The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields.

Raw materials lost or else available only in greatly decreased amounts consisted of everything made from native plants and birds, including wood, rope, bark to manufacture bark cloth, and feathers. Lack of large timber and transport brought an end to the transport and erection of statues, and also to the construction of seagoing canoes."

"Deforestation must have begun some time after human arrival by AD900, and must have been completed by 1722, when Roggeveen arrived and saw no trees over 10 feet tall (...) All this suggests that forest clearance began soon after human arrival, reached its peak around 1400, and was virtually complete by dates that varied locally between the early 1400s and the 1600s (...) Clearance of the palms led to massive erosion (...) Other damages to soil that resulted from deforestation and reduced crop yields included desiccation and nutrient leaching. Farmers found themselves without most of the wild plant leaves, fruit, and twigs that they had been using as compost (...)

In place of their former sources of wild meat, islanders turned to the largest hitherto unused source available to them: humans, whose bones became common not only in proper burials but also (cracked to extract the marrow) in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was ‘the flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth' (...)

The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalisation, international trade, jet planes and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter's dozen clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future".

These extracts quoted in full from Diamond's book alert us to the fact that the capacity of Earth's ecosystem is not unlimited and that, as was shown at a given moment on the limited scale of Easter island, something similar could re-occur in the near future if humanity does not learn how to administer its resources in an adequate manner.

In fact, we can make an immediate parallel at the level of deforestation, which has been a reality from the times of the primitive community to today, but which is now developing to the point where the last green lungs of the planet like the Amazon forest are being destroyed. As we know, the maintenance of these green zones is extremely important, not only to preserve a series of animal and plant species, but also to ensure the right balance between CO² and oxygen (vegetation develops by consuming CO² and so produces glucose and oxygen). As we have already seen with regard to mercury poisoning, the bourgeoisie knows very well the risks involved, as we can see from the noble intervention of the 19th century scientist Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius, who expressed himself very clearly on the problem of energy and resources, well over a century before all the current discourse about the preservation of the environment: "In the economy of a nation, there is a law that is always valid: you must not consume during a given period more than has been produced during the same period. We should thus not burn more wood than is possible to reproduce through the growth of trees"[12].

But if you look at what is happening today, we can say that the precise opposite of what Clausius recommended in being done, and that we are heading in the same fatal direction as Easter Island.

To examine the problem of resources adequately, we also have to take into account another basic variable , which is the variation of the world population:

"Up till 1600, the growth of the world population was so slow that the increase was about 2-3% per century: it took 16 centuries to go from the 250 million inhabitants at the beginning of the Christian era to around 500 million. From that moment, the time taken for the population to double continued to diminish to the point where today, in certain countries, it is close to the so-called ‘biological limit' in the speed of population growth (3-4% a year). According to the UN, we will go past 8 billion inhabitants around 2025...We should consider the notable differences that exist today between the advanced countries, which have almost arrived at zero growth and the developing countries which contribute to 90% of the present demographic growth (...) In 2025, according to UN predictions, Nigeria, for example, will have a larger population than the USA and Africa will outnumber Europe three times. Overpopulation, combined with backwardness, illiteracy and the lack of facilities for hygiene and health certainly represent a very grave problem, and not only for Africa, because of the inevitable consequences of such a phenomenon on a world scale. There seems in fact to be an imbalance between supply and demand of available resources, which is also due to the using of around 80% of world energy resources by the industrialised countries.

Overpopulation brings a strong fall in living conditions because it diminishes productivity per worker and the availability per head of food, drinking water, health services and medicine, The strong pressure from human populations today is leading to the degradation of the environment and will have inevitable repercussions of the balance of Earth's ecology.     

The imbalance of recent years is increasing: the population is not only continuing to grow in a non-homogeneous way but is also becoming more and more dense in the urban zones"[13].

As we can see from this information, the growth in the world's population can only exacerbate the problem of the exhaustion of resources, all the more because, as this document shows, the problem of a lack of resources is more strongly felt in places where the demographic explosion is at its height, which heralds increasing calamities for a growing part of the world's population.

Let's begin by examining the first natural resource par excellence, water, a universal necessity which is today very clearly under threat from the irresponsible action of capitalism.

Water is a substance which is found in abundance on the surface of the earth (not to speak of the oceans, the Polar icecaps and underground waters), but only a small part of it is drinkable - the water found in underground springs and some non-polluted water courses. The development of industrial activity, without any respect for the environment, and the very widespread dispersal of urban waste has polluted a very important part of the underground water levels which are the natural reservoirs of drinking water, This has led on the one hand to various cancers and pathologies among the population, and the rapid diminution of the sources of such a precious material.

"By the mid 21st century, according to the most pessimistic predictions, 7 billion people in 60 countries will not have enough water. If things turn out for the best, however, there will ‘only' be two billion people in 48 countries suffering from lack of water (...) But the most worrying facts in the UN document are probably those about the deaths from polluted water and the bad conditions of hygiene: 2.2 million a year. What's more, water is the vector for numerous diseases, among them malaria which kills around a million people every year".[14]

The British scientific review New Scientist, drawing the conclusions from the symposium on water in Stockholm in the summer of 2004, wrote that "in the past, tens of millions of wells have been dug, most of them without any controls, and the quantities of water extracted from them by powerful electric pumps are far superior to the rain waters which feed underground water levels (...) Pumping water allows many countries to have abundant rice harvests and sugar cane (crops which need a good deal of water to grow, ed.), but the boom is not destined to last...India is the epicentre of the revolution in prospecting for underground water. By using the technology of oil industry, small farmers have sunk 21 billion wells in their fields and the number is growing by about a million a year (...) In China, in the northern plains, where there is the largest amount of agricultural production, each year the cultivators extract 30 cubic km of water in addition to what is derived from rainwater (...) In the last decade, Vietnam has multiplied the number of wells by four (...) In the Punjab, the region of Pakistan which produces 90% of the country's food resource, the underground levels are beginning to dry up"[15].

While the situation in general is grave, in the so-called emerging countries like India and China the situation is already close to disaster

"the drought which reigns in the province of Sechuan and Chongking has led to economic losses, at least 9.9 billion yuan, and to restrictions on drinking water for over 10 million people, while in the nation as a whole there are at least 18 million people who lack water"[16].

"China has been hit by terrible floods in recent years, affecting 60 million people in central and southern China, resulting in at least 350 deaths and direct economic losses which have already reached 7.4 billion yuan; 200,000 houses destroyed or damaged; 528,000 hectares of agricultural land destroyed and 1.8 million submerged. At the same time, desertification is increasing rapidly, involving a fifth of the land area and provoking dust storms which reach as far as Japan (...) While central and southern China is hit by floods, in the north the desert continues to advance, now covering a fifth of the land along the upper reaches of the Yellow River, on the high plateau of Qinghai-Tibet and part of Inner Mongolia and Gansu.

The population of China represents around 20% of the world population, but it only has around 7% f the cultivable land.

According to Wang Tao, a member of the Chinese Academy of Science in Lanzhou, the deserts of China have increased by 950 square km a year over the last decade, Each spring time, the sand storms hit Beijing and the whole of northern China and reach as far as South Korea and Japan".[17]

All this has to make us reflect on the much vaunted power of Chinese capitalism. In reality, the recent development of the Chinese economy, rather than revitalising senile world capitalism, is a perfect expression of the horror of its death throes with its cities devastated by smog (hardly hidden for the last Olympic Games), its drying up water courses and its factories where working conditions are frightful and lack any rules of basic safety.

There are may other resources that are running out. To finish this first article, we will only look briefly at two of them.

The first is oil. As we know, there has been talk of dwindling oil reserves since the 1970s, but it does seem that in 2008 we really are reaching a peak in oil production, the so-called Hubbert peak, i.e. the moment when we will have exhausted and consumed half of the natural resources of oil estimated by the various geological prospectors. Oil today represents around 40% of basic energy and around 90% of the energy used for transport; its applications are equally important in the chemical industry, particularly in the fabrication of fertilisers for agriculture, plastics, glue and varnish, lubricants and detergents. All this is possible because oil has constituted a low cost and seemingly unlimited resource. The change in this outlook has already led to an increase in prices, obliging the capitalist world to turn towards less onerous substitutes. But once again, the recommendation by Clausius not to consume in one generation more than nature is capable of reproducing has had no echo and the capitalist world has thrown itself into a mad race to consume energy, with countries like China and India to the fore, burning everything that can be burned, going back to toxic fossil carbon to produce energy and generating unprecedented pollution all around them.

Naturally, even the recourse to the miracle solution of biofuels has already had its day and has shown all its inadequacy. Producing combustibles from the alcoholic fermentation of maize or oily vegetable products not only does not make it possible to meet the current market for combustibles, but above all has helped increase the price of food, which results in famine for the poorest populations. Those who have drawn benefit from this, once again, are the capitalist enterprises, like the food companies who have switched to biofuels. But for mere mortals, this means that vast areas of forest are being cut down to make way for biofuel plantations (millions and millions or hectares). The production of biofuels demands the use of large stretches of land, To get an idea of the problem, it's enough to think that a hectare of land growing colza or sunflower, or other semi-oleaginous plants, produces around 100litres of biofuel, which could keep a car going for around 10,00 kilometres. If we assume for the sake of argument that on average the cars of one country travel 10,000km a year, each car would consume all the biofuel produced by a hectare of land, That means that for a country like Italy, where there are 34 million cars, to obtain all the fuel needed through agriculture, you would need a cultivatable surface of 34 million hectares. If we added to the cars around 4 million trucks, which have bigger engines, the consumption would double, and would demand a surface area of 70 million hectares, which would correspond to a land surface almost double the Italian peninsula, including its mountains, cities, etc.

Although it's not talked about to the same degree, an analogous problem to the one with combustible fuels is posed with other mineral resources, for example the ones used to extract metals, It is true that, in this case, metal is not destroyed by use as is the case with oil or methane gas, but the negligence of capitalist production ends up spreading huge quantities of wasted metal over the surface of the earth, which means that sooner or later the supply of metals will also be exhausted. The use, among other things, of certain alloys and multi-stratified metals makes the eventual recovery of the ‘pure' material all the more difficult.

The breadth of the problem is revealed by estimates according to which in the space of a few decades, the following resources will be exhausted: uranium, platinum, gold, silver, cobalt, lead, magnesium, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, tin, tungsten and zinc. These are materials which are practically indispensable for modern industry and their scarcity will weigh heavily in the near future. But there are other materials which are not inexhaustible: it has been calculated that there are still available (in the sense that it is economically feasible to extract them) 30 million tons of iron, 220 million tons of copper, 85 million tons of zinc. To have an idea of these quantities, you need to think that to take the poorest countries to the level of the advanced ones, they would need 30 billion tons of iron, 500 millions of copper, 300 of zinc: that is to say, far more than the planet Earth has to offer.

Faced with this approaching catastrophe, it has to be asked whether progress and development must inevitably go together with pollution and the disruption of the planet's ecosystem. We have to ask whether such disasters have to be put down to poor education of human beings or something else. This is what we shall see in the next article.

Ezechiele (August 2008).

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[1] The version published on the internet is slightly longer than the one published in the printed version of the Review. Cuts are marked by (....)

[2](G Barone et al, ‘Il metano e il futuro del clima', in Biologi italiani, no 8, 2005).

[3] G. Pellegri, Terzo mondo, nueva pattumiera creata dal buonismo tecnologico 

[4] Vivere di rifiuti, http:/www.scuolevi-net: [26]

[5] Roberto Saviano, Gomorra, Viaggio nell'impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra, Arnoldo Montaldi, 2006.

[6] La Republica online, 29.10.07

[7] In the USA alone, more than 100 billion plastic bags are used, and 1.9 billion tons of oil are needed to produce them; most of them end up being thrown away and take years to decompose. American production of around 10 billion plastic bags requires around 15 million trees to be cut down

[8] See the article Mediterraneo, un mare di plastica, in La Republica, 19.7.07.

[9] It's quite possible that the dizzying price rises in oil which we've been seeing since the end of last year will provoke a discussion about the use of this raw material in the production of non-biodegradable synthetics, leading to the conversion to the ecological faith of these vigilant entrepreneurs - vigilant about safeguarding their own interests. 

[10] R. Troisi : la discarica del mondo luogo di miseria e di speranza nel ventunesimo secolo.

[11] See the article : ‘Alcuni effetti collaterali dell'industria, La chimica, la diga e il nucleare'.

[12] RJE Clausius (1885). Clausius was born in Koslin (in Prussia, now Poland) in 1822 and died in Bonn in 1888.

[13] Associazione Italiana Insegnanti Geografia, La crescita della popolazione

[14] G. Carchella, Acqua : l'oro blu del terzo millenario, ‘Lettera 22, associazione indipendente di giornalisti'

[15] ‘Asian Farmers sucking the continent dry', New Scientist, 28.8.04

[16] ‘Cina : oltre 10 milioni di persone assetate dalla siccità', Asia News,

[17] ‘La Cina stretta tra le inondazioni e il deserto che avanza', 18/08/2006, in Asia News.