See also: The Workers' International Network: Questions and Answers
PREPARING FOR REVOLUTION
A DISCUSSION DOCUMENT
INTRODUCTION
The world today stands on the brink of catastrophe:
a “perfect storm” that threatens to tear society apart and call into question
the survival of human civilisation itself.
This pamphlet represents the ideas of a network of workers
from several countries. We all participate in a broad online discussion list
which links committed socialists worldwide, and provides a forum for the vital
exchange of experiences and ideas. At its best, it has been a source of advice,
support, and even occasional inspiration. Many of the list’s participants – not
all from the same past traditions – have evolved over a period a certain common
political outlook, and we feel that the time has come to set down more explicitly
some of these common principles.
This task is especially timely, given that we find
ourselves at a turning point in world history. During the previous period, it
was right to give priority to reflecting on past lessons, drawing a balance
sheet, and re-examining basic principles, to adjust to the changed balance of
forces and prepare for the new period ahead. With the sudden implosion of the
world financial system, however, and the imminent prospect of class struggles
not witnessed perhaps for more than 70 years, it is now time to take a more
proactive stance. The first step towards building the kind of coherent political movement that can hope to change
society is to work out answers to the complex new questions of the day, and
work accordingly to spread our ideas.
Nothing less than a worldwide party of the working
class is needed. We have no pretensions to constitute even the embryo of such a
party, let alone a substitute for it. We are just a like-minded group of
committed co-thinkers with a certain point of view. We simply offer these ideas
as a contribution to the discussion that will help arm the pioneers of such a
future party. In the common interests of workers everywhere seeking a way
forward to a better and more rational society, we welcome discussion and
interaction with anyone with similar objectives.
History since primitive times has meant a struggle
between classes. The working class, or proletariat, are those who earn a living
not by their ownership of property but by their capacity to work, whether by
hand or brain. Workers live solely by selling their labour-power by the week or
the month, and at times of capitalist crisis their very livelihood is put at
risk.
Capitalism has long since reached the limits of its
potential to develop society. The only force capable of further extending human
progress is the working class. The key to liberating the oppressed and to
saving the planet from war and environmental destruction is the establishment
of a new social system based on human solidarity. The indispensable first step in
this direction is the establishment of a government of workers’ democracy, which
will bring the key strategic sectors of the economy into state ownership under
workers’ management and control. Only publicly owned services, run
democratically by the working class, can meet the essential needs of a
civilised society and open up a flourishing of human talent.
Wherever workers are exploited, they develop
collective means of struggle to defend their rights. We base our outlook on the
traditions established by previous generations of workers and the lessons
learned from their past struggles. Our discussion list is a point of contact
for anyone who sincerely wants to fight against capitalism and find common
principles in the struggle.
The working class has the potential to take power
across the globe. Industry has expanded worldwide, and huge layers of the
population have been recruited into the workforce of the multinationals. The
forces of production have become globally socialised: each sector of production
depends upon cooperation with others. Monopolies long ago replaced capitalist
competition, the classic justification for private ownership of the means of
production; yet the ruling class still cling to their property. They can no
longer rationally defend their privileges because they no longer serve a useful
role.
A TURNING POINT IN HISTORY
The past twenty years have been a period of
paradox, uncertainty and flux. The collapse of Stalinism, the
information-technology revolution and globalisation all combined to tempt
capitalist ideologues into a premature celebration of the victory of the
“market economy”. Their complacency was reinforced by the relative lack of any
coherent challenge from the working class, either ideologically or, in most
countries, in terms of industrial militancy. This arose on the one hand from an
apparent decline in proletarian consciousness and combativity in the formerly
industrialised economies, and on the other from the weakness and immaturity of
the new industrial proletariat taking root on virgin territory.
These years marked an unexpected pause in the growing
crisis of capitalism. Up to 1989, Marxists had confidently counted on an intensified
polarisation in the class struggle, a deepening crisis in the ex-colonial
world, a mass movement for workers’ democracy in the Stalinist states, and imminent
revolutionary upheavals everywhere. These general perspectives were abruptly
cut across by the sudden restoration of capitalism in the former Stalinist
states and the new lease of life gained by capitalism through the effects of
the information technology boom. The mass appeal of socialism suddenly weakened.
With the onset today of the delayed financial
crisis, the loop of history is being tied once again. Where reality had seemed
for a time to defy all reason, the socialist critique of capitalism has once
again been vindicated.
A new stage in history is now opening up, in which
the warnings of Marx and Engels that society stands at the crossroads of “socialism
or barbarism”, or Trotsky’s characterisation of the period as “the death agony
of capitalism”, take on an added immediacy. Not twenty years ago, the “spectre
of communism” had seemed finally exorcised, with the collapse of those states
which had claimed to be based on socialist planning, and the abandonment of even
their earlier token acknowledgement of socialist goals by mass parties founded
decades ago to champion the workers’ cause. One fashionable philosopher had
even proclaimed “the end of history”: the final victory of liberal capitalism.
Now Newsweek proclaims: “We are all socialists
now”, as, on the contrary, the ideology of unbridled deregulated speculation becomes
universally derided, along with the unprecedented orgy of greed which accompanied
it – a display of self-indulgence which might have shamed the Borgias in
Renaissance Italy.
After 60 years of relative calm in its main
citadels of North America and Western Europe, world capitalism now faces its
worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Within months, its spokesmen have passed
from acknowledging a “credit crunch”, to a recession, to a depression, to a
crisis comparable to the 1930s, to “the worst crisis for a century, lasting
10-15 years”. The unemployment forecast for Britain has risen to four million,
and for Germany to 4.6 million. The prospect lies ahead of a pauperisation of
the historically more “affluent” populations and a plunge back into starvation
globally – to say nothing of the new series of wars that the crisis could precipitate,
from the Middle East to the Indian sub-continent to the Pacific, and quite
possibly Europe too.
This crisis came as a shock to mainstream
commentators; however, it was by no means unpredictable. Not only had Marxists
been predicting such a crisis for so many decades that it had become almost a
cliché, but a rare minority of others too had seen it coming. For instance, the
economist Harry Shutt had written ten years previously of an approaching “deepening economic crisis whose
only possible denouement... will be a financial holocaust on such a scale as to
bring comprehensive ruin.... Such a disaster could undo all the considerable
gains so painfully made by Western civilisation in the five centuries since the
Renaissance and usher in a new Dark Age such as that foreseen by Winston
Churchill as the likely consequence of a Nazi victory in 1940.”
If the working class does not succeed in
overthrowing capitalism, then this chilling prediction will seem in retrospect
to have been too mild.
THE END OF THE POSTWAR RESPITE
In the postwar economic upswing of the 1950s and
1960s, there was a huge expansion of world trade and an increase in the
exploitation of the ex-colonial world. The labour shortage in the
industrialised countries led to a strengthening of trade union power which
enabled the workers to win unprecedented gains in living standards. This was
only possible due to exceptional and temporary conditions. The postwar respite
in the developed countries has been bumpy and protracted, but after six decades
it has finally come to a halt.
Between 1945 and 1975, the colonial revolution had
transformed the world. In epic struggles, millions of formerly mute subject
peoples invaded the stage of world history. After the overthrow of their
imperial rulers, the unremitting cycle of intensifying poverty, famine and
political instability weakened the grip of landlordism and capitalism. In
China, Cuba, and parts of Asia and Africa, victorious guerrilla leaders or
insurgent junior military officers struck blows against capitalism and
established states modelled on Stalinist Russia. This process culminated in the
mid-1970s in the defeat of the USA at the hands of a peasant army in Vietnam.
At the same time, Portuguese imperialism collapsed in Africa, and regimes in
several ex-colonial countries, including Cambodia, Ethiopia, Angola and
Mozambique took drastic steps against landlordism and capitalism.
The postwar world order was already crumbling by
the 1970s, both economically and politically. In 1968, mass protests against
the Vietnam war, uprisings in the black ghettoes of the USA, a revolutionary
situation in France, pre-revolutionary turmoil in Italy, street protests in
Mexico, and many other events heralded the end of post-war political stability.
The long war of the USA on Vietnam – a manifestation of the worldwide uprising
of the colonial peoples since 1945 – killed 58,000 US soldiers, created a
mutinous army and unprecedented defiance at home, and ended in the national
humiliation of the USA’s first ever military defeat. It also undermined the
dollar, which had emerged supreme from the world war. 25 years of financial
stability were terminated by the scrapping of the Bretton Woods agreement tying
the dollar at a fixed exchange rate to the price of gold – an event which
foreshadowed the collapse of the Keynesian strategy for moderating capitalism’s
tendency towards periodic crises, as inflation in the developed world threatened
to sky-rocket out of control. Then, in the mid-1970s, the collapse of the dictatorships
in Portugal, Spain and Greece confirmed Europe’s growing political instability,
and a four-fold rise in oil prices in the mid-1970s precipitated a world
recession.
The balance of forces between the classes had
altered so drastically that the capitalists had lost morale. In France, out of
the blue, in a country where only three million workers were even organised,
suddenly ten million workers were occupying their workplaces and decking them
with red flags, while the President fled the country, muttering “the game’s
up!” In Portugal a few years later, when bank workers occupied their banks and forced
through their nationalisation, The Times calmly announced: “capitalism is dead
in Portugal”. At around the same time, the West German Chancellor resigned his
post, gloomily predicting communism or fascism throughout Europe within twenty
years.
After its defeat in Vietnam, the USA avoided any
major overseas military intervention for almost two decades. It resorted to CIA
subterfuge to destabilise regimes which threatened its interests such as
Allende’s in Chile and the Sandinistas' in Nicaragua. It was not until the
downfall of Stalinism that US imperialism once again reasserted its crushing
military superiority in direct military attacks on Serbia, Afghanistan and
Iraq. Nevertheless, overall American
economic influence in the ex-colonial world is waning. The inability of America
to achieve its military objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite its
overwhelming superiority of fire-power, is a striking reflection of this
changed relationship of forces – as is, even more spectacularly, its new
powerlessness to enforce its will decisively in its very own “back yard”, Latin America.
The collapse of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe in 1989-90 gave a new and unexpected lease of life to
capitalism. State economic planning had successfully laid the foundations for
industrial development in these countries; but once the economy had become more
sophisticated the bureaucracy was turning from a relative brake on further
development, to an absolute obstacle.
When workers revolted in Hungary in 1956,
Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1970, they were defending their common
stake in a system of state ownership against bureaucratic wastage, corruption
and mismanagement. Stalinism faced the real threat of overthrow by a workers’ political
revolution to wrest control of their state from its sticky fingers. However, by
the 1980s a combination of bureaucratic sclerosis and stagnation at home, a new
economic impetus in the West due to the technological revolution, and higher
living standards in neighbouring countries, had created illusions in capitalism
amongst the people of Eastern Europe. Large swathes of these nationalised
economies were dismantled and privatised in a wholesale looting by the
bureaucracy, which thereby converted itself into a capitalist class. New
markets opened up, former eastern bloc countries joined the European Community,
and cheap labour boosted profits as migrant workers from Eastern Europe arrived
in the west. Capitalism seemed vindicated, and for one brief moment of euphoria
looked forward to a new dawn.
THE ECONOMIC CRISIS
Though the upswing since the Second World War was
punctuated by sharp but brief recessions in 1974-5, 1980-1 and 1990-1, the
developed countries had enjoyed decades of relative stability. Even in the last
twenty years, a serious slump had been avoided, first by massive arms
expenditure, then by the real economic development of the info-technological
revolution, and finally by a massive expansion of personal, state and corporate
credit, lubricated still further by a range of ingenious speculative financial instruments.
Capitalism could defy the law of gravity for just so long, however; now it is
paying the price.
It is true that part of the economic expansion that
preceded this crisis was due to expanded production, which in turn was made
possible by such factors as the opening up of new markets in the former
Stalinist countries as well as the development of new technologies such as high-tech.
However, a central driving force of this boom was the massive development of
credit. This reflects the increased dominance of finance capital over
industrial capital. In the United States, for instance, manufacturing fell from
29% of GDP in 1950 to 12% in 2005. In this period, “financial services” grew
from 10.9% to 20.4%, and the financial sector’s share of total corporate
profits grew from under 10% to 50%.
From around the year 2000, the influx of money from
the booming Asian economies, and especially the trillions of dollars cascading
into US banks from China, provided the impetus to the ballooning of financial
speculation. Capital has to find a niche in profitable investment, and
following successive bubbles in share prices, currency speculation,
privatisation scams, dot-com companies, and the property market, came the
sub-prime racket. Against the background of a seemingly unstoppable 60-year
boom in US house prices, toxic and irredeemable loans were desperately promoted,
then repackaged together with sounder loans and sold on in a pass-the-parcel party
game as so-called “collateralised debt obligations”, all dutifully guaranteed
by tame notaries as AAA credit ratings. The profits raked in from these successive
CDO sales were further invested in increasingly obscure derivative gambles, in
an orgy of profiteering which amounted to a vast global pyramid scam. When
inflation began to take off again – due among other factors to a massive hike
in oil prices (another consequence of China’s industrial boom) – the whole game
began to unravel. Interest rates rose, a wave of defaults on mortgages
followed, and US house prices started to free-fall at an annual rate of 20-30%.
The value of financial assets rotted, there was a sudden freeze on inter-bank
lending, and the “credit crunch” followed. The party was over.
A fundamental factor in this process was the
increased use of “derivatives”. This form of speculation got a tremendous boost
with the collapse of the Bretton Woods accord. In the context of a far less
stable world currency climate, massive speculation developed around betting on
changes in currencies’ values. From there, derivative speculation went to
betting on fluctuations in interest rates (when this became a chief tool of the
US central bank), in commodity prices, and even on debt itself. The tendency
towards lower profit rates in manufacturing further drove increased investment
in financial speculation, as did the increased indebtedness of all sectors of
society.
The crisis is first and foremost a crisis of US
capitalism, which is no longer an industrial powerhouse but maintains its
economic dominance merely as the world’s prime consumer, temporarily sheltered
from collapse only by the anachronistic survival of the dollar as the world’s
reserve currency. The imminent collapse in the value of the dollar will leave
the USA’s power dependent solely on its military superiority. Yet no nation can
maintain supremacy by military might alone. The USA is falling under a growing threat
from its rivals, notably China. A graphic token of its humiliation was the surprise
terror raid of 9/11/01, a daring gesture of futile defiance made on behalf of a
dissident clique of Arab oil sheikhs, using suicide tactics – a variant of the
classic weapon wielded by a weaker adversary. The wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and
many more to come, represent oil and resource wars in which the fading
super-power is exploiting its colossal military advantage while it can, to prop
up an economic power it can no longer sustain by industrial might.
The current economic crisis was foreshadowed by
previous shocks in major sectors of the world economy. The counter-revolution
in the former Soviet Union had brought draconian
cuts in living standards – more drastic even than those in Chile under
Pinochet. Life expectancy dropped sharply, the population fell by several
millions, half the population suffered a drop in living standards to below the
poverty line and a quarter faced "desperate poverty". Ever since 1990, Japan has suffered a prolonged
recession comparable to that of the 1930s, due like the current world crisis to
a previous orgy of financial speculation based on booming property prices. Then in 1998 the currencies of the
booming economies of South-East Asia were hit by massive speculative attacks,
and $600 billion were wiped off share prices. The warning signs were clear.
Countries in every continent have been bankrupted by
this crisis, including Iceland, Latvia, Ireland, Hungary, Ukraine, Turkey,
South Korea and others. The economic situation in Eastern Europe has been
compared to the 1998 Asian crisis. Recent IMF loans are equivalent to
around a staggering half of GDP in Latvia, Hungary and other countries in the
region. In some cases, IMF demands for budget cuts have been resisted. In these
countries, capitalism has weak social and political roots, and there must
surely be a growing nostalgia for the old regimes, with their record of relatively
full employment, cheap rents and low subsidised food prices.
Capitalist governments are taking desperate,
drastic and contradictory steps in their search for a way out of the crisis. They
have reacted with panic to the financial crisis, lurching from “sound” monetary
probity to Keynesian deficit financing, and even resorting to “quantitative
easing” (a euphemism for the outright manufacture of counterfeit money, a
debasement of the currency with all its concomitant risks of future
hyper-inflation). So far, a total of some £16 trillion – the equivalent of
around £2,300 for each man, woman and child on the planet – has been spent on the
recent bail-outs and partial nationalisation of the banks, insurance companies
and the car industry.
Today, there is some call for reregulating finance
capital, and inevitably some new token regulations will be imposed. However, under
lax and corrupt supervision, finance capital will have no difficulty in
devising one scheme after another to escape, avoid or undermine such
regulations.
The delusion that such measures might work is an
indication of their despair. Capitalist economies are already over-burdened
with “delinquent” debt. While monetarism – balancing the books on government
spending – will only lead to massive unemployment and further collapse of
demand, deficit financing cannot overcome the fundamental contradictions of the
system, and runs the added risk of stoking future inflation. Meanwhile there is an inexorable tendency
towards protectionism, competitive devaluations and even the possible threat of
a break-up of the Euro.
THE COMING REVOLUTION
The current economic crisis brings back on to the
agenda the prospect of revolution and counter-revolution. The period which is
opening up will be protracted; there will be ebbs and flows, setbacks and
outright defeats. The workers will not come into struggle immediately seeking
revolution. There will be despair, confusion, and illusions in reformism,
religious demagogy, populism, nationalism and – most dangerous of all – racism
and xenophobia. However, there will also be a resurgence of socialist ideas,
which will become increasingly, in Lenin’s words, a “material force” that will
“grip the minds of the millions”.
Even the British Tory commentator Max Hastings has
concluded: “It will be strange if voices of the left do not find audiences such
as they have not known for 30 years... There is speculation about a rise of
rightwing extremism. But it will be even more surprising if a new left does not
sooner or later present a challenge for power in Britain and other
democracies.”
It is two or three generations since the last such
crisis. That brought the classes into direct confrontation. The failure to overthrow the rule of capital
and introduce a rationally planned socialist system brought a return in the
mid-twentieth century to scenes hardly witnessed since the Middle Ages:
starvation, homelessness, mass hysteria, civil war, genocide, the destruction
of cities, the killing of tens of millions, concentration camps, gas chambers,
nuclear bombs, barbarism.
The only way to avoid a recurrence of such a
nightmare, resulting quite possibly this time in the terminal destruction of
human society itself, is to reorganize society on the basis of a rational
administration of resources and a harnessing of humankind’s productive
potential.
The battles of the 1930s came after almost two
decades of revolutionary upsurges, and already in the wake of some defeats,
notably in Italy. Nevertheless the working class was organised, mobilised and
even in some cases armed. It had a strong tradition, a recent memory of
revolution, a class loyalty to proletarian organizations, and a socialist
consciousness.
There was also a fatal negative aspect to this: a
misplaced loyalty to leaders who had a conscious interest in betraying their
cause – not only the caste of reformist and trade-union paid officials who
lived off their role mediating between the classes, but above all the political
mouthpieces of the newly crystallised caste of Stalinist bureaucrats in Russia.
This bureaucratic ruling caste had come to power on the basis of the isolation
of the revolution to a country still mired in barbaric backwardness. It drew
its sustenance from the privileges of the new Soviet state, and was rapidly
institutionalising what began as catastrophic political blunders – both of
opportunism and ultra-left adventurism – into calculated treachery. It was
ultimately their conscious betrayal that doomed the workers to defeat.
The eclipse of Stalinism offers a clean slate to
socialists to win fresh layers. Not only has the malevolent insidious force
that derailed the movement in the 1930s gone forever; the baleful association
of a state-owned planned economy with monstrous corruption and repression is no
longer a significant factor complicating the argument for socialism.
The new crisis today finds the working class in its
former strongholds politically disarmed. Its earlier traditional socialist
outlook and basic class consciousness have ebbed, due to a number of factors.
The most immediate of these was the collapse of the former Stalinist states,
which for all their more repugnant aspects, nevertheless had still held out
some fading hope of an alternative future. Other causes were the decline of
formerly formidable trade unions in the by now rapidly de-industrialising
countries; the erosion of industrial communities in their traditional
strongholds; the prolonged upswing and development of the new technology; the
new-found triumphalism of the capitalists; and the abandonment by former “left”
as well as right-wing reformists of even the pretence of socialist aspirations.
The need for
trade unions, the power of the strike, the culture of class solidarity, and the
obsolescence of capitalism were most strikingly obvious within the old great
concentrations of industrial manufacturing workers. What remains today of 150
years of socialist tradition in the West is little more than a fading memory
among diminishing circles within the older generation. In the old homeland of the proletariat,
many workers today are far less conscious than previously of their role, their
tasks or even their class identity. However, whether or not they are aware of
it yet, they remain proletarians, living
on the daily sale of their labour-power – probably a greater proportion than
ever before – who produce on
a still more collective scale than any workers in the past. In the struggle to
defend themselves against the capitalists’ attacks on their rights and
livelihoods, they will have no alternative but to fight back collectively, and
to learn afresh on the picket line the lessons of solidarity. It will take the experience of the coming struggles
to restore a proletarian consciousness among these layers.
However, old traditions die hard. In Britain, there
have been strikes of firemen, railway workers, civil servants, teachers, etc.
The public sector workers have retained the innate class consciousness,
solidarity and loyalty that were formed over decades of struggle in the
vast concentrations of productive industrial labour of the past.
Many new factors have strengthened the workers’
cohesion. There has been a huge growth in the size and specific weight of the
proletariat everywhere, most spectacularly in many of the former colonial
countries, and a remorseless shrinkage in the petit-bourgeoisie, in the wake of
monopolisation and the concentration of production in the hands of the
super-corporations. The working class is far better educated than previously.
Mass communications and the “information revolution” have made the present
generation of working people incomparably better informed than their parents
and grandparents. The world has drawn together and an international
consciousness has arisen that would have been inconceivable before. All these
factors have objectively strengthened the proletariat worldwide. Taken
together, they have created a cultural climate which drastically tilts the
relative balance of forces in society. Even in a period of relative quiescence
in terms of days lost in strikes compared to the late 1970s, it is this new
cultural awareness – a mood to which capitalists themselves have had to pay
homage in pledges of fair trade, ethical banking, etc. – that has become an
unquantifiable factor standing in the way of the capitalists’ resolve to drive
down living standards.
What is more, since the battles of the
1930s there has been a social transformation: a mass democratic uprising of all
the formerly super-oppressed strata of society – above all the women, who have
risen to their feet and forever shaken off their historically subservient role,
and mobilised to form sometimes the most militant contingents at the forefront
of working-class struggles. Ethnic
minorities and native indigenous peoples too have stood up to demand their
rights, largely inspired by the magnificent black revolt of the 1950s and 1960s
in the US, which transformed consciousness worldwide. The working class in
the former industrialised countries has become internationalised by decades of
immigration, with workers from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent
working alongside indigenous workers in Britain, Mexicans in the USA, North
Africans in France, Turks in Germany, East Europeans throughout Western Europe,
etc. The counter-revolution today will have little chance of bolstering its
resources by recruiting “colonial” reserves as its foot-soldiers, as Franco
used the Moors in the Spanish civil war.
In these conditions, the sheer persuasive power of
reality itself has elevated mass awareness of corporate rule. The incredible
range of mass communication today, through the internet, instant 24-hour news
channels, mobile phone technology, etc., has enormously accelerated this
process. There is a clarity and awareness throughout society today beyond
comparison with the past; to a large extent, too, an evaporation of illusions
in the viability of gradual reforms, middle ways or national solutions.
Ordinary people have far better access to information and vastly superior means
of communication than previously – a fact that even totalitarian governments
find hard to control.
Already around the turn of the millennium, this new
awareness was manifested in an unprecedented international movement of
anti-capitalist protest, with thousands of young activists crossing national
frontiers and encircling the secret conclaves of world capitalist leaders in
Seattle, Prague, Genoa… This spontaneous eruption of inchoate protest was
enough to alarm the ruling class, and in Genoa exemplary and ferocious
brutality was meted out to demonstrators.
This movement was temporarily cut across by the “war
on terror” following the attacks on US targets on 11th September
2001 – themselves a token of the fading ascendancy of US imperialism. But soon
afterwards, on 15th February 2003, came another significant landmark of the new
times, in the unprecedented mobilisation of some 30 million people worldwide,
in a simultaneous international demonstration of solidarity with the people of
Iraq.
WOMEN’S STRUGGLES
Women account
for between 60-80% of the export manufacturing work force in developing
countries. More than half of the people living on a dollar a day or less are
women. Women face limited recognition as workers, so even the minimum labour
laws are not applied to them. The textile and other industries employing women
across the globe rely on low pay, super-exploitation and a deliberate policy of
driving their workforce to burn out within a few years.
The World
Bank predicts that the credit crunch will cause a surge of up to 2.8 million
more babies to die between now and 2015, and notes that falls in GDP lead to
much greater increases in female than male infant mortality. Other sources,
including OXFAM, record the shocking facts that almost 70% of the world’s poor
are women; that two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women; that
violence against women is the biggest cause of death and disability among women
aged 15-44; that women earn just over half what men earn, and that, even in the
UK, women are still paid nearly 20% less than men for the same or equivalent
work.
The most
dangerous event in human life is that of giving birth. Maternal death should be extremely rare, but the neglect of health services and the
inaccessibility of such services to many women make such deaths a commonplace
in many countries. The legacy of the neo-cons in many countries is the
destruction of modern health services. In these circumstances the old network
of traditional midwives has been eliminated and modern medicine closed to the
women, with nothing to replace it.
Women face
double discrimination, as workers and as domestic labour and childbearers. Most
women are still expected to raise children and care for sick and elderly
relatives when they become cash-earners.
Waves of
repression have developed in some Islamic countries, culminating in the
sadistic and misogynistic policies of the Taliban, masquerading as orthodox
religious injunctions. All religious restrictions on dress or lifestyle
represent an attack on democratic rights.
Repression of women has always been an instrument of class oppression.
The deliberate use of rape as a tool of war in Africa and the Balkans in recent
decades is one horrific example. Historically waves of repression have met
waves of resistance, some successful, others defeated. The resistance of the
women of Pakistan is wonderful to behold and deserving of every woman’s full
support. Venezuela has also seen women ready for struggle.
History shows
that women have been at the forefront of the struggle for a better life for
themselves and, crucially, their families, and their struggles should never be
consigned to a footnote in the struggle. Women have played roles in all the
great revolutions from the 17th to the 20th centuries,
although their role is hidden from most written history.
The
Massachusetts textile workers’ struggle of the nineteenth century was one of
the earliest and most critical struggles of US workers. Later in the 19th
century, the work of Mother Jones in unionising the miners of the USA included
her imprisonment at the age of 90. In Britain the great explosion of the unskilled
was presaged by actions by the match workers and other female factory workers.
Marxists were deeply involved in the organisation of working women at a time
when conventional trade unionism could see no use for these desperately
exploited workers. The working class women’s campaign for the vote linked into
the need to unionise workers and unionised workers in turn played a major role
in the suffrage campaign. Women at Fords in the 1960s fought a long and bitter
struggle for equal pay at work and won. Later, in the 1970s, the British Asian
women at Grunwick were the first of a wave of union militancy.
Women play a significant role in community organisations that
generally persist even after the end of industrial/trade union organisations.
Such women will often challenge capitalism because they see no future for
themselves, their families, or their communities in the current system.
The new awareness of women’s rights both in the
workplace and in society generally has changed the balance of forces decisively.
GLOBALISATION
Globalisation represents the fullest possible
realisation -- to the nth degree, a degree beyond
contemplation even by its authors -- of the processes brilliantly expounded in
The Communist Manifesto in 1848. It is chemically distilled capitalism; a
vindication of Marxism. And yet it creates unforeseen consequences. A massive
new virgin proletariat is awakening in distant continents that are far removed
from the centres of capitalist power. Meanwhile, capital is concentrated as never
before, with a ruling class never before so fiendishly armed, technologically
and militarily, resting socially upon a population largely consisting of
clerical and retail workers servicing its comforts.
The economic upswing of the last two decades was partially
due to the out-sourcing of production to the former colonial world. The productive industrial hard core of the
proletariat has largely disappeared in the traditional metropolitan countries,
and is now concentrated more and more in Latin America, Asia and China. This helped to undermine the wages of
workers in the industrialised countries of the west. Nevertheless it also had
the effect of drawing millions of workers into capitalist production processes
and the world economy for the first time. Millions of people have been sucked
from villages and small- scale production into the labour force of the
multinationals. A huge proletariat has been developed in countries such as
China, India and Brazil.
There has been a haemorrhage of
manufacturing jobs from their traditional locations. In 2007 the number of
manufacturing jobs in Britain fell below the corresponding figure for 1848! In
the USA, the manufacturing sector lost more than three million jobs between
1998 and 2003. In 1950, a third of the US labour force worked in manufacturing;
now the figure is 12.5% at most, and by some estimates 10%. In the UK, trade unionism survives for the
moment mostly within a rapidly shrinking public sector. The days when giant
industrial factories were run by shop stewards' committees are long gone.
In 2005 the expansion of steel production in China
was greater than the total steel production of the USA. Since China opened its gates to foreign direct investment, an ever
growing flood of capital has been sucked in by the lure of a rare combination
of limitless reserves of virtual slave labour, and the benefits inherited from
decades of state planning, which – though wasteful and corrupt – has provided a
relatively streamlined infrastructure, and literacy rates closer, at 80%, to
those of the West.
The heavy battalions of the industrial working
class are no longer to be found for the most part in their traditional
strongholds, but on virgin soil. There has been a
massive proletarianisation of the formerly underdeveloped world and an entry
into the world labour market of the workers of the former Stalinist states.
There are now 1.47 billion wage workers in India, China and Eastern Europe,
plus another billion in the very least developed countries, to be added to the
460 million workers in the traditional “developed” world. In other words: of
the world’s three billion wage workers, for every one worker in the West, there
are now five based in China, India, Russia, Latin America, South-East Asia,
etc.
The combination of industrialisation in
the South (the former colonial countries) with privatisation in the East (the
former Stalinist states) has doubled the size of the global working class, to
the extent that today, for the first time ever, it represents a majority of the
world population.
Moreover, those factors which have
formerly divided the working class are fast receding. There is an inexorable
tendency towards a levelling of the income differentials in living standards.
The same process which created an independent and often militant working class
in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand is now rekindling
the heroic labour traditions of China, India, Eastern Europe and Latin America.
At the same time, in the West, an insidious process of casualisation,
exploitation of migrant workers, and resort to agency labour have drastically
cut wages, rights and conditions for workers. Automation has cut the labour
force so thin that for many companies, distribution and logistical costs are
now higher than manufacturing costs, while the falling value of the dollar, and
during the recession, the falling price of oil, change the relative costs of
outsourcing and relocation.
The relocation of the industrial
proletariat to new territories has fundamentally changed the international
outlook.
The old tripartite division of the world no longer exists. The old
"metropolitan" countries are no longer necessarily the theatre of
world history. For the
first time in history, there is now a truly global working class. The industrial proletariat is taking root throughout entire
new continents. In Latin
America we see an entire sub-continent in revolt, and in East Asia and China
the beginning of what will surely become a tidal wave of trade unionism which
could transform the outlook worldwide. It is there that we will find the
birthplace of the future International.
Trotsky explained the political effects of the
rapid transformation in the consciousness of people suddenly whisked forward
several centuries from medieval agricultural conditions to modern industrial
production: “In Russia the proletariat did not arise gradually through the
ages, carrying with itself the burden of the past as in England, but in leaps
involving sharp changes of environment, ties, relations, and a sharp break with
the past. It is just this fact – combined with the concentrated oppressions of
Tsarism – that made the Russian workers hospitable to the boldest conclusions
of revolutionary thought – just as the backward industries were hospitable to
the last word in capitalist organisation.”
Just as in Russia it was peasants transplanted from
the technology of the medieval wooden plough to the futuristic factories of the
multinationals who carried through the revolution, so too now it is the Chinese
and other workers who will be sharply radicalised. Already
in 2005 – before the sudden drop in the growth rate – there were 90,000
officially designated “public order disturbances” in China. This figure is
likely to be multiplied many times over as workers are laid off and wages cut.
In a sense, it is in the factories of China, and
their nascent underground trade unions, that the future salvation of humankind
is being forged right now. They will need common mobilisation with their fellow
workers internationally, to create new bonds of solidarity stretching
between assembly line workers in China, software engineers in India, service
workers in Europe, financial workers in New York, etc. Workers in the old
industrial countries will have a crucial part to play. It will be the task of
those who embody the old labour traditions in the West to promote class
solidarity with the new proletariat and share with it a century of rich
experience across a vast geographical and cultural chasm.
THE EU
A foreshadowing of full-blown globalisation took
place in Europe, starting at the end of the 1950s. European capitalisms, having
twice engaged in internecine warfare,
and having twice nearly lost power to the working class as a result,
chose continentalisation as a new way of overcoming the straitjacket of their
national boundaries restricting the need for expansion. The European Economic Community steadily
removed tariffs and other barriers to the exchange of goods and services
amongst six major European powers following 1958, and within fifteen years this
free trade zone had expanded to include Britain, Scandinavia, Greece and the
Iberian Peninsula. This organisation, coming to fruition during a major organic
upswing of the world economy, facilitated the rapid improvement of the infrastructures
of its members even before the collapse of the Stalinist bloc at the beginning
of the 1990s. Continental legislation was unified in many areas, border
controls were completely abolished in the central area and the establishment of
a single currency eased travel and exchange. The GDPs and also the standard of
living of the masses in the EU countries rose sharply during the two decades of
the 1980s and 1990s.
Seizing a unique historical opportunity with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and its dependencies, capitalists in the EU states
swooped on the prone and bleeding bodies of the economies of Poland, Hungary,
East Germany, etc., and were able enormously to increase their turnover and
profits by exporting finished goods. This economic counter-revolution followed
the democratic political counter-revolutions, often within a few months. Not only did eastern Europe provide new
markets for goods, it also provided new opportunities for western capitalism to
export manufacturing plant itself, by taking over or completely replacing
bankrupt industries with branches of their own firms, thereby throwing
thousands out of work in the western EU member states. In addition, the
unemployed and low-paid workers in eastern countries supplied a ready army of
cheap labour to undercut wage levels in the west. If the boom had been able to
continue, the discrepancies in wage and price levels could have been equalised
in the normal course of trade, but the collapse of the boom cut across this
process.
At first, the new eastern European members were
sucked into the orbit of capitalism just as the cheap and easy credit boom was
in full swing and a rapid, albeit unstable, expansion began, temporarily
consolidating the political support of the masses for the new capitalist
system. But the weakest of the eastern European countries joined the EU in 2007,
at the beginning of the end of this boom, and of all the EU member states it
has been the economies of the ex-Stalinist countries which have suffered most
from the collapse of the credit market. The end of the credit boom also exposed
the structural weaknesses in southern European states, with their low
productivity and general inefficiency. The EU’s rules on state indebtedness
have had to be suspended for the duration of the credit crunch, and the
simultaneous character of the economic recession across the whole EU has even
raised the question of whether the Euro currency can be maintained across all
its members. But far from any proposals to leave the EU or the Euro zone, new
states such as Poland and Croatia and even Turkey are clamouring to join,
hoping for continental support during the severe crisis. Jingoism and a certain
xenophobia, and, more importantly, the demands of the financial wing of the
capitalists, will probably politically prevent the UK from applying to join the
Euro zone, as that would mean the end of the privileged role of the City of
London in world financial markets; but such a step would be logical for the
manufacturing wing of the capitalist class. There is no reason to suppose that
the EU must necessarily fall apart into its component parts during this severe
recession, although the weakest members may be suspended if their drag on
recovery is seen as excessive. However, this would be a risky step for the EU
capitalists to take, knowing that any national collapse – with its accompanying
risks of hyperinflation, emigration and other symptoms – could ignite or
accelerate revolt inside the EU itself.
For the movement of the working class, the
continentalisation of Europe has had both positive and negative aspects. The chain of crises affecting the car
industry and its dependent component subsidiaries has shown hundreds of
thousands of industrial workers how closely the work processes are
internationally knit together. A Europe-wide day of action for the first time
surrounding the demise of General Motors in Europe presages serious continental-wide
union militancy for the future. The internationalisation of capital has been
creating not only commodities and services, but also its own gravediggers.
IS THERE A WAY OUT?
The current crisis is much deeper and probably much
longer than many capitalist economists had predicted at its outset. These are
dangerous times for capitalism. Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider
capitalist economists’ conjectures on the possible technological innovations
that could feed the next upswing, because, if the working class does not take
power, then over blood and bones – and barring a massive environmental
breakdown – capitalism will find a means of reviving itself.
Within monopoly capitalism, prices are manipulated
by regulation of production. The OPEC oil-producing states meet regularly to
set oil prices at levels that will maximise their profits, often at painful
human cost. With a socialist plan of production, the full utilisation of the
productive capacity of modern technology and the full use of all the skills and
inventiveness of the working class can vastly increase levels of output for all
socially useful sectors of the economy. This could be accompanied by a
progressive reduction in working hours as productivity rises. The impasse faced
by capitalism underlines again the need for a socialist plan of production.
For capitalism there is a paradox. Increasing the productivity
of labour is the point of capitalist innovation. Yet, by definition, most such
changes entail an increase in the organic composition of capital: the ratio of
investment in constant capital (technology and other fixed assets) compared to
variable capital (living labour). As the proportion of capital invested in
labour declines in the system as a whole, profit rates tend to fall. During an
economic upswing, it is possible to counteract this trend temporarily,
especially for those companies which gain a bigger share of the market. But in
a recession it usually hits back with a vengeance.
Capitalism
has now reached the point where, at least in some areas of the economy,
productivity is so advanced that its products are effectively available free of
charge. This is the case with much of the music industry, and it is becoming so
with computer software. Recorded music that was a big source of profits from
the 1950s to the 1990s is available online at no cost. Within the computer
industry, some products are now given away, partly a reflection of fierce
competition but also an indication of the huge fall in cost per item as a
result of burgeoning technological progress
Even if the capitalists were successful in finding
alternative sources of energy, this too would only contribute to the system’s
downfall. Capitalist economists are talking about a “green revolution”. They
are considering the possible market in fitting solar panels on buildings across
whole continents, installing wind turbines, developing “environmentally
friendly” forms of transport. Their commitment is of course to maintaining
stability and finding new ways of making profits, not saving the planet. Mass
production of such new technology would, of course, create a big crisis for the
oil and motor industry, but it could create a boom in some new areas of
capitalist investment. Yet the long term implications of such innovation would
be a massive decline in company profits, because most energy, once the initial
investment had been made, would become effectively free from any further input
of labour, apart from minimal maintenance. So, after it had burned itself out,
even a new capitalist boom would make the world even more “rotten ripe” for
socialism.
AFRICA
In
their desperate search for solutions to the economic crisis, some Western
economists have pointed to Africa as an untapped market.
They
have overlooked the fact that the recent economic expansion of China was
facilitated by half a century of state ownership and planning. For all the instability,
wastage and corruption associated with the Stalinist bureaucracy, it was this
crucial factor which provided the infrastructure and level of education needed
for capitalism to take root. Without a comparable scale of state investment
into the necessary infrastructure, in terms of power supply, transport and
communications, not even India will be able to sustain its recent impressive
growth rates or live up to the projections of capitalist economists as a
potential expanding market.
This
applies still more to Africa. It is a continent largely of household-based
agrarian economies with limited long-distance trade, colonially imposed (and
neo-liberal IMF-reinforced) cash-crop production for export and mineral
extraction, with limited industrialization (and even a recent
deindustrialisation), tiny domestic markets, largely mono-commodity exports, a collapsing
infrastructure, and a poorly trained workforce. Brain-drain and labour
migration exert further strains on resources. There is abject poverty, which
has increased from 11% of the population in 1960 to some 50% at present: 340
million people live on less than $1-25 a day.
Is
it possible that “pump priming” aid could somehow raise African living
standards on a scale sufficient to create mass markets commensurate with the
needs of twenty-first century capitalist production?
The
history of the economic relations between the imperialist powers of the west
and Africa provides little grounds for optimism. From the time of the Atlantic
slave trade, and through its twentieth-century colonization by European powers,
the resources of Africa have been looted for the benefit of the rich in Europe.
The decolonisation of Africa was a huge and liberating event for its people,
but it has not stemmed this pattern of plunder. Today the wealth of the world’s
richest fifteen people exceeds the total production (GDP) of sub-Saharan Africa!
The gross national product of sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa), a
total of 450 million people, is about equal to that of Belgium.
Western
imperialism boasts of the $580 billion of ‘aid’ that Africa has received
between 1960 and 2006; but despite that most of the economies of Africa during
much of that period have stagnated or regressed, because of continued looting.
Onerous debt service payments to the West may have exceeded by three times the
amount of ‘aid’ that was given. In addition (until the recent very temporary
commodities boom, which has now already collapsed) the terms of trade (the cost
of manufactured goods versus the cost of primary commodities which are Africa’s
principal exports) have been weighted against Africa, draining huge surpluses
from the continent to the imperialist powers. In 2006, even the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development stated that “In the case of Africa various
studies have shown that since the early 1980s aid has barely compensated for
losses resulting from the decline in the terms of trade, let alone meeting the
resource needs for rapid and sustained growth.” At the same time, protectionist
agricultural subsidies in the imperialist countries cost Africa, it is
estimated, some $500 billion a year in lost exports. The EU subsidy for a cow
is $913 – nearly twice the average income per head in sub-Saharan African
($490).
Undoubtedly,
with a socialist plan of production allowing full employment, education and the
development of a high-skills economy, there is enormous potential for raising
productivity, so that Africans could not only enjoy decent living standards but
also contribute to world growth. The current statistics are a devastating
indictment of the waste of human resources created by the free market.
Unemployment was already shockingly high for many African countries even during
the boom years. Now it is horrific: Angola (70%), Liberia (80%), Lesotho (50%),
Senegal (40%), Somalia (47%), Zimbabwe (70%). Women are the main victims. Many
(some 22) countries are scarred by past or present massacres, civil wars and
rebellions. The refugee problem is chronic in the continent.
In
the past, aid programmes were mostly directed to bolstering the private sector.
The G20 meeting in April 2009, floundering about trying to find sound-bite
“solutions”, promised $50 billion additional assistance to the poorest
countries in the world (mainly in Africa). Even if this materializes at all, it
is likely to be phased over a period of 2-3 years and may well consist of loans,
not grants. The bulk of it is to be administered by the IMF, notorious for
imposing onerous neo-liberal conditions. From an economic point of view, such
remedies may well turn out to be little more that a utopian dream.
What
of the political consequences? In Africa, state systems are fragile, a
patchwork of weak dictatorships and weak nominal democracies. Some (e.g.
Somalia) have broken down completely. State corruption is endemic and
embezzlement rife. All this is the product of the capitalist system. An aid
programme on a large enough scale to make a significant economic difference in
the present juncture would involve huge risks for the capitalist class.
Economic
development would enlarge and embolden the African proletariat. Even as a
result of the puny and inadequate economic development of the post-war period,
a significant proportion of the population now work in industry. Out of a
population of some 940 million, Africa now has 130 million non-agricultural
workers, or 13.87% of the population. The social composition of the continent
is thus more heavily weighted towards the working class than was Russia on the
eve of the revolution in 1917. In
Nigeria, the figure is 18%, Egypt 20%, and South Africa 32%. In these countries
there are mighty concentrations of industrial workers who would feel their
strength returning as soon as economic expansion got going. Aid that leads to economic
development could therefore just as easily destabilise as consolidate the
fragile regimes of the capitalist class on this continent.
Against
a background of chronic food shortages and incipient mass starvation, imposed
by soaring food and energy prices, there is already resistance to global
imperialism. In 2007 there were food riots in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Ivory
Coast, Egypt, and Tunisia. There were big strikes in Egypt, Guinea, Zambia and
South Africa – an indication of the role that the African working class will
play in the coming global revolution.
LATIN AMERICA
The most striking feature of Latin America today is
the spectacular rebirth of the traditional radicalism of the Latin American
workers and peasants. From Guatemala to Argentina, a series of “left” regimes
have come to power on populist programs. Among other things, in some cases
these regimes also represent the increased militancy of the indigenous peoples.
Without a mass mobilisation from below, these regimes cannot go on to overthrow
capitalism, but the continental-wide movement of the downtrodden of a continent
that not long ago was an unbroken chain of brutal military dictatorships indicates
a massive upsurge of renewed militancy and defiance.
Foremost among such regimes today is that of Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela. Having risen to power without a clear class base, Chávez
appears to be seeking to gain a more solid base within the Venezuelan working
class, through the building of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. It is
not clear if he will succeed in doing this, or if this party will get bogged
down in bureaucratism. In any case, Chávez is seeking to build Venezuela as a
regional power, based in part on its oil wealth.
The decline in the power of US imperialism is
strongly affecting Latin America. Previously, the US was able to impose its
will upon the region. Any regime that even partially defied the US was quickly
brought to heel or overthrown, with the backing of the US. Those days are over.
Several competitors to US imperialism are using the weakening of the US to make
inroads in Latin America. Foremost amongst these are China and Russia, but
secondary powers such as Iran are also engaged in this process. As the US
Council of Foreign Relations, the foremost such US think tank, put it in a 2008
report: “The era of the United States as the dominant influence in Latin
America is over.”
In the late 1970s, Latin America experienced a
general economic collapse, which then led to the neo-liberal policies of the
1980s. The period since then has been one of wild fluctuations in economic
growth throughout the region. Today, the Latin American economies have been
strongly affected by the global economic crisis, and some are predicting that
even if this crisis moderates or even ends by 2010, many Latin American
economies will not recover.
At the same time, the crisis of US capitalism is
affecting Latin America in other ways too. The social crisis in the US
continues to fuel the demand for drugs, including heroin and cocaine. This
extremely profitable US market is driving the continued growth of the drug
gangs in Latin America, especially in Mexico. There, some entire states are
reported to be under the drug gangs’ control, and these gangs have people in
the highest places at the national level of government. In fact, some US
analysts are warning that Mexico could become the next “failed state”.
It is these gangs – rogue capitalists, in reality –
coupled with the massive poverty in Latin America, which are giving the
countries of Latin America the highest murder rates in the world. Neither the
Latin American capitalist class nor world imperialism will have any more
success in eradicating this crisis than it has in the past. What will be
required is a renewed movement of the powerful Latin American working class – a
class that has been enormously strengthened in recent decades.
FRANCE
Of all the old imperialist countries, it is perhaps
France which seems to be closest to a revolutionary crisis. But one should
beware of the theory that France is a “special case", bandied about
by so many European journalists and French politicians. They would have you
believe that France is the last European country where strikes are still
frequent, and even boast in a nationalist manner about France's combative,
republican spirit. The current crisis has put an end to any idea of a
French 'special case' of class struggle. After all, it's not France but Greece
where mass demonstrations turned into riots, and it wasn't France but Iceland
where a government was recently overthrown after mass protests on the streets.
Before all of this, France had seen several strike waves, in 1995, 2003 and 2006, which staved off government attacks on earlier social gains, and slightly and temporarily softened the blow of the crisis for the working class. However, since the onset of mass unemployment, it is new global political and economic conditions which are determining the class struggle in France.
The particular character of France, especially in comparison with Britain or the USA, is the way the class struggle takes on a political aspect, and the importance of constitutional questions concerning the state itself. Some pages from Marx's The Class Struggle in France (1849) on bonapartism pack their punches with renewed impact today with the regime of the Fifth Republic – the product of a coup in 1958 – and in particular with Sarkozy. The fact that the power of capital is concentrated in the person of what is effectively a monarch (a characteristic which it shares with the USA, but which differs from it in its much weaker parliamentary and judicial powers and its centralisation of the state apparatus) is at the same time a trap for the working class following every presidential election, and
a factor which serves to concentrate the class struggle against the summit of power between elections – especially at the present time.
Conditions are such that if the parties emerging from the movement of the workers, or even any single one of them, were to demand a united struggle to bring down Sarkozy, force immediate elections, and form a democratic government representing the workers, this would open such opportunities for the working class that their struggles would swiftly be brought to a successful conclusion. But the fact is that none of the parties has put forward such a policy: not the traditional parties the Socialist Party, Communist Party or the Left Party (Parti de Gauche) which emerged from it, nor the three historic Trotskyist tendencies – the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA – successor to the former LCR), the Independent Workers’ Party (POI), nor Workers’ Struggle (Lutte Ouvriere). It is this very question of power that is taboo to all of them, even though the strikers, demonstrators, the youth and many activists pose it every day. At the same time, the TU leaders organise great days of struggle at widely spaced intervals, resisting pressure to come together against the government, and collaborate with Sarkozy’s and the bosses’ plans for lay-offs and attacks on welfare and social services
But there is still a chance right now for revolutionaries to build an organisation both with rank-and-file workers and with the youth, acting together with activists from the left parties. Such an organisation could gradually unite them in this common goal, which is nothing other than a concrete perspective of socialist revolution in the form of preparation for a victorious confrontation with Sarkozy.
In this context two particular points should be emphasised:
French Imperialism is on the retreat and in difficulty, surviving by performing a balancing act between Germany on the one hand and the EU and the UK on the other. But its real presence, especially in Africa, remains extremely risky and potentially murderous, as shown in 1994 by the genocide in Ruanda which it provoked. Every defeat for French Imperialism in these countries, as well as in the Antilles or the popular struggle of the Guadeloupian people – each of them linked to the class struggle in France – brings us back to the question of independence for these last of the French colonies, something which will always benefit the working class. No anti-American demagogy on the part of the government should hold back revolutionaries in France from campaigning for such objectives.
Before all of this, France had seen several strike waves, in 1995, 2003 and 2006, which staved off government attacks on earlier social gains, and slightly and temporarily softened the blow of the crisis for the working class. However, since the onset of mass unemployment, it is new global political and economic conditions which are determining the class struggle in France.
The particular character of France, especially in comparison with Britain or the USA, is the way the class struggle takes on a political aspect, and the importance of constitutional questions concerning the state itself. Some pages from Marx's The Class Struggle in France (1849) on bonapartism pack their punches with renewed impact today with the regime of the Fifth Republic – the product of a coup in 1958 – and in particular with Sarkozy. The fact that the power of capital is concentrated in the person of what is effectively a monarch (a characteristic which it shares with the USA, but which differs from it in its much weaker parliamentary and judicial powers and its centralisation of the state apparatus) is at the same time a trap for the working class following every presidential election, and
a factor which serves to concentrate the class struggle against the summit of power between elections – especially at the present time.
Conditions are such that if the parties emerging from the movement of the workers, or even any single one of them, were to demand a united struggle to bring down Sarkozy, force immediate elections, and form a democratic government representing the workers, this would open such opportunities for the working class that their struggles would swiftly be brought to a successful conclusion. But the fact is that none of the parties has put forward such a policy: not the traditional parties the Socialist Party, Communist Party or the Left Party (Parti de Gauche) which emerged from it, nor the three historic Trotskyist tendencies – the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA – successor to the former LCR), the Independent Workers’ Party (POI), nor Workers’ Struggle (Lutte Ouvriere). It is this very question of power that is taboo to all of them, even though the strikers, demonstrators, the youth and many activists pose it every day. At the same time, the TU leaders organise great days of struggle at widely spaced intervals, resisting pressure to come together against the government, and collaborate with Sarkozy’s and the bosses’ plans for lay-offs and attacks on welfare and social services
But there is still a chance right now for revolutionaries to build an organisation both with rank-and-file workers and with the youth, acting together with activists from the left parties. Such an organisation could gradually unite them in this common goal, which is nothing other than a concrete perspective of socialist revolution in the form of preparation for a victorious confrontation with Sarkozy.
In this context two particular points should be emphasised:
French Imperialism is on the retreat and in difficulty, surviving by performing a balancing act between Germany on the one hand and the EU and the UK on the other. But its real presence, especially in Africa, remains extremely risky and potentially murderous, as shown in 1994 by the genocide in Ruanda which it provoked. Every defeat for French Imperialism in these countries, as well as in the Antilles or the popular struggle of the Guadeloupian people – each of them linked to the class struggle in France – brings us back to the question of independence for these last of the French colonies, something which will always benefit the working class. No anti-American demagogy on the part of the government should hold back revolutionaries in France from campaigning for such objectives.
Another point: another aspect of the idea of France as a 'special case' has for a long time been the presence of a mass fascist party with considerable electoral support: the 'Front National'. Its present decline can be explained on the one hand by the absolute hostility to the FN on the part of the majority of the youth and of large sections (but not all) of the working class, and, on the other, by the absorption of the majority of its electorate and political apparatus in Sarkozy's efforts to renew the Fifth Republic through enhanced authoritarianism. But the ruling class and the French state cannot manage without provocations and aggressive actions of a pre-fascist nature, which could lead to real fascist movements. The propaganda of the old FN was anti-Arab, but there are now attempts to bring fascists together around other issues, notably anti-Semitism, hoping thereby to attract disorientated sections of the youth of Arab or African descent (the Dieudonné-Soral-Gouasmi list for the EU elections). These people have already understood the new era which the crisis has brought. Revolutionaries in France are faced with the task of pointing out this danger and explaining that whichever way it is dressed up, there is only one way to nip it in the bud: preparation for a victorious confrontation with Sarkozy: the prospect of revolution.
PAKISTAN
Pakistan
is today perhaps the most volatile society in the world. Since it is also to a
great extent the pivotal fulcrum upon which US imperialism is resting in its
so-called “war against terror” (more properly, its war against the
oil-producing nations), the fate of the whole world largely depends upon how
events play out there.
Forced
to accept the humiliating role of a US client state throughout the Cold War,
fighting surrogate diplomatic and military wars, first against
Soviet-patronised India and later against Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, Pakistan
staggered under the weight of a constantly swelling crazed clerical-fascist
military intelligence state-within-a-state: the ISI. Among the horrors spawned
by the ISI, its coffers swilling with dollars, was al-Qaeda, the most notorious
of its creatures. Every al-Qaeda atrocity bears the hallmarks of the ISI, the
monster which the CIA nuzzled to its breast. Pakistan meanwhile continues its
tawdry cycle of blundering pantomime military dictatorships, interspersed with
brief chaotic interregnums of corrupt quasi-parliamentary
regimes.
However,
today we see in Pakistan not only the weakest link in the worldwide chain, but
a rapidly developing revolutionary situation too. The overthrow of the
Musharraf dictatorship was the outcome of a revolution in the making: the
masses’ heroic expression of anger, solidarity and growing determination.
A
new trade-union based working-class party has emerged immeasurably strengthened
out of this movement – the Labour Party of Pakistan, which has won the loyalty
of thousands of super-exploited workers and peasants. The LPP defiantly
challenged in turn the deposed dictatorship, the US military, the corrupt
government, and the fundamentalist fascists. By its courage, its transparent
honesty, and its tactical flair, it has captured the imagination of workers and
peasants, at least in some areas, as well as that of a layer of professionals.
Whether it will succeed in harnessing the energies of the masses now that they
are once again on the move; whether it can ultimately lead them to a decisive
victory, or at least in the attempt leave behind it a lasting heritage, will be
decided not just by tactics – by agitational brilliance – but also by
theoretical and strategic vision. The movement in Pakistan has snatched away
from socialist commentators around the world the luxury of comfortable
platitudes and abstract discussion, and forced them to focus on the constant
crucial decisions of a living struggle. Finding the right means of balancing
bold leadership of every democratic struggle, on the one hand, with clear
warnings, sharply defined perspectives and a transitional programme, on the
other, is precisely the science of revolution.
It
is true that in Pakistan, counter-revolution in the form of mystical
obscurantism already has a mass base, an ideological appeal and an army strong
enough in wide swathes of territory to hold the state itself at bay. Conversely,
unlike in Russia, the proletariat is relatively weak and scattered. The
tireless militant workers of the LPP are facing a harder task; all the more
glory to them for their success in building their authority in the struggle.
This authority extends also internationally, through their contacts in the
Indian sub-continent, South-East Asia, the Pacific region, Australia and
Europe. Within their own modest limits, socialists internationally share a duty
to observe, discuss and support their work, both practically and in terms of
theoretical discussion and an exchange of ideas. We have a lot to learn from
their experience. Before too long, we will all be facing similar difficult
questions.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Capitalism has
long outlived its usefulness. The global banks and corporations which rule the
world have been revealed to be totally parasitic on the taxpayer. Their
operations are now endangering life on the planet. The question is: can a
solution be found within capitalism itself? Is the destruction already so
widespread that not even socialism could guarantee lives worth living? Has the
idea of a socialist society faded into a utopian mirage?
The material
basis for socialism is plenty. The irony is that it is this very plenty which
is posing apparently insuperable problems for capitalists. Their problem is how
to dispose of the goods, but they present us with a picture of scarcity and
hopelessness.
We are told we
are about to run out of silver, indium, platinum, antimony, zinc and many more
essential elements. As the ‘New Scientist’ puts it: "Virgin stocks of
several metals appear inadequate to sustain the modern 'developed world'
quality of life for all of Earth's people under contemporary technology."
This has already led to wars in the Congo and to a new ‘scramble for Africa’
involving China and other imperialist powers.
We are also
told that the world population of six billion is set to rise exponentially to
nine billion by 2050, while food production is already in crisis owing to
drought, floods, bio-fuel production etc.
Oil reserves
are of course limited, and reaching the point where extraction becomes
increasingly uneconomic. In any case, the atmospheric pollution and global
warming, due mainly to gross overuse of fossil fuels, has reached the stage
where even professional government and corporate liars admit that a world
catastrophe involving the destruction of whole countries and populations is now
inevitable unless overall emissions are brought down by at least 80% from 1990
levels.
It is an
anomaly that it is the very productivity on which the chances for socialism and
for human survival depend which is too much for the capitalist market to cope
with. Climate change and environmental destruction are problems of capitalism
(and, in its day, also of Stalinism). What is needed is not simply more
renewable energy, or this or that technological fix, but a changed attitude to
technology and the relationship of man and nature.
For capitalism
the whole of nature has been parcelled up into fixed quantities: so many
resources – commodities – to be plundered, exploited and sold. Capitalists
derive their profits e.g. from their ownership of and rights to oxidise
hydrocarbons. The inevitable unwanted side-product, CO2, is somebody else’s
problem. But, amid oil wars and global ruin they tell us that we must buy
more but consume less; that there are too many of us to feed, and especially
too many that are old and non-productive; that wars are due to “human nature”;
etc.
Marxism has
always looked at nature as a network of dynamic processes of which human life
was a part. It arose in answer to Malthus’ gloomy calculations that food
production could never catch up with population growth, and was based on the
idea that human energies once released would always find new ways to “harness
the forces of nature”
This is
something that we have barely started. If we have not misunderstood the basic
fundamental principles of physics, 95% of the matter/energy in the universe
must be 'dark' – unknown to us. We are, as Engels said, in a period of
prehistory: i.e. technologically as well as socially. But the forces of
nature are virtually inexhaustible. A ten-square-metre patch of normal sunlight
has in it all the energy needed to meet all a person's conceivable energy
requirements. In all, photosynthetic organisms convert around
100,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon into biomass per year. Plants are
typically 3-6% efficient: humans have created solar panels achieving 41%
efficiency. 1 kilogram of matter has enough energy to power a 1-kilowatt
electric heater for 3 million years. We have begun to tap the force of nuclear
fission (even though we have not yet learned how to dispose of the radioactive
waste). In the not-too-distant future, nuclear fusion will almost certainly be
one of our fundamental energy sources. If we do not reach this stage, it will
not be on account of lack of resources or intrinsically insurmountable
technical obstacles.
In response to
the New Scientist feature referred to above, letters came back stating that
"Elements cannot be created or destroyed... There is exactly as much
platinum today as there was at any time in the past, or will be in the future,
same for any other element. The issue with an element is strictly cost of
recovery, be it mining or recycling.” The New Scientist article itself was
precise about the solution: "We need to minimise waste, find substitutes
where possible, and recycle the rest... Platinum makes up as much as 1.5 parts
per million of roadside dust. They are now seeking out the largest of these
urban platinum deposits, and ... developing a bacterial process that will
efficiently extract the platinum from the dust.”
The UN Food
& Agriculture Organisation’s prediction of population growth are often
misquoted. They state specifically: "Perceptions of a continuing
population explosion are false. In fact it is more than 30 years since the
world passed its peak population growth rate.” They predict that world human
population will grow and by 2050 or so stabilise at around nine billion.
There is enough good land in the world to give each person half a hectare – enough to feed five people (minimum estimates). But private and grossly unequal ownership of the land makes such calculations meaningless. Even in an ‘advanced democracy’ like Britain, up to a half of the land remains unregistered in the hands of private families: a mere 0.7% of the population owns two thirds of the land. (Only about 7.5 per cent of land of England & Wales is under residential occupation, with a population of 47.8 million living on a mere 3.4 million acres. The other 26.9 million acres are owned by as few as 135,000 people See Kevin Cahill: ‘Who owns Britain?’. There’s also a more recent book ‘Who owns the world?’)
'Overpopulation'
is a relative term. There are geographical limits to the population a given
land area can support within a certain technology. But there are no
intrinsic limits to possible technologies. A society in which each new member
is seen as an additional burden is a sure sign of its degeneration and imminent
collapse. From the palaeolithic age onwards, the development of society is
precisely defined by the new technologies it devises to overcome previous
limits.. Nature itself is unstoppable. The inexorable earthly physical and chemical forces that gave rise to carbon-based life in
all its forms persist, and are at no risk of diminishing for another five
billion years or so. Societies where people can tap into these forces
thrive.
The food crisis
is predominantly a problem of marketing. (As recently as 2005, the WHO were
warning of the dangers of overproduction!) It is the result of measures taken
to reduce past ‘grain mountains’, reduce subsidies and open agribusiness to
‘free market forces’, to domination by supermarkets and by traders and
speculators, to monoculture and consequent overgrazing, deforestation,
desertification, over-ploughing, over-reliance on petroleum-based fertilisers
and pesticides – causing soil erosion and depletion. All of this is a boon to
speculators. The biggest single cause of the panic was the flurry of futures
speculation caused by the deliberate reduction of food warehousing.
The only values
capitalism recognises are monetary values. This can distort the ‘real’ value.
Measured by energy input and output, pre-capitalist farming methods yield
10kcal for each 1kcal spent: present day over-mechanised agribusiness gives
just1kcal for each 10kal. In other words. in energy terms – in rational terms –
it is 100 times less economic! All
serious writers on the subject like Colin Tudge have made essentially identical
observations to Marx’s words (Capital Vol I): “All progress in capitalistic
agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of
robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a
given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that
fertility.”
Some NGOs and
the United Nations still talk in terms such as these: “Turning resource
access into wealth requires good commercial models. The poor need assistance in
commercializing their ecosystem assets. This means better marketing.” Yet more
and more people are coming to the same conclusions as Marx’s (Capital Vol III)
even today: “The capitalist system works against a rational agriculture,” or
that “a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system
(although the latter promotes technical improvements in agriculture), and needs
either the hand of the small farmer living by his own labour or the control of
associated producers.”
Tudge is not
the only one to point out that “the economic system that is now so
enthusiastically embraced by the world's most powerful governments and
corporates cannot work in the field of agriculture, which is where it matters
most: and it would very bad indeed if it did work. Meanwhile the efforts to
make it work are destroying what's there.” He says that, to survive “we have to
re-invent democracy, or rather to make it work almost for the first time in the
history of civilisation.” Meanwhile “nothing except farming can even begin to
employ….the majority of the human species,” (while even industrialised
Britain continues to lose more than 1000 farmers a month!). Apart from the
depredations of world agribusiness, a combination of high fuel prices and soil
depletion has forced many small farmers off the land, and 20% of US wheat
farmers to turn to more productive no-till farming. Tudge's "enlightened
agriculture" would use the human resources at hand and combine the
knowledge gathered over countless generations with continued efforts at
enhancing soil productivity through scientific advances. Today’s scientific
method is more holistic than the mechanistic science of the era of Imperialism:
one which takes account of the dialectical interplay of existing natural
processes and distant consequences. Within agronomy, such an approach can allow
many for many systems of arable, horticultural and pastoral agriculture – from
large-scale wheat and rice fields to smaller varied forest horticulture and
'permaculture' projects which between them could restore lost
micro-nutrients and guarantee the diet of "plenty of plants, not
much meat, and maximum variety" which corresponds to the nutritional needs
humans acquired during their million-year evolution (and also, as it happens,
to the world’s great traditional cuisines!)
OIL
Nothing
illustrates the primitive nature of capitalism better than oil. Coal powered
the industrial revolution, and oil powered its 'highest stage': imperialism.
(See
http://www.rense.com/general80/wilmce.htm). In its short reign, oil has
been responsible for untold human misery: the key to world economic and
military domination. Enmeshed with banking, the military, espionage and industry,
it has been at the root of two world wars and innumerable 'minor' wars and
imperialist escapades, inflation and economic collapse, right up to the
present.
There is no shortage of alternatives to fossil fuels. Every new issue of every science journal reports new breakthroughs in carbon reduction or capture, alternative forms of electricity generation etc.: cars which run on compressed air, ultra-rapid charging batteries, sewage to fertiliser and ethanol fuel etc. But every day makes it clearer that the problem does not lie in the technology, but in the ability of the social system to manage it. A whole massive worldwide infrastructure and a range of powerful global industries has crystallised around oil. Until recently, electric vehicles were dumped and crushed as potential threats to the survival of the system. Now climate change and peak oil are beginning to suggest that such alternatives may be the only way they can survive and continue profiteering. The benefits to society of efficient modern public transport systems have never been given serious consideration by the capitalist class and much information about their potential is ignored or suppressed. But the question remains whether a system based on private profit is capable of handling an energy delivery programme where the interests of the whole of society and of future generations have to be the decisive factors.
There are any number of studies (e.g. books by George Monbiot, Chris Goodall and David King) which present global solutions to climate change based solely on combinations of proven or immediately developable technologies and on actual practical business experience of countless small-scale (and some very large-scale) operations across the world. Apart from minor disagreements about the effectiveness of this or that particular solution, they are in broad agreement. For example, tthey confirm spectacular claims that with the use of existing modern CSP solar panels a mere 0.3% of the North African desert could supply all the energy needs of Africa, the Middle East and Europe. A cross-continental grid could store and carry this together with wind- and wave-generated electricity from Britain and Scandinavia across high voltage DC undersea cables. They agree on the viability and surprising effectiveness of thorough home-insulation and emission-neutral housing, on combined heat and power plants, electric vehicle development, carbon capture and storage, reforestation and anti-deforestation, cellulose ethanol fuels and much else.
None of their findings questions capitalism's ability to deliver. On the contrary, they represent a new layer of big eco-business. Sophisticated and detailed global cost-analyses have been commissioned. The business journal, McKinsey Quarterly, for example, in 2007 published "a cost-curve for greenhouse gas reduction" which lists many alternatives such as the above and provides assessments for which of these would provide net savings and which losses. If all were used to their fullest potential they calculated the cost, by 2030, as just 0.6% of world GDP ($54.62 trillion at 2007 estimates) and if less efficiently, no more than 1.4% - perhaps 1.8% for 'rich countries'. (For comparison, this represents the approximate worth of the world's top 100 billionaires, or the cost to the USA of the Afghan and Iraq wars). But the returns on investment are not immediate or guaranteed, and the benefits tend to be spread among people too poor to create any effective demand or extended to presently economically unviable future generations only. The authors were also canny enough to recognise that a time-span of 21 years to take us to 2030 is perhaps too long for capitalism even to contemplate in its present weakly state. So they suggest looking at such investment as a form of life insurance, comforting them with the thought that, after all, the global insurance industry's turnover amounted to more: 3.3% of world GDP.
But even this seems to be more than the system can take. The Stern report described climate change as "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen." Some suggested a tax on carbon emissions. But those particular countries which were imposing such a tax could reach no agreement on the rate to be charged. Attempts to impose a universal rate failed as an impossible step towards an unthinkable world government. Hence the well-known cap and trade schemes whereby high polluters can buy excess pollution-rights from those under the set limit. In 2006 this collapsed, since the market demand for carbon emissions had been over-estimated and the price plummeted! (However, 'good' news was announced the following year when CO2 emissions rose, allowing the market to climb back up from $10 billion to $30 billion). Rising emissions have created a flourishing global business in carbon offset trading. (Despite global agreements and targets, annual carbon emissions between 2000 and 2007 grew at four times the annual rate they had through the 1990s). Deals are advertised on the internet: Carbon Offsets at only £7.50 Per Tonne, etc.
There is no shortage of alternatives to fossil fuels. Every new issue of every science journal reports new breakthroughs in carbon reduction or capture, alternative forms of electricity generation etc.: cars which run on compressed air, ultra-rapid charging batteries, sewage to fertiliser and ethanol fuel etc. But every day makes it clearer that the problem does not lie in the technology, but in the ability of the social system to manage it. A whole massive worldwide infrastructure and a range of powerful global industries has crystallised around oil. Until recently, electric vehicles were dumped and crushed as potential threats to the survival of the system. Now climate change and peak oil are beginning to suggest that such alternatives may be the only way they can survive and continue profiteering. The benefits to society of efficient modern public transport systems have never been given serious consideration by the capitalist class and much information about their potential is ignored or suppressed. But the question remains whether a system based on private profit is capable of handling an energy delivery programme where the interests of the whole of society and of future generations have to be the decisive factors.
There are any number of studies (e.g. books by George Monbiot, Chris Goodall and David King) which present global solutions to climate change based solely on combinations of proven or immediately developable technologies and on actual practical business experience of countless small-scale (and some very large-scale) operations across the world. Apart from minor disagreements about the effectiveness of this or that particular solution, they are in broad agreement. For example, tthey confirm spectacular claims that with the use of existing modern CSP solar panels a mere 0.3% of the North African desert could supply all the energy needs of Africa, the Middle East and Europe. A cross-continental grid could store and carry this together with wind- and wave-generated electricity from Britain and Scandinavia across high voltage DC undersea cables. They agree on the viability and surprising effectiveness of thorough home-insulation and emission-neutral housing, on combined heat and power plants, electric vehicle development, carbon capture and storage, reforestation and anti-deforestation, cellulose ethanol fuels and much else.
None of their findings questions capitalism's ability to deliver. On the contrary, they represent a new layer of big eco-business. Sophisticated and detailed global cost-analyses have been commissioned. The business journal, McKinsey Quarterly, for example, in 2007 published "a cost-curve for greenhouse gas reduction" which lists many alternatives such as the above and provides assessments for which of these would provide net savings and which losses. If all were used to their fullest potential they calculated the cost, by 2030, as just 0.6% of world GDP ($54.62 trillion at 2007 estimates) and if less efficiently, no more than 1.4% - perhaps 1.8% for 'rich countries'. (For comparison, this represents the approximate worth of the world's top 100 billionaires, or the cost to the USA of the Afghan and Iraq wars). But the returns on investment are not immediate or guaranteed, and the benefits tend to be spread among people too poor to create any effective demand or extended to presently economically unviable future generations only. The authors were also canny enough to recognise that a time-span of 21 years to take us to 2030 is perhaps too long for capitalism even to contemplate in its present weakly state. So they suggest looking at such investment as a form of life insurance, comforting them with the thought that, after all, the global insurance industry's turnover amounted to more: 3.3% of world GDP.
But even this seems to be more than the system can take. The Stern report described climate change as "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen." Some suggested a tax on carbon emissions. But those particular countries which were imposing such a tax could reach no agreement on the rate to be charged. Attempts to impose a universal rate failed as an impossible step towards an unthinkable world government. Hence the well-known cap and trade schemes whereby high polluters can buy excess pollution-rights from those under the set limit. In 2006 this collapsed, since the market demand for carbon emissions had been over-estimated and the price plummeted! (However, 'good' news was announced the following year when CO2 emissions rose, allowing the market to climb back up from $10 billion to $30 billion). Rising emissions have created a flourishing global business in carbon offset trading. (Despite global agreements and targets, annual carbon emissions between 2000 and 2007 grew at four times the annual rate they had through the 1990s). Deals are advertised on the internet: Carbon Offsets at only £7.50 Per Tonne, etc.
Governments are
now eager to show they are ready to engage in talking. At their latest meeting
in Poznan, they even got so far as to agree on methods for how to measure
deforestation programmes (that have not taken place) and also on "the
principles of financing a fund to help poor and vulnerable countries to
cope with the impacts of global warming (rising seas, floods, droughts, storms
and wildfires)". More words. "We just left a lot on the table for us
to do in 2009," said a major participant. Considering that they continue
failing to provide the mere $10-30 billion a year which could give 17% of the
world's population the clean water they need to save their lives, it is hardly
surprising that it is proving hard to convince the ruling class that
planet-saving is good business..
In any case, the world has changed in the few months since all those books came out. Saving the banks has already cost more than the estimated cost of saving the world. Governments have been forced to declare targets, but business has already (surreptitiously) declared its intention to sabotage them. In their most recent survey, nPower (UK) found that “the majority of businesses (83%) said the target to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050 was unrealistic... Only 31% think new business will occur as a result of reducing emissions, compared to 47% in 2008... 97% said they are currently more concerned with reducing costs than emissions.”
In any case, the world has changed in the few months since all those books came out. Saving the banks has already cost more than the estimated cost of saving the world. Governments have been forced to declare targets, but business has already (surreptitiously) declared its intention to sabotage them. In their most recent survey, nPower (UK) found that “the majority of businesses (83%) said the target to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050 was unrealistic... Only 31% think new business will occur as a result of reducing emissions, compared to 47% in 2008... 97% said they are currently more concerned with reducing costs than emissions.”
Ours would not
be the first society that had exhausted its resources, ruined its environment
and moved on or perished. Ice-age hunters very likely out-hunted the prey on
which they depended. But capitalism has already encompassed the globe. Under
capitalism there is nowhere for humans to move on to.
"We must act quickly" the experts all agree "Can we afford to do what it takes?" they ask. "Can we afford not to?" they answer, using the 'we' word as though they not only accepted the need to ‘reinvent democracy’ but imagined that it had already been done! If they were prepared to follow the consequences of their own thoughts to their conclusion, they would ask themselves just who they mean by “we?” and who it is that has to act now.
WHO CAN SAVE THE PLANET?
In their various ways they have drafted rational
plans for the drastic measures that have to be taken for the survival of
civilisation. In doing so they are, more than they know, testing the system to
its limits. The global market place has its own laws. Profit-maximisation is
the life-force of capitalism. None of the measures governments have taken to rescue
the system for the capitalists can be expected to take away their life-support.
Already in 2004, 0.13% of the world’s population had gained control of 25% of
the world’s financial assets. It is not reasonable to expect that any knowledge
and science placed at the disposal of a class which only exists by force of the
profits it can extract from others is ever going to be used in the interests of
the remaining 99.87%, who for them cannot possibly be anything more than
customers, rivals or workers
A system founded on individual profit-maximisation
was, in its time, the only conceivably effective motivating force to set up
extraction and production industries, and create the worldwide infrastructures
to accommodate them. This system not only transformed the world; it gave rise
to a technology and science of transformation, which is not only part of
education, but has become assimilated into our general human culture. There are
more scientists alive today than there have been in the whole of human history.
But the system of private profiteering cannot complete the process. It cannot
even secure human survival. To ask it now to clear up the mess it has left us
all in – to start all over again and to implement humane and rational plans in
the interests of the whole world – is asking it to do something it was never
designed to do.
It has been proved that most of the particular
technologies and the means of delivering them that have been suggested, can and
do bring in good returns for investors. But, for there to be the slightest hope
of avoiding a catastrophic global rise in temperature, each technology has to
be able to work in combination with the others, as part of a coordinated energy
plan on a scale never before seen, which crosses national boundaries and is
applied consistently over a considerable period of time, and has to be launched
right now. Some steps have been taken, but the profits are too uncertain or
distant in time, or the outlay too gigantic; or else the level of international
cooperation appears to be beyond the reach of nation states and world
institutions which are themselves crystallisations of the worldwide onslaught
of capitalism. At a time when companies cannot look beyond the next bail-out,
any such grand plan looks unlikely. To succeed, the plan would have to be able
to call upon the combined knowledge, initiative, skill, imagination and
enthusiasm of the countless millions of people who have no material interest in
profiteering and world despoliation: the working class. But the capitalists, as
a class, are no longer on the side of the future. They are now a threat to our
future.
The great achievements of bourgeois science have
been perverted into pseudo-science and outright superstition: fatalistic
propaganda which makes ‘Chicken-Lickens’ of us all (the nursery-tale farmyard
animals who ran to the king to tell him the sky had fallen down). Discoveries
in anthropology, evolutionary biology and genetics are being interpreted
mechanistically for media use as yet another weapon against us, to ‘prove’ that
wars are unavoidable because humans are naturally disposed to violence (because
humans are sometimes aggressive); or that class divisions are in-built (because
monkeys sometimes show dominance/submission behaviour patterns): that criminals
are born, not made (because above average numbers of XYY-chromosome men are
found in prisons); and that it is our folly in over-consuming and
over-reproducing which has brought the world to the brink of disaster, rather
than the wastefulness, destructiveness and venality of the capitalists. In its
youth, bourgeois science took delight in the discovery of nature’s operating
mechanisms. This was to be a tool of human liberation. How crabbed, shabby and
mean the great age of reason has become now, in its senility!
If “all that
is real is rational; and all that is rational is real” then this society is due
for dissolution. “All that is real in the sphere of human history” as Engels
explained Hegel’s phrase, “becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore
irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality;
and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become
real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality.”
Irrational
capitalism is now fighting all that is progressive in modern dialectical and
materialist science. It is urgent that what they have seen as rational is
understood and taken up by the only class which can turn their vision into
something real: the working class. The formerly somewhat remote warning
“socialism or barbarism” is now closer to hand than ever.
CLASS STRUGGLES AHEAD
How fast can the will to change society
materialise? Events in the near future will tell. The working
class today has suffered no defeats remotely comparable to those of the 1920s
and 1930s. It may have become disorientated politically by the desertion of its
former self-appointed leaders, and stunned by the rapid dilution of its
industrial organisation and power in the age of globalisation, but its capacity
to struggle has not yet been put to the test. That will be tested anew on
a truly international scale, on every continent and in every sector, in
the period ahead. It is
impossible to calibrate in advance the new balance of forces. The ground has
been prepared for a quick and widespread revulsion at capitalism and a rise in
consciousness by leaps and bounds.
The paralysis of the working class in moving to
change society today comes not so much from the old illusions in reformist or
national programmes, but in the perceived helplessness of the mass of ordinary
people to challenge the dictatorship of the corporations and their state
apparatus of repression.
The initial response to the crisis is likely to be
one of stunned shock. As workplaces close, as workers lose their jobs by the
millions and their homes by the tens of thousands, we can expect explosive reactions.
It is true that, once mass unemployment sets in, by definition
there will be a drastic weakening in the cohesion, solidarity and initiative of
the working class. However, in the process of the descent into the abyss, there
will inevitably be inspiring struggles. The period of the Great Depression also
witnessed the great waves of sit-in strikes in the USA and France.
In some countries there have already been huge mobilisations. Governments have been overthrown in
Iceland and Latvia. There have been running battles between youth and police in
the streets of Athens. And, in accordance with its especially rich
revolutionary traditions, the French working class has shown its power.
Millions came out on to the streets throughout France in two successive one-day
general strikes, and again on May Day 2009. Bosses have been held captive by
workers in factory after factory, and there have even been “free picnics”
organised in the supermarkets. This is clearly only the beginning of a massive
worldwide movement of protest.
If there were sizeable revolutionary socialist parties
in any country today, they would be leading mass demonstrations for nationalisation
of the banks and finance companies and the industrial corporations, an end to
repossessions, occupation of the workplaces, etc. It is impossible to say how
powerful such a movement would prove. Remember that after the outbreak of the
events of 1968, within a matter of days de Gaulle had concluded that revolution
was inevitable.
It is a remarkable fact, and unprecedented, that there
is a general understanding throughout society today of the causes and nature of
the current crisis. So far there has been no attempt to blame asylum seekers,
illegal immigrants, benefit scroungers, single mothers, Polish plumbers, or
even Islamic terrorists for the crisis. To quote Max Hastings again: the crisis
“cannot be blamed on political troublemakers, workers, asylum seekers,
terrorists or climate change”. Bankers are held in universal contempt – and
this time without even any attempt to stereotype them ethnically. If only there
were a political party ready to channel that mass class hatred and follow
through with policies to put an end to capitalism, the revolution could already
be within reach.
At the time of the onset of the banking crisis,
there was much talk of how close it came to “collapse” or “meltdown”. Mere
metaphors! What would such a collapse actually mean? It has been reported that
in December Britain came within 48 hours of running out of currency. In such a scenario,
what would happen? Quickly and naturally, for a time, some kind of
rough-and-ready barter system would start to operate; an improvised
quasi-monetary system based on tokens would develop; there would be an
occupation of workplaces, a network of co-operatives, a refusal to vacate
homes… And it is hard to tell where initially the forces could be found to repress
such spontaneous mass action.
A political party would be needed to generalise
this process into a political programme, to put forward a plan for
democratically elected committees to liaise and co-ordinate, for a system of
elected defence patrols to maintain the new system against sabotage by old
bosses or new criminals or bureaucrats, to rotate administrative duties, etc.,
and above all to imbue the people with confidence in the historic meaning of
the change, give their actions an international horizon, and make explicit and conscious what would
already be taking place on the ground in an instinctive and pragmatic form.
The battle has still to be joined, and we will be
surprised what latent resources the working class can still summon forth
when the time comes. The working class today amounts to half the global
population, the big majority in the newly industrialised world, and the heavy
battalions have not yet spoken. When they do, they will transform the outlook.
THE NEW FACE OF COUNTER-REVOLUTION
In default of such a party, an eventual return to
the old scenario is inevitable: popular demoralisation, a degeneration into
racism and nationalism ending in defeat, repression and war; perhaps only
eventually, after Armageddon – if humanity even survives such a defeat – to a
resurgence of revolution and ultimate victory.
The historic
effect of the series of betrayals and defeats suffered by the working class
over the inter-war period, in country after country – the victory of Fascism in
Italy, the defeat of the German revolution, the defeat of the British
General Strike, the rise of Nazism, the civil war in Spain, the Stalinist
counter-revolution in Russia, etc. – created the nightmare world of Auschwitz,
Hiroshima, the Gulags, and the worst horrors in human history. In the coming
period, the alternatives posed by Marx of socialism or barbarism will once
again be placed squarely on the agenda.
Counter-revolution in
the 1920s and 1930s took the form of horrific monolithic police super-states,
resting on the mass base of the dispossessed on the margins of production,
driven into a frenzy by the collapse of economic life and mobilised into armies
of fascist terror against the trade unions. The counter-revolution today shows another
face: the disintegration of civilised life into murderous communal bigotry,
along national, racial, sectarian and religious fault lines.
What are the prospects for counter-revolution
today? Fascism is the conscious riposte of capitalism to revolution – the
mobilization of armed gangsters and the scum of society against the workers’
picket lines and protest marches, whipping up the basest appeals to racism and
chauvinism to rally cross-class support.
Even during
periods of stability, through the mass media the ruling class consciously keeps
backward prejudices simmering. Beneath the surface of British society, for
instance, there is a bubbling inferno of barely suppressed racism. The warning
signs are clear. Already, to a stratum of disillusioned ex-Labour voters, the
BNP have successfully crossed the barrier from the lunatic fascist fringe to an
increasingly acceptable expression of protest. The election of a few BNP MEPs
at the next Euro-election can no longer be ruled out, or even conceivably of a
victory or two at parliamentary elections – something that would immeasurably
embolden the fascists and represent the greatest threat for generations to the
working class. It should not be forgotten that in the 1928 general election in
Germany, the Nazis received just 2.6% of the votes; less than four years later,
they were already in power. In conditions of crisis, the BNP could grow fast.
However, the class basis for fascism today has been drastically eroded since the
1920s and 1930s. In Germany in 1933 the proletariat was dwarfed by a vast petit
bourgeoisie both urban and rural, the peasantry alone constituting 40% of the
population, in addition to a large class of urban shopkeepers and small
producers and a huge pool of declassed unemployed.
In the present epoch, the capitalists are even more
reluctant than they were then to resort to outright fascist methods. In the
1920s and 1930s, it took the creation of mass fascist armies composed of the
dregs of society to block the flood-tide of revolution. Now, only if faced with
an immediate threat to its very survival will the ruling class risk entrusting
its future to deranged maniacs like the Nazis. Racism is always a useful tool
to the ruling class in diverting popular resentment – the time-honoured tactic
of divide-and-rule. But Nazi excesses went beyond defending the property of the
rich. These political protection racketeers brought disaster on the heads of
their masters, for an entire epoch losing capitalism half the continent.
Nor will the working class submit to fascist
gangsterism without all-out resistance. There has been an enormous advance in
the general cultural level in the postwar period, won by decades of
working-class struggle, bringing improved living standards, better conditions
of work, and higher levels of education. Expectations are immeasurably higher. Drastic
cuts in living standards will provoke protest and instability. The youth above
all will not tolerate militarisation or the outright repression of democratic
rights. Any resort to the old racist terrorist attacks on ethnic minorities
would risk explosive consequences today, after the black revolt in the USA and
the colonial revolution, due to their enhanced confidence as well as a sea
change in the consciousness of most whites, especially the youth. Thus the scope for counter-revolution
is limited. For the moment, the capitalists are forced to move by stealth, surreptitiously
eroding democratic rights in semi-disguised ways: using anti-terrorist
legislation to tighten up on surveillance over all manner of protest movements
completely unrelated to terrorism. In the event of a big upsurge, their first
recourse will be to these methods to repress the organised working class.
Counter-revolution
raises its ugly snout in many disguises. The complex ethnic composition of the population in most major countries
nowadays, particularly in the main cities, would be likely to create
conditions for resistance to racist or communal attacks, and counter-attacks on
the part of the victimised minorities. Given the demographic shifts and globalized scope of
modern capitalism, rather than the establishment of monolithic police
dictatorships based on ethnically pure nation states, counter-revolution could
take the no less bloodthirsty but more unstable form of communal massacres,
secessionist uprisings and regional wars. Rather than being crushed underfoot by the jackboot of fascism, the
labour movement could instead find itself torn to pieces by the vendettas of
rival gangster warlords, as in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sri Lanka,
Rwanda, Sudan, Chechnya, Afghanistan, the Congo, Georgia, Gaza, etc. This
alternative face of barbarism is the model of reaction today: a
global patchwork of communal fratricide.
Racism in
Britain too could polarize society, erupting in assaults and murders;
provocative marches through Asian, Muslim and black areas; the development of
defence groups which might well take on semi-militaristic overtones; rival
terrorist gangs; police repression; segregation; no-go areas; internment camps,
calls for repatriation; and a possible communal division into warring ghettoes
along the lines of Northern Ireland during the troubles.
ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM
The temporary eclipse
of socialism as the clear worldwide alternative to the rule of the global
corporations has given scope to the emergence of various spurious ideologies,
including militant religious obscurantism, especially in the form of Islamic
fundamentalism. This phenomenon threatens to create a dangerous obstacle to the
unity of the working class against its common enemy.
In protest against what
can quite plausibly be presented as an international crusade against Islam –
waged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir and Europe – many Muslim youth
are seduced by the propaganda of the Islamists, which cleverly combines a sharp
critique of US imperialism and its allies with insidious medieval bigotry and
anti-Semitism. It has gained a radical aura from the revolution in Iran, where
the mullahs’ regime was brought to power on the back of a proletarian revolt,
and from the spectacular raid against US imperialism on September 11th
2001 ascribed to the terror gang of the Saudi oil billionaire Osama bin Laden –
the most militant face of the dissident oil sheikhs in their conflict with US
imperialism over control of the oilfields.
Nevertheless, Islamic
fundamentalism was promoted by imperialism as a bulwark against revolution. In
Afghanistan, the Taliban was virtually conjured up by Pakistan’s ISI to launch
a paramilitary mass movement of lumpen and rural youth. Armed and financed by
imperialism as a frontline force against the Soviet occupation, its underlying
mission from the start was to defend the existing property relationships from
revolution. It was a counter-revolutionary army that used terror and bigotry to
reverse the democratic gains of the Afghan revolution, defeat the Soviet-led
Afghan state army, and reinstate the rule of the local landlords and mullahs on
behalf of imperialism.
That is exactly the
same role as Franco played in Spain, using fascist terror and the
fundamentalist bigotry of the Catholic priests, to reverse the democratic gains
of the Republic, defeat the Soviet-led republican army, and reinstate the rule
of the local landlords and bishops on behalf of imperialism.
Trade unionists in neighbouring Pakistan come under constant attack from the Taliban’s local counterparts, which quite demonstrably play the same role in society as, say, the Blackshirts did in Italy: to terrorise the proletariat, break strikes, smash picket lines, assassinate trade union militants, suppress every trend and intimidate every person in society that is remotely democratic or progressive, or that represents in any way the embryo of the future society.
Similarly, in India, in the industrial metropolis Mumbai, the local Marathi-based paramilitary Hindu communal party Shiv Sena was created, mobilised, financed and armed by the industrialists, with the specific objective of breaking the grip of the Communist Party and the CP (Marxist) on the trade unions. They smashed the labour movement, organised anti-Muslim riots that amounted to full-scale "ethnic cleansing", and even came to power, both on the city council and (in coalition with the all-India communalist BJP) in the Maharashtra state legislature. Their leader Bal Thakray explicitly modelled himself on Hitler, the Nazi party, and the Final Solution.
The Taliban appear very different from the Nazis – but so did Mussolini's Blackshirts, or the Franco regime. Reaction always and by its very nature takes on the cultural coloration of its environment. It has been argued that the role of the Taliban is "medieval-inquisitionist" – but, again, Franco’s regime was also a parody of the medieval inquisition. What other form could fascism adopt in the culture of Afghanistan or Pakistan? If you isolate its mock-medieval formal trappings from its actual modern global context, it belongs with all the other paraphernalia of a bygone age in a historical junk room. It only makes any sense within the context of the worldwide struggle of imperialism against revolution. Similarly, if you were to take the whole circus of Mussolini and transplant it to ancient Rome, then that could be said to be Caesarism; but Caesarism in the context of modern decadent capitalism is fascism.
Trade unionists in neighbouring Pakistan come under constant attack from the Taliban’s local counterparts, which quite demonstrably play the same role in society as, say, the Blackshirts did in Italy: to terrorise the proletariat, break strikes, smash picket lines, assassinate trade union militants, suppress every trend and intimidate every person in society that is remotely democratic or progressive, or that represents in any way the embryo of the future society.
Similarly, in India, in the industrial metropolis Mumbai, the local Marathi-based paramilitary Hindu communal party Shiv Sena was created, mobilised, financed and armed by the industrialists, with the specific objective of breaking the grip of the Communist Party and the CP (Marxist) on the trade unions. They smashed the labour movement, organised anti-Muslim riots that amounted to full-scale "ethnic cleansing", and even came to power, both on the city council and (in coalition with the all-India communalist BJP) in the Maharashtra state legislature. Their leader Bal Thakray explicitly modelled himself on Hitler, the Nazi party, and the Final Solution.
The Taliban appear very different from the Nazis – but so did Mussolini's Blackshirts, or the Franco regime. Reaction always and by its very nature takes on the cultural coloration of its environment. It has been argued that the role of the Taliban is "medieval-inquisitionist" – but, again, Franco’s regime was also a parody of the medieval inquisition. What other form could fascism adopt in the culture of Afghanistan or Pakistan? If you isolate its mock-medieval formal trappings from its actual modern global context, it belongs with all the other paraphernalia of a bygone age in a historical junk room. It only makes any sense within the context of the worldwide struggle of imperialism against revolution. Similarly, if you were to take the whole circus of Mussolini and transplant it to ancient Rome, then that could be said to be Caesarism; but Caesarism in the context of modern decadent capitalism is fascism.
Fundamentalism in the
Islamic world plays the same role: the smashing of the labour movement and of
everything that represents the embryo of the future society. It wraps itself in
fantasies about a golden age of Islam, in just the same way that Mussolini
wrapped himself in the glories of the ancient Roman Empire, or Hitler in
mystical folklore about a legendary Nordic Aryan race of supermen. Behind all
the hypnotic mythology, the real programme of all three was to smash the labour
movement and any threat of revolution.
This peculiar
phenomenon reflects the recent distorted period that history has gone through.
For the first time in a century or more, the organised aspiration of the
proletariat for a new society hardly registered as even a political
consideration for the capitalists – and yet the contradictions of capitalism
have never been more acute. The grotesque nature of the crisis in society is manifested
in the demonic form of bin Laden.
Many genuine youth are
misled by the dangerous tricks of the fundamentalists. Socialists should obviously
oppose the victimisation of those who might be fooled by their propaganda, but
also explain to them that the fundamentalists are the greatest threat to the
rights of all workers everywhere, and that their goal is to enslave the working
class.
THE DECLINE OF REFORMISM
During the era when capitalism still had a role to play
in developing the productive forces, there was still scope for workers’ leaders
to win some political and economic reforms without challenging the system, and
a caste emerged on the upper crust of the labour movement of reformist
mediators in the class struggle, who had a material interest in the survival of
class society. Historically speaking, this era came to an end early in the
twentieth century, when civilisation was plunged into the horrors of world war,
slump and fascism. Reformist leaders swung openly to the defence of the ruling
class once mass revolutionary movements threatened its overthrow, only themselves
to be crushed in turn under the jackboots of the counter-revolution. Mass
communist parties arose, but these too were soon to be perverted into
instruments of the new privileged state bureaucracy that had taken control in
Russia, another bureaucratic caste that likewise had a stake in the survival of
capitalism internationally.
During the prolonged upswing that followed the
Second World War, capitalism enjoyed a belated spurt of growth, with the
development of chemicals, electronics and later information technology. There
was a sellers’ market in labour, and a massive growth of trade unionism which
brought sections of workers in these countries real material gains, though at
the cost of long hours and intensified exploitation. This gave reformism an
unexpected though temporary new lease of life.
In Britain, an overwhelming mood for radical change
combined with the devastation wreaked by the war brought the first majority
Labour government to power on a programme of nationalisation of coal, steel,
the railways and other basic industries, and the creation of the National Health
Service. The reforms introduced by this government renewed the loyalty of the
working class to Labour for a new generation.
The beginning of economic instability from the 1970s onwards was already beginning to lay bare the limits of reformism, and a mass left wing began to develop in the socialist and social-democratic parties (or in some cases, new left parties) in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, France and other countries.
By the late 1970s, the leading ideologues of world capitalism had switched from conciliation and appeasement of the trade unions to harsh monetarist policies, in effect calling the bluff of the reformist and trade union leaders. The capitalists were summoning up the resolve to claw back all the gains made by the working class by cuts in subsidies and the social wage, and direct attacks on the trade unions. This led to bitter confrontations in the 1980s, notably the air traffic controllers’ strike in the USA and the miners’ strike in Britain.
The year-long miners’ strike was a heroic chapter in working-class history, bringing out on strike some 200,000 workers and directly involving entire communities in women’s support groups, mass pickets of power stations, nationwide solidarity by fellow trade unionists, and pitched battles with police strikebreakers. The defeat of the strike was the direct responsibility of the reformist leaders of the British trade unions, who, in shrinking from the consequences of an all-out fight with the capitalist state, doomed the strike.
With the defeats of the 1980s, the leaders of the reformist
parties swung sharply to the right, launching mass expulsions of left activists,
and openly embracing the monetarist policies of Reagan and Thatcher. These events have left the working class politically
disenfranchised for the last couple of decades. In most countries, this is so
for the first time since the early history of the modern working class.
While there have been unrelenting attacks on
workers' rights throughout this period, there have been no major shocks such as
might have precipitated political landslides. There have been massive protest
strikes in some countries, as well as huge anti-capitalist and anti-war
demonstrations. And yet, apart from in the countries of Eastern Europe, where
the former ruling Stalinist parties retain some working-class support due to
the memory of full employment and state welfare, there have been few serious
moves to fill the vacuum left by the traditional mass labour, socialist and
communist parties of the previous hundred years. The main exception is the
special case of Germany, where the remnant of the former Stalinist party in the
East merged with dissident left reformists in the West to form a left
alternative to the SPD. In Britain, which had a history of alternating cycles
of industrial militancy and political radicalism, the number of days lost in
strikes flatlines year after year at a historic low, while there is general
apathy about politics and mass abstention in elections.
The obstacle in the path of either a new workers'
party or a Labour Party with socialist aspirations is the crisis of reformism.
In the new epoch of globalised corporate dictatorship, national programmes have
less meaning today than ever. In a more immediate and practical sense than
ever, every demand for defence of existing standards, for even minimal reforms
or elementary democratic rights, leads directly to the need for international
solidarity and a new society.
THE LABOUR PARTY
Marxists have always welcomed every step taken by
workers towards the creation of their own independent class organisations,
whether on the trade-union or the political front, and condemned the antics of
sectarians who have insisted upon programmatic ultimata rather than a campaign
of patient explanation. As workers move into struggle they do not jump
immediately to revolutionary conclusions. Their first step is to recognise that
they have their own, distinct interests that are in direct conflict with the
capitalist class. A mass workers’ party represents the organised expression of
this elementary class consciousness. The creation of mass social-democratic,
socialist and labour parties in Europe and elsewhere around the turn of the
twentieth century were historic achievements of the working class; all the more
so in that most of them were founded on explicitly socialist principles, and
even those that were not – notably the Labour Party – came to adopt socialist
ideas later, under the impact of the Russian revolution.
The question of the nature of these traditional
parties today – especially the British Labour Party – has been a source of
controversy among socialists. It is therefore appropriate to examine this
question here at some length.
In 1921, Lenin advised Britain’s fledgling
Communist Party to affiliate to the Labour Party. Even prior to 1918, when the
Labour Party was not yet even formally a socialist party, Lenin had advocated
its admission into the Second International on the grounds that it was the
political voice of the trade unions. Again, in the 1930s, at a time of rapid political changes,
Trotsky had suggested that revolutionaries who found themselves excluded from
the Communist Parties should escape political isolation by joining the leftward
moving factions evolving out of the Social-Democratic parties – for instance
the ILP, which had broken away from the Labour Party. Later Trotsky recommended
entry into the Labour Party.
In the 1950s, during the long postwar
upswing, what subsequently became the Militant tendency adapted this to a far more
protracted long-term tactic, slowly building a formidable Marxist force within
the Labour Party, especially by winning control of its youth section. By
extension, the CWI’s policy in most countries was to follow a similar course.
Militant’s decades of work in the Labour Party were
exemplary. Militant turned Trotskyism for the first time in living memory into
a force to be reckoned with, introducing thousands of working-class youth to
Marxist ideas and leading mass movements into confrontation with capitalism.
Militant was explicitly feared by the Labour leaders and by the capitalist
state itself; it even brought down a prime minister. Militant pushed entrism to
the very limits and achieved spectacular results. The split in Militant came
when it was necessary to decide where to go next.
Entrism had been originally proposed by Trotsky as
one example among many of a daring and flexible short-term tactic, not much
more than a brilliant but fleeting improvisation. This was in a period of rapid
changes, of revolution and counter-revolution. Militant was right in the more
stable circumstances of its time to extend entrism to a whole historical period
– a period of slow historical development; but even then, it remained a tactic
and not a strategic principle.
The question now is to what extent this
tactic is applicable to the Labour Party today; and even whether it can still
be considered a workers’ party, rather than a capitalist party relying on the
traditional though passive support of large sections of the working class. (This
question also applies to socialist or social-democratic parties in other
countries; for present purposes we will focus on the British Labour
Party.)
The fact that the leadership of the Labour Party
has betrayed the working class is certainly nothing new. Labour’s first Prime
Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 broke his electoral mandate, split the party
and formed a National Government – in effect, presided over a Tory government –
in order to carry through cuts in the dole to the unemployed. After an initial
wave of radical reforms, the 1945 Attlee government moved quickly to
counter-reforms, a trend continued by the Wilson and Callaghan governments in
the 1960s and 1970s. Hugh Gaitskell had tried in the late 1950s to renounce Clause
Four of the party constitution which set out Labour’s socialist aims.
It is also true that ultra-left sectarians have
always impressionistically dismissed the Labour Party as a capitalist party,
and that Militant in its day was right to insist that as the political arm of
the trade unions, Labour was the workers' traditional party, to which they
would turn first in their search for a political solution. On the other hand,
it is not enough to repeat old formulae worked out decades previously, without
looking afresh at living processes. We need to examine whether or not the
changes that have taken place since then are so fundamental as to represent a
qualitative transformation. Let us remind ourselves what changes there have
been in the Labour Party's nature, programme, constitution and declared
aims since the days of Attlee and Wilson.
First of these is the removal from the constitution
of the party's commitment to socialism: Clause 4. On its own, such a change
need not be decisive in defining a party's class base. The Bad Godesburg
conference in 1959, which carried through a similar change, did not in itself
alter the working-class nature of the German SPD. And yet the removal of Clause
Four represented a historic shift. For decades such a retreat had been resisted
tooth and nail. At the very same time as Bad Godesburg, the Labour Party rank
and file had forced Gaitskell to abandon his attempt to take the same route.
Gaitskell, a blatant forerunner of Blair, nevertheless had to fight the 1959
election on a programme of wholesale nationalisation. Right up to the
1980s, the party conference was committed to "a fundamental shift in the
balance of power and wealth" in society. It was that relentless
underlying impulse towards social change that Militant always based itself
on.
Unlike the ultra-left groups, Marxists never
measured the class nature of the party by the scale of treachery by the
leadership. That was predictable. Their assertion of the proletarian nature of
the party was based on the aspirations of the membership. Gaitskell was
defeated by a mass revolt when he tried to remove Clause Four, and was forced
to abandon his attempt. The fact that in 1994 Clause Four was dropped with
hardly a murmur of protest was a significant fact to be taken into serious
consideration. Since then, the "curious behaviour of the dog in the
night", as Sherlock Holmes might have put it – the absence of any major rank-and-file
protest against the Blair/Brown government's policies – itself suggests a
significant change in the character of the party.
Accompanying this political retreat, there has been
a drastic reduction in the specific weight of the trade unions in the
party structure. The impact of trade union block votes at Party conference,
trade union representation on the national executive, and above all the very
powers of party conference and the national executive, have been reduced
virtually to zero. The party leadership in the past owed its authority to the
mandate it enjoyed from the trade unions. Today the Labour leadership are
apparently accountable to no one. In the recent leadership election, there was
not even an alternative candidate. A residual trade union link remains, but the
principal function of the trade unions in the Labour Party today is their
continued donation of cash.
There is also a reversal of the previous
relationship of the Labour leadership towards big business. In the 1959 general
election, under Gaitskell (a leader considered in those days an arch-right
winger), the Labour Party still campaigned in its manifesto for the
nationalisation of the top 512 monopoly companies and the “commanding heights”
of the economy. In the 1960s, the Wilson government was still pledged to
renationalise the privatised steel and road haulage industries. In contrast,
New Labour governments have carried much further than even Thatcher dared to go
the counter-reforms of the Thatcher regime: privatisation of air traffic
control and of whole swathes of the NHS, a disguised return to de facto
selection and even semi-privatisation in state education, the introduction of
tuition fees for higher education, an astronomical rise in the prison
population, etc.
In the past, Labour governments were tolerated only
at times when capitalism was suffering a severe crisis of authority, and only
then under protest and with gritted teeth, for brief periods, and under
relentless pressure. Having been swept to power on the crest of a mass wave,
which gave them the scope to make genuine reforms, the Attlee government fell
after one and a bit terms, and it was thirteen years before Labour regained
office. The first Wilson government objected in so many words that it had been
dictated to by the "gnomes of Zurich"; it was blackmailed into
reversing its policies by a "strike of capital"; and already there
was serious talk of a coup plot to overthrow this government, led by Cecil King
and Lord Mountbatten. The second Wilson government found itself back in
power when Britain was paralysed by the miners' strike and the three-day
week, and Heath had called an election on the issue of "who runs
Britain: the government or the trade unions?" That government was rocked
by economic crisis, runaway inflation, waves of strikes, and terrorist
bombings. During its period of office, contingency plans were openly discussed
for a Chilean-style military coup, and military manoeuvres were even
staged at Heathrow airport as an overt warning.
Big business has a very different attitude towards
Blair and Brown. For a decade they explicitly patronised New Labour as their
preferred instrument of government. They showered donations on New
Labour, having abandoned their traditional party the Tories. Now, New
Labour having from their point of view served its purpose and outlived its
usefulness, the capitalists seem to have opted tactically for a return to their
traditional party of government. However, they cheerfully supported the New
Labour government for an unprecedented three successive terms of office.
Certainly, the Labour leaders always pursued
treacherous policies. Today, however, they have lost all political constraints.
In the past, they always had to be careful to justify themselves in terms of
the need for "realism", "gradualism",
"priorities", etc. They dared not question the overall goal of a
social transformation. When Ramsay MacDonald swung towards direct frontal
attacks on the working class, he had no option but to break with Labour and
rely on the capitalist parties in a National Government, to pursue policies
that New Labour nowadays carries out with relative quiescence from the party
rank and file. New Labour politicians show open contempt for even the mildest
of the old Fabian aspirations for even the most gradual social change.
The Labour Party used to have a socialist
constitution, a decisive trade union block vote, an elected national executive
committee, a genuine policy-making conference, an active working-class base,
and a parliamentary party largely composed of former workers and trade-union
officials. It was created by the trade unions, stood for a socialist
transformation of society, and actually carried through nationalisation of the
basic industries, the foundation of the national health service, and
comprehensive education. These are not necessarily socialist measures; but they
were reforms inscribed for generations on the banner of the working class. The
Tories bitterly opposed every one of them, and did all they could to reverse
them at the earliest opportunity. It took years of struggle by the working
class to achieve them, and their implementation by Labour Governments was
rightly celebrated as a historic victory. For all its corruption and
bureaucratisation, Labour was manifestly a party based on the working class,
and its leaders had to hypocritically justify each and every treacherous twist
and turn with reference to the interests of labour and the cause of social
reform.
There have now been twelve years of government by a
"New Labour" clique which expunged the Labour Party's socialist
aspirations, undermined the link with the trade unions, destroyed any semblance
of party democracy, bad-mouthed its Labour heritage, and carried through
ultra-Thatcherite policies that even the Iron Lady herself had shrunk from. Its
leaders openly proclaim themselves champions of big business: they are “supremely
relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. They even adopted a new name, to
differentiate themselves from Labour’s historic traditions.
New Labour served a very specific historical
purpose: to carry through to a conclusion the Thatcherite counter-revolution,
once the Tories had become so discredited that they were no longer capable of
finishing the job. Now it is the New Labour leaders who are personally
discredited, and the Tories who have donned the public-relations-friendly mask
of Blair. This is the true face of Toryism, a reversion to time-honoured
tradition: rule by the Old Etonian caste.
It is still open to question whether or not even these
significant changes add up to a qualitative change in the Labour Party's class nature.
We are in uncharted waters. It is unprecedented for a party to
change its class character without a split. It was also unprecedented, however,
for a state to change its class character without a civil war... and yet that
is what has happened in Russia.
Has the point been reached when quantity becomes
quality? Has the accumulated erosion of the party’s working-class traditions yet
reached the stage where the dominant influence of capitalism outweighs the
weakening pressure of the trade unions, and the party becomes less a
bureaucratically corrupted workers' party, remembered nostalgically as Old
Labour, and more an alternative political instrument of the ruling class to
which the trade unions for historical reasons continue to lend grudging
allegiance?
A NEW PARTY OF LABOUR?
At some point, this question will be resolved in
deeds. Either there will be an influx of workers into the Labour Party branches
and a resurgence of trade-union opposition at conference and national executive
level, or there will be a mass breakaway of the trade unions and the creation
of an alternative party. Most likely of all, perhaps, is a combination of both:
attempts by some trade unions to reclaim the Labour Party, alongside movements
by sections of worker activists to replace it.
After the defeat of the last Labour government
in 1979, there was an influx of workers into the Labour Party and a
sharp swing to the left, resulting in a historic vote for Tony Benn as deputy
leader, who came within a hair's breadth of victory. Such an outcome remains a
possibility. However, that event took place in a very different political
climate, following a massive wave of militancy and industrial struggle.
Great events impend. The working class will have no
option but to fight for its interests, first on the industrial front, but then
necessarily politically. Somehow or other, it must find a means of
representing itself. How will the vacuum of Old Labour be filled? One way or
another, the Labour Party will split. The trade union base and the middle-class
careerists who have made their nests in the Parliamentary Labour Party
cannot preserve for much longer their current uneasy cohabitation. How
that split comes, what premature and false starts might occur along the way,
whether or not it manifests itself as one clean sharp break or a messy series
of realignments... these are not such decisive questions as they might appear
at close range.
In the stormy period that is opening up, there will
be all kinds of political convulsions, including breakaways, revolts and
splits. Undoubtedly, alongside a wave of mass agitation and struggle by
newly awakened workers, unemployed people and youth, there will also be
campaigns and protests by trade unionists within the Labour Party. This cannot
end with them reclaiming the party and merely spitting out the careerists, as might
once have been the outcome. It will mean a confrontation between the trade
unions and a highly professional machine of smooth pro-business politicians,
owing no allegiance to and sharing no traditions with the working class; a
full-scale split with the New Labour apparatus; and quite possibly unification
under a new banner with those who left earlier to organise afresh.
The old illusions in gradual, partial or national
programmes have lost much of their credibility. In Britain, for instance,
before the trade unions can launch a credible campaign either to recapture the
Labour Party or to create an alternative – to mount a political struggle to
defend the interests of the working class as a whole – they first have to
show themselves ready to fight industrial battles on behalf of their own
members. If they won't fight for their members' rights directly on the picket
lines, how can they summon up the political will to launch a campaign either to
reclaim or to replace the Labour Party?
The trade unions are operating without any coherent
political alternative. Their confusion can be seen, for instance, in the decision
by the British railway union the RMT to stand alternative candidates in the
Euro-elections on an openly chauvinistic platform.
Nevertheless, the idea of a mass breakaway by the
trade unions to represent the interests of labour, maybe alongside single-issue
anti-capitalist campaigning lobbies, is by no means far-fetched in this
scenario. A new workers' party would inevitably be a broad conglomeration
of federated platforms, lobbies and campaigns, as was the Labour Party when it
was formed a hundred years ago.
If some trade union leaders were to proclaim a new
workers' party, even if it meant a temporary split with fellow trade unionists
remaining in the Labour Party, that need not be more than a passing episode. Such
a move would immediately raise the hopes of trade unionists, public sector
workers, and youth. It would mark the first break in the long self-imposed
political silence of the trade unions. A public break with New Labour by a
sizeable section of working-class activists and an appeal to the masses to
campaign for a manifesto including an end to privatisation,
re-nationalisation of basic services, restoration of welfare cuts,
restoration of trade union rights, taxes on the rich, etc., would bring a ray
of light into the political gloom, a breath of fresh air into the stale
atmosphere. It would transform the mood throughout Britain. Of course, it may
well still take years of campaigning and of bitter experience to win the battle
for the allegiance of the mass of the working class.
Such a party may or may not replace the Labour
Party in broad historical terms. It might prove short-lived, as was the ILP in
the 1930s – or, more recently, the Scottish Socialist Party or the Rifondazione
Comunista in Italy. Those parties all nevertheless played a positive role in
winning youth to their ranks and to socialist ideas who would otherwise have
been left demoralised and depoliticised. A possible later revival in a
radicalised Labour Party could well be inspired by those very same recruits.
When the ILP disaffiliated from the Labour Party in
1931, it was on the most trivial and pedantic issues, and with disastrous
timing, coming as it did just after a prior split by the right wing under
Ramsay MacDonald. Nevertheless, it took 100,000 workers with it, and recruited
a generation of youth, many of whom went on to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
Trotsky quite rightly urged his comrades in Britain to join the ILP and help to
"Bolshevise" it. That would surely be the right attitude towards any
such new party today.
A WORLD PARTY
From the time of the European revolutions of 1848
until the aftermath of the great wave of revolutionary upheavals that followed
the First World War, constant and renewed attempts were made to unite the
international working class into a single world party representing their common
interests. During these seven or eight decades, great historical landmarks were
built. However, the history of the last
85 years has been blighted by one factor: the absence of a workers’
international party. The working class has grown immeasurably and the social
reserves of capitalism have shrunk inexorably. Again and again, whenever it
came to big social conflicts, all the objective factors for revolution have
existed; only the subjective factor was missing that could have made these
objective processes conscious. Countless millions have fallen victim, entire
populations enslaved, for lack of the existence of the International. The
issues of civilised life, war and peace, and environmental survival all depend
directly upon the building of a world revolutionary party.
The struggle to build an international workers'
party goes back almost to the beginnings of capitalism. The history of the
International reflects the ebb and flow of the class struggle over the last 150
years. While a handful of revolutionary cadres steadfastly upheld the banner of
internationalism throughout the darkest days of reaction, mass labour
organisations swelled and gathered momentum in periods of an upsurge in the
class struggle, only to be dashed against the rocks of reaction when their
offensive was defeated. The creation of the Communist League in 1848, the
International Working Men's Association in 1864, the Socialist International in
1889, and the Communist International in 1919, were all organisational
expressions of the workers' innate striving towards a new society on a world
scale, as manifested most brilliantly in the events with which these
organisations have become forever historically associated: the revolutions of
1848, the Paris Commune, and the Russian revolution.
Each of these monuments to the class struggle was
later to be destroyed by counter-revolution. The Communist League and the IWMA
succumbed directly to objective defeats of the working class as a result of
demoralisation and state repression, following the defeats of the 1848
revolutions and the Paris Commune. The Second and Third Internationals were
stifled by the parasitic castes which crystallised at the top of these workers'
parties: by the labour bureaucracy in the imperialist countries, and the new
ruling bureaucratic caste in Stalinist Russia, respectively. They too were
destroyed under the shadow of counter-revolution, in the form of the outbreak
of the First World War and the Nazi victory in Germany respectively.
The Second International went through a period when
its leaders Kautsky and Bebel defended Marxism in words against the open
revisionist Bernstein, but in practice pursued day-by-day reformist goals (a
phenomenon known as centrism). After its first Four Congresses, the Communist
International likewise went through a period of bureaucratic centrism, when it
lurched drunkenly from opportunism to lunatic ultra-leftism and back again,
thus losing several precious revolutionary opportunities. But in each case
these transitional phases of blind centrism were later to crystallise into calculated
policies of conscious betrayal. For the Social-Democracy, the Rubicon was
crossed in August 1914, when its ringing promises of 1912 for a Europe-wide
General Strike against the impending imperialist war were betrayed, and war
credits were voted to the German Kaiser and the other respective combatants.
For the Stalinised Communist International, after Hitler’s accession to power
in 1933 (a catastrophe which nevertheless raised not a murmur of debate within
its ranks), the Russian bureaucracy too began to pursue a conscious policy of
counter-revolution, to consolidate its own grip and to appease imperialism. It
was at that point that Trotsky launched his campaign for a new International.
The sectarianism which has afflicted Trotskyism has
its roots in the aborted birth of the Fourth International. The 1938 Founding
Conference was held in anticipation of the development of a mass International
even more powerful than its predecessors. Trotsky had correctly anticipated
that the coming world war, like its precursor, would be followed by a renewed
worldwide revolutionary wave, and went on to predict that this would likewise
sweep aside the parties of the old failed Internationals into oblivion. Within
a decade "not one stone would remain upon another" of the relics of
the Second and Third Internationals, and the Fourth International would be
"the decisive force on the planet". Trotsky fought the sectarians of
his day, and would have been horrified at how their heirs distorted his legacy.
However, it was the peculiar conditions following
the Second World War which derailed the development of the Fourth
International. The economic stabilisation of capitalism on the one hand, and
the establishment of Stalinist bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe and China
on the other, cut across this process. The conditions were laid down for a
consolidation over a whole historical period of reformism and Stalinism. These
factors put back by decades the development of a new International.
The collapse of the surviving remnants of the 1938
Conference was exacerbated by their failure to understand the post-war world
order. The disintegration of the Trotskyist current into rival factions on the
fringes of the workers’ movement was the consequence. However, even the
clearest Marxist leadership could not have withstood the objective turn of
events.
THE CWI
The general analysis of the world situation
that was put forward in the late 1940s by the tendency which later went on to
establish Militant in Britain and the CWI internationally remained for the most
part valid for the following three decades. On this basis its leadership earned political
authority, the tendency grew steadily, and over this period it avoided serious
splits such as characterised the ultra-left fringe groups.
The Committee for a Workers' International was
founded in 1974, the first small step since 1938 towards a new International.
Over decades of patient work, its British section, under the banner of
Militant, grew into a serious force. It founded a mass youth movement; won
control of a major trade union; got three Marxists elected to Parliament; led
an entire city in prolonged resistance to the Government; mobilised millions of
people in a civil disobedience campaign; and was instrumental in the overthrow
of a hated Prime Minister. In addition, to varying degrees in Spain, Greece,
Sweden, Ireland, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria and elsewhere,
sections of the CWI became prominent tendencies within the organised working
class.
In its heyday the CWI began to approach some of the
functions of a genuine International: comparing the experiences of workers in
different countries; working out common programmes and strategies; organising
international demonstrations and solidarity campaigns; bringing international
pressure to bear for the release of political prisoners, etc. More precisely,
perhaps, it became a recognised international tendency, comparable to the left
wing of the Socialist International at the outbreak of the First World War,
which given the shock of objective events was soon to burst on to the stage of
history as the Communist International.
By the mid-1980s, the CWI had become colloquially
known by its members as an International. While this was never strictly
accurate, it would have been a legitimate claim, given the perspectives of a
rapid movement towards revolution. After all, it is only with hindsight that we
are now compelled to recognise that the historic meeting called in 1938 under the
name of the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, for all its crucial political significance, proved unable
to consummate that goal. Given the peculiar objective twist in events that was
to undermine its initial perspectives, it was doomed never to live up to that
mission. In the same way, it is only due to the fact that history proved its
earlier perspectives ultimately inadequate that the CWI never came to realise
its objective of becoming a fully-fledged International.
Militant played a crucial role in two prolonged struggles against the Thatcher government: the resistance by Liverpool Council to attacks on local government rights, and the mass civil disobedience campaign against the poll tax. These campaigns showed the potential that existed objectively for resistance to attacks by the state. However, Marxists were still a minority within the movement as a whole, and despite their exemplary conduct of these struggles (which in the case of the poll tax led directly to Thatcher’s downfall), they were unable to carry them further. In particular, the CWI failed to understand or draw the lessons from the defeat of the miners’ strike, claiming that this was the beginning of a new wave of militant struggles. This mistake contributed to its decline.
It is no accident that the CWI’s rise coincided
with the disintegration of the Keynesian model and the crisis in world
capitalism. Likewise, its collapse came when capitalism was able to re-stabilize
itself and, in fact, gain major victories – a process which confused and disorientated
the CWI.
While the CWI was never quite an International, its
decline too was occasioned by something far short of a classic defeat, such as
past defeats which have physically annihilated the vanguard and largely wiped
out the historical memory of the class. The recent period has had a paradoxical
nature, in which the working class, though disorientated, has not been
violently defeated as in the 1930s. It has become politically disarmed, but not
by any means crushed. The memory of the more active layers of the working class
lives on. This is a tribute to the strength of the working class and the new
balance of forces in society.
Over the course of the 1980s, the CWI's by now
fossilised perspectives became increasingly at odds with the reality of events.
A mistake persisted in for long enough becomes a dogma. By the early 1990s this
incompatibility erupted in a split. The minority clung unashamedly to the
unreconstructed formulae of the past. The majority missed the opportunity to
conduct an honest reappraisal of its mistakes, and floundered in its efforts to
grapple with the new realities. The loyalty earned over decades was dissipated
in attempts to impose by administrative decree a habitual control which was no
longer based upon genuine political authority, with the inevitable result that
the CWI split and entered a sharp decline. Events had exposed the weaknesses
that had by now developed in the tendency's world outlook, and paved the way
for an internal crisis which accelerated into a tailspin.
BUILDING THE INTERNATIONAL
It is through elemental movements of the working
class that a new International will be built. By its very nature, the working
class strains instinctively towards solidarity, a goal which is implicit in its
conditions of existence and the indispensable guarantee for its capacity to
struggle. At its highest political expression this is manifested in conscious
internationalism.
It is the elementary task of socialists to stress
the common interest of all working people, and to fight against the insidious devices
of demagogues to divide the workers against each other, along the lines of craft
prejudice, nationalism, racism or chauvinism.
These principles have not changed since the days
when they were explained 160 years ago in The Communist Manifesto: "The
Communists… have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat
as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which
to shape and mould the proletarian movement. The Communists are distinguished
from the other working-class parties by this only: 1) In the national struggles
of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the
front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all
nationality. 2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the
working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and
everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists,
therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute
section of the working-class parties of every country…. On the other hand,
theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage
of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate
general results of the proletarian movement."
The new International will be built out of the
common struggles of mass organisations wherever the working class is organised.
This is a historical law. The IWMA consisted of all the nascent working-class
parties in the world. The Socialist International was created by mass workers'
parties standing proudly upon the principles of Marxism, supported by mass
trade unions. The Communist International too – contrary to popular
misconceptions – was built out of upheavals in the mass workers' parties. It
comprised within its ranks the Bolshevik majority of the Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Party; most of the Independent Social-Democrats who
had formerly been the activists of the German Social-Democratic Party; the
French Socialist Party (which promptly renamed itself the Communist Party); the
Norwegian Labour Party; the majority of the Italian Socialist Party; and even
trade unions like the Spanish CGT and the South Wales Miners' Federation.
As with every one of its precursors, the new
International will be built on the basis of mass organisations, numbering in
today's conditions millions. In the impending struggles, the working class will
once again revive or recreate such organisations. To begin with, it is
inevitable that these will be built around partial, incomplete and reformist
programmes. It will be necessary to support these demands while patiently
explaining their limits. The tactics of the united front and entrism will once
again be on the agenda.
A new mass workers’ international will not simply
grow ready-made out of any single self-styled vanguard organization; rather it
will be a much more complicated process, representing an interaction and fusion
of various schools of thought within the workers’ movement. The pretensions of
any existing socialist group that it, and it alone, is building the future mass
workers’ international completely misses the mark and risks rendering it ultimately
ineffectual.
In supporting every struggle, no matter how
partial, of any section of the working class, the first duty of socialists is
to make concessions to no separate sectarian interest but to broaden the
struggle's immediate objectives towards the general interests of the class as a
whole. Socialists must be the most resolute fighters for the interests of the
class, distinguished only by their understanding of the overall "line of
march" – the perspectives of events.
This means the practice of the transitional method
– an approach largely forgotten by those who have pretensions to Trotskyism
today. All the left tendencies today tend to repeat the formulae of 100 years
ago, agitating in their day-to-day routine for partial reforms, while vaguely
propagandising for Socialism as an abstract long-term goal. What is necessary, as
Trotsky put it, is “to help the masses in daily struggle to find the bridge
between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution”.
The working class moves into action by organising
collectively. The picket line is, after all, an attempt to enforce the
democratically agreed will of the majority. That is a fundamental principle of
any workers’ organisation. The real traditions of democratic centralism have
long been obscured by such factors as the distortions introduced by Stalinist
repression, which became commonly mistaken for the norms of a Leninist revolutionary
party; the authoritarianism of some pseudo-Trotskyist groups; and insufficient
safeguards against the unfortunate tendency within any growing organisation
towards elitism, sycophancy and intrigue.
A workers’ international draws its power from real
unity, something that can only be guaranteed by a healthy democratic internal
regime, based not merely upon the formal constitutional trappings of democratic
centralism but upon a genuinely healthy climate which encourages open debate.
The emergence of temporary groupings and factions over a succession of issues
will be inevitable. Those who seek to avoid honest debate end up in practice
just as undemocratic as those who repress it outright. The principle was best
summed up by Trotsky: march separately, strike together. Free and open
discussion is as necessary to political life as oxygen is to the human body. It
is the indispensable corollary for effective united action.
It is impossible to find a way forward without a
compass, and in politics this means an understanding of the processes at work
in society. Marxists are not clairvoyants, and there is nothing magical about
their method, but to understand complex processes a dialectical approach is
needed which takes into account the limitations of formal logic, and the value
of such concepts as the unity of opposites, the transition from quantity to
quality, development through contradiction, and the science of perspectives.
And the first condition for a clear perspective is the maximum input of
information from all sources and the crucial corrective of free and open
discussion, in which ideas can be constantly asserted, challenged, corrected
and abandoned. Without such vital safeguards, even the most eminent authority
can prove fatally fallible – as is shown most graphically by the experience of
the CWI.
There are times when it is easy to predict the
course of events: during prolonged periods of relative stability when the main
underlying trends have been proven over and over. There are also periods of
flux when society is passing through uncharted waters, and undue dogmatism in
such circumstances can prove dangerous. The last two decades have been
contradictory and paradoxical, and in such conditions it was necessary to
develop an approach towards perspectives that was more conditional and
provisional than in the past.
Today the outlines of future events are beginning
to come into sharper focus.
Without the necessary corrective of constant review
and debate, no political leadership can avoid for long the risk of catastrophic
mistakes. A revolutionary tendency that continually proclaims that huge events
are impending will burn out its members. Yet equally a revolutionary tendency that
is not prepared to recognise a sudden change, an acceleration in mass
consciousness, will be left behind by events.
Together with the widespread revulsion at
capitalism that has sprung up recently has come a sudden thirst for ideas.
Through personal contacts, our discussion list, and local discussion meetings,
it is becoming easier every day to convince contacts and especially young
people of the relevance of socialist ideas. We can begin to organise as a
coherent tendency, not with grandiose pretensions or sectarian prejudices, but
in the hope of joining forces with individual militants and groupings which
genuinely strive towards the same objectives.
We do not ask members of existing organisations to
turn their backs on them; on the contrary, we urge them to raise within their
ranks those issues which are crucial to the future of the working class. The
main cadres for the future International, however, will by definition be fresh
young forces, untainted by previous disappointments or delusions, and free from
old allegiances and habits. That is why we do not see it as our principal task
to engineer regroupments of retired veterans or new permutations of past
failures. Many of the old warriors are battle-weary, tired and blasé. Our
overriding task in the great events that lie ahead is to help a new generation
learn from the history of the workers’ movement, winning in common struggle,
and by patient explanation, the best young militants to these ideas.
The tasks facing socialists today are not those of
1938 – to lay claim to rightful leadership of a working class that was already organisationally
and politically mobilised – but to rebuild a worldwide movement of the working
class in the new conditions of the age. New organisations of struggle and new
political alignments are needed, both in countries with long-established
traditions and above all on new geographical terrain. The main obstacle
standing in the way of revolution is no longer the treachery of a corrupt
bureaucracy, but the lack of political confidence of the working class
itself.
In contrast to those pseudo-revolutionaries who habitually
wreck any initiatives that are outside their control, or toy dangerously with
communal or nationalist politics, there remain some surviving fragments from
the best Marxist traditions of the past which still embody elements of our
common heritage, and still play a worthwhile role in terms of theoretical
education or general propaganda. The main obstacle to working with these groups
is the difficulty they have in coming to terms with the new tasks of the day,
as distinct from their familiar routines inherited from the era that began in
1938. This misconception has led them to a predisposition towards messianic
pretensions and a tendency, with the best of intentions, to put their own sectarian
interests before those of the class as a whole.
In their day, Marx and Engels had to pit their
scientific socialist ideas against the pet remedies of a range of cheap charlatans
and snake-oil salesmen. They had to challenge the quackery of Duhring, the
opportunism of Lassalle, the adventurism of Blanqui, the confused posturing of
Bakunin, etc. The workers’ movement was many times put in peril by the cowardice,
vanity or treachery of such characters, by honest mistakes or even by personal
crimes... but by nothing more sinister than that.
In the twentieth century, things were very
different. In country after country, the working class was drowned in blood,
due to conscious betrayal by two entire social castes – the reformist
bureaucracy of the Second International and the Stalinist bureaucracy of the
Third International – both exploiting the trust of the class, both having a
material interest in their failure to carry through the revolution, and both armed
to the teeth with limitless resources of money, full-timers, patronage, coercion
and a fiendish police apparatus of repression.
The historical basis for Stalinism has gone, and
the material basis for reformism is severely weakened. The kind of conscious
betrayals that led to the terrible defeats of the twentieth century can no
longer pose the same threat in the epoch that is now opening up. The task
facing socialists today is far closer to that of Marx and Engels in the
mid-nineteenth century than that of Trotsky in the mid-twentieth century.
Marx and Engels succeeded brilliantly, and almost
single-handedly. When the Socialist International was founded in 1889, it
brought together mass parties and mass trade unions, and stood on the
foundation of clear scientific socialist ideas. Its first act was to organise an
international one-day general strike, an event which struck terror into the
ruling class.
Engels wrote with
pride: “Today, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting
forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate
aim... And today’s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and
landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all
countries are united indeed. If only Marx were still by my side to see this
with his own eyes!”
Engels could not have foreseen
the betrayals and defeats that were still to come. But today the conditions
really have arrived for the realisation of the goal for which generations of
socialists have been striving.
The Internationals of the past represented the
composition at each successive stage and the changing character of the working
class of their times. In today’s conditions, it seems strange to recall that the
First International was actually called an association of working men. Even the
Third International was largely concentrated in Europe and, to a limited extent,
Asia. The International that will emerge from the coming struggles will
encompass a new and strengthened working class comprising hundreds of millions
of men and women from all the continents. It will constitute the most
formidable mass movement in history. No force on Earth can stand in its way,
short of the sheer destruction of human society. It will be a privilege to play
a part in its creation.
Preparing for
revolution is a discussion document
published by
the Workers’
International Network, May 2009.
We encourage discussion on this document, feel free to add comments at the end of this page using the "comment" feature.
******************
Some comments on "Preparing for Revolution"
Dear readers,
As we have explained, the organizers of this blog are loosely affiliated with the Workers' International Network (WIN). We have general agreement with the documents published at the top of this blog; The Future International and Preparing for Revolution. We have received some comments on the Preparing for Revolution document which is a discussion document and we welcome a healthy exchange of ideas over its contents.
We would like to encourage our readers to read these documents and share their thoughts on them as well as on comments already made, hopefully we will have more. Unfortunately there is a comment length limit and we are trying to find out if we can increase it but we publish the comments below sent to us by Stephen Morgan. If you would like to respond and your comments are short enough please do so here or on the document above. If they are longer send them to us and we'll see what we can do.
I would like to give some more information to reinforce the arguments in the WIN Preparing for Revolution and Future International documents and also raise a few differences in emphasis with some statements which concerns the “new and old” working class and de-industrialization. At the end of this document I will suggest a few adjustments or edits. I have uploaded it and it is also attached in pdf.
Let me say first of all that I agree with the analysis put forward. I particularly welcome the shift away from the Anglo-centric character of many documents published by the CWI in the past. Another thing is that I think the style of writing makes the ideas is very clear and much more readable and understandable for new youth and workers entering the revolutionary movement.
I also want to say that I agree with the strong emphasis in the documents on the key role of the working class in the developing countries and China in particular. The document excels in the way it explains the quantum shift, which has happened in class relations globally and there is absolutely no doubt that the spectacular growth of the working class in these countries means they will now play a - or the- leading role in the victory of the world socialist revolution.
I think that there is also no doubt about the startling scale of de-industrialization in the older advanced capitalist countries, which the documents explain has contributed to throwing back of the consciousness of the proletariat in the advanced countries. I agree that it is important to emphasize this as a new trend in the development or “de-development” of capitalism compared to the post-war boom.
Where I think the problem lies is that some of the sentences used to emphasize the changes worldwide, could lead to an underestimation of the role which the working class could still play in the advanced capitalist countries and their importance for the world revolution.
In fact, while at the same time as being lifted by the document, at the end, I also felt a little deflated or disheartened because of the impression I got from certain points of emphasis or overemphasis. Despite the excellent description of recent events in Greece and upheavals in other countries, the general impression made on me was that the European working class could no longer play a leading role in the world revolution.
I am exaggerating the point a little, but I came away with a certain feeling that the centre of the world revolution is only in China and whatever happens elsewhere is something of a sideshow. It seemed to be that China would decide everything and until a new International has mass forces in that country, we are simply building up support on the fringes, until the success of the Chinese revolution opens the chance of creating socialist states around the rest of the world.
This is not so much a rational critique as such, but more a description of my subjective feelings, which may be particular to me and not to others. Let me make it clear; I don't think that this is what the document wants to purvey, at all, but I do think that some paragraphs could be rearranged and a few more added to make sure that somebody else, who reads it for the first time, doesn't come away with the same initial impression which I had. I am worried that without a few amendments, the document could leave the way open for a misunderstanding about the situation and the excellent possibilities for the building a new International in advanced countries.
I will quote a few sentences, which I think, when put together, are responsible for leaving a wrong impression in my mind. example, in the “Preparing for Revolution” document, it talks of
“organic changes in the composition of the working class, which have demolished entire communities and partly eroded their militant traditions;” (page 15 - the New International)
Page 14 “the specific weight of the industrial proletariat in society has been eroded.”
Page 13 “The heavy battalions of the industrial working class are no longer to be found for the most part in their traditional strongholds”
Page 12 “The productive industrial hard core of the proletariat has largely disappeared in the traditional metropolitan countries,
Page 13 “The old "metropolitan" countries are no longer necessarily the theatre of world history.”
Page 9 “rapidly de-industrialising countries;” and “the erosion of industrial communities in their traditional strongholds;”
P14 “In a sense, it is in the factories of China, and their nascent underground trade unions, that the future salvation of humankind is being forged right now.” “Preparing for Revolution”
P14 “It is there (China) that we will find the birthplace of the future International.”
To be fair, in most of the sentences the statements are qualified with words like “partly,” “largely,” “for the most part,” “In a sense.” “no longer necessarily” and in one or two paragraphs in the document, the interpretation is qualified even more. However, I don't think that it has been enough to counterbalance the potentially wrong impact the statements could leave, when taken collectively.
I do agree it is well worth highlighting the staggering decline of British capitalism and the degeneration of its Labour leaders. When the document talks of the way in which monetarism and the domination of finance capital has “demolished entire communities and partly eroded their militant traditions,” it is correct and especially true for the UK.
I come from South Wales, which, along with Lancashire and the Walloon area of Belgium, was the first industrialized region in the world. It was founded on mining, metal working and steel. Even in my Grandfather's day, the region had over a quarter of a million miners, out of a total population of about 2 million. This was besides metal, steel and manufacturing industry.
Today, apart from a steel plant and a few large manufacturing sites, nothing is left. Thatcher put the final nail in the coffin. It was devastating. When I go home, I get a hollow feeling, a sense of emptiness, an awareness that something is missing, which was at the core of our culture and can never come back.
Furthermore, to give an example of how the political consciousness of the workers has fallen back and their militant traditions eroded, in 1920, the South Wales Miners' Federation voted to affiliate on bloc to the 3rd International. In the 1930s, they sent a contingent of 300 miners to fight as a brigade in the Spanish Civil War. I remember that as late as the final miner's strike of 1986, the last pensioners, who had scabbed on the 1926 General Strike, were still spat at on the street. Therefore, from personal experience, I agree entirely with the document in its points about this in Britain.
However, although Europe has suffered similar processes to the UK, it has not been on the same scale in most countries. During the early 80's a record came out in the UK called “Ghost Town”. It described the decline of the inner cities, the loss of jobs and increasing violence. It shot to Number 1. It is, indeed the case that the term “ghost town” could be equally applied to areas of Northern France, Southern Belgium or Easter Germany.
However, it is still much less prevalent in other European countries. While France closed some 30% of its industry, others like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland actually expanded industry and jobs and improved their main cities and manufacturing centres - mostly as a result of EU financing. And in some other northern countries, like Austria, (West) Germany, Switzerland and Finland, the economic decline has had much less of a devastating effect. This is also the case for the Scandinavian countries, but I would prefer comrades living there to give us a more accurate picture, since Sweden, in particular, went through a severe economic crisis in 1990-93.
Thatcherite monetarism was not applied evenly across Europe. Not all countries followed it to the same degree and some continued with a largely Keynesian economic policies. It is only now that workers on the continent are facing a sort of “Euro-Thatcherism.” and the Spanish miners struggles have clear parallels to the miners' strike in Britain in 1985-86. But, Spain has not suffered the same industrial decline as the UK, its industrial centres are more intact and their militant traditions have been maintained. Mining in the north has been reduced drastically, as elsewhere in Europe, but the violence of the battles in Asturias, for example, are an indication that the lessons and traditions of the Spanish Civil War have not been entirely lost.
If we compare Spain to the country in the 1930s, it is enormous changed and the working class has been enormously strengthened. In the interwar period, 57% of the population were peasants and 20% worked in industry, much of which was small scale at the time. Now, 30% of the workforce are employed in industry and agricultural accounts for only 5.3% of sectoral employment. The percentage has not come down since 1990. Furthermore, the communities and traditions of the working class appear not to have faced the same devastation as the UK.
Its main industrial regions of Barcelona, Biscay, Madrid, Navarre and Oviedo still produce over half the country's industrial output. Catalonia, which was the bedrock of the Spanish Revolution remains Spain's economic powerhouse and one of Europe's most important industrial regions. Some 85% of companies are still located in Barcelona, which was the fortress of the revolutionary proletariat in the 1930's.
The situation looks similar for neighboring Portugal. Before the War and even into the 1960's it was essentially a developing country. In the 1930's 70% of the population were illiterate. Even at the time of the 1974 Revolution, 40% of the population couldn't read or write. Today, only 10% of the population work in agriculture, compared to 44% in 1974 and 30% of the workforce are employed in industry. The industrial bastions of Lisbon-Setúbal and Porto-Aveiro-Braga in the north appear not only to be intact, but to have expanded in the last 30 years.
Italy too has gone through a transformation, which led it to outstrip France and Britain as manufacturing countries in the 1990s. At the height of the revolutionary crises of 1918-1921, agriculture employed 59% of the working population, while industrial employment stood at 24%. Today, 32% of the work force are in industry and only 5% in agriculture. The “Old Industrial Triangle" of Milan-Turin-Genoa, which is the backbone of Italian industry, is still an area of intense industrial and machinery production.
Germany remains the industrial powerhouse and 4thlargest economy in the world. In 1980, 40% of the workforce was employed in industry. Today that figure has fallen, but still remains at an impressive 30%. The earlier figure was based on the old West Germany and given a reduction of 60% in industrial employment in East Germany, the new figure probably hides a less precipitous fall in the West.
German cities which were bastions of the revolutionary proletariat like Hamburg and Bremen remain strongholds of the working class and centres for the huge shipbuilding industry. Berlin has lost none of its radicalism and the cities of Dortmand, Duisburg and the Dusseldorf are at the core of traditional heartlands of heavy industry, where iron, steel and mining is concentrated around the Ruhrgebiet and Saarland - one of the most important industrial centres in the world. Added to them is the automobile industry in the southwest around Stuttgart and in Bavaria, where BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Opel and Audi have their car plants. Plus, there are the chemical giants like Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst and manufacturers like Siemens and Bosch. I think it is fair to say that the German working class remains one the strongest and most decisive forces in Europe and the world.
The documents correctly stresses the size and importance of the proletariat in Eastern Europe. Figures for the size and weight of the working class in these countries, as a region, are the highest in the world. The Czech Republic has climbed to an amazing to 38% of the workforce in industry, close to the record of Germany in the post-war period. This makes it country with the highest specific weight of the working class in the world. Bulgaria, which was mostly an agricultural country, even under Stalinism, is now 4thwith 35%. In Croatia the percentage of the workforce in industry has grown from 25.4% in 2002 to 31%. Since 1999, in Poland the percentage of workers in industry has leaped from 22% to 29% and in Romania from 25% to 31%. The figure for Slovenia is 35% and Slovakia 29%. Of the Russian satellite countries, Ukraine has been stagnant, but remains at 32% and the Belarus share of the workforce in industry is 35%. Most of these countries are in the EU and part of Europe in all respects and, therefore, I think we should not count them differently.
From a political point of view, especially its historic role in European revolutions, I think we also have to count Russia as part of Europe, without forgetting the effect a new revolution there would also have on Asia and the world. The best figure I have the industrial workforce in Russia is 27.%, although I am a little surprised that it is not more.
Even excluding Russia, the European proletariat and the West European working class on its own, still represents a very large force on the arena of the world revolution. Its percentage of industrial workers is at least as important as the specific weight of the working class in Brazil and China. Indeed, the average percentage of the workers in industry in Europe is higher than these two countries. The latest figures I have, show 14% of the workforce to be in industry in Brazil, making it 98th out of the 120 and close to India, which also has a figure of 14%. Of course, the sheer size of the working class in China gives it a global significance and in terms of percentage share in the economy, the industrial workforce is 28%, just behind Germany with 30%.
Apart from Brazil, many other countries in Latin and Central America now have with large proletariats almost equal to Europe. In Mexico, for example, 24% of the workforce is in industry. Honduras 21%, Eucador 24%, Dominican Republic 24%, Puerto Rico 20%, Venezuela 23%, Argentina 23%, Chile, 23%. The working class is highly concentrated in some countries like Argentina, where half of all industry is situated around Buenos Aires. Mining remains a bedrock of Chilean society and recent student battles are an example of how the working class and youth can recover from the most brutal reaction and how the best revolutionary traditions can be kept alive.
Latin American stands out as the region of the world where socialist ideas still have mass support and are part of the consciousness of the working and much of the peasntry. The legasy of the dictatorships and hatred of US involvement has left a very strong anti-imperialist sentiment, which adds to the mass support for left-wing policies.
Furthermore, the growth of an industrial working class in many countries of Central America makes for an explosive mixture, given the continuing scale of poverty and huge inequalities of wealth. In my opinion, the workers of Southern and Central America are now the most advanced sections of the world proletariat and a key area of the globe for socialist ideas and revolutionary developments.
As regards S.E. Asia, I was a little surprised not to see a larger proportion of workers in industry given the effects of the Asian Tigers and the role of Japan, China and Australia. Nevertheless, the industrialization of Malaysia has been quite amazing and the country now has the second highest concentration of workers in the world, with 36% of the workforce in industry! Taiwan, at n° 2, also has 36%. Indonesia is another key country, because of the size of its population, some 237 million, as well as being the largest Muslim country on Earth. Indonesia has the 4thlargest workforce in the world of 116,500,000 and 16% of them are in industry, making an industrial working class of some 18,500,000. Surprisingly, however, only 24% of the workforce is in industry in South Korea. While the Philippines has really enjoyed a regional economic spin-off and it industrial working class is still only 15% of the workforce.
I decided to try to make some calculations based on the figures I unearthed. However, I am no statistician, so if comrades find discrepancies, please point them out. I chose the top 100 countries with a working class of the same size as revolutionary Russia or more. I decided also to choose countries which play an important local or international role. There are some countries with higher concentrations of the working class, which are not included, but trust me these are small countries with special factors and little specific revolutionary weight like Liechtenstein, Gibraltar, the British Virgin Islands or Greenland.
I found that on this basis, the average share of the industrial working class in the labour force worldwide is 22.5%. 52 countries equal this figure or have a greater percentage.
By region, the average percentage of workers employed in industry is ;
Asia is 23%,
Arab countries 21%,
Latin and Central America 21%,
Western Europe 22%,
Eastern Europe 29%,
Europe Total 25% (Russia incl 28%)
Others 16%,
World average 22.5%
“Others” include developing countries like South Africa, Bangladesh and former Soviet republics. I have not included the US, because I found the way the statistics were broken down and presented made it difficult to calculate properly. I'd prefer to leave it to US comrades to add anything on that because I don't feel knowledgeable enough about the situation in the US and Canada to do so myself.
A few articles, which I have read make the point that the area around the region of North East USA and Southern Canada still remains one of the most important centres of industry and manufacturing in the world. Then there is Silicon Valley and I'd be interested to know about the situation in Pittsburgh and with the mining and oil industries. It certainly also appears that the traditions of radicalism in San Francisco and Oakland are intact!
The full statistics are below. I have tried to be as accurate and consistent as possible. One can Google and get some different results. Often, the same dates aren't available, some figures use industry as percentage of GDP, others exclude mining and construction from industry workforce, etc The figures here are industrial labor force including mining and construction and the principal sources come from Nation Master, Economy Watch and CIA Factbook..
Rank
Country
Value
1. Czech Republic 38.60
2 Malaysia 36.00
3Taiwan 35.90
4 Bulgaria 35.20
5 Slovenia 35.00
6 Belarus 34.70
7 Bosnia and Herzegovina 32.60
8 Ukraine 32
9 Tunisia 31.90
10 Croatia 31.30
11 Iran 31.00
12 Hungary 30.90
13 Italy 30.70
14 Singapore 30.20
15 Montenegro 30.00
16 Bangladesh 30.00
17 Germany 29.70
18 Poland 29.20
19 Lithuania 29.10
20 European Union 28.70
21 Portugal 28.50
22 Sweden 28.20
23 China 27.80
24 Russia 27.50
25 Austria 27.50
26 Slovakia 27.00
27 Turkey 26.20
28 Japan 26.20
29 South Africa 26.00
30 Latvia 25.80
31 Belgium 25.00
32 France 24.30
33 Sri Lanka 24.20
34 Spain 24.00
35 Peru 23.80
36 Korea, South 23.60
37 Switzerland 23.40
38 Mexico 23.4
39 Romania 23.20
40 Chile 23.00
41 El Salvador 23.00
42 Venezuela 23.00
43 Libya 23.00
44 Argentina 23.00
45 Albania 23.00
46 Estonia 22.70
47 Greece 22.40
48 Namibia 22.40
49 Dominican Republic 22.30
50 Iceland 22.20
51 Macedonia 22.10
52 Costa Rica 22.00
53 Palestine 22
54 Saudi Arabia 21.40
55 World 21.40
56 Ecuador 21.20
57 Norway 21.10
58 Australia 21.10
59 Honduras 20.90
60 Serbia 20.50
61 Cyprus 20.50
62 Pakistan 20.30
63 Vietnam 20.30
64 Denmark 20.20
65 Uzbekistan 20.00
66 Ireland 20.00
67 Jordan 20.00
68 Morocco 19.80
69 Thailand 19.70
70 Cuba 19.40
71 Puerto Rico 19.00
72 Nicaragua 19.00
73 New Zealand 19.00
74 Jamaica 19.00
75 Iraq 18.70
76 Paraguay 18.50
77 United Kingdom 18.20
78 Kazakhstan 18.20
79 Netherlands 18.00
80 Bolivia 17.00
81 Egypt 17.00
82 Finland 16.70
83 Syria 16.00
84 Israel 16.00
85 Cambodia 15.90
86 Philippines 15.00
87 Guatemala 15.00
88 Brazil 14.00
90 Uruguay 14.00
91 Turkmenistan 14.00
92 India 14.00
93 Algeria 13.40
94 Colombia 13.00
95 Tajikistan 12.80
96 Indonesia 12.80
97 Kyrgyzstan 12.50
98 Azerbaijan 12.10
99 Nigeria 10.00
100 Zimbabwe 10.00
I think we should add to the figures that because of historical factors and world culture, the success of socialist revolutions in the older capitalist countries like France, Germany or Japan would still have a massive political influence worldwide.
The size of the German proletariat today is the same as at the height of its industrialization in 1870 at the time of the 1st International. Although it climbed dramatically and has fallen by ¼ since it height in 1950, in some ways its specific weight is greater because of the atomization of the peasantry, which in 1870 employed 50% of the population compared to 2% today. I also think that the growth of the service industry cannot be compared to the negative effect of a large backward petty bourgeoisie and peasantry in society throughout Europe, though the document doesn't say that.
Therefore, I think we need to qualify statements like those below and make some edits based on the figures above and because we need to raise the sights of comrades to wealth of possibilities for and importance of building the International anywhere in the world and in the old world.
If it were possible to rearrange things, I would have preferred to have introduced some of the more negative aspects of developments in the advanced capitalist countries after the following paragraph from the Preparing for Revolution document, page 9;
“There has been a huge growth in the size and specific weight of the proletariat everywhere, most spectacularly in many of the former colonial countries, and a remorseless shrinkage in the petit-bourgeoisie, in the wake of monopolisation and the concentration of production in the hands of the super-corporations. The working class is far better educated than previously. Mass communications and the “information revolution” have made the present generation of working people incomparably better informed than their parents and grandparents. The world has drawn together and an international consciousness has arisen that would have been inconceivable before. All these factors have objectively strengthened the proletariat worldwide.”
This is “spot-on,” so to speak. There has obviously never been a more favorable time for building a new International, all over the planet. The objective situation and balance of class forces is something Marx and Engels could never have dreamed of when beginning the task of creating the 1st International. It is even far more favorable than the situations which the revolutionaries of the 3rd and 4th Internationals faced. Today there are 20 countries worldwide with the same size proletariat as Germany had at the time of the Industrial Revolution, 12 of which are in Europe. Imagine if Marx and Engels had looked about themselves and seen 12 “Germanies.” Clearly, it is a marvelous time to be a Marxist.
So below are suggested just a few edits for discussion:
Page 12 “The productive industrial hard core of the proletariat has largely disappeared in the traditional metropolitan countries,
Suggested edit “The share of industry in the economy has been reduced in Europe, but the productive industrial hard core of the proletariat remains mostly intact”
Page 13 “The old "metropolitan" countries are no longer necessarily the theatre of world history.”
Suggested edit “The old "metropolitan" countries can still play a key role on the theatre of world history.”
Page 14 “the specific weight of the industrial proletariat in society has been eroded.”
Suggested edit “the specific weight of the industrial proletariat in society has been eroded, but is still higher worldwide than at any other time in history, including in many advanced countries. However, there are major exceptions like the UK, where de-industrization has gone much further and is a warning of the what is to come.”
P14 “In a sense, it is in the factories of China, and their nascent underground trade unions, that the future salvation of humankind is being forged right now.”
Suggested ADD ON “Yet in the modern world, revolution can break out anywhere and as we saw in the Arab Spring, it can spread like wildfire across continents and influence new anti-capitalist movements like Los Indignados in Spain, the Wisconsin union battles in the US and Occupy movements all across the world.”
P14 “It is there (China) that we will find the birthplace of the future International.”
Suggested edit “It may well be, that it is there (China) that we will find the birthplace of the future International. However, given the extremely favorable situations in the Americas, Asia or Europe, movements there could just as well provide us with the impetus to begin forming the organizational forces of world revolution”
Let me finish by reiterating the point, that I agree entirely that we should highlight the key role of China (not to do so would be like Marx ignoring Germany or Britain at the founding of the 1st International) and also pointing to the qualitatively new tendency towards de-industrialization and its negative consequences for political and class consciousness. Not to do that also would leave us theoretically and organizationally rudderless in the face of coming storms.
I hope that I am not guilty of nostalgia here or Eurocentrism and I don't want to twist the real situation, in order to try to rally the forces of a combat organization like the CWI has done. Nevertheless, I think that without qualifying things a little, we could face the danger of underestimating the urgency and importance of building the forces of a new International in the old advanced capitalist countries and their crucial role in the coming world revolution.
Stephen Morgan July 10th 2012
As we have explained, the organizers of this blog are loosely affiliated with the Workers' International Network (WIN). We have general agreement with the documents published at the top of this blog; The Future International and Preparing for Revolution. We have received some comments on the Preparing for Revolution document which is a discussion document and we welcome a healthy exchange of ideas over its contents.
We would like to encourage our readers to read these documents and share their thoughts on them as well as on comments already made, hopefully we will have more. Unfortunately there is a comment length limit and we are trying to find out if we can increase it but we publish the comments below sent to us by Stephen Morgan. If you would like to respond and your comments are short enough please do so here or on the document above. If they are longer send them to us and we'll see what we can do.
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I would like to give some more information to reinforce the arguments in the WIN Preparing for Revolution and Future International documents and also raise a few differences in emphasis with some statements which concerns the “new and old” working class and de-industrialization. At the end of this document I will suggest a few adjustments or edits. I have uploaded it and it is also attached in pdf.
Let me say first of all that I agree with the analysis put forward. I particularly welcome the shift away from the Anglo-centric character of many documents published by the CWI in the past. Another thing is that I think the style of writing makes the ideas is very clear and much more readable and understandable for new youth and workers entering the revolutionary movement.
I also want to say that I agree with the strong emphasis in the documents on the key role of the working class in the developing countries and China in particular. The document excels in the way it explains the quantum shift, which has happened in class relations globally and there is absolutely no doubt that the spectacular growth of the working class in these countries means they will now play a - or the- leading role in the victory of the world socialist revolution.
I think that there is also no doubt about the startling scale of de-industrialization in the older advanced capitalist countries, which the documents explain has contributed to throwing back of the consciousness of the proletariat in the advanced countries. I agree that it is important to emphasize this as a new trend in the development or “de-development” of capitalism compared to the post-war boom.
Where I think the problem lies is that some of the sentences used to emphasize the changes worldwide, could lead to an underestimation of the role which the working class could still play in the advanced capitalist countries and their importance for the world revolution.
In fact, while at the same time as being lifted by the document, at the end, I also felt a little deflated or disheartened because of the impression I got from certain points of emphasis or overemphasis. Despite the excellent description of recent events in Greece and upheavals in other countries, the general impression made on me was that the European working class could no longer play a leading role in the world revolution.
I am exaggerating the point a little, but I came away with a certain feeling that the centre of the world revolution is only in China and whatever happens elsewhere is something of a sideshow. It seemed to be that China would decide everything and until a new International has mass forces in that country, we are simply building up support on the fringes, until the success of the Chinese revolution opens the chance of creating socialist states around the rest of the world.
This is not so much a rational critique as such, but more a description of my subjective feelings, which may be particular to me and not to others. Let me make it clear; I don't think that this is what the document wants to purvey, at all, but I do think that some paragraphs could be rearranged and a few more added to make sure that somebody else, who reads it for the first time, doesn't come away with the same initial impression which I had. I am worried that without a few amendments, the document could leave the way open for a misunderstanding about the situation and the excellent possibilities for the building a new International in advanced countries.
I will quote a few sentences, which I think, when put together, are responsible for leaving a wrong impression in my mind. example, in the “Preparing for Revolution” document, it talks of
“organic changes in the composition of the working class, which have demolished entire communities and partly eroded their militant traditions;” (page 15 - the New International)
Page 14 “the specific weight of the industrial proletariat in society has been eroded.”
Page 13 “The heavy battalions of the industrial working class are no longer to be found for the most part in their traditional strongholds”
Page 12 “The productive industrial hard core of the proletariat has largely disappeared in the traditional metropolitan countries,
Page 13 “The old "metropolitan" countries are no longer necessarily the theatre of world history.”
Page 9 “rapidly de-industrialising countries;” and “the erosion of industrial communities in their traditional strongholds;”
P14 “In a sense, it is in the factories of China, and their nascent underground trade unions, that the future salvation of humankind is being forged right now.” “Preparing for Revolution”
P14 “It is there (China) that we will find the birthplace of the future International.”
To be fair, in most of the sentences the statements are qualified with words like “partly,” “largely,” “for the most part,” “In a sense.” “no longer necessarily” and in one or two paragraphs in the document, the interpretation is qualified even more. However, I don't think that it has been enough to counterbalance the potentially wrong impact the statements could leave, when taken collectively.
I do agree it is well worth highlighting the staggering decline of British capitalism and the degeneration of its Labour leaders. When the document talks of the way in which monetarism and the domination of finance capital has “demolished entire communities and partly eroded their militant traditions,” it is correct and especially true for the UK.
I come from South Wales, which, along with Lancashire and the Walloon area of Belgium, was the first industrialized region in the world. It was founded on mining, metal working and steel. Even in my Grandfather's day, the region had over a quarter of a million miners, out of a total population of about 2 million. This was besides metal, steel and manufacturing industry.
Today, apart from a steel plant and a few large manufacturing sites, nothing is left. Thatcher put the final nail in the coffin. It was devastating. When I go home, I get a hollow feeling, a sense of emptiness, an awareness that something is missing, which was at the core of our culture and can never come back.
Furthermore, to give an example of how the political consciousness of the workers has fallen back and their militant traditions eroded, in 1920, the South Wales Miners' Federation voted to affiliate on bloc to the 3rd International. In the 1930s, they sent a contingent of 300 miners to fight as a brigade in the Spanish Civil War. I remember that as late as the final miner's strike of 1986, the last pensioners, who had scabbed on the 1926 General Strike, were still spat at on the street. Therefore, from personal experience, I agree entirely with the document in its points about this in Britain.
However, although Europe has suffered similar processes to the UK, it has not been on the same scale in most countries. During the early 80's a record came out in the UK called “Ghost Town”. It described the decline of the inner cities, the loss of jobs and increasing violence. It shot to Number 1. It is, indeed the case that the term “ghost town” could be equally applied to areas of Northern France, Southern Belgium or Easter Germany.
However, it is still much less prevalent in other European countries. While France closed some 30% of its industry, others like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland actually expanded industry and jobs and improved their main cities and manufacturing centres - mostly as a result of EU financing. And in some other northern countries, like Austria, (West) Germany, Switzerland and Finland, the economic decline has had much less of a devastating effect. This is also the case for the Scandinavian countries, but I would prefer comrades living there to give us a more accurate picture, since Sweden, in particular, went through a severe economic crisis in 1990-93.
Thatcherite monetarism was not applied evenly across Europe. Not all countries followed it to the same degree and some continued with a largely Keynesian economic policies. It is only now that workers on the continent are facing a sort of “Euro-Thatcherism.” and the Spanish miners struggles have clear parallels to the miners' strike in Britain in 1985-86. But, Spain has not suffered the same industrial decline as the UK, its industrial centres are more intact and their militant traditions have been maintained. Mining in the north has been reduced drastically, as elsewhere in Europe, but the violence of the battles in Asturias, for example, are an indication that the lessons and traditions of the Spanish Civil War have not been entirely lost.
If we compare Spain to the country in the 1930s, it is enormous changed and the working class has been enormously strengthened. In the interwar period, 57% of the population were peasants and 20% worked in industry, much of which was small scale at the time. Now, 30% of the workforce are employed in industry and agricultural accounts for only 5.3% of sectoral employment. The percentage has not come down since 1990. Furthermore, the communities and traditions of the working class appear not to have faced the same devastation as the UK.
Its main industrial regions of Barcelona, Biscay, Madrid, Navarre and Oviedo still produce over half the country's industrial output. Catalonia, which was the bedrock of the Spanish Revolution remains Spain's economic powerhouse and one of Europe's most important industrial regions. Some 85% of companies are still located in Barcelona, which was the fortress of the revolutionary proletariat in the 1930's.
The situation looks similar for neighboring Portugal. Before the War and even into the 1960's it was essentially a developing country. In the 1930's 70% of the population were illiterate. Even at the time of the 1974 Revolution, 40% of the population couldn't read or write. Today, only 10% of the population work in agriculture, compared to 44% in 1974 and 30% of the workforce are employed in industry. The industrial bastions of Lisbon-Setúbal and Porto-Aveiro-Braga in the north appear not only to be intact, but to have expanded in the last 30 years.
Italy too has gone through a transformation, which led it to outstrip France and Britain as manufacturing countries in the 1990s. At the height of the revolutionary crises of 1918-1921, agriculture employed 59% of the working population, while industrial employment stood at 24%. Today, 32% of the work force are in industry and only 5% in agriculture. The “Old Industrial Triangle" of Milan-Turin-Genoa, which is the backbone of Italian industry, is still an area of intense industrial and machinery production.
Germany remains the industrial powerhouse and 4thlargest economy in the world. In 1980, 40% of the workforce was employed in industry. Today that figure has fallen, but still remains at an impressive 30%. The earlier figure was based on the old West Germany and given a reduction of 60% in industrial employment in East Germany, the new figure probably hides a less precipitous fall in the West.
German cities which were bastions of the revolutionary proletariat like Hamburg and Bremen remain strongholds of the working class and centres for the huge shipbuilding industry. Berlin has lost none of its radicalism and the cities of Dortmand, Duisburg and the Dusseldorf are at the core of traditional heartlands of heavy industry, where iron, steel and mining is concentrated around the Ruhrgebiet and Saarland - one of the most important industrial centres in the world. Added to them is the automobile industry in the southwest around Stuttgart and in Bavaria, where BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Opel and Audi have their car plants. Plus, there are the chemical giants like Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst and manufacturers like Siemens and Bosch. I think it is fair to say that the German working class remains one the strongest and most decisive forces in Europe and the world.
The documents correctly stresses the size and importance of the proletariat in Eastern Europe. Figures for the size and weight of the working class in these countries, as a region, are the highest in the world. The Czech Republic has climbed to an amazing to 38% of the workforce in industry, close to the record of Germany in the post-war period. This makes it country with the highest specific weight of the working class in the world. Bulgaria, which was mostly an agricultural country, even under Stalinism, is now 4thwith 35%. In Croatia the percentage of the workforce in industry has grown from 25.4% in 2002 to 31%. Since 1999, in Poland the percentage of workers in industry has leaped from 22% to 29% and in Romania from 25% to 31%. The figure for Slovenia is 35% and Slovakia 29%. Of the Russian satellite countries, Ukraine has been stagnant, but remains at 32% and the Belarus share of the workforce in industry is 35%. Most of these countries are in the EU and part of Europe in all respects and, therefore, I think we should not count them differently.
From a political point of view, especially its historic role in European revolutions, I think we also have to count Russia as part of Europe, without forgetting the effect a new revolution there would also have on Asia and the world. The best figure I have the industrial workforce in Russia is 27.%, although I am a little surprised that it is not more.
Even excluding Russia, the European proletariat and the West European working class on its own, still represents a very large force on the arena of the world revolution. Its percentage of industrial workers is at least as important as the specific weight of the working class in Brazil and China. Indeed, the average percentage of the workers in industry in Europe is higher than these two countries. The latest figures I have, show 14% of the workforce to be in industry in Brazil, making it 98th out of the 120 and close to India, which also has a figure of 14%. Of course, the sheer size of the working class in China gives it a global significance and in terms of percentage share in the economy, the industrial workforce is 28%, just behind Germany with 30%.
Apart from Brazil, many other countries in Latin and Central America now have with large proletariats almost equal to Europe. In Mexico, for example, 24% of the workforce is in industry. Honduras 21%, Eucador 24%, Dominican Republic 24%, Puerto Rico 20%, Venezuela 23%, Argentina 23%, Chile, 23%. The working class is highly concentrated in some countries like Argentina, where half of all industry is situated around Buenos Aires. Mining remains a bedrock of Chilean society and recent student battles are an example of how the working class and youth can recover from the most brutal reaction and how the best revolutionary traditions can be kept alive.
Latin American stands out as the region of the world where socialist ideas still have mass support and are part of the consciousness of the working and much of the peasntry. The legasy of the dictatorships and hatred of US involvement has left a very strong anti-imperialist sentiment, which adds to the mass support for left-wing policies.
Furthermore, the growth of an industrial working class in many countries of Central America makes for an explosive mixture, given the continuing scale of poverty and huge inequalities of wealth. In my opinion, the workers of Southern and Central America are now the most advanced sections of the world proletariat and a key area of the globe for socialist ideas and revolutionary developments.
As regards S.E. Asia, I was a little surprised not to see a larger proportion of workers in industry given the effects of the Asian Tigers and the role of Japan, China and Australia. Nevertheless, the industrialization of Malaysia has been quite amazing and the country now has the second highest concentration of workers in the world, with 36% of the workforce in industry! Taiwan, at n° 2, also has 36%. Indonesia is another key country, because of the size of its population, some 237 million, as well as being the largest Muslim country on Earth. Indonesia has the 4thlargest workforce in the world of 116,500,000 and 16% of them are in industry, making an industrial working class of some 18,500,000. Surprisingly, however, only 24% of the workforce is in industry in South Korea. While the Philippines has really enjoyed a regional economic spin-off and it industrial working class is still only 15% of the workforce.
I decided to try to make some calculations based on the figures I unearthed. However, I am no statistician, so if comrades find discrepancies, please point them out. I chose the top 100 countries with a working class of the same size as revolutionary Russia or more. I decided also to choose countries which play an important local or international role. There are some countries with higher concentrations of the working class, which are not included, but trust me these are small countries with special factors and little specific revolutionary weight like Liechtenstein, Gibraltar, the British Virgin Islands or Greenland.
I found that on this basis, the average share of the industrial working class in the labour force worldwide is 22.5%. 52 countries equal this figure or have a greater percentage.
By region, the average percentage of workers employed in industry is ;
Asia is 23%,
Arab countries 21%,
Latin and Central America 21%,
Western Europe 22%,
Eastern Europe 29%,
Europe Total 25% (Russia incl 28%)
Others 16%,
World average 22.5%
“Others” include developing countries like South Africa, Bangladesh and former Soviet republics. I have not included the US, because I found the way the statistics were broken down and presented made it difficult to calculate properly. I'd prefer to leave it to US comrades to add anything on that because I don't feel knowledgeable enough about the situation in the US and Canada to do so myself.
A few articles, which I have read make the point that the area around the region of North East USA and Southern Canada still remains one of the most important centres of industry and manufacturing in the world. Then there is Silicon Valley and I'd be interested to know about the situation in Pittsburgh and with the mining and oil industries. It certainly also appears that the traditions of radicalism in San Francisco and Oakland are intact!
The full statistics are below. I have tried to be as accurate and consistent as possible. One can Google and get some different results. Often, the same dates aren't available, some figures use industry as percentage of GDP, others exclude mining and construction from industry workforce, etc The figures here are industrial labor force including mining and construction and the principal sources come from Nation Master, Economy Watch and CIA Factbook..
Rank
Country
Value
1. Czech Republic 38.60
2 Malaysia 36.00
3Taiwan 35.90
4 Bulgaria 35.20
5 Slovenia 35.00
6 Belarus 34.70
7 Bosnia and Herzegovina 32.60
8 Ukraine 32
9 Tunisia 31.90
10 Croatia 31.30
11 Iran 31.00
12 Hungary 30.90
13 Italy 30.70
14 Singapore 30.20
15 Montenegro 30.00
16 Bangladesh 30.00
17 Germany 29.70
18 Poland 29.20
19 Lithuania 29.10
20 European Union 28.70
21 Portugal 28.50
22 Sweden 28.20
23 China 27.80
24 Russia 27.50
25 Austria 27.50
26 Slovakia 27.00
27 Turkey 26.20
28 Japan 26.20
29 South Africa 26.00
30 Latvia 25.80
31 Belgium 25.00
32 France 24.30
33 Sri Lanka 24.20
34 Spain 24.00
35 Peru 23.80
36 Korea, South 23.60
37 Switzerland 23.40
38 Mexico 23.4
39 Romania 23.20
40 Chile 23.00
41 El Salvador 23.00
42 Venezuela 23.00
43 Libya 23.00
44 Argentina 23.00
45 Albania 23.00
46 Estonia 22.70
47 Greece 22.40
48 Namibia 22.40
49 Dominican Republic 22.30
50 Iceland 22.20
51 Macedonia 22.10
52 Costa Rica 22.00
53 Palestine 22
54 Saudi Arabia 21.40
55 World 21.40
56 Ecuador 21.20
57 Norway 21.10
58 Australia 21.10
59 Honduras 20.90
60 Serbia 20.50
61 Cyprus 20.50
62 Pakistan 20.30
63 Vietnam 20.30
64 Denmark 20.20
65 Uzbekistan 20.00
66 Ireland 20.00
67 Jordan 20.00
68 Morocco 19.80
69 Thailand 19.70
70 Cuba 19.40
71 Puerto Rico 19.00
72 Nicaragua 19.00
73 New Zealand 19.00
74 Jamaica 19.00
75 Iraq 18.70
76 Paraguay 18.50
77 United Kingdom 18.20
78 Kazakhstan 18.20
79 Netherlands 18.00
80 Bolivia 17.00
81 Egypt 17.00
82 Finland 16.70
83 Syria 16.00
84 Israel 16.00
85 Cambodia 15.90
86 Philippines 15.00
87 Guatemala 15.00
88 Brazil 14.00
90 Uruguay 14.00
91 Turkmenistan 14.00
92 India 14.00
93 Algeria 13.40
94 Colombia 13.00
95 Tajikistan 12.80
96 Indonesia 12.80
97 Kyrgyzstan 12.50
98 Azerbaijan 12.10
99 Nigeria 10.00
100 Zimbabwe 10.00
I think we should add to the figures that because of historical factors and world culture, the success of socialist revolutions in the older capitalist countries like France, Germany or Japan would still have a massive political influence worldwide.
The size of the German proletariat today is the same as at the height of its industrialization in 1870 at the time of the 1st International. Although it climbed dramatically and has fallen by ¼ since it height in 1950, in some ways its specific weight is greater because of the atomization of the peasantry, which in 1870 employed 50% of the population compared to 2% today. I also think that the growth of the service industry cannot be compared to the negative effect of a large backward petty bourgeoisie and peasantry in society throughout Europe, though the document doesn't say that.
Therefore, I think we need to qualify statements like those below and make some edits based on the figures above and because we need to raise the sights of comrades to wealth of possibilities for and importance of building the International anywhere in the world and in the old world.
If it were possible to rearrange things, I would have preferred to have introduced some of the more negative aspects of developments in the advanced capitalist countries after the following paragraph from the Preparing for Revolution document, page 9;
“There has been a huge growth in the size and specific weight of the proletariat everywhere, most spectacularly in many of the former colonial countries, and a remorseless shrinkage in the petit-bourgeoisie, in the wake of monopolisation and the concentration of production in the hands of the super-corporations. The working class is far better educated than previously. Mass communications and the “information revolution” have made the present generation of working people incomparably better informed than their parents and grandparents. The world has drawn together and an international consciousness has arisen that would have been inconceivable before. All these factors have objectively strengthened the proletariat worldwide.”
This is “spot-on,” so to speak. There has obviously never been a more favorable time for building a new International, all over the planet. The objective situation and balance of class forces is something Marx and Engels could never have dreamed of when beginning the task of creating the 1st International. It is even far more favorable than the situations which the revolutionaries of the 3rd and 4th Internationals faced. Today there are 20 countries worldwide with the same size proletariat as Germany had at the time of the Industrial Revolution, 12 of which are in Europe. Imagine if Marx and Engels had looked about themselves and seen 12 “Germanies.” Clearly, it is a marvelous time to be a Marxist.
So below are suggested just a few edits for discussion:
Page 12 “The productive industrial hard core of the proletariat has largely disappeared in the traditional metropolitan countries,
Suggested edit “The share of industry in the economy has been reduced in Europe, but the productive industrial hard core of the proletariat remains mostly intact”
Page 13 “The old "metropolitan" countries are no longer necessarily the theatre of world history.”
Suggested edit “The old "metropolitan" countries can still play a key role on the theatre of world history.”
Page 14 “the specific weight of the industrial proletariat in society has been eroded.”
Suggested edit “the specific weight of the industrial proletariat in society has been eroded, but is still higher worldwide than at any other time in history, including in many advanced countries. However, there are major exceptions like the UK, where de-industrization has gone much further and is a warning of the what is to come.”
P14 “In a sense, it is in the factories of China, and their nascent underground trade unions, that the future salvation of humankind is being forged right now.”
Suggested ADD ON “Yet in the modern world, revolution can break out anywhere and as we saw in the Arab Spring, it can spread like wildfire across continents and influence new anti-capitalist movements like Los Indignados in Spain, the Wisconsin union battles in the US and Occupy movements all across the world.”
P14 “It is there (China) that we will find the birthplace of the future International.”
Suggested edit “It may well be, that it is there (China) that we will find the birthplace of the future International. However, given the extremely favorable situations in the Americas, Asia or Europe, movements there could just as well provide us with the impetus to begin forming the organizational forces of world revolution”
Let me finish by reiterating the point, that I agree entirely that we should highlight the key role of China (not to do so would be like Marx ignoring Germany or Britain at the founding of the 1st International) and also pointing to the qualitatively new tendency towards de-industrialization and its negative consequences for political and class consciousness. Not to do that also would leave us theoretically and organizationally rudderless in the face of coming storms.
I hope that I am not guilty of nostalgia here or Eurocentrism and I don't want to twist the real situation, in order to try to rally the forces of a combat organization like the CWI has done. Nevertheless, I think that without qualifying things a little, we could face the danger of underestimating the urgency and importance of building the forces of a new International in the old advanced capitalist countries and their crucial role in the coming world revolution.
Stephen Morgan July 10th 2012
1 comment:
We do not have to do anything to overthrow the elite ruling class. We just have to stop doing what we have been doing - cooperating. Without our cooperation they have no money and no power, they would soon have to serve in order to survive.
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