PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The Indian Institute of Marxist Studies has produced this booklet compiling articles, speeches, notes and interviews representing CPI(ML)’s views on imperialist globalisation and the Party's commitment to the vision of glorious socialist future of the humankind.
Arindam Sen is a Central Committee Member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and Director of Indian Institute of Marxist Studies.
Vinod Mishra was General Secretary of CPI(ML) from 1974 to the day of his untimely demise on 18 December 1998.
Dipankar Bhattacharya is the General Secretary of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)
DO we really want to carry to completion the work left unfinished by Carlo Giuliani, Rachel Corrie, Lee Kyang Hai
IN March 1999, the cover of the New York Times magazine displayed a giant clenched fist painted in the stars and stripes of the US flag above the words: ‘What The World Needs Now: For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is’. The cover story by Thomas Friedman, author of pro-globalisation bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree, urged the United States to embrace its role as enforcer of the capitalist global order: ‘... the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. … The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.’ This was not a lone voice; many people like Martin Wolfe, Robert Kaplan and others began to stress the need for a ‘new imperialism’. Evidently, on the eve of a new century and a presidential change-over, America was preparing for the big leap in world domination — frantically searching for excuses and scapegoats, which would soon be discovered in 9/11 and Saddam’s fabled WMDs.
To see the new development in proper perspective, let us note that from the time of its founding in 1776 with 13 British colonies on the east coast, US expansionism has passed through four stages: continental expansion (toward the west coast of the continent; up to the end of the nineteenth century), overseas expansion (from the Spanish war of 1898 to the second world war), semi-colonial and neo-colonial domination (up to the end of cold war) and the current phase of unabashed empire-building. A distinct feature of the historical evolution of USA as a great power lay in its emphasis on trade, foreign investment, aid (mostly state loans) and banking and finance rather than on grabbing colonies (as was the case with older powers like Spain, France, England etc). Even during the phase of overseas expansion, it acquired few colonies like Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, preferring instead to extend its sphere of influence over the Caribbean Islands, Central and South America etc. This accent on economic penetration and indirect control enabled the USA (a) to keep aloof from the great wars for redistribution of colonies and avoid the losses suffered by countries like England, France and Germany, even as it reaped enormous profits from “war contracts”, including supply of arms and ammunitions, ships etc. (b) build a huge military-industrial complex in the process and (c) to outshine all other competitors when indirect means of control and exploitation remained about the only available ones.
In the wake of WW-II, the US entered upon its third phase of expansion — the extension of hegemony (leadership based on a certain degree of moral authority plus coercion in case of necessity) over the entire capitalist world — by means of the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, WB, GATT), NATO and other mechanisms including military manoeuvres. But in the prevailing political milieu the American imperialists thought it wise to distance themselves from the hated imperial/imperialist legacy. Said President JF Kennedy: “what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced upon the world by our weapons of war”. Kennedy’s successors — Democrats and Republicans alike — more or less followed this line in public utterances, Vietnams notwithstanding. Empire and imperialism remained embarrassing terms in the dominant discourse in the world’s most aggressive imperialist country.
But things changed in the 1990s. Emboldened by the collapse of the other superpower and the international support or muted response to the first war on Iraq, the world’s most powerful, most ambitious bourgeoisie decided to go over to a new phase of aggressive, unilateralist and unabashed empire-building. While the Democrat Clinton presided over a series of aggressions — Somalia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq (punitive air strikes, effective domination over a third of the country via Kurdish agents in the north and “no-fly zones” in the south and economic blockade to destroy the state and the economy) — and took measures like passing the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, Republican hawks were busy working out a complete, long-term strategy as well as an immediate programme of world domination. Three landmark developments in this regard were: (a) the Project for New American Century or PNAC founded by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Olfowitz in 1997, (b) the strategy of “full-spectrum dominance” contained in the PNAC policy document “Rebuilding America's Defenses” (2000) and (c) the “National Security Strategy” adopted by the Bush administration in September 2002 which put forward the doctrine of preventive strike. The ruling consensus was very clearly expressed in this 1998 remark of Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.” With authentic organs of the bourgeoisie (New York Times as mentioned above, and others like Wall Street Journal, Washington Post etc.) taking the lead, terms and phrases like benevolent/soft imperialism, imperial preference, “The Case for American Empire”
It was this planned political build-up that continued into the wars over Afghanistan and Iraq. Arrogant unilateralism of the solitary superpower manifested itself also in acts like rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on environmental controls on industry, bullying of sovereign states like Syria while shamelessly supporting the rogue state of Israel, total disregard shown to the UN and the International Criminal Court, and so on.
IN keeping with the Roman pretensions of his administration, Bush often speaks as if he were a modern Caligula (the Roman emperor who reigned from 37 to 41 AD and who wanted to appoint his horse to the Senate). In the second presidential debate on October 11, 2000, Bush said, “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator. “A little more than a year later, he replied to a question by the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, “I’m the commander — see, I don’t need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” - Bob Woodward, Bush at War
Is there anything incongruous about this apparently stupid shift from a hegemonic policy of manufacturing consent, which had earned Washington considerable support bases around the world, to unilateralism and overt empire-building? Not really. Left to itself, capital is limitlessly and savagely voracious; it operates within limits only to the extent it is so compelled. During the first few decades after WW-II, two things — the aroused anti-imperialism of Third World peoples and the enhanced power and appeal of socialism — actually forced capital’s strongest state to enter into a ‘New Deal’ with the American working class and take the indirect route of aggrandising itself in the process of preserving and leading the entire capitalist world in opposition to the socialist challenger. The compulsions were removed with the gradual corruption of the first force by the ruling elites and the great setback of the second. Unchained, and egged on by its own internal crises, the beast pounced on the prey: the resources, the masses and the markets of mother earth. Having colonised Afghanistan and Iraq and established military bases in about 140 of the 189 member countries of the UN, Washington was now actively pursuing a time-bound programme of colonising the space. After the dreaded swastika logo, the Statue of Liberty became the new mascot of anti-people empire.
Yes, it is not for nothing that Gorge W Bush has been rechristened the Hitler of 21st century. Nor is it simply a matter of this war criminal’s personal bent of mind. At work in American society and polity are deeper and more long-term processes or trends which can only be termed fascist.
Full-blown fascism, or fascism in power, means negation of bourgeois democracy and open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most aggressive sections of imperialist finance capital. But fascism does not come to power in a day. It crops up on the soil of bourgeois parliamentarism (both Hitler and Mussolini were, to start with, elected heads of governments), gradually corrupts and erodes it from within, and if not resisted in time, usurps dictatorial powers at an opportune moment of ‘national crisis’. Fascism fans up racist/national chauvinist/fundamentalist fanaticism directed against some imagined ‘enemy of the state’ to mobilise popular support for the fascist project. Such a project expresses itself in foreign policy as aggressive expansionism and domestically as extreme attacks on people’s livelihood and political rights, together with state-sponsored bonanza for millionaires, particularly those in strategic and war-related sectors.
All these symptoms or features of a fascist tendency, a fascist buildup, are quite prominent in the US today:
“In February 2003, Bush proposed a fiscal year 2004 budget with a $951 billion tax cut package over the next decade that would primariiy benefit millionaires, push the federal budget to a record deficit in fiscal year 2004 and destroy 750,000 more jobs over the next 10 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In May, Congress passed a $320 billion tax measure that gave the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans an average of almost $100,000 in tax reductions over the next four years.”
All this stands in stark contrast against massive tax-cuts, protective tariffs, bail-out operations for corrupt corporations etc. the rich-poor gap is growing at an alarming rate, and 13,000 richest families in US now have almost as much income as the 20million poorest.
To take serious note of these symptoms is not to suggest that a fascist takeover is imminent in the US. Apart from ordinary women and men, considerable sections of the American capitalist class are opposed to the dangerous ways of the ruling dispensation and a partial reversal of the hawkish policies after next presidential election cannot be ruled out. But we have drawn attention to the fascist tenets because to build up an effective resistance and to carry it to its logical conclusion – to the demolition of the imperial regime itself- the enemy must be known and exposed for what it is. And to gain a better understanding on this score, we must extend our study to cover the broader category of imperialism, of which the US empire-builders are the most obnoxious product.
Imperialism is a term that was first popularised by bourgeois economists and then taken over by Marxist theoreticians. Drawing on works like Imperialism (1902) by JA Hobson, a bourgeois social reformist and pacifist, Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital (1910) and Russian Marxist NI Bukharin’s Imperialism and the World Economy (1915), Lenin produced the celebrated Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (April 1917). “... Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat”, he observed, on the basis of a thorough study of “the economic essence of imperialism”. The world’s first proletarian socialist revolution took place within six months after the pamphlet was published.
So far as basics are concerned Lenin's Imperialism remains the best aid to understanding the original or defining features of imperialism. Let us now take note of the most important characteristics, which continue from Lenin's time into our own (the following quotes are from this pamphlet, unless otherwise mentioned).
“IF it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”
A special stage in the historical evolution of capitalism – the monopoly stage following that of (so-called) perfect competition investigated by Marx and Engels – this is how Lenin contextualises his specialised study in the general framework of Marxian critique of capitalism.
Monopoly refers, most obviously, to the giant corporations arising out of concentration of production –corporations which have become much more powerful today than in Lenin's time, not only in the economic arena but in the realms of politics and culture too. Thanks to the spate of mergers and acquisitions witnessed during the opening years of the present century, the degree of monopolisation has grown enormously. Just take a look at the business and non-business activities of, say, Rupert Murdoch's ever-expanding media empire and firms like Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Vodafone, etc, look at the way they almost dictate state policy, and you will see why present-day capitalism is best described as monopoly capitalism. In addition, Lenin referred to monopolistic control over sources of major raw materials like coal and petroleum; monopolies in banking and finance (the finance oligarchy) and so on. However, in all these areas, monopolies do not mean the end of competition. Monopoly grows out of, and further accentuates, competition between firms and nations, (trade wars among developed nations, for example) as we can see everyday everywhere.
In addition to monopolisation, Lenin drew attention to several other features of imperialism.
“AS banking develops and becomes concentrated in a small number of establishments, the banks grow from modest middlemen into powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists and small businessmen and also the larger part of the means of production and sources of raw materials in any one country and in a number of countries. This transformation of numerous modest middlemen into a handful of monopolists is one of the fundamental processes in the growth of capitalism into capitalist imperialism; ...”
Banks now take up radically new functions, e.g., that of the stock exchange – managing the issue, sale and repurchase of shares and bonds. “The result is, on the one hand, the ever-growing ... coalescence of bank and industrial capital and, on the other hand, the growth of the banks into institutions of a truly ‘universal character’.”
“THE concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of the banks with industry — such is the history of the rise of finance capital and such is the content of that concept.
Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enormous and ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of stock, state loans, etc., strengthens the domination of the financial oligarchy and levies tribute upon the whole of society for the benefit of monopolists.”
“THE uneven and spasmodic development of individual enterprises, individual branches of industry and individual countries is inevitable under the capitalist system. England became a capitalist country before any other, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, having adopted free trade, claimed to be the “workshop of the world”, the supplier of manufactured goods to all countries, which in exchange were to keep her provided with raw materials. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this monopoly was already undermined; for other countries, sheltering themselves with “protective” tariffs, developed into independent capitalist states. On the threshold of the twentieth century we see the formation of a new type of monopoly, firstly, monopolist associations of capitalists in all capitalistically developed countries; secondly, the monopolist position of a few very rich countries, in which the accumulation of capital has reached gigantic proportions. An enormous “surplus of capital” has arisen in the advanced countries”.
This surplus has to be exported to colonies and dependent countries, and in such measure that export of capital begins to predominate over the export of goods (and services). But capital exported to underdeveloped countries plunders their wealth and ruins them, so in the long run they cannot absorb much of the excess investible funds. Even a reverse flow of capital may begin, as we have seen in recent times.
“...the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still ‘reigns’ and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialised production; but the immense progress of mankind, which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit... the speculators.”
BY the beginning of the 20th century, big capitalist powers like France, Britain etc. had already carved up the less and least developed parts of the globe amongst themselves as colonies, semi-colonies (such as pre-revolutionary China, different parts of which were colonised by Japan, USA, Britain etc.) and spheres of influence, putting on the agenda a struggle for their redivision. Simultaneously, the emerging “trusts and cartels” (the initial forms of MNCs) began to spread their operations in different parts of the world — to carve up the world economically- and to fight amongst themselves on this score. Lenin described these as important features of imperialism and added : “... finance capital and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world, give rise to a number of transitional forms of state dependence. ... Diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically, are formally independent, but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence, are typical of this epoch ...”
In the world today, we find many such dependencies, though not colonies as such (with few transitional exceptions like Iraq). Powers like the US, Japan, UK and France continue to hold their respective spheres of influence in the shape of trade and investment blocs – the dollar, yen and euro zones and regional trade bodies. Except for socialist countries, others in Asia, Africa and Latin America are still subjected to economic plunder, political intervention, diplomatic pressure, cultural invasion, technological subjugation and often military threats or aggression by imperialist powers. The working people in these semi-colonial and neocolonial countries are fighting tooth and nail against the neo-liberal offensive of the global North. Considering the grand scale of this struggle, the number of people involved, and the cardinal facts that imperialism thrives precisely on the pillage of these countries and that the latter’s road to substantive development and people’s democracy can open up only by overthrowing the imperialist yoke, it must be affirmed that the deep-seated, historic contradiction between imperialism and these peoples constitutes the principal contradiction of the world today, the axis of the world people’s long-drawn battle for a better, brighter place to live in.
On the basis of these and other observations, Lenin declared :
“Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small and weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations - all these have given rise to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism...”
Do we need evidence of the parasitic character of metropolitan capital? Just remember the gory story of British Petroleum and Burma Shell, of countries like England, Holland, America building up their oil empires on the liquid gold plundered from Middle East; just look at the continuing dependence of petrodollar imperialism on OPEC oil. There are a thousand other means - the WTO regime including IPRs, TRIPs, the proposed Singapore issues, etc. — whereby the G-7 countries suck the third world dry. Lenin had already talked of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of “advanced” countries — by “international banker countries” and “usury imperialism” — a trend that has assumed more institutionalized shape with the rise of the transnational financial corporations and the IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank etc.
Parasitism is indeed well known and well documented, but how about decay?
“It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of bourgeoisie, and certain countries betray ... now one and now another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before.”
Spectacular but extremely uneven, lopsided growth and pronounced decay in fact constitute a unity of opposites — where, in the ultimate analysis, decay is the principal aspect of the contradiction. This contradiction manifests itself at all levels: inter-sectoral (high-speed growth in the “new economy” vis-a-vis crisis in the “smokestack” industries), inter-national (say Argentina compared to the USA) and inter-class (everywhere a small minority growing fatter and the vast majority sliding further down in relative or absolute poverty) and so on.
Overall, signs of decay are all too manifest in corporate scandals in some of the richest countries, in speculative financial boom (the bubble bust syndrome) juxtaposed against persistent recessionary trends in manufacturing sectors, in the rapid environmental degradation and mindless depletion of scarce resources of the planet and not the least in the rampant cultural decadence and rise of obscurantist forces worldwide. Compared to the liberating impulses provided by nascent capitalism in economic, political and cultural arenas a few centuries ago, the all-pervasive decay witnessed over the last hundred years or so is indeed appalling.
WRITTEN during the last phase of WW-I, Imperialism gives a simple yet theoretically profound analysis of why wars are inevitable under imperialism. Development of capitalism was (and remains) very uneven, so some of the capitalist great powers (like Germany in the early 20th century) experienced more rapid development than others (Great Britain, for example) and naturally, aspired after bigger shares in the world’s resources, markets, territories. But since the “territorial division of the world was already completed” (in the form of monopolisation of colonies, spheres of influence etc.), redivision was only possible by means of war. Thus wars between big powers - or among groups of them – originate from a basic compulsion of capitalism at its monopoly stage, not from bad motives of bad statesmen. Alliances among imperialist states, he observed, “prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics.”
This is exactly how the world situation developed up to the Second World War, and the formulation remains relevant as a long-term perspective.
But that war brought about certain basic and long-term changes in forms of political domination /hegemony and in the international balance of forces. And consequently, in the rules of the imperialist game of war and peace. A tremendous upsurge in national liberation movements forced the old and wounded imperialist powers like Great Britain, France, Italy, etc. to beat a retreat and take recourse to indirect methods of exploitation and domination. Many countries like India and Pakistan passed on from colonial to semi-colonial status, where a limited political independence serves to hide unbridled economic plunder by several imperialist powers. War among imperialist countries for redivision of these colonial possessions, which marked the whole modern history of Europe and which therefore found a prominent place in Imperialism, had to become, historically, a thing of the past.
Secondly, the USA, which suffered the least in the war, emerged as an economic and military “superpower” (a new category) even as certain “great powers” (Germany, Italy, Japan) found themselves in ruins and others (most notably Great Britain and France) suffered heavy casualties in human, military and economic terms, including the loss of colonies. Washington used the situation to its best advantage. Through economic measures like launching the Marshall Plan and setting up the Fund-Bank twins, military initiatives like the floating of NATO, a high-pitch ideological campaign against the “red danger” (rendered all the more palpable after the emergence of socialist China) and various other means, it acquired over the capitalist world a hegemony — a combination of domination and leadership — that was unique in modern history. A semblance of unity prevailed, and the gradual rise of a hegemonic “Soviet superpower” (a new category again) served as an inhibiting factor, keeping the inter-imperialist contradictions in check.
On the military plane, the rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons (which, for the first time in history, had the capacity to destroy all life on earth several times over) led to the novel doctrines of “mutual deterrence” and “cold war” even as wars of aggression against underdeveloped countries continued to be waged by imperialist powers, the USA in particular.
But behind these alterations, there was an essential economic continuity. Lenin had written about “war contracts” as sources of mega-profits for big corporations; today we stand witness to a full-scale “war economy” and “military-industrial complex” (to use a term coined by US president Elsenhower). We also hear about “military Keynesianism” which advocates wars as a means for toning up first the war-related industries and then, by extension, the whole economy — a strategy quite popular with US military top brass and ruling circles, particularly the Republicans.
How war helps the capitalist class at the cost of the working people is an old story retold through the Iraq episode. Barely a quarter after the invasion started, big business went gaga over the big news : in the second quarter of 2003 the US economy grew by 2.4%, much higher than expected. This is attributed to the hefty 44% (annualised) rise in defence spending, resulting in a 22% (annualised) growth in overall government spending. According to the Financial Times this was the largest run-up in government spending since the Vietnam War. The third quarter is expected to record an impressive 7% growth rate, the highest among G-7 countries, although experts doubt whether the upturn can be sustained in the face of the weak fundamentals
To top it all, more than 70 American companies and individuals have won up to $8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two years, according to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity. Those companies donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush — a little over $500,000 — than to any other politician over the last dozen years, the Center found. Moreover, dozens of lower-profile, but well-connected, companies also shared in the reconstruction bounty. Their tasks ranged from rebuilding Iraq’s government, police, military and media to providing translators for use in interrogations and psychological operations
There are other, longer term, benefits too. Modern warfare is getting more and more high-tech, and an enormous amount of R&D work is conducted with taxpayers' money. But the resultant advances in technology go to benefit the military-industrial complexes and private business in general. Moreover, since budget deficits caused by military expenditure can be shown to be ‘unavoidable in national interest’, required austerity measures can be thrust on the working people in the shape of wage freeze, cuts in jobs and social security provisions, etc. – in short, a “roll back [of] the New Deal”, as Noam Chomsky put it
BARELY a few weeks following the entry of the US Marines into Baghdad, the US Senate Armed Services Committee gave the green light to the Pentagon to develop a new tactical nuclear bomb, to be used in conventional war theatres, “with a yield [of up to] six times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb”.
Following the Senate decision, the Pentagon redefined the details of its nuclear agenda in a secret meeting with senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex held at Central Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Ironically, the meeting was held on August 6, the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, 58 years ago.
The new nuclear policy explicitly involves the large defence contractors in decision-making. It is tantamount to the “privatization” of nuclear war. Corporations not only reap multibillion dollar profits from the production of nuclear bombs, they also have a direct voice in setting the agenda regarding the use and deployment of nuclear weapons.
— Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War for Global Domination (www.globalresearch.ca)
GLOBALISATION is a euphemism for the global offensive of capital in crisis on the working people in rich as well poor nations. Viewed in another context, it is the economic, political and, as it recently turned out, military offensive of imperialism (notably the G-7 countries) led by US imperialism on what is called (no longer very aptly, for there is no second world) the third world. If we were to divide the historical stage of imperialism, which has completed a hundred years of existence, into a few distinct phases (i.e., sub-stages), we might call globalisation its latest phase.
But is not globalisation an old, inbuilt tendency of capital? Yes it is. We all remember the ever-bright and highly insightful portrayal of the globalising impulse of capital in the Communist Manifesto. In fact this impulse has manifested itself over the centuries in three distinct but overlapping “waves”:
The first, of mercantile capital on its trading and colonising spree starting from the fag end of the 15th and continuing upto early 20lh century;
The second, of industrial capital since the industrial revolution in late 18lh century, aimed principally at controlling/capturing sources of raw materials and markets for industrial products;
The third, of finance capital (which emerged at the juncture of the 19th and 20lh centuries, as the monopolistic coalescence of industrial capital and bank capital) based on the electronics revolution of the last 20 years of the 20th century.
The second wave did not end but merged into the third, which became particularly conspicuous since the early 1990s with the spread of information technology and came to be called globalisation. We must not lose sight of this thread of continuity running through the different stages and phases of capitalism, but perhaps we should pay even more attention to studying what is new in the present phase. For instance, in Lenin's time export of capital from advanced to backward countries (as well as between advanced ones) was a growing feature of imperialism; in recent times we have also seen a reverse flow from underdeveloped to developed countries (from the peripheries to the metropolitan centres of capitalism).
Globalization is the accelerated integration of capital, production, and markets globally, a process driven by the logic of corporate profitability. — Walden Bello, One World, July 10, 2003
Walden Bello is Director of Focus on the Global South
Yes, many are the new features of imperialist globalisation; we shall briefly mention the more important ones:
1. Increasing integration of the global economy based on incredibly fast and massive movements of finance capital across the globe through stock and currency markets, made possible by (a) the amazing achievements in information technology (IT) and (b) dissolution of the Soviet bloc and opening up of the great China market, which have cleared the ground for a single world capitalist economy with information economy playing the most dynamic role.
2. The cult of the colossus being played out in the shape mega-mergers (Exxon-Mobil, Daimler Benz-Chrysler-Mitsubishi), mega scams (Enron) and of course, of mega bankruptcies (world.com, Daewoo). The global stranglehold and ever-deepening intrusion of mega corporations into all domains of public and private life.
The whole point is aptly driven home by Percy Barnevik, (quoted in Gerard Greenfield, The Success of Being Dangerous: Resisting Free Trade and Investment Regimes, 2000, http://www.globallabour.org/qreenfield1.htm) who is former chairperson of ABB, the third most transnationalised corporation
3. Emergence of the WTO as the flagship leading the imperialist economic offensive against underdeveloped countries, razing their tariff barriers to the ground while protecting the markets of rich countries from third world manufactures. After the IMF, the WTO is imperialism's most uncouth arm in demolishing the weaker nations' economic sovereignty, which also results from the unrestricted cross-border flow of private (non-institutional) finance.
4. Concomitant attacks on the political sovereignty of these countries in so many ways, including the open rehabilitation of colonialism – in the “failed states” and “rogue states” (the trial of Milosevich; the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq) to start with.
5. Speculation in foreign currencies, shares, bonds etc. predominating over manufacturing sectors, which is plagued by overproduction and surplus capacity and falling profit rates. By the late 1990s, the volume of transactions per day in foreign exchange markets alone came to over $ 1.2 trillion, which was equal to the value of all trade in goods and services in an entire quarter
6. The central role of speculation leading to frequent and devastating stock market crashes and currency turmoils. To cite just one example, the great dotcom collapse of 2000-2001 wiped out $ 4.6 trillion in investor wealth on Wall Street - an amount that was half of the American GDP and four times the wealth wiped out in the 1987 crash
7. Rise of the anti-globalisation (and lately anti-war) movement and “new internationalism” as a powerful countercurrent to the global offensive of capital.
In these features one easily finds the elements of both continuity and change. It is the dialectical unity of the two aspects that impels us to describe globalisation as the latest phase (and of course, the most reactionary phase) of imperialism. As such, its agencies include not only the
IMF-WB-WTO triad, but the Pentagon and NATO too. Above we have seen an intellectual's perception on the role of the (not so) hidden fist, now hear an army insider who calls a spade a spade:
“... the new security paradigm that shapes this age [is that] disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein's outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms ...
“... show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and - most important – the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.
... So where do we schedule the U.S. military’s next round of away games? ... in the Gap.
“The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years. The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment.”
This is how Thomas PM Barnett, strategist at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island and advisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defence, described Pentagon's role in the furtherance of globalisation. The speech, reproduced in Esquire, March 2003, was delivered in November 2002. In his view, the Pentagon’s task is to (1) protect the “core” (the entire developed world “where globalization is thick”), (2) help the “seam states that lie along the Gap’s bloody boundaries’ (such as Pakistan, Mexico etc.) so as to “firewall the Core from the Gap’s worst exports, such as terror, drugs, and pandemics; and, most important, (3) Shrink the Gap.”
WHEN imperialism is defined as the highest stage of capitalism — as decaying, parasitic, monopoly capitalism dominated by finance capital — all countries which have reached that stage are to be reckoned as imperialist: Japan, Canada, Switzerland, UK and the like. All these states exploit the global south as well as the working people at home; many possess, and occasionally use, their enormous military prowess. But among them there is one country which has earned the outrageous distinction of being the world people’s enemy number one.
The first wave of global extension of capitalism was led by maritime and mercantile powers like Spain, Holland, England; the second wave by England to start with, (for that was the birth place of the industrial revolution); the third by the USA, the forerunner in the latest Scientific and Technological Revolution and by far the biggest economic (and also military) power. It is only natural that like Spain and England in earlier periods, today the USA aspires after continuous expansion of its sphere of influence — after building a world empire. But the most crucial difference is that, as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out in a recent article in Guardian, all other empires knew that they were not the only ones — they had to reckon with real and potential challengers. Not so Washington. After the collapse of the other superpower, it thinks and acts like the monarch of all it surveys. Moreover, whereas even the British at the summit of its power operated no more than one quarter of the earth’s surface, Pax Americana has got the economic, diplomatic and military means to actively campaign for “full spectrum dominance” over the globe. This is the Empire of our times
But highly complex and contradictory are the relations between the empire and imperialism. The highest product and (in a sense) locomotive of the latter, empire may also lead imperialism into a dangerous roller-costar ride or bring the whole train to a screeching halt. And such a situation seems to be emerging at the moment in the context of globalisation. In the first place, a serious turmoil in US banking and finance cannot be ruled out, and that would be devastating for the highly integrated world capitalist economy as a whole. Secondly, the growing American unilateralism, a sure sign of crude empire-building, is badly disturbing the political order of imperialism. Persistent criticism from Washington’s NATO and OECD allies together with a few instance of censuring by the IMF and WTO in recent months go to show that the chasms are widening. This contradiction between the leader and its allies, as well as those among all the imperialist countries taken together, are bound to intensify in proportion as the fundamental mismatch between deepening international economic integration and persistent political division among competing nation-states remains and grows. George Soros presented the problem fairly well back in 1998, when he wrote:
“To stabilize and regulate a truly global economy, we need some global system of political decision making ... insofar as there are collective interests that transcend state boundaries, the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions. Interestingly, the greatest opposition to this idea is coming from the United States, which, as the sole remaining superpower, is unwilling to subordinate itself to any international authority. The United States faces a crisis of identity : Does it want to be a solitary superpower or the leader of the free world ? ”
Soros is obviously for the second option, and regrets that Washington is taking the first course. The realistic perception of the most successful money manager of our time is conspicuous by its absence in the post-Marxist discourse of Hardt and Negri. These authors fancy an already accomplished transcendence of imperialism based on nation-states into a supra-national “sovereignty of capital”, or Empire.
Real life, of course, tells a very different story. A product, leader, and still an organic part of imperialism, US empire becomes a reckless, ruthless, domineering force standing above it. While collusion remains the principal aspect, conflicts grow sharper and centrifugal tendencies emerge (look at France, Germany and a number of countries in Middle East and Latin America), giving us a favorable terrain to fight our way forward.
ON the morrow of WW-II, the US enjoyed an absolute supremacy, a monopoly of sorts, in all domains of the world economy. Not so now, although it remains the number one far ahead of the second and the third (Europe and Japan respectively):
In this long-term backdrop, let us now assess the current scenario. For all its enormous power, the US economy has in the recent past been suffering from some fundamental weaknesses : unmanageable budget deficits; abnormally low savings rate (1.6 per cent of GDP, less than a third of the average savings rate obtaining in the 1990s); rising unemployment and jobless growth
When in a particular year the sum total of a country’s export earnings and other earnings from abroad (such as dividends) falls below the total expenditures on account of imports and other costs incurred abroad (e.g., for wars and for maintaining military bases), that entails a CAD. When the opposite happens in a particular year, i.e., when total incomes from abroad exceeds total expenditure abroad, that country is said to have a current account surplus. In the year 2000, Japan and France enjoyed surpluses to the tune of 117 billion and 20 billion dollars respectively. In the same year, USA reported a deficit of 445 billion dollars (up from 79 billion in 1990) compared to around 25 billion dollars each for England and Brazil and 18 billion dollars for Mexico. At present the American CAD amounts to more than 4 per cent of its GDP, much higher than the 3 per cent obtaining in the critical years of mid-’80s. Here it may be noted that during its heyday the British empire enjoyed a consistent and comfortable surplus (e.g., 4 per cent of GDP on the eve of World War I) and so did the US until recently.
How does the USA cope with this highly abnormal situation? When an individual expends more than he earns, he has to bridge the gap by borrowing. In the case of a nation too, borrowing covers the current account deficit. In 2002, the United States borrowed $503 billion from abroad, a record 4.8 per cent of GDP. In other words, it manages the CAD with a huge inflow of funds from abroad on capital account: FDI, investments in treasury bills and non-government bonds and securities, petrodollars earned by OPEC countries and deposited in American banks, and so on. The extent of dependence on investment from abroad will be evident from the fact that foreigners now own 42 per cent of US treasury bills.
The massive inflow takes place because of a dollar fetishism caused by (a) the belief, supported by decades of real experience, that investment in dollar is as good as investment in gold, since its value never (well, almost) falls; (b) the position of the US as the safest investment haven with very high, if not the highest, rate of return in the world. And to bolster these economic factors, there are the ultimate imperial weapons of political pressure in various forms (aid-diplomacy, veiled military threat or simply a threat of downgrading economic relations) and even armed intervention (as in the case of Iraq which dared to switch over to the euro as petrocurrency, followed by a decision to convert the country’s $10 billion reserve fund at the UN to euro).
What if the economic factors behind the huge inflow of finance on capital account cease to operate? There will be a decline in the inflow, for the politico-military pressures do not work equally effectively against all states and they cannot be applied against private (including institutional) investors. The decline could be small if there were no other feasible international currency, but big or perhaps even devastating now that such an alternative (the euro) has emerged. In the latter case, the US would lose the unique advantage of carrying on with a persistent and growing CAD. The world’s most-indebted country will face a situation comparable to that experienced not long ago by Mexico, Argentina, and South Korea. There will be a run on US banks, as holders of dollar reserves convert these into other currencies. A stock market crash of unprecedented proportions may be unavoidable.
The gravity of the situation was recognised in the (US) President’s Report 2003:
“... the U.S. current account has typically been in deficit for the past two decades. As a result, the net international investment position in the United States (the value of U .S. investment holdings abroad less that of foreign holdings in the United States) has moved from an accumulated surplus of slightly less than 10 per cent of GDP in the late 1970s to a deficit of almost 20 per cent of GDP in 2001 ... Recent increases in the current account deficit have led to some concerns that continued current account deficits (and the increase in the United States’ international debt that would result) might not be sustainable.”
As expected, the Council of Economic Advisors which prepared this report took pains to play down the threat. But as Guardian reported on 19 September 2003:
“The International Monetary Fund yesterday warned that the colossal United States trade deficit was a noose around the neck of the economy, emphasising that the once mighty dollar could collapse at any moment. ... The IMF’s chief economist Kenneth Rogoff said that it was just a matter of time before the gap closed, tipping the dollar into a potentially steep fall. ‘If we were looking at a poor developing country, the world gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. A country like the United States, they give them enough rope to tie the noose around their neck several times. But it does happen in the end,’ he said.”
As if to lend credence to the IMF prognosis, capital flow data for September released by the US Treasury showed a net $ 4.2 billion of inflows in the month, down from $ 49.9 billion in August — by no means sufficient to cover the current account deficit estimated at about $ 46 billion a month. Certain OPEC countries like Venezuela have switched oil trade from dollar to euro, Russia also is contemplating a similar course and in recent months wealthy Saudi investors have pulled $ 200 billion out of US financial markets. When these trends are considered in conjunction with the growing euro-challenge (e.g., the rise of the euro by around 35 per cent against the dollar over the last three years, including 16 per cent this year and 3 per cent in December alone), it becomes clear why the deadly symbiosis of skyrocketing CAD, falling dollar and rising euro – where each reinforces the other- constitute the proverbial Achilles' heel of the demonic dollar empire.
In Greek mythology, the seemingly insuperable Achilles was eventually hit on his heel and felled. In our era too, conditions are emerging and forces are getting mobilised to launch the final battle against the demon that has none of the great qualities of the Trojan hero but only the myth of being undefeatable.
APART from those who are valiantly fighting an incomparably superior military power in Afghanistan and Iraq, we see basically there kinds of forces ranged against the empire.
First, the world-wide anti-American/anti-Bush feelings that numerous recent surveys have shown to have grown to unprecedented levels in several decades. In addition to anti-establishment organisations and individuals, America’s traditional allies and admirers also have vehemently criticised the Bush push for war. “American imperialism used to be a fiction of the far-left imagination,” wrote the English journalist Madeleine Bunting early this year, “now it is an uncomfortable fact of life.”
Compared to this rather amorphous opposition, a second and more potent force is the internal resistance from American civil society. To be frank, part of this emanates from narrow political self interests (on the part of Democratic Party leadership, for instance) while some amounts to no more than pious wishes. But there is also a strong streak of persistent opposition, particularly against war mongering and attacks on democratic rights and livelihoods. Emerging as it did from a glorious independence struggle against British colonialism, the nation boasts a healthy tradition of democracy and love of independence (remember Abraham Lincoln’s famous statement: “when the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs others, it is no longer self-government; it is despotism.”) So it is only normal that there is a robust resistance to the fascist project of empire-building. At the core of this force is the American working class
(a) A surge in strikes and other forms of struggles together with the rise of a new leadership challenging the old workers' aristocracy
(b) Welcome changes, however small, in the national TU leadership. The participation of the AFL-CIO in something like the Seattle demonstration was pretty unthinkable a few years back, given the organisation’s track record. As New York Times reported on February 28,2003: “After backing administrations in the Korean, Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, ... the AFL-CIO executive council unanimously approved a resolution urging Mr. Bush to embrace a broad multilateral approach to Iraq and criticizing the administration for dividing the world and insulting America’s allies.” March 12,2003 was observed as the first-ever National Labour Day for Peace.
(c) The spirit of solidarity with workers in underdeveloped countries, as expressed for example, in the activities of the US LABOUR AGAINST the WAR (USLAW), a coalition of workers’ organisations which opposed the Iraq war and which is now trying to help Iraqi workers particularly in struggles against firms like Halliburton.
(d) Broadening base of the movement, with new sections joining in. Mike Martin observed in Straight Goods, (Internet edition, New Society Publications, November 18,2003):
“Americans have lost nearly three million jobs in George Junior’s first three years... as many as a third of these are ... white collar jobs. ... These highly-paid professionals are being betrayed by the same corporations that used to coddle them.” These professionals never felt the need for organising unions, but attitudes are changing rapidly: “The American trade union center, the AFL-CIO, report that a record 66,000 new white-collar workers joined unions in 2002, and accounted for almost 30% of the overall rise in AFL-CIO membership. In 2002, their growth outpaced all other occupational groups within the federation.... In the United States white collar workers, such as nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, attorneys, musicians, journalists and even forest rangers, now account for 60% of the overall US workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a lot of people to organize, but at least they seem to be making some headway.” (Ibid.)
Thirdly, the challenge thrown out to the surviving superpower by the militant movements in its backyard: Brazil (notably the MST or Landless Peasants' Movement, which engaged in over 330 land occupations involving over 55,000 families in 2003)
Mexico, Ecuador, Columbia, Bolivia, and so on. In Argentina, insurgent masses came close to seizure of power in late 2001 and early 2002. Public sector employees across all these countries — workers, doctors and medical staff, public school teachers and others — launched concerted strike struggles in middle of this year. Millions were involved and in many cases the strikes triggered work stoppages in the private sector too, defying mafia and police attacks. And are not the protracted Cuban and Venezuelan resistances to blatant US exploitation and intervention truly inspiring?
All these discrete streams of struggle, like those in other parts of the world against other imperialist plunderers and their local clients, hit the imperialist system as a whole. Despite economic and political contradictions, imperialism consciously operates as a block pitted against the world people; despite communication gaps; we the activists fighting against oppression and exploitation objectively constitute an international common front against a common enemy: imperialist globalisation (or simply imperialism) with US empire as the spearhead and national ruling groups as local agents. The difference is, our enemy is most efficiently organised, whereas we are in the primary stage of networking.
The progress we have made in this respect during the four years since Seattle is no mean achievement, but we must qualitatively develop the level of mutual cooperation, coordination, and healthy debate. Seminars, publications, symbolic protests, occasional demonstrations and WSF-type congregessions may appear gratifying if we are prisoners to the illusion (could we decelerate the marauding march of globalisation or stop the Iraq war?) that nebulous public pressure can force the enemy change his way; but to actually make him bite the dust, we need to advance further. To go deeper among the masses, to learn from them, to help them organise themselves and play the role of conscious creators of history.
INDEED it is capitalism’s inherent tendency to go global. The early mercantile expeditions and colonial conquests played a key role in the development of capitalism in the metropolitan countries, and in a different way, in the colonies as well. Marx and Engels were categorical in their recognition of the expansionary thrust of capital. In the classic words of the Manifesto, “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” “The historic task of bourgeois society”, wrote Marx a decade later, “is the establishment of the world market, at least in its basic outlines, and a mode of production that rests on its basis.”
Certain features that we currently associate with the drive towards globalisation have indeed been even more pronounced during certain previous phases of capitalist development.
Inter-country and even inter-continent migration of labour, if only in the form of indentured labour under colonial framework, was probably more widespread in the nineteenth century.
The trade-GDP ratio for many countries was also higher at the turn of the previous century than it is today. Indeed, it can be argued that the world economy was globalising at quite a high speed before the First World War intervened. Yet it will be stupid on our part to miss the enormously changed context and scale of contemporary international economic integration and cross-border production and circulation of commodities.
Let us first note the following major points.
1. The first thing that obviously strikes us is the tremendous advance in science and technology, particularly the remarkable shortening of distance through incredibly faster systems of communication and telecommunication. Ironically, true to the parasitic nature of capitalism, and despite all talks of a computerised ‘new economy’ this has revolutionised speculation much more than production.
2. The mind-boggling volume of finance capital that circulates around the global economy in unthinkable speed, the mysterious dynamics of share markets, bouts of drastic decline in currency values and share prices leading to overnight wiping out of enormous amounts of paper wealth, sudden flight of capital at the hint of a crisis — in short, the mad and mysterious world of speculative finance marks another distinguishing feature of present-day globalisation.
3. The all-pervading global reach of mega companies called MNCs/TNCs is another hallmark of contemporary capitalism. In the year 2000, out of world's top 100 economies, 54 were corporations and 46 were countries. The corresponding figures in 1998 were 51 and 49. In the year 2000, the combined revenues of top 500 corporations ($ 140,64,960 million) were 170 per cent of the combined GDP of all but the top ten high-income countries. The MNCs are engaged in a mad scramble for merger and acquisition resulting in unprecedented levels of concentration and centralisation of capital. The trend toward the development of monopolies and formation of cartels discussed by Lenin in his classic work on imperialism continues unabated with a few oligopolies controlling huge chunks of market share in every major line of production of both goods and services.
4. The vice-like grip of the institutional network of IMF, World Bank and WTO on the economies of the developing countries is another central feature of globalisation. The first two organisations came up as part of the post-War drive for economic reorganisation while it took another fifty years for the WTO to take shape. A move to launch an International Trade Organisation (ITO) together with the IMF and WB (its actual name is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development or IBRD) was aborted by the developed countries, the US in particular, which preferred protectionism to the so-called doctrine of free trade. Instead of a full-scale ITO they opted for a relatively piecemeal approach under the banner of GATT. The recent transformation of GATT into WTO reflects a more desperate attempt on the part of the powerful economies to control world trade, as much as a response to the success stories of export-led growth as an urge to establish early control over the rapidly burgeoning service sector and what has come to be known as the knowledge economy.
5. The ongoing globalisation of the world capitalist economy is happening in a largely post-colonial context. Formally speaking, the phase of national liberation struggles is more or less over, a few residual struggles for self-determination notwithstanding. Yet what we are witnessing everyday is a constant trivialisation of this formal independence, a growing mockery of national sovereignty, something which was brilliantly anticipated by Lenin in his classic “Imperialism”.
6. Finally, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and what was formerly known as the Soviet Bloc, the ground has been cleared for a single integrated world capitalist economy. Whatever resistance individual nation-states are extending does not amount to anything like a parallel bloc. Alongside this geo-political expansion of capitalism we also see an unprecedented intensification of commodity production reflected primarily in the burgeoning growth of the service sector.
IN spite of such massive sweep and power, globalisation is currently facing a whole lot of problems and threats. The wave of anti-globalisation protests we have been seeing from Seattle to Genoa may not yet have reached a level where we can talk about a serious political challenge to globalisation, but to be sure these protests have crossed the level of mere ethical dissent and academic questioning. They have acquired an unmistakable mass dimension and the increasing mass participation of the working class and the unemployed youth is rooted in the economic crisis and uncertainty enveloping the world.
Let us begin with the growing shadow of crisis enveloping the entire world economy. The rate of growth, the most favourite indicator of bourgeois economists, is languishing at a very low level in almost all developed countries. Japan is awaiting recovery from its stagnation for nearly a full decade. Europe has been experiencing low growth and a disturbingly high rate of unemployment for quite some time. And finally the US, which maintained impressive growth during almost the entire 1990s has also joined the downturn. In fact, the sudden outbreak of the crisis in the US has been described by some critical observers as the US economy “hitting the wall at 90 kmph.” This massive canvas of stagnation, with almost the entire developed world mired in a kind of synchronised recession, is indeed remarkable. In the US, parallels are being frequently drawn with the Great Depression of 1929-33.
The crisis has of course been most glaringly manifest in the financial sector. In the early 1990s we first had the Mexican meltdown followed by the East Asian turmoil which spread to other regions and described as the ‘Asian Flu’. In the words of the noted Canada-based analyst of speculative finance Michel Chossudovsky “This Worldwide crisis of the late twentieth century is more devastating than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has far-reaching geo-political implications; economic dislocation has also been accompanied by the outbreak of regional conflicts, the fracturing of national societies and in some cases the destruction of entire countries. This is by far the most serious economic crisis in modern history.”
The driving force behind this crisis, according to him, is the worldwide scramble to appropriate wealth through “financial manipulation”, which he describes as “financial warfare”. In this war, the outright “conquest of nations” meaning the control over productive assets, labour, natural resources and institutions can be carried out in an impersonal fashion from the corporate boardroom: commands are dispatched from a computer terminal or a cell phone. The relevant data are instantly relayed to major financial markets — often resulting in immediate disruptions in the functioning of national economies.
In Korea, Indonesia and Thailand, the vaults of the central banks were pillaged by institutional speculators while the monetary authorities sought in vain to prop up their ailing currencies. In 1997, more than 100 billion dollars of Asia's hard currency reserves had been confiscated and transferred (in a matter of months) into private financial hands. In the wake of the currency devaluations, real earnings and employment plummeted virtually overnight leading to mass poverty in countries which had in the post-War period registered significant economic and social progress. Russia has already suffered a similar fate since the first injection of IMF “shock therapy” in 1992. Some 500 billion dollars worth of Russian assets — including plants of the military industrial complex, infrastructure and natural resources — have been confiscated (through the privatisation programmes and forced bankruptcies) and transferred into the hands of Western capitalists. Now even in Japan — where the yen has tumbled to new lows — “the Korean scenario” is viewed (according to economist Michael Hudson), as a “dress rehearsal” for the take over of Japan’s financial sector by a handful of Western investment banks.
Interestingly, George Soros, the notorious Hungarian currency speculator who made news by raking in billions from the 1992 devaluation of the British Pound, has emerged as a key commentator on the global financial crisis. In 1998 he came up with a book entitled The Crisis of Global Capitalism. It may be recalled that he claims to have played his bit in engineering the Soviet collapse with his Open Society Fund, but in 1989 when he proposed a second edition of the post-WWII Marshall plan to enable post-Soviet Russia to reconstruct its economy he was greeted with derisive laughter. Now he argues that the global capitalist system is coming apart at the seams. The decline in the US stock market is only a belated symptom of the profound problems afflicting the world economy.
Financial markets, he tells us, are inherently unstable, whereas the global capitalist system is based on the belief that financial markets, left to their own devices, tend towards equilibrium. This belief, he insists, is false. Financial markets are given to excesses and if a boom/bust sequence progresses beyond a certain point it will never revert to where it came from. His chosen imagery for financial markets therefore is not a pendulum oscillating around and eventually returning to its equilibrium position, but a wrecking ball knocking over one economy after another.
While Soros deals primarily with financial markets, historian Robert Brenner in his much-acclaimed book-length essay “The Economics of Global turbulence” (New Left Review, May-June 1998) describes the crisis as a case of long downturn since 1965 and especially since 1973 (the oil shock), in contrast to the long post-war boom since 1945, caused by falling profitability of capital. This falling rate of profit is in turn attributed to over-investment and overproduction. The origins of over-capacity and overproduction are to be found in the profound intensification of international competition that took place in the later 1960s, as a consequence of the accelerated entry of German, and especially Japanese manufacturers, into world markets, which brought a reduction of US manufacturing profitability by more than 40% in the period between 1965 and 1973.
The profitability problem was not long confined to the United States, but quickly came to affect Japan, Germany, and most of the rest of the advanced capitalist world, when the dollar was radically devalued at the time of the world money crisis and collapse of Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s.
Paradoxically, moreover — and counter to standard economic expectations — manufacturing overcapacity and overproduction did not lead to the expected processes of adjustment, but has persisted right into the present... with the partial (and likely temporary) US profitability recovery of the 1990s more than counterbalanced by sharp profitability slumps in Germany and Japan. Heightened international competition leading to persistent overcapacity and overproduction and eventually resulting in falling aggregate profitability – this is the basic contention of Brenner, and in spite of debates on finer points, he is acclaimed by Marxist economists for having taken the discussion back into the realm of capitalist anarchy, the real economy of over-investment, over-production and the falling rate of profit.
WHAT then continues to sustain the globalisation drive in the face of the growing financial crisis propelled by such a long economic downturn? Some commentators glibly talk of technology and especially the dramatic rise of what has come to be known as the new economy. But the euphoria seems to be evaporating faster than it grew. After all the information- and knowledge-based new economy, though it added a lot of gloss to the brick-and-mortar old economy and brought about dramatic changes in certain operational respects, could by no means replace the latter. We hear tall talks about e-commerce, but nobody has heard about e-production! The new economy people may talk about ICE (information-communication-entertainment) and the speculators may breathe FIRE (finance-insurance-real estates), but the growing economic crisis is once again tearing asunder the veil of appearance, the fetish of what Marx called ‘fictitious capital’, to reveal the disquiet in the backyard of manufacturing.
At the end of the day, the sustenance of globalisation depends on power and particularly on the military might of the world’s lone superpower or hyper-power, as the French call it, the United States. The noted American journalist and the celebrated author of the pro-globalisation bestseller, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman ends his book with “the unique role the United States plays, and needs to keep playing, in stabilizing” the new system of globalisation. Friedman is quite emphatic in his defence of the centrality of the US superpower to the gobalisation project. “Sustainable globalisation,” he tells us, “requires a stable power structure, and no country is more essential for this than the United States. All the Internet and other technologies that Silicon Valley is designing to carry digital voices, videos and data around the world, all the trade and financial integration it is promoting through its innovations, and all the wealth this is generating, are happening in a world stabilized by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, D.C. ... The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.”
Friedman would of course like us to believe that “America truly is the ultimate benign hegemon and reluctant enforcer.” He is afraid that if the remains hidden for too long, if America takes this ‘reluctance’ too far, it would threaten the stability of the whole globalisation system. He therefore calls for more vigorous US intervention and quite naturally after the bombings began in Afghanistan, he exclaimed “Give war a chance”.
Even though the trajectory of events unfolding since September 11 does not quite coincide with the trajectory of the ongoing economic crisis and anti-globalisation protests, the hidden fist has nevertheless come out into the open and the link between Kabul and Doha, between the US-led bombing of Afghanistan and the bulldozing of the third world at the recent WTO ministerial summit is not difficult to understand. Crisis and war have once again come together, the recession-hit US economy and the Western world is once again seeking a way out of the crisis through war and destruction. We may recall Galbraith’s keen observation about the Great Depression: the depression had never really ended, it just merged into the war.
The unfolding turn of events has forced even the most ardent advocate of globalisation to talk about its uncertain future. More and more people are drawing rather alarmist parallels to how previous rounds of closer economic integration and capitalist expansion had produced sharp competition and ‘nationalist backlash’ leading to the eruption of inter-imperialist wars. In his famous book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Professor Paul M Kennedy of Yale University draws the picture of a US in decline. Like the earlier Spanish, French and British empires, the American empire is also slated to decline because of its own imperial overreaching, warns the professor. Soros says he doubts if the global capitalist economy would once again be plunged into another world war (while financial crises had caused severe economic dislocation and decline, the actual collapse of previous rounds of globalisation, he points out, was triggered by political and military developments), but nevertheless he sees intense instability ahead.
HOW do we analyse the major contradictions in the era of globalisation? Those who believe that globalisation amounts to a qualitatively new system or order, locate the main contradiction between the global economy and nation-states. And they see the resolution of this contradiction in the development of a global society and a corresponding system of global governance to match the development of the global economy. For some, this entails a veritable world revolution, while many liberals believe this to be achievable through democratisation of the existing multilateral institutions and effective containment or engagement of US within an effective international framework. Friedman and Co. of course believe that such a global society must necessarily be led by the US and the US alone.
A significant and most sensational recent addition to this literature has been a book called “Empire”, which has been advertised as the new Communist Manifesto for the new millennium. Let us take a brief look at the basic ideas enunciated in this new book by American literary theorist Michel Hardt and Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, who have been acclaimed as the Marx and Engels of the Internet age! They claim that imperialism is over and the era of Empire has dawned. They argue that while it is certainly true that, “in step with the processes of globalization, the sovereignty of nation-states, while still effective, has progressively declined, the decline in sovereignty of nation-states, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined. Sovereignty, they say, has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what they call Empire.
They describe the emerging global capitalist economy as the economy of postmodernisation in which the role of industrial labour is getting minimised and production is tending ever more toward what they call bio-political production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.
The Empire does wield enormous powers of oppression and destruction, but these, they insist, are radically different from the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation. And hence the political task, they argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. Imperialism in the analysis of Hardt and Negri consists primarily in the act of colonial annexation and with the end of the era of colonial annexation in its direct form they therefore declare that imperialism is over. Lenin had rejected precisely this notion of imperialism-as-policy and established that imperialism was a special stage of capitalism, the stage of monopoly capitalism. The unevenness of capitalist development which both results from and culminates in periodic redivision of the world is substituted in their analysis by what they called spatial totality and interpenetration of First and Third Worlds. In spite of all talks of subversion the authors therefore fail to locate any weak links in the chain of that totality. And the vague concept of the multitude in place of the working class and the oppressed peoples matches perfectly with their decentered notion of Empire.
The best rejoinder to the absurdly Utopian and romantic notions of Empire has been provided by real life itself. The wishful nature of their talk of erosion of American sovereignty in relation to the abstract global sovereignty of capital has been mercilessly exposed in the wake of the unprecedented political and military offensive of US imperialism since the Gulf War, the growing shift of US policy towards unilateralism and the impotence of multilateral institutions and even the UN in the face of this heightened imperialist aggression.
FROM the anarchist or petty-bourgeois romanticist Utopia of reorganisation of globalisation and smooth subversion of the capitalist empire to bring about a counter-empire of the multitude, let us turn to those Marxists who still talk about imperialism but are so worried about the decline of inter-imperialist rivalry and are seriously taken in by the mischievous rumour of retreat of the nation-state and erosion of sovereignty. We will see how the two streams once again converge in their helpless surrender to imperialism.
The talk of retreat of the nation-state has been premised primarily on three points, phenomenal growth of MNCs/TNCs, extreme cross-border volatility of speculative finance and the domineering discipline of multilateral institutions like the IMF, WB and WTO. But on all these scores there are enough evidences to suggest that what is happening is no generalised retreat of all nation-states, but the retreat of some which in turn means the advance of others. Moreover we will see that even where states are being said to be making a retreat, the states are actually playing a more vigorous role in shaping and implementing neo-liberal economic policies.
As for TNCs or MNCs they are still heavily rooted in their parent countries and there is intense competition among them. Moreover even though technically there are some 63,000 parent TNCs with over 8,00,000 foreign subsidiaries, wealth is highly concentrated among the top 500, and within the top 500 club among the elite top 100. According to the latest Fortune 500 list of the world's biggest 500 corporations (in terms of total revenue), US accounted for 185 followed by Japan (104), together accounting for 58 per cent of the total. Among the top 100, the US accounts for 37, followed by Japan (22), Germany (10) and France (7).
A 1993 study of the world's 100 largest companies showed that only 18 companies maintained the majority of assets abroad. The internationalisation of shares was even more restricted. 2.1 % of the board members of the top 500 US companies were foreign nationals with only 5 of the top 30 US companies listed having a foreigner on their boards. All the companies seemed to have benefited from industrial and trade policies of their own countries and at least 20 would not have survived if they had not been saved in some way by their governments (Financial Times 5 January 1996, The Economist 24 June 1995). UNCTAD's own index of transnationality based on shares of foreign assets, foreign sales and foreign employment shows 40 of top 100 multinational companies in 1993 have more than half of their activities abroad, with the average for the whole group at 41 per cent, falling to 34 per cent for US Multinationals, which comprise nearly one-third of the total. Even these figures are misleading as Nestle, which tops the list with 92 per cent, limits non-Swiss voting rights to 3 per cent of the total. In addition most research and development (R&D) takes place in the home country. For US multinationals, the share of R&D performed by majority owned foreign affiliates was only 12 per cent in 1992. Another study by Hirst and Thompson (H&T), based on company data for 500 MNCs in 1987 and 5000 MNCs in 1992-3, assessed the relative importance for MNCs of home and foreign sales and assets of particular countries, mainly US, UK, Germany and Japan. They found that between 70 and 75 per cent of MNC value added was produced in the home nation. They therefore concluded that international businesses remained heavily 'nationally embedded'.
The massive and mysterious cross-border flows of finance capital and the nation-state’s ‘inability’ to establish any kind of control on that is generally treated as technologically ordained. But this again is more a question of policy than technology. Technology in any case is a double-edged sword, the same technological revolution which enables finance capital to skip state control can also be used by the state to strengthen its control mechanism. If technology can be used to intensify control over labour and ordinary citizens, the same can also be used to control capital. The issue is ideology and not technology. Similarly, it is nation-states which are members of the multilateral institutions and of various regional trading blocs. Noted leftwing critic of globalisation James Petras quite rightly points out, “The scale and scope of nation-state activity has grown to such a point that one needs to refer to it as the “New Statism” rather than the free market. Globalisation is in the first instance a product of the New Statism and continues to be accompanied and sustained by direct state intervention.” (Petras and Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century)
THE other point which continues to bother many an observer of imperialism is the so-called muted nature of inter-imperialist rivalry. This has in fact led several analysts to some sort of a Kautskian thesis of ultra-imperialism. In the midst of the First World War, Kautsky had wondered,”... Cannot the present imperialist policy be supplanted by a new, ultra-imperialist policy, which will introduce the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capitals? Such a new phase of capitalism is at any rate conceivable. Can it be achieved? Sufficient premises are still lacking to enable us to answer this question.” “From the purely economic point of view”, wrote Kautsky, “it is not impossible that capitalism will yet go through a new phase, that of the extension of the policy of the cartels to foreign policy, the phase of ultra-imperialism.” Interestingly, Kautsky had reduced the question of imperialist annexations to a matter of mere ‘preferred policy’, thus detaching the politics of imperialism from its economics, or refusing to treat imperialism as a definite stage of imperialism, but he was quite prepared to treat ultra-imperialism, “the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital” as a possible future phase of capitalism.
Lenin had vehemently condemned and discarded this Kautskian notion, not because he thought finance capital could never forge international unity, but because he considered it reactionary to treat any temporary international unity of finance capital as a separate phase, detached from the very basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics. Let us follow carefully Lenin’s argument from the following extensive excerpt from his classic “Imperialism”.
“Let us consider India, Indo-China and China. It is known that these three colonial and semi-colonial countries, with a population of six to seven hundred million, are subjected to the exploitation of the finance capital of several imperialist powers : Great Britain, France, Japan, the U.S.A., etc. Let us assume that these imperialist countries form alliances against one another in order to protect or enlarge their possessions, their interests and their “spheres of influence” in these Asiatic states; these alliances will be “inter-imperialist,” or “ultra-imperialist” alliances. Let us assume that all the imperialist countries conclude an alliance for the “peaceful” division of these parts of Asia; this alliance would be an alliance of "internationally united finance capital.” There are actual examples of alliances of this kind in the history of the twentieth century, for instance, the attitude of the powers to China. We ask, is it “conceivable,” assuming that the capitalist system remains intact — and this is precisely the assumption that Kautsky does make — that such alliances would be more than temporary, that they would eliminate friction, conflicts and struggle in every possible form?
“It is sufficient to state this question clearly to make it impossible for any reply to be given other than in the negative, for any other basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, of interests, of colonies, etc., than a calculation of the strength of the participants in the division, their general economic, financial, military strength, etc., is inconceivable. And the strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism. Half a century ago Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, as far as her capitalist strength was concerned, compared with the strength of England at that time; Japan was the same compared with Russia. Is it “conceivable” that in ten or twenty years' time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? Absolutely inconceivable.
“Therefore, in the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons, or of the German “Marxist,” Kautsky, “inter-imperialist” or “ultra-imperialist” alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably than a “truce” in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, giving rise to alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle out of one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics. But in order to pacify the workers and to reconcile them with the social-chauvinists who have deserted to the side of the bourgeoisie, wise Kautsky separates one link of a single chain from the other, separates the present peaceful (and ultra-imperialist, nay, ultra-ultra-imperialist) alliance of all the powers for the pacification of China (remember the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion) from the non-peaceful conflict of tomorrow, which will prepare the ground for another “peaceful” general alliance for the partition, say, of Turkey, on the day after tomorrow, etc., etc. Instead of showing the living connection between periods of imperialist peace and periods of imperialist war, Kautsky presents the workers with a lifeless abstraction in order to reconcile them to their lifeless leaders.”
A world war or direct military conflicts cannot be the sole yardstick for measuring inter-imperialist rivalry. Local wars and civil wars too provide ample scope for imperialist intervention and there is no dearth of such wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The process of redivision of the world for securing greater control over economic resources continues unabated, and so does the strategic contention for enlarging spheres of imperialist influence. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc has re-opened huge territory and resources for the major imperialist powers. Witness the clamour for Eastward expansion of NATO and the major acts of imperialist intervention in former Yugoslavia. Look at the intense economic competition within the Triad – the US, Europe and Japan – and the shrill cries of trade war. And not the least, the fierce warfare raging on the battlefields of speculative finance. Imperialist countries will always have a common agenda against the third world, but that does not preclude their own uneven development and the resulting contention.
Indeed, American commentators are increasingly admitting that for all its military superiority, the US cannot really treat the world as a unipolar system. We quoted Huntington in the PB Statement on War where he has described the world as a uni-multipolar arrangement. “Global politics”, he says, “has now moved from a brief unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War into one or perhaps more uni-multipolar decades on its way towards a multipolar twenty-first century.... In this uni-multipolar world the central relationship is that between the superpower and the major regional powers.... The superpower would prefer a unipolar world and is continually tempted to act as if it were a unipolar world. The major powers would prefer a multipolar world and believe global politics is moving in that direction. A uni-multipolar world is stable only to the extent that these conflicting pulls can be balanced. In the longer term, they probably cannot be balanced, and, if as seems probable, the superpower cannot create a unipolar world, global politics will gradually evolve in the direction of a multipolar system.”
FINALLY let us take a look at the anti-globalisation protests. Domination of speculative finance has been a major feature of the present round of globalisation, and this has meant a massive depoliticisation of the economy. Stock exchanges do not produce trade union struggles and unless there are major upheavals or scams they generate little political heat either. Meanwhile nation-states are busy excusing themselves with this rumour of erosion of sovereignty and forced retreat of the state. With the economy getting depoliticised, ‘culture’ has become central to politics and all sorts of identities have sprung up. Huntington's thesis of the clash of civilisations is premised on the centrality of culture to politics. Depoliticisation of the economy and centrality of culture to politics are two sides of the same coin.
Viewed against this backdrop, the anti-globalisation protests are serving to repoliticise the economy, bringing the economy back on top of the agenda. This despite the fact that the anti-globalisation protesters are drawn from all backgrounds including many who have come through the culture route in politics. And now since September 11, the question of imperialism has come up in a big way and the anti-war anti-imperialist agenda has been forced on the anti-globalisation movement. This transition would of course not be smooth, but if the massive anti-war protests are any indication, there has been no major depletion in the ranks of anti-globalisation protesters. The ongoing economic crisis and the massive job cuts announced since September 11 – half a million jobs have been cut in the US alone – have also fuelled enough resentment merging with the global outrage against imperialist war and doublespeak on terrorism.
We must remember that while imperialism generates popular protests and resistance, it also causes splits in the ranks of the working class movement. The edifice of international workers’ unity broke down in the face of the First World War. Lenin came down heavily on opportunism in the working class movement, his polemics with Kautsky was not confined to the economics of imperialism, and it was focussed sharply on the ideological-political debates of the day. While Kautsky defended his position in the name of broad working class unity, Lenin condemned him for toeing the opportunist line and siding with the opportunists who were busy siding with the bourgeoisie of their own respective countries. Lenin exposed the social roots of opportunism in the labour aristocracy and the economic basis of labour aristocracy in the spoils of imperialist super profits and called for ridding the working class movement of the culture of bourgeois respectability and what he called Lloyd-Georgism bred by bourgeois labour parties, an infection that the opportunists carried within the socialist-communist movement. In his.famous article “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (Vol. 23, Collected Works), Lenin enunciated the revolutionary Marxist tactics against imperialism in the following words :
“On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to “rest on the laurels” of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism. On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labour movement will now inevitably develop. ...
“Engels draws a distinction between the “bourgeois labour party” of the old trade unions — the privileged minority — and the “lowest mass”, the real majority, and appeals to the latter, who are not infected by “bourgeois respectability”. This is the essence of Marxist tactics!
“Neither we nor anyone else can calculate, precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.
The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.”
Earlier, the First International had also collapsed in the wake of the Paris Commune following the rupture between Marxists and anarchists. Right now, anarchism seems to be the dominant trend in the anti-globalisation protests. The terrorist strikes and the legitimacy acquired by imperialist militarism in its wake are also bound to have opportunist echoes within the working class movement. Consequently, the ideological-political struggles waged during both First and Second Internationals will also have their echoes within the anti-globalisation, anti-imperialist movement. Of course no struggle repeats itself in history in exactly the same manner, but nevertheless communists once again will have to wage a determined ideological struggle against anarchism and opportunism.
THE last bastion of communism in Europe has crumbled. Desperate last-ditch attempts to save it through a coup d’etat have only hastened its doom.
There was a time when the spectre of communism haunted Europe and now the spectre of Europe is haunting communism everywhere. Will the demise of communism in Europe affect the future of communism in Asia too? How long can China withstand the capitalist onslaught? How does it all affect the Indian communist movement? These and many other questions are haunting the minds of communists and Marxist academicians of our country and are becoming major questions of public debate.
Let us start with an analysis of the events in the Soviet Union. The setback for socialism in the country of the first successful proletarian revolution, in the country of great Lenin, is indeed a most shocking event for communists. For weak-hearted communists it may well provide grounds for dejection and desertion. But for the Marxist-Leninists it only reveals the protracted and highly complex nature of class struggle in the international arena — the struggle between socialism and capitalism.
There is no use blaming American designs or individuals like Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The essential point is that while capitalism overcame the setbacks after the Second World War and renewed itself, the socialist system at a certain stage of its development began failing to deliver the goods and stagnated. It was being rejected by the people themselves including the working class. The socialist chain was put under tremendous strain and it broke at the point where distortions were severest — first in East Europe and then in Soviet Russia.
To defend the socialist Soviet Union from imperialist aggression a huge nuclear arsenal was built up. Achieving military parity with the USA, and even surpassing it, had become the sole motto of the socialist state. In the process, the peculiar phenomenon of a hegemonic superpower built on socialist economic base had emerged. Ironically, when the crunch came, not even a single shot was fired and the Soviet Union’s transformation became a classical case of ‘peaceful evolution’. The mechanical transplantation of the basic contradiction between the two systems of imperialism and socialism into the principal contradiction, between two blocs in the present stage gave rise to the phenomenon of super leader, super party and superpower which definitely had its genesis in Stalin's period itself. As a natural corollary to those absurd ideas, the socialist bloc underwent a split as Mao refused to subscribe to this theory and China refused to accept Soviet domination. Militarisation of the Soviet economy left vital gaps in the sector of primary and essential commodities and people were fed with false statistics. Socialist democracy was given the go by, no dissidence of any sort was tolerated and, in return, people were served the illusions of ‘developed socialism’, ‘primary stage of communism'’ and of a superpower syndrome often reminiscent of the great Russian chauvinism. Under cover of all this, a communist party and a regime grew which was detached from the masses and was corrupt and degenerate.
The socialist economic base could not sustain this superpower structure for long and the Soviet Union was already sitting on a volcano by the middle of the ’80s. Gorbachev initiated reforms to salvage the situation, but it was already too late. His perestroika and glasnost brought far-reaching changes in Eastern Europe, kindled national aspirations within Soviet Union and unleashed a host of social forces within the Soviet society and soon a pole emerged around Yeltsin demanding full-fledged restoration of capitalism. Western powers got a fertile ground for meddling in Soviet Union's internal affairs. All the efforts of Gorbachev to tame the forces unleashed by himself proved futile and one after another he had to surrender his positions with the fond hope of striking a harmonious balance. Economic rejuvenation of the society remained a far cry and he had virtually to beg before the Western powers for assistance and in return offered them one political concession after another. As a net result, his own position went on weakening and that of Yeltsin grew stronger. With all the political and constitutional changes the communist party had already been pushed to the sidelines. With its old formation it became out of tune with the multi-party parliamentary democratic system. Gorbachev mooted the idea of a social-democratic party and opted for a new union treaty.
It was at this point of time that the much-discredited coup came. We don’t have with us all the facts to judge what really prompted the coup leaders to act and what went on behind the scene.
But to brand them as hardliners and conservatives is wrong. They were all Gorbachev’s handpicked men, the products and the mainstay of Gorbachev’s reforms. When the entire cabinet is found to betray the President, the more logical explanation seems to be that it was actually the President who betrayed the trust placed in him. They expected Gorbachev to halt at a point and use the emergency powers he himself had obtained to arrest the drift. They felt that the time had come but Gorbachev, becoming victim of his own creation, refused to oblige. The abrupt rupture left no other option but to seize power through a coup. The coup was destined to fail because Gorbachev was still the leader of pro-perestroika forces and the coup leaders remained a vacillating tiny and incoherent group from the very beginning. Yeltsin sensed the crack and stood in valiant defiance. The coup collapsed and masses flocked over towards Yeltsin, the hero. A dejected Gorbachev returned to find his social base eroding fast and he himself being forced to surrender vital positions to Yeltsin. A weakened central power accelerated the process of disintegration and the three Baltic republics have, for all practical purposes, separated from the Soviet Union. Yeltsin whipped up an anti-communist hysteria. After remaining for a few days virtually under the dictates of Yeltsin, Gorbachev has started making moves for his consol-idation vis-a-vis Yeltsin. His moves to disband the communist party are actually the preparation for launching a social democratic party as per his original scheme, now in a roundabout way. To be sure, major sections of the Communist Party will transform themselves into the Gorbachevian scheme. In the coming days it will be interesting to watch, how the cooperation and rivalry between the two representative personalities of the present Soviet society advance.
We do not know how the Marxist-Leninists of Russia will regroup themselves. We also don't know how the ‘hardliners’ and ‘conservatives’ are going to react and what sort of dramatic developments are still in the offing. But we do know that for the second edition of the November Revolution in Soviet Union we shall have to wait much longer.
In over a century, from France to Germany to Russia, the centre of the communist movement has decisively shifted to China now and of course, India will be the other country most keenly watched.
Now a few words of polemics. The CPI(M) theoretician Mr. Prakash Karat, citing our positive evaluation of the 28th Congress of the CPSU, accused us of turning totally pro-Gorbachev and pro-Russia from the totally anti-Soviet position of our earlier days. They take credit for criticising Gorbachev from the very beginning. Let facts speak for themselves. In the great debate we sided firmly with the CPC’s position and criticised the Khruschevite thesis. We never believed in the ‘equidistance theory’ and sided resolutely with Mao and China. We took Mao’s thought as our guideline, which in international relations opposed the thesis of a leading party, which put the Third World versus imperialism as the principal contradiction in the present day world, and which opposed the superpower hegemonic status of the Soviet Union. Not the metaphysics of Stalin but the dialectics of Mao, was our philosophical guide and it helped us to understand the existence of class struggle in a socialist society and also the danger of capitalist restoration. We did commit mistakes and sometimes went to the extremes but our basic premise has withstood the test of history. The CPI(M), on the other hand, ridiculed Mao’s philosophical thought, applauded the superpower status of Soviet Russia and backed to the hilt the Czechoslovak, Afghan and Kampuchean invasions. The CPI(M)’s basic premise has proved to be subjective despite some correct criticisms of this or that mistake.
We were the first to criticise the 2nd November speech of Gorbachev in the harshest of terms, in our Fourth Congress document in January 1988 itself. The CPI(M) opened its mouth much later — only after visits to Moscow. All along we have been severely critical of Gorbachev’s approach towards imperialism. Regarding Gorbachev’s ideas on class struggle etc., we termed him as nothing else but a sophisticated version of Khruschev. We welcomed Gorbachev's measures in dismantling the superpower status of Soviet Russia and bringing democratic reforms within a highly authoritarian system. If the CPI(M) still harbours illusions about the Brezhnevian model of socialism, it should not forget that the model had reached its saturation point and was bound to collapse. Gorbachev only acted as the catalyst of history. One should also not forget that it was the same Brezhnevian regime which supported the Emergency and the authoritarian regime of Indira Gandhi in India. As regards the 28th Congress, in the then balance of forces within the Soviet Communist Party, we only supported Gorbachev against Yeltsin and it was nothing more than that. We knew that the search for ‘genuine revolutionary communists’ of our imagination in present-day Soviet Union is subjectivism, pure and simple. The search leads the CPI(M) to pin their hopes on Ligachev & Co. and the 28th Congress exposed their real worth.
Now if we don’t support the coup it is only because we know that howsoever satisfying it may appear to our senses, in conditions obtaining in Russia, the coup did not enjoy even a minimal popular support. If we don’t make any hue and cry over the American interference in Russian internal affairs, if we don’t weep for the demise of the Communist Party there, it is because there is no voice being raised against all this from within the Soviet Union. We cherish socialism, but as a social system it can never be imposed on a people. If the Soviet people, after 74 years of experience with socialism, have decided to reject it, how can we advocate its imposition through army, KGB and martial law? When there was still time left to check the drift nothing was done and all criticisms were just branded as CIA-inspired both by the Soviet leadership and their henchmen in India. In the concrete conditions now we can only support the lesser evil against the bigger one and wait for a favourable turn of events when communists will be able to seize back the initiative. This can be the only Marxist approach. All the rest are hysteric cries, cries in the wilderness out of sheer frustration.
China is different from the Soviet Union in many respects and particularly due to its strong ‘Maoist’ legacy. Socialism, of course at a primary stage, survives there and enjoys popular support despite the unfortunate events in Tiananmen Square and despite several distortions. We should not try to keep people’s faith in socialism intact by presenting a golden image of China, the method which the CPI(M) is now well set to adopt. This is not only factually incorrect, it is counter-productive too. We should tell the people the reality and educate them about the zigzag course of the struggle between socialism and capitalism.
[From Liberation, October 1991]
[Adopted by the Fifth All India Party Congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Kolkata, December 1992 ]
1. The CPI(ML) firmly upholds the banner of the Great October Revolution of 1917 led by Comrade Lenin in Russia. This was not only the first successful proletarian revolution in the world, it also brought about a new awakening in Asia. Though after 75 years the revolution is defeated, its historic significance can never be obliterated.
2. The CPI(ML) reaffirms the crucial role played by Comrade Stalin in building socialism in Soviet Union and in defending the Soviet Union against fascist aggression.
Stalin, however, had a lot of metaphysics in his approach and this was the main source of his grievous mistakes. During his period, inner party democracy as well as socialist democracy in society suffered from gross distortions.
3. The CPI(ML) stands by the struggle conducted against modern revisionism by Mao Zedong and the CPC in the Great Debate of early 1960s.
Comrade Mao’s theses regarding the existence of class struggle in socialist society and its reflection within the communist party; the danger of capitalist restoration and the as yet undecided nature of the struggle between socialism and capitalism have been borne out by history. Mao’s thought thus developed in negation of both Stalinist metaphysics and Khruschevite revisionism and put Marxism Leninism back on the rails once again.
Mao’s struggle had a great impact on the Indian communist movement. His thought contributed a lot to the emergence of our Marxist Leninist Party in struggle against all the Indian variants of modern revisionism.
4. In order to revitalise socialism, the Soviet Union in the post Breznev period was in crying need of a thorough transformation of its superpower status, restructuring of its rigid economic structure and rebuilding of its socialist democratic institutions. That is why when Gorbachev embarked upon Perestroika and Glasnost, he received overwhelming support from communists, progressive forces and democratic people throughout the world. However, it turned out that Gorbachev had been operating within the framework of liberal bourgeois ideology and economic political collaboration with western imperialism. The CPI(ML), therefore, denounces Gorbachev as a renegade.
5. The CPI(ML) is firmly against any international centre and any super party. In international affairs, it believes in following an independent policy based on its perception of the international situation. While welcoming the Chinese efforts to normalise and improve relations with Vietnam, we cannot but criticise the Chinese foreign policy response to the Gulf War.
6. The CPI(ML) does not rule out the possibility of a proletarian state with a multi-party system in Indian conditions. Its nature and form can, however, only be decided in the course of practice.
7. The CPI(ML) considers it to be the Party’s foremost duty to rise in defence of Marxism which is now facing an all out attack by the world bourgeoisie, to retrieve its revolutionary essence and to enrich it further in course of accomplishing the Indian revolution.
I essentially think that socialism itself is not a complete or stable system. Socialism is meant to be a transitory system, between capitalism and communism. So it is a very specific phenomenon. It does have certain features of communism — the society which is to be established — and it retains certain features of capitalism in the sense that what Marx calls ‘the principle of distribution’ remains essentially the same — to each according to his work. For example, in a socialist system, say there is a factory which is supposed to be representing ownership by people. A worker there, on the one hand, has the feeling that he is part of the people, so in a sense he is the owner of the factory as well. On the other hand, because he receives according to his work, he feels that he is a wage worker. So this duality operates in the worker’s consciousness.
As far as ownership is concerned, on the one hand, it is ownership by the whole people; on the other hand, this ownership is managed through state ownership, (because the state still exists in a socialist society) and exercised through officials appointed by the state. So the ownership aspect also has a duality and is liable to degenerate into bureaucracy. This duality of both workers and ownership is characteristic of the transitory society.
There is also the fact that we have been experimenting with socialism in backward countries, not advanced capitalist countries. Productive forces are backward and you cannot establish any higher system of ownership immediately. Different kinds of ownership exist: ownership by the whole people, ownership by the collective, small private enterprises ... only gradually can you move to another stage. Commodity relationships, money, all this not only continue but it has a role to play because capitalism has not exhausted itself. A lot of exchange is really commodity exchange, market exchange. For example, exchange between enterprises owned by the people and enterprises which are collectives — enterprises at different stages — is essentially commodity exchange. Because of this particularity of socialist society and especially of socialism in backward countries, socialism has both possibilities — it can advance towards communism or it can slide back towards capitalism.
Originally the conception had been that a socialist society will be established and after some time it will go over to communism. But later there were theoretical developments in Marxism, Lenin started saying that this transition will take a long time, and then in China Mao said that it’s still not settled whether capitalism or socialism will win, it may take hundreds of years. This change came about because of the particular conditions under which socialism had to be built. And formulations started appearing about the existence of class contradictions, class struggles in socialist society, whereas the original proponents of Marxism had envisaged socialism as a classless society. So I feel that Marx’s original thesis only gives a general outline, because his whole conception was based on the analysis of a capitalist society, and that too in abstraction, the perfect capitalist society. In concrete terms even a very highly developed capitalist society doesn’t conform to Marx’s ideal standards. So you can’t even say that the study of capitalism is complete because capitalism is still present and it has evolved very fast, it has not run its course. And more importantly, the study of socialism and the economic laws of socialism is still at a very primitive, primary stage.
Because of all this I believe that Marxism, for its retrieval now, requires what in popular terms I call a new Das Kapital. The time is ripe for that. The basics are there, they will continue to operate, but the study of capitalism remains incomplete. Even when Lenin studied monopoly capitalism, he too had the conception that this monopoly capitalism was the last stage of capitalism and it was moribund and would collapse. But you can see that monopoly capitalism has taken new forms and continues. So new studies are needed. Then there is the [need for a] study of the economic laws of socialism, with the experience of 75 years in Russia and later China ... so I feel Marxism needs a work comparable to Capital, particularly because all the experiments with building socialism are going on in the backward countries — in China, Vietnam and so on. If socialism as a transitory society has to continue for hundreds of years, that means you can't see commodities, money and markets just as a liability, and start taking steps to overcome them. Rather, even in a socialist society they may require development, they may require a particular utilisation for advancing the cause of socialism itself. It’s not something which has to be just dispensed with or a necessary evil which you have to go through. Planning is supposed to be a socialistic phenomenon and we saw that capitalist society used planning to check the anarchy of production with which capitalism is associated. So similarly, communists will have to think about how to utilise commodities, money and markets to build socialism in a positive way.
There is one more point that Marx made when he said that socialism was a transitory system: he said that proletarian dictatorship was an absolute necessity. So I feel that in case where proletarian dictatorship is weakened, the chance of that transitory system slipping back to capitalism is obvious. For example if we look at the Soviet Union we find that before its collapse, the economic model was more or less a traditional socialist one. All belonged to the state sector; privatisation and foreign capital were virtually absent. But they started losing proletarian dictatorship from Krushchev’s period itself, and from there we find that somewhere the gateway to capitalism was opened. In contrast I feel that Mao studied this danger of socialism going back to capitalism, the potential for reversal which the Russians denied was possible.
With the concept of Cultural Revolution — the Cultural Revolution was conceived not for tampering with the economic laws of socialism, not for bypassing backward productive forces and building some sort of advanced communist production relations — actually Mao wanted to strengthen proletarian dictatorship. And proletarian dictatorship is another name for broad people’s democracy of 90%. And this he tried to build through the Cultural Revolution: dictatorship over the few and democracy of 90%. And the Cultural Revolution had that emphasis — big character posters, mass enthusiasm etc. Socialist countries like Russia, East European countries...by proletarian dictatorship they understood just the dictatorship. The other part, that means democracy for 90%, this question of socialist democracy was not perceived as an integral part of proletarian dictatorship. So other forces took up the question of democracy. In China also, this question has always been there and Mao’s was the first attempt to generalise this democracy under socialism. Tiananmen again represented the desire for democracy, and I think every ten years, or five years or seven years, we are witnessing some big people’s movement, and if you don’t take it up from within a socialist framework it will be taken up within a bourgeois framework.
Anyway the Cultural Revolution was an experiment with that. It is true that certain petty bourgeois social forces emerged and the whole Cultural Revolution was derailed, and some people started tampering with the basic economic laws of socialism, trying to develop some sort of higher relations. The Party, which has to be the instrument of this, got disorganised. So it ended in failure. But my point is that it raised certain very important questions of socialist democracy. It did create a lot of enthusiasm among masses although it could not be organised properly and that was a problem.
At present in China they are carrying out economic experiments and keeping intact the Communist Party’s leadership — this is something I do appreciate and as an experiment it is worth watching and studying. But the other aspect, the desire for democracy, is also present. China will witness some sort of democratic movement once again. A country cannot just survive on economic statistics. And there I think the lessons of the Cultural Revolution will again be useful, for the sake of reference at least. So this is how I see this whole crisis of socialism or problems of socialism.
A few words about the international communist movement. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the far-reaching changes in China have drastically changed the scenario of the international communist movement. The old division between pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese parties, a legacy of the Great Debate of the ’60s, has become irrelevant. The Soviet collapse, however, has brought about a reorganisation of communist parties and communist platforms in Russia as well as in several East European countries. These parties are reassessing their past, particularly the harmful effects of revisionism. On the other hand, several ML parties the world over which emerged during the stormy days of 1968-70 and sustained themselves have also been analysing the ultra-left deviations they had suffered from. This has created a favourable situation for the parties belonging to both the streams coming closer. This typical phenomenon was reflected in the recent international seminar held under the auspices of the Workers’ Party of Belgium where more than 50 parties and groups belonging to both the erstwhile streams as well as ‘independent’ streams participated. Our Party too was represented there and extended its cooperation to such a coming together.
We think that reducing the concept of the unity of the International communist movement to simply the unity of ML parties who uphold Mao’s Thought, and that too a particular interpretation of it, is too sectarian an approach and unsuited to the present conditions.
I think it is necessary to reiterate our attitude to China as it remains a great source of confusion and polemics. In our opinion, building of socialism should not be viewed in abstraction devoid of the concrete conditions of the country concerned and the concrete times. Building socialism in a backward country like China and in conditions where socialism does not exist anywhere except in a few small socialist countries and there are no prospects for any proletarian revolution for a fairly long time to come in any advanced capitalist country, is a specific problem. So it is not the question of building socialism in general that ought to be discussed; rather building socialism in China in the present-day conditions that must be the point of departure for any meaningful discussion. These considerations only lead us to appreciate the general orientation of Chinese reforms. There is no question of supporting each and every measure of CPC and Chinese government. The support to the general orientation at the same time implies our serious concerns over the risks involved and, of course, criticisms of the policies which we consider harmful to the general interests of socialism and the international communist movement.
We are neither in favour of a China — or CPC-centred international communist bloc nor are we eager to join any international formation that makes condemnation of China its central concern. This I think sums up our attitude to China as well as to the international communist movement.
We are living in times when almost all the basic tenets of Marxism are being challenged and declarations are being made about the end of history. This reminds me of Marx who in his Poverty of Philosophy wrote some 150 years back, “When they say that the present-day relations — the relations of bourgeois production — are natural, the economists imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. Thus, these relations are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any.”
So bourgeois philosophers and economists had declared the end of history much earlier. But still history progressed and Marxism played a guiding role in its advance. Marx had challenged the eternity of bourgeois relations of production and through a rare scientific insight shown that these relations too, like earlier relations, are but transitory in nature. The eternity of change lies at the core of Marxist philosophy and all future attempts to change the world shall only draw sustenance from Marxism. Marx in his grand treatise Das Kapital had exposed the exploitative basis of bourgeois relations of production. He wrote in his Wage Labour and Capital, "Even the most favourable situation for the working class, the most rapid possible growth of capital, however much it may improve the material existence of the worker, does not remove the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the bourgeoisie, the interests of the capitalists. Profits and wages remain as before in inverse proportion.
“If capital is growing rapidly wages may rise, the profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist has widened.”
Despite all the changes in the structure and organisation of production, the exploitative basis of the bourgeois relations of production, the extraction of surplus value remains intact and if anything, the social gulf between imperialism and dependent countries on the international scale and between the proletariat and bourgeoisie within the developed capitalist world has only widened. And hence the antagonism, the motive force that continues to propel the history forward.
And yet the proletarian struggle has suffered setbacks, socialism built over a large part of the globe has suffered reversal. Hence, mere reiteration of faith in Marxism, in the victory of proletariat, is not enough. Marxism can be defended only through its enrichment.
By the time Marx’s study of British capitalism, the most ideally developed country of capitalism, the base material for his Das Kapital was complete, free competition had started giving way to the monopolies. The stage of finance capital, of monopoly capitalism, replaced competition within the country by competition among capitalist countries for the world market. And thus arose the phenomena of world wars and of proletarian revolution breaking the imperialist chain where it is weakest. And then again the rise of a single economic, military and political bloc of imperialism led by USA and the defeat and subsequent collapse of socialism in the prolonged cold war.
This interrelation, in the background of structural changes in capitalist production owing to scientific and technological revolution and virtual stagnation in the socialist economy, opens up new fields of study and investigation for Marxist theoreticians the world over. Communists have before them over seventy five years of experience of building socialism. One learns only through one’s mistakes and hence the study I mentioned shall essentially be a study of the political economy of socialism, comparable only to the dimensions of Das Kapital.
AMERICAN political scientists who are fond of designing new theories of world order at the slightest possible provocation have understandably been quite busy over the last few years. The unfolding post-Cold War world however continues to surprise and refute them and defy even the best of bourgeois trajectories of analysis. Ironically, while bourgeois thinkers and propagandists prefer to dismiss Marxist analyses of the contemporary world as idle exercises in conspiracy theory, every Seattle and September 11 sends them back to the mother of all excuses: ‘intelligence failure’!
Seattle of course did not happen overnight. The signal from Chiapas came early in the 1990s. It was quite evident that the working people and revolutionary and progressive forces the world over had a more ambitious and active agenda than merely lamenting and analysing why the Soviet Union had finally collapsed. Even before the World Trade Organisation was formally launched, the Uruguay Round negotiations of the GATT had been greeted with bitter protests in large parts of the developing world. Powerful militant demonstrations of tens of thousands of people against the neo-liberal dictates of the IMF, World Bank and WTO were being routinely reported from almost all corners of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Seattle marked a new high. It also set a new trend. One could say it produced a huge demonstration effect.
For those of us who were understandably worried about the future of the Seattle spirit after the trauma of September 11 and more importantly in the wake of the war that followed, let me say at the outset that we have good reasons to believe that the Seattle spirit has not only survived, but it is also getting stronger. Only the other day we heard this roaring resolve at the second World Social Forum meet in Porto Alegre: “WTO, IMF and World Bank will meet somewhere, sometime. And we will be there.” And now Barcelona has shown that it need not be only WTO, IMF or World Bank.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the larger Soviet bloc and the onset of pro-market reforms in China obviously marked a major opportunity for capitalist expansion, extensive as well as intensive. But this expansion could only be achieved by aggravating the internal contradictions of an increasingly globalised capitalism. Even as the contradiction between socialism and capitalism was relegated for the time being from the domain of practical politics to the realm of ideology, the heroic Cuban resistance notwithstanding, and inter-imperialist rivalry remained somewhat muted, the contradiction between imperialism and the third world grew sharper and the rift between capital and labour in advanced capitalist countries wider. For the cronies of capitalism, Seattle was a rude reminder of the growing intensity and unmanageability of global capitalism’s own internal contradictions. For the soldiers of socialism, it signified the beginning of an exciting and challenging new phase for pressing ahead.
One could not however miss a rather pronounced streak of American conservatism in the Seattle showdown. But as the theatre of action travelled from Seattle to Melbourne, Prague and Genoa, the tone became increasingly anti-imperialist, the US imperialism was squarely named as the number one global enemy and issues like third world debt began to figure much more prominently alongside the other issues that are of immediate concern for the youth and the working class. I am happy to tell you that Carlo Giuliani is popularly acknowledged among Left circles in India, and I hope the same must be true of many other countries, as the first martyr of the anti-globalisation resistance. Rudy Giuliani may be the hero of New York after September 11, but Carlo Giuliani remains the hero of the worldwide campaign against globalisation.
From Seattle to Genoa, the context of anti-globalisation resistance however remained predominantly economic. In a way this was probably inescapable. For if we are thinking and talking in terms of mass resistance to globalisation, it cannot be based merely on the premise that globalisation is bad. The point is, globalisation is not just bad but it hurts and it hurts so many millions the world over and in such a massive way. For the broadest majority of the people cutting across communities and cultures, countries and continents, the hurt is probably felt most acutely in the realm of economy. It is quite understandable that the recent anti-globalisation protests have grown in a climate of global economic slowdown or recession that refreshed and refuelled memories of the Great Depression in all major capitalist centres.
But then as Lenin showed so brilliantly and categorically a century ago in his classic What Is To Be Done, transition from the economic to the political does not happen spontaneously. And this is precisely where he located the most crucial role of revolutionary ideology and vanguard organisation. One is inclined to remember this teaching of Lenin not just as a basic principle of class struggle and proletarian or communist politics. In the face of a revolutionary crisis, when the question of power cries to be clinched, it is politics which becomes decisive, which makes or mars a revolution. Look at what is happening in Argentina now. Blossoming in full glory right in the American backyard is a mighty movement of millions of Argentinians, a veritable festival of mass resistance against the neo-liberal offensive of globalisation. Understandably, parallels are being drawn in Left circles to the great Paris Commune of 1871. After all, it’s not everyday that one gets to see a popular movement assume such gigantic proportions and come so close to even wresting power. Yet another teaching of Lenin, of the imperialist chain snapping at its weakest link, appears in striking distance of being vindicated once again. But the question that remains to be answered: Is the movement in Argentina politically and organisationally prepared for such a possibility?
To return to Seattle and September 11 and the world defined by these markers, one is tempted to see it in terms of an ongoing transition from the economic to the political. The surface reality of globalisation does not always reveal the underlying imperialist content and dynamics with the kind of clarity and precision that the aftermath of September 11 has provided. Even though many Marxists insist on using the term imperialist globalisation in place of the widely used ‘corporate globalisation’, and some would like to give up the word globalisation altogether and stick to imperialism, no amount of theoretical debate and discussion could possibly have brought imperialism back on the practical agenda in a way that September 11 and its aftermath has done.
Ironically, even as protesters fought pitched battles on the streets from Seattle to Genoa, a book that began making waves even in the anti-globalisation camp declared imperialism to be a thing of the past. And this book, Empire has been compared to the Communist Manifesto and its authors have been described as Marx and Engels of the Internet age! The book was of course written long before Seattle, it was possibly only marketed with an eye on the Seattle effect. The authors in fact tell us that it was written during the interregnum between the Gulf War and the war in Kosovo, and that makes it look all the more strange and silly.
It is difficult and perhaps not necessary to try and explain September 11 directly in terms of the logic of globalisation. In fact, it is the proponents and apologists of globalisation who would like us to believe that September 11 marked a desperate revivalist backlash of the old and the outdated against the grand vision of a technology-driven future. They are however appalled that the perpetrators of September 11 had the audacity to use the same sophisticated technology to such brutal precision and lethal ends, a prerogative that Washington considers to be exclusively America's own. Promotion and export of terror has always been a core element of the American drive for political hegemony and this was probably the first major occasion when part of this terror took the reverse route.
Washington knew only one way to respond to the 'opportunity' provided by September 11. An American author has rightly said, “for America, there are only two kinds of years, the war years and the interwar years”. When imperialism does not actually wage war it prepares for one. War is where the economics and politics of imperialism attain the closest convergence, and what better and surer way could there be for recession-hit America to spend its way out of recession! We need not elaborate here the strategic objectives prompting America’s war in and on Afghanistan. The crucial geo-political significance of Afghanistan from Washington’s point of view is now common knowledge.
Along with war we have also got a whole set of freebies, the usual war accessories and adjuncts: racist attacks, theorised as the clash of civilisations; massive layoffs and redundancies; globalisation of repressive legislation or should we say competitive and compulsive cloning of the USA PATRIOT Act; and media censorship or self-censorship, if you will. This catalogue is of course only indicative and not exhaustive. Meanwhile, the Afghan war itself is by no means over as one overt operation merges into another, not to speak of the clandestine war that never stops. Operation Enduring Freedom gave way to Operation Anaconda and the praxis of devil has now once again invoked the axis of evil argument so that the war machine can roll on without gathering much of a moss.
As we have already noted, in the wake of September 11 there was widespread apprehension that the fledgling anti-globalisation campaign might get derailed. Colonialism and imperialist wars have indeed an alarming record of disrupting and distorting the international working class movement and there can be no underestimating the damage potential of September 11. But for once the apprehensions do not seem to be coming true, if anything, the war seems to have only helped further politicise and galvanise the anti-globalisation movement. It was heartening to note that the organisers of the September 29 New York demonstration against IMF and World Bank did not give up their planned programme, instead they went ahead with a bold call against Bush’s war plans. In fact, for once the anti-war movement did not wait for the bombings to start and large sections of the anti-globalisation camp had little difficulty in making opposition to the war and racism a key agenda of the anti-globalisation campaign.
American and Western propaganda managers tried all possible tricks to sell the war. There were shrill cries of a crusade against Islam, thoroughly demonised and equated to fundamentalism and terrorism, as were clever chants of freedom and democracy. There were images of humanitarian intervention and most crucially there was this thoroughly reprehensible attempt to project the war as liberation of Afghan women from the bondage of the Talibans. But nothing really worked. In fact, women’s organisations in different parts of the world have been among the most active and vocal against the war. We must especially salute the courage and determination of the fighting women of Afghanistan who continued to call the American bluff and boldly demarcated their agenda from America’s war campaign.
The anti-war movement continued with undiminished energy and resolve even after the calls of Jihad died down following the fall of Kabul. In fact, one of the biggest demonstrations against the war was held in London on November 18, shortly after the Talibans had fled Kabul. And from Barcelona to Rome, we continue to hear anti-war slogans echoed by million voices all over Europe. It is quite encouraging to note that representatives of social movements attending the second World Social Forum at Porto Alegre called for a resistance to not just neo-liberalism, but war and militarism as well, stating clearly that “opposition to the war is at the heart of our movement.” And while Bush goes on expanding his agenda, the anti-war movement has also begun to identify increasingly with the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people for their land and freedom, and for peace with dignity.
The wild hope of seeing Vietnam being repeated in Afghanistan has turned out to be wishful thinking. The retreat of the ragtag band of Taliban fighters without virtually a fight has once again established the fact that guerrilla warfare is not a question of mere terrain or technique, its success or failure depends primarily on the extent of popular support and mobilisation. Having said this we must also recognise that with every passing day the balance in Afghanistan is bound to turn increasingly against the American troops. Reports of significant casualties of US troops have begun to reach from the inhospitable interiors of Afghanistan. Mr. Karzai's imported regime remains as rootless and clueless as ever. He may be making waves in the world of fashion, but back home his government’s writ does not run beyond Kabul. The shock of September 11 followed by the speedy overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the apparent retreat of Osama bin Laden has of course expanded the hitherto narrow domestic support base of the Bush presidency. Bush's rating and diplomatic manoeuvreability have also gone up in the international arena. Washington made full use of this conjuncture to effectively clinch the issue of opening a new trade round at the Doha summit of WTO in November. And by all accounts, the US is now really desperate to do an Afghanistan in Iraq.
But it is equally certain that the US will not be able to muster the kind of global support it enjoyed at the time of the Gulf War or early in the war against Afghanistan. Most apologists of US foreign policy agree that the unipolar moment of the US is over and Bush would have to shed his unilateral stance and rely more on multilateralism. In fact, Samuel Huntington describes the present world as a uni-multipolar one, a state of transition from a brief unipolar moment at the end of Gulf War towards a really multipolar arrangement.
On the economic front, officially, the US economy is now out of recession even as the global economic outlook continues to be gloomy especially with the recession in Japan showing no signs of abating. But following Enrongate, corporate confidence and credibility have hit a rock bottom in the US. It has now been exposed quite conclusively that the fountainhead of crony capitalism is located not in East and South-east Asia, but right in the US.
Politically, consensus around Bush's anti-terrorism campaign remains confined to the US, elsewhere it is being seen increasingly as America’s own agenda in spite of a visible worldwide consolidation of the right and the hard right at that. Even in countries like India and Pakistan, both of which are vying for closer strategic partnership with the US, the ruling classes are not completely united on going the whole hog with the US on the entire agenda. In India, the ruling party of the hard Right, the BJP suffered a humiliating defeat in recent elections held in four provinces including Uttar Pradesh, the biggest and politically most crucial of Indian provinces. Terrorism, let me tell you, was the principal poll plank of the party. And now it has had to resort to an unconventional joint session of the two houses of the Parliament to get the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act passed.
Where do we go now from here? The anti-globalisation campaign has taken the first steps towards a sustained and powerful anti-imperialist movement with a clear opposition to the war and racism. We must step up international political cooperation and coordination among broad sections of anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation forces to accelerate the tempo of resistance. While exploring and utilising every possible opportunity to broaden the frontiers of this movement and get more shades of people on board of the growing coalition for peace, democracy and progress, I think the crying need of the hour is to deepen it in every available national and even local context. The deeper we go, the stronger we grow. And with strong roots among the masses, there can be no fixed limits for revolutionary imagination and initiative. Argentina shows the way.
Just as it is important to name and target the global enemy, it is no less important to identify and target the numerous local linkages of the global enemy. Let us remember that the imperialist war machine moves on several wheels and every wheel has numerous cogs. It is therefore crucial to resist every local linkage and stop every real and potential and aspiring ally of the US from aiding the war campaign in particular and the neoliberal economic offensive in general. The best way, for example, we in India can oppose imperialist globalisation and the war and racism is by defeating the Indian collaborators of US imperialism who are unleashing a rein of what we call communal fascism in India. And even in this struggle, let me tell you, we derive our greatest strength from the anti-feudal struggles of the landless and poor peasants, from the growing awakening and assertion of the rural poor for basic freedom and human dignity. I say this not to belittle the unquestionable importance of more direct forms and avenues of anti-imperialist struggle, especially struggles of urban organised and unorganised workers, but only to highlight the great reserves of revolutionary strength and energy that are still waiting to be tapped in the Indian countryside and I am sure, the same must be true of many other third world countries.
In this context let me also add that to resist the neo-liberal offensive of imperialist globalisation, it is absolutely important to scotch the rumour of the so-called retreat of nation-states. This talk of nation-states beating a retreat may be music to our ears schooled in proletarian internationalism and eyes dedicated to the ultimate communist dream of a classless and hence stateless society, but the point is it is just a rumour and a dangerous rumour at that. Bourgeois nation-states are perhaps more active than ever before, they have only reshaped their policies and reordered their priorities. If the proletariat of each country, as called upon by the Communist Manifesto, must first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie; if, to quote the Manifesto again, the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, the practitioners of proletarian politics and proletarian internationalism cannot afford to suffer from any confusion on this score. The importance of nation-state as an arena of class struggle has only grown and not diminished in the present era of globalisation. And in third world countries where the bourgeois rulers are fast capitulating to imperialist dictates and are busy selling off key and scarce national resources, the renewed relevance of economic nationalism can hardly be overemphasised. Just as parliamentary treachery and the historical obsolescence of parliament has not made parliament practically and politically irrelevant to communists and socialists the world over, the crimes committed in the name of bourgeois nationalism and the technological marvels that are purportedly shrinking the world into a village cannot render nation and nationalism superfluous in the international struggle against global capitalism. After all, internationalism as opposed to globalism can only become more meaningful when it strikes strong national roots.
To conclude, the world since Seattle and September 11 is an immensely exciting and challenging world. The times are testing but full of promises. With imperialism on the offensive and the war machine rolling on with all its force, many a former voice in the left and liberal camp has fallen silent. Worse still, many are singing different tunes. This is how bourgeois liberalism has always exposed its limits. And this is why it is called bourgeois liberalism. But for every voice that is falling silent there are dozens more that are turning vocal. And there are millions more that are waiting to be heard. As Lenin said almost a century ago while surveying what he called 'Inflammable Material in World Polities’, “Less illusions about the liberalism of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. More attention to the growth of the international revolutionary proletariat.” We have a war to defeat, and a world to win!
WE have assembled here to hold a political convention against globalisation. A little distance away from the venue of this convention, the first Asian Social Forum is being held on the Nizam College grounds. Does this corroborate the notion that social is social and political is political, and the twain shall never meet? For me, the answer is a big NO. I think more and more of us who are attending either this convention or the ASF or maybe both increasingly realise that the twain must meet. Political devoid of social is plain managerial -managing the crying contradictions of the society and the economy in a way that only reinforces the status quo. Similarly, social divorced from political is bound to remain rather ineffectual – for all its noble intentions sheer social activism can hardly scratch the surface of the existing reality.
The theme of our convention is “against globalization”. I need not waste any time here discussing what globalisation is and why it should be opposed. Each one of us present here can explain the process and dynamics of globalisation from a number of angles. Each one of us is aware of its disastrous consequences for people who are at the receiving end of this skewed process that reinforces the unevenness of development and accentuates all kinds of disparities. Each one of us can therefore list any number of valid reasons as to why globalisation should be questioned and opposed.
I’ll address myself to the question of how we can put up a more effective resistance to globalisation. Ten years ago, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when we began to understand globalisation against the backdrop of IMF-inspired Structural Adjustment Programmes, the view of globalisation that was discussed most widely the world over was primarily economic. Globalisation was analysed primarily in terms of the IMF and the World Bank, and the giants called MNCs. The Dunkel Draft and the transformation of GATT into WTO gave us a new target. The Mexican meltdown and the subsequent Asian currency turmoil acquainted us with the unprecedented volume and volatility of finance capital. In the midst of globalised economic crisis and transnational offensive of big capital many argued that globalisatbn is weakening and disciplining nation-states, including the most powerful of all states, the United States of America.
But post September 11, we are now more aware than ever before how the talks of globalisation weakening the US — the seat of the most concentrated might of imperialism — have been nothing but wishful thinking. The speculative offensive of finance capital and American mega corporations is fully underwritten by the growing military muscle of Washington. Globalisation means imperialism and imperialism means war. The anti-globalisation campaign must therefore also grow into a powerful anti-imperialist anti-war movement. And this is precisely what is happening in more and more parts of the world. The anti-globalisation forces in India must also strengthen their voice against imperialism and war.
Pitted against the enormous might of the US imperialism and the mega corporations and huge institutions like IMF, WB and WTO, it is natural that we should also look for a powerful global rebuff. It is indeed quite heartening to note the global growth of solidarity and shared resistance. But it will be a folly to believe that globalisation can only be confronted on a global level. No globalisation is conceivable without the active connivance of sundry ‘local’ agents. In fact, it is these local agents who promote and sell globalisation whether by painting it in rosy colours or by invoking the TINA (there is no alternative) factor. Have we not seen successive central governments in India, from the days of Narsimha Rao and Manmohan Singh to the present period of Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh, surpass one another in pushing through pro-globalisation policies? Various state governments are also playing a similar role as active agents of globalisation. Some governments, and the one in Andhra is leading the pack, are doing it quite brazenly; others are doing it in a guarded manner behind some veil or the other. If the World Bank is too discredited, they say they are borrowing from the Asian Development Bank; if the dictates of the WTO cause uproar they present them as the prescription of a ‘hired’ international consultancy firm.
To confront globalisation effectively, we have to take all these local vehicles of globalisation to task. Effective resistance has to be built up here and now. This is precisely what is happening in Latin America. In Andhra too, this has been the logic of struggle. It is issues like cotton growers’ suicides, the visit of Bill Clinton and steep hike in power tariff that ignited powerful mass protests and the Left unity developing in the state is a product of this struggle. We cannot go to Washington to challenge the policies of IMF and World Bank, but we can surely convey a clear message to all our governments that if these policies are not changed, then we will go ahead and change the governments themselves.
We cannot fail to notice the fact that in India predatory globalisation and aggressive communalism have been working and growing in tandem. Cyberabad and Ahmedabad are two sides of the same coin. In fact, Gujarat itself is one of the most advanced laboratories of globalisation in India and now we have incontrovertible evidence to show that the genocide in Gujarat has been hate-funded by MNCs, imperialist lending agencies and the VHP's own variety and network of globalisation.
Evidently, in India the opposition to globalisation must also go hand in hand with the opposition to the communal fascist offensive of the saffron brigade. But such a convergence is often lacking and we find a disjunction between the two lines of opposition. Globalisation is treated as an economic process and the task of opposing globalisation is often delegated to the trade unions. Comrade Yechuri has spoken about the duality displayed by the working people in opting for the red flag in economic struggles and choosing another flag in the arena of politics. This duality actually starts from above when opposition to aggressive communalism is taken as the sole defining principle of political mobilistaion and opposition to imperialist-globalisation is not stretched to its political conclusion. The result is an anti-communal alliance of various shades of pro-globalisation forces and the opposition to both communalism and globalisation gets diluted in the process. The answer lies in taking consistent opposition to both communalism and globalisation as the key-link in politics, as the irreducible basis of political mobilisation.
This is the basis on which we can have the broadest possible unity of the Left, a glimpse of which we are seeing in Andhra, on a nationwide scale. This is the basis on which we can redefine and strengthen the politics of a third front in the country and check the growing trend towards bipolarity. This is the lesson of our unity and struggle in Andhra.
Hyderabad today is one of the key laboratories of globalisation in India. The result of this globalisation can be best measured in terms of the growing phenomenon of peasants' suicides in the state. Yesterday, it was the cotton-growers of Warangal, today it is the turn of the groundnut-growers of Anantapur. Time was when Telangana used to vibrate with a different political culture, when the name of Telangana used to evoke the images of a powerful mass revolutionary upsurge. Today once again we need to resurrect that glorious spirit to halt imperialist globalisation in its tracks and give a fitting rebuff to the fascist offensive of the communal forces.
WHETHER we discuss the future of socialism or socialism of the future, we now have more than eighty-five years of experience with building socialism. From this vantage point of history we can survey the debris of what used to be the Soviet Union till recently, we can study the experiment that is going on in China and a number of other countries in an admittedly adverse environment. Naturally we have strong opinions as to what socialism should be like in different respects. The inadequacies and imperfections of past and present socialism prompt us to dream of a perfect socialism in future. We want socialism to be totally different from capitalism, we want it to look and feel totally different.
But we would do well to remember Marx’s caution that socialism can only be constructed in a historically given situation and emerging from the womb of capitalism, socialism cannot but carry all the birthmarks of capitalism. A lot of social, economic and cultural details that we often discuss, the high degree of decentralisation that we want to see in socialism, may well be perfectly compatible with the vision of communism. Indeed it is communism and not socialism which really constitutes the negation of capitalism.
It is communism which envisions a classless society in which the state can only wither away and decentralisation reign supreme, in which the differences between the city and the countryside disappear, labour finally overcomes its dehumanising and alienating capitalist context and mental and manual work finally loses all distinction to merge into an integrated, glorious and profoundly satisfying celebration of human creativity.
The whole concept of socialism arose on the basis of the realisation that the journey from capitalism to communism could only progress through a period of transition. This transition was theorised as socialism. So even in theory, socialism is a compromise, it is an approximation, it is quite imperfect. Quite early on in the battle for socialism, Marx and Engels realised the importance of making a clear distinction between utopian and scientific socialism. The word scientific is bound to raise many eyebrows in the present era when words like science and truth are viewed with considerable suspicion. But even after stressing all the differences between natural science that can be verified in a laboratory and social science that can never be as exact, it is important to separate myth from reality, fact from fiction, and grasp socialism as something real and practical as opposed to something that is only imaginary and absurdly romantic.
Making a distinction between Utopian and scientific socialism was however not enough. It turned out that history had many more surprises in store and that the first break came in backward Russia and not in advanced Europe. It was nobody's case that socialism could be better constructed in a single country and on a backward social, economic and political foundation, but that’s how it happened in history. As revolutionaries we can only make the most of a chance that comes our way in history. We must grab it with both hands for in history we do not have the luxury of rejecting a chance simply because it does not conform to the predetermined parameters and standards of our theory.
The debate however still continues and the collapse of the Soviet experiment has only refuelled it. An eminent Marxist like Istvan Meszaros has predicted that the United States might well be the next land to turn socialist and that will really be socialism on a solid technological and political foundation. I wish history were to prove him true. A socialist US will surely be a stunning negation of US imperialism, the most barbaric imperialist power of the world ever since the Sun set on the British Empire and German fascism was overpowered in the Second World War.
But contrary to Meszaros’ belief, the countries that have turned towards socialism since the Russian Revolution of November 1917 have all been backward countries of the Third World. In other words, it is socialism which has had to take on the responsibility of freeing the world from feudal and pre-capitalist survivals while capitalism has continued to lay the scientific and technological foundation for its own eventual negation. The banner of socialism in the present day world really stands for extensive growth of productive forces while intensive growth is still happening within the contours of capitalism. It is probably this combination of extensive and intensive growth which will aggravate the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system and eventually push them up to and beyond a point when the capitalist integument is torn asunder and socialism starts cornering capitalism in its traditional strongholds.
As far as the ongoing battle for socialism is concerned, the overall scene today certainly looks far more encouraging than any period in recent past. During the later years of Soviet Union there was an atmosphere of complacency. The more the quality of socialism deteriorated inside the Soviet Union and worldwide Soviet socialism became synonymous with a never-ending and totally unmanageable arms race between two superpowers, the louder became the claims of developed socialism and even transition to communism. The Chinese experiment with socialism is at least not marked by such a crying contrast between theory and practice. Worldwide, the forces of socialism now have a much better understanding of the limitations of the earlier and ongoing experiments with socialist construction. The relentless development of science and technology and the concomitant growth of people’s consciousness are creating stronger possibilities of a more democratic and less bureaucratic socialist order. And now we have a powerful anti-globalisation anti-imperialist anti-war movement providing a vibrant and conducive international environment for the fight for socialism in any part of the world.
As revolutionary communists we can only feel more hopeful and confident. It is not our job to denounce or idealise the socialist attempts going on in other countries. Our job is to prepare for the victory of socialism in India and to make sure that when we get a chance we can prove it in practice that we have learned a lesson or two from the Soviet debacle or the protracted Chinese experiment with socialism.
Socialism is necessary. Socialism is possible. Socialism is irresistible.
THE WSF slogan or motto ‘another world is possible’ has quite understandably given rise to widespread political debates. In contrast to the triumphalist bourgeois claim of “there is no alternative,” the WSF slogan did reflect the popular yearning for a progressive alternative to the decadent and oppressive capitalist order. It also exuded a resolute optimism and even enthusiasm for such an alternative world order. Yet, with many forces within the WSF talking increasingly about the possibility of a regulated and reformed capitalism, of a romanticised and humane globalisation, the inherent ambivalence and vagueness of the WSF motto has also become quite clear. The slogan indeed says nothing about the nature of another world, and for another, it also does not address the important question of how that possibility of another world is to be realised.
Socialists of the world are more or less convinced and agreed that the only meaningful another world we can talk about is a socialist world and that the path to socialism proceeds through revolutions and not reforms. But then the WSF is not a World Socialist Forum, it is merely a world social forum and it is futile to expect sharp and crisp statements and definite calls to action from a body which calls itself a context, a process, a space, virtually anything and everything but an organisation or a movement.
When the WSF was born, the word ‘social’ was apparently stressed as a counterpoint to ‘economic’. If the annual World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland were a jamboree of the big MNCs, and policymakers of capitalist states, the WSF was projected to be a global counter-gathering of activists, an international rainbow of protests against the oppressive Fund-Bank-WTO order. But the world has undergone major changes since January 2001 when the WSF was born in Brazil. In the wake of America's Afghan war and the subsequent Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq, the whole world has been forced to sit up and confront the brutal and barbaric reality of imperialism and militarisation. And over the last two years we have seen a huge worldwide anti-war movement come up in almost every corner of the globe. But the WSF has been completely aloof from the anti-war movement and remained busy only with ‘social concerns’ that refuse to lead to any commensurate political action. The ‘social’ in the WSF thus increasingly seems to be building bridges with the ‘economic’ in WEF while moving further away from the developing leftwing political trends of socialism and anti-imperialism.
Coming in the wake of the series of anti-globalisation demonstrations that began with Seattle, the WSF initially seemed really huge and promised to bring a new impetus and a lot of fresh inputs to the anti-globalisation campaign. But now that the anti-globalisation campaign has already acquired a strong anti-war anti-imperialist thrust, now that we have already seen millions of men and women marching across the globe demanding an end to war and racism, to all the accumulated debt burden imposed on the third world and to the entire ‘multilateral’ framework of domination and plunder, the WSF has started paling into insignificance. A world solidarity forum aiding and encouraging all the live and vibrant anti-globalisation anti-imperialist movements of the world would of course be relevant, but an exclusively social and avowedly non-party forum does indeed look like a forum too many. With its present orientation, the social forum does indeed run the risk of being rendered superfluous by the onward march of events.
The word ‘possibility’ has been vulgarised a lot in bourgeois politics. When bourgeois politicians and ideologues define politics as the art of the possible, we know we are being asked to prepare for the worst. Every opportunist alliance, every marriage of convenience, every act of betrayal to the cause of independence and democracy has been sought to be legitimised in the name of the art of the possible. Yet when the people seek to bring about a revolution and push beyond the capitalist frontier, it is sought to be dismissed as a futile exercise in Utopia, something that is outright impossible and undesirable. In the framework of bourgeois politics, the ‘desirable’ is always sought to be defined in terms of the ‘possible’ and the possible is then reduced to the existing. In other words, politics, the art of the possible, is reduced to a worship of the status quo, the worst kind of conformism. The point of departure in socialist or communist politics, on the contrary, is transformation of what is existing into what is not just possible but also desirable and necessary.
History continues to reveal before us a range of possibilities. During the last one hundred years two world wars have been shown to be possible, revolution in backward Russia and China has been shown to be possible, facism and nazism have been shown to be possible, the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union has been shown to be possible, recolonisation of Iraq has been shown to be possible. Indeed, world history evolves through a constant battle between conflicting possibilities. The point is to choose the kind of possibility that one finds most appealing and fight for its realization and development. The fight for socialism began long before the first socialist republic was born – as many as seven decades elapsed between the initial articulation of the Marxist vision of socialism and its first realisation in the form of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The fight continues today even after the collapse of the USSR and even in the midst of continuing retreat of the existing socialism in a few republics like China, Vietnam and Cuba.
Marxism however considers socialism to be not just desirable and necessary but also inevitable. Like the word ‘possibility’, the word 'inevitability' too has often been interpreted in a very mechanical manner. The ‘inevitable’ in Marxism is not automatic or spontaneous, but very much an outcome of conscious historical action. This inevitability is a projection into future of the laws of motion that have determined the trajectory of human history since the beginning of the written phase. Capitalism seeks to portray the present as the ultimate or eternal, and the laws governing capitalist market economy are sought to be passed off as natural laws. But if history has evolved through successive modes of production from the era of primitive communism through the age of slavery to the days of feudalism and capitalism, why should the process of change suddenly come to a standstill with the present phase of domination of capital? Why cannot there be social life beyond the frontiers of capitalism? Why cannot the small changes daily taking place in the capitalist context add up to a qualitative leap heralding the onset of a post-capitalist or socialist order?
This quest found its answer in the analysis of the dynamics of the processes of capitalism, and the vision of socialism provided a real solution to the contradiction between the growing socialisation of production and private appropriation and concentration of wealth by matching socialised production with socialised ownership and control over the means of production and the output.
The term scientific socialism has also been a matter of great controversy. The term scientific was used as opposed to Utopian notions of socialism which were rich in imagination but had little roots in social action or the history of social progress. And in today's technologically driven times, the distinction between scientific and technological must also be underscored. Scientific socialism did not provide any technological blueprint for building socialism, it only provided broad general guidelines for organising a socialist revolution. And these broad guidelines have been proved to be essentially correct even in considerably different circumstances. More importantly, the applied science of socialism has not remained static. Initially, it was considered scientific to expect socialism to arrive in developed capitalist countries where possibilities of further development of productive forces would have been exhausted under capitalist production relations. Also socialism was expected to announce its arrival simultaneously in a number of countries. In real life, the break however came in a single backward country. Uneven development of world capitalism made it virtually impossible for socialism to win simultaneously in several countries and forced socialists to go about building socialism in a single country.
It is true that following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of socialism in China and other existing socialist countries, there is now not much practical evidence or display of the inherent superiority of actually existing socialism over capitalism. There are plenty of analyses about the degeneration and eventual collapse of socialism in the former Soviet Union, but a significantly superior model is yet to emerge. Yet if socialism remains a dream, the reality of capitalism is becoming increasingly nightmarish and the notion of a truly and universally peaceful, prosperous and democratic capitalism has been proved to be completely fictitious and illusory. Indeed, the model of postwar welfare capitalism seemed to work only so long as countering the socialist model of social security and employment for all remained a priority for advanced capitalism. It is no wonder therefore that the collapse of the Soviet system also signalled a rapid 'retreat' of the welfare state and return of predatory capitalism with all its ugly features of imperialist plunder and aggression.
On the eve of the revolution in 1917 when Lenin began to talk about the impossibility of simultaneous socialist revolution, he also started stressing the importance of anti-imperialist wars of national liberation. Massive economic plunder and brutal national oppression have been the two basic characteristic features of both colonialism and post-colonial or neo-colonial imperialism. The ‘clashes of civilisation’ argument is nothing but a theory of racist national oppression. From Palestine to Iraq, there has been no let-up in the imperialist campaign of national oppression. Along with socialist class wars, the battle for national liberation and independence from the clutches of the imperialist machine of plunder and humiliation therefore continues to remain central to any international vision of anti-imperialist resistance.
The two wars of anti-imperialist resistance — we can loosely call them class war and national war — are of course dialectically inter-related. During large parts of the twentieth century the two surged in tandem, each encouraging and strengthening the other. The leadership of the national wars of liberation, however, passed on in most cases into the hands of a vacillating bourgeoisie which in turn did everything to throttle the internal class war. As we approach yet another combined wave of class war and national awakening and assertion in large parts of Latin America, Asia and Africa, the forces of socialism must try to gain the upper hand both on the internal and external fronts of the war against imperialism.
A lot has been said about the disintegration of the organised working class and even the dismantling of the organised economy. We have heard any number of stories about the miraculous rise of the new economy, about computers replacing human hands all along the chain of production and human beings having little more to do than to press the occassional button of sophisticated electronic machines. Well, if capitalism has succeeded in partially doing away with the concentration of thousands of workers in a single production point, it is because production centres have been considerably relocated and the production chain or net has been cast much wider. For every automated production plant, there are sweatshops proliferating all over the third world. Socialisation of production has not been reversed, it continues to grow and in the process it has crossed national boundaries. If we keep the big picture in mind we will see that what is happening is not disintegration of the working class but dispersal and expansion of the class. From highly educated and skilled groups working with state-of-the-art computers and sophisticated machines and electronic equipments to vast masses of unorganised and informal sector workers, the working class today occupies a much bigger social turf than any time before.
Of course the class remains to be welded with a new consciousness and spirit, the transition from being a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself is certainly a very big challenge. But on this score too, there are a lot of new inputs. Apart from local trade union and other struggles, the anti-globalisation anti-war movement is also shaping up as an excellent international training school for the working class. The communication revolution especially the rise of satellite television and the arrival of the internet has opened up whole new avenues for not just dissemination of information but also networking for actual struggle. The vibrant two-way traffic between networking in the cyberspace and actual demonstration of solidarity and unity on the street is indeed an exciting development of our times.
A socialist world still remains a dream. Even during the heyday of the Soviet Union and China, the world was very much a capitalist world even though there was a powerful socilaist challenge. The conflict between the two worlds — the dominant capitalist world and the socialist challenger — has proved to be more intense, with more ups and downs, and twists and turns, than was possibly imagined in the early days. But the historical and material foundation of socialism, developed and democratic socialism if you will, continues to mature within the womb of global capitalism. And the forces of socialism are also gaining in maturity and strength. With the structural crisis of capitalism spreading deeper and wider and inter-imperialist rivalry intensifying all over again, socialism is sure to bounce back with new strength and vitality.
A socialist world is possible. It is necessary. It is the future of humankind.
Their (the disarmament advocates’ — ed) principal argument is that the disarmament demand is the clearest, most decisive, most consistent expression of the struggle against all militarism and against all war.
But in this principal argument lies the disarmament advocates’ principal error. Socialists cannot, without ceasing to be socialists, be opposed to all war.
Firstly, socialists have never been, nor can they ever be, opposed to revolutionary wars. The bourgeoisie of the imperialist “Great” Powers has become thoroughly reactionary, and the war this bourgeoisie is now waging we regard as a reactionary, slave-owners’ and criminal war. But what about a war against this bourgeoisie? A war, for instance, waged by peoples oppressed by and dependent upon this bourgeoisie, or by colonial peoples, for liberation? In Section 5 of the Internationale
That is obviously wrong.
The history of the 20th century, this century of “unbridled imperialism,” is replete with colonial wars. But what we Europeans, the imperialist oppressors of the majority of the world’s peoples, with our habitual, despicable European chauvinism, call “colonial wars” are often national wars, or national rebellions of these oppressed peoples. One of the main features of imperialism is that it accelerates capitalist development in the most backward countries, and thereby extends and intensifies the struggle against national oppression. That is a fact, and from it inevitably follows that imperialism must often give rise to national wars. Junius (Rosa Luxemburg – ed.), who defends the above-quoted “theses” in her pamphlet, says that in the imperialist era every national war against an imperialist Great Power leads to intervention of a rival imperialist Great Power. Every national war is thus turned into an imperialist war. But that argument is wrong, too. This can happen, but does not always happen. Many colonial wars between 1900 and 1914 did not follow that course. And it would be simply ridiculous to declare, for instance, that after the present war, if it ends in the utter exhaustion of all the belligerents, “there can be no” national, progress, revolutionary wars “of any kind”, wages, say, by China in alliance with India, Persia, Siam, etc., against the Great Powers.
To deny all possibility of national wars under imperialism is wrong in theory, obviously mistaken historically, and tantamount to European chauvinism in practice: we who belong to nations that oppress hundreds of millions in Europe, Africa, Asia, etc., are invited to tell the oppressed peoples that it is “impossible” for them to wage war against “our” nations!
Secondly, civil war is just as much a war as any other. He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle. That has been confirmed by every great revolution. To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution....
Only after we have overthrown, finally vanquished and expropriated the bourgeoisie of the whole world, and not merely in one country, will wars become impossible. And from a scientific point of view it would be utterly wrong — and utterly unrevolutionary — for us to evade or gloss over the most important things: crushing the resistance of the bourgeoisie — the most difficult task, and one demanding the greatest amount of fighting, in the transition to socialism. The “social” parsons and opportunists are always ready to build dreams of future peaceful socialism. But the very thing that distinguishes them from revolutionary Social-Democrats is that they refuse to think about and reflect on the fierce class struggle and class wars needed to achieve that beautiful future.
Theoretically, it would be absolutely wrong to forget that every war is but the continuation of policy by other means. The present imperialist war is the continuation of the imperialist policies of two groups of Great Powers, and these policies were engendered and fostered by the sum total of the relationships of the imperialist era. But this very era must also necessarily engender and foster policies of struggle against national oppression and of proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie and, consequently, also the possibility and inevitability; first, of revolutionary national rebellions and wars; second, of proletarian wars and rebellions against the bourgeoisie; and, third, of a combination of both kinds of revolutionary war, etc.
