Introduction

‘Europe’, the collective title of these essays, is a comparatively recent concept. As the historian Norman Davies explains, it “gradually replaced the earlier concept of ‘christendom’ in a complex intellectual process lasting from the 14th to the 18th centuries”.¹ Only in the early years of the 18th century did notions of a common European identity finally supersede those of christendom. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 provides perhaps the last major diplomatic reference to the ‘christian commonwealth’.

Europe is a continent of the mind. Europe certainly owes more to culture and history than geography. Geographically it is merely an extension of the great Asian land mass, akin in that sense to India. Over time the exact borders of Europe have waxed and waned. William Blake illustrates his 1794 poem ‘Europa’ with a cartoon depicting god reaching down from the heavens holding a pair of compasses. Yet despite such divine intervention the matter has never been fixed. Europe is “tidal”; the main gravitational factor being Russian state power.²

Russia, and Russian otherness, stretches far into the east and Asia but is also vast to the west. Sometimes the perceived borders of Europe have included Russia. At other times Russia - along with its occidental possessions and satellites - have been excluded. But whether Europe stops at the Elbe, the Wista, the Don or the Urals there have been repeated proposals to overcome Europe’s often bloody divisions.

The Quaker leader, William Penn (1644-1718), the founder of Pennsylvania, advocated religious toleration and has the distinction of being perhaps the first to advocate a European parliament. Charles Castel de St Pierre (1658-1743), a dissident French abbot, called for a confederation of European power in order to secure peace. The so-called religious wars of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries and then the emergence of orthodox Russia as a great power certainly necessitated radical rethinking. Notions of a European commonality steadily gained prominence. Voltaire, writing in 1751, described Europe as a “kind of great republic”, some of its components monarchical, “others mixed” ... “but all corresponding with one another”. He cites not only common religious foundations but common “principles of public law and politics unknown in other parts of the world”.³ Twenty years later Rousseau was saying that there were no longer French, German, Spanish “or even English”, but “only Europeans”.⁴

Europe came to represent a cherished goal, the ideal of peace and harmony that was so lacking in reality. Invoked by revolutionary democrats and reactionaries alike, Europe has served every cause. Napoleon Bonaparte sought to unite Europe in the image of France. In turn the main counterrevolutionary powers joined in concert against the French revolution in the hallowed name of European civilisation. The 1815 Congress of Vienna put in place an interlocking system of semi-despotic European states. Later, imperialism was justified with reference to Europe’s moral superiority and world-wide mission. Another Europe gestated. Proletarian Europe. Karl Kautsky desperately wanted to prevent the outbreak of a horrendous inter-European slaughter - socialism would be thrown back a generation or more. So in 1912 he proposed that the working class should settle accounts with autocratic Germany, Austria and Russia and boldly take the lead to bring about a republican united states of Europe.

World War I saw the collapse of the European autocracies - but socialism was isolated in the suffocating backwardness of Russia. The main powerhouse of world productive activity shifted from Europe to the United States. Yet Europe remained of paramount political importance. Both revolutionaries and reformists sought to rescue Europe from decay and fragmentation - the former for socialism, the latter for capital. Trotsky won Comintern to call for a United Socialist States of Europe in 1923. In his turn Aristide Briad, the right socialist French politician, presented vague proposals for a federal Europe based on peace and economic cooperation. He envisaged a European union of 27 sovereign states and a permanent executive.

The coming to power of first Joseph Stalin in 1924 and then Adolf Hitler in 1933 scuppered all such plans; especially when Germany embarked on its second attempt to dominate Europe by means of conquest and terror. By 1941 half of the continent had been united ... in Nazi fetters. Hitler madly dreamed of a Europe purged of all Untermenschen - jews, Roma, homosexuals, Bolsheviks - and a Germany gigantically extended to the east. Those semi-Asiatic Slavs who were permitted to survive would be reduced to serfs; their lot in life, to serve under a colonial master-class of Aryan farmers.⁵ Hitler drew an analogy with British rule and exploitation of India - “The Russian space is our India”.⁶

After World War II Europe once again found itself devastated, exhausted and much reduced. Under the terms of the Yalta agreement, the eastern half of the continent was incorporated into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence and, through bureaucratic revolution, ‘sovietised’. As to western Europe, it was shorn of the glories - and booty - of empire. Humiliatingly it had to rely on the US nuclear umbrella to counter the much exaggerated threat from beyond the iron curtain. The desire to avoid another internecine conflict, and to create a bulwark against bureaucratic socialism, drove the states of western Europe, in particular federal Germany and France, towards an historic compromise and overcoming the division of Europe into numerous antagonistic powers.

European capitalist integration has advanced qualitatively since the Treaty of Rome was signed between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands in 1957. The customs union has become a political zone embracing 379 million people and 15 countries. But what was advancing tortuously - with endless compromises and half-measures – speeded up following the collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the USSR and eastern Europe in 1989-91. With the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties the tempo of integration catapulted forward. A common currency and new members to the east. Sacrificing his beloved deutschmark for the euro was purportedly the price chancellor Kohl paid for French acquiescence to German reunification. Though the EU still often appears to be a jerry-built Tower of Babel, the goal is clear - some kind of quasi-democratic superstate.

Europe’s parliament is little more than a democratic fig leaf. The European parliament exercises no effective control over commissioners or national governments. The EU is run by appointed bureaucrats and proceeds according to the interests and deals concocted by narrow-minded member governments. In the final analysis that means serving capital accumulation. However, as we have consistently argued, just saying ‘no’ to this constitutes a completely inadequate response. A positive programme is required - our programme of unity as against their programme of unity.

In Britain the ongoing capitalist process of integration caused well known and deep divisions. Ideologically the residues of empire arrogance clouded the brain. Barred from the Common Market in 1963 by De Gaulle’s veto, the British ruling class tried to maintain a residual empire, along with the ‘special relationship’ with the US and a stake in Europe through Efta. But neither the Commonwealth nor the conceit of being an independent world power added up to a viable strategy. Britain eventually entered the EEC in 1973 under Heath’s Tory government (along with its Danish and Irish Efta allies).

Apart from its extreme right wing around Roy Jenkins, the Labour Party presented itself as highly critical of the terms and conditions. Nonetheless in 1975 - after some minor renegotiations - Harold Wilson’s government successfully fought a referendum on the issue of continued membership. The main opposition came from a Tony Benn-Enoch Powell popular front, with the ‘official’ Communist Party, the Tribune left and associated trade union bureaucrats forming the tail (the revolutionary left formed the tail of the tail). Labour remained programmatically uneasy with European integration till the leadership of John Smith and then the government of Tony Blair. A parallel shift occurred in the TUC with the appointment of John Monks. New Labour and its coterie of middle class career politicians loyally and openly serve the interests of the most competitive, most internationalised, sections of British capital. The subaltern working class pole of Labourism is today a marginalised appendage and is treated with barely concealed contempt.

It is the Tories who are organically split. While Lady Thatcher and co call for a “fundamental renegotiation” of Britain’s relationship with the EU, an embattled Heseltine-Clarke wing joins the Lab-Lib pact over the forthcoming referendum on the euro. These pro-big business traditionalists will operate within the Britain in Europe campaign under Blair. Meantime Smith Square and the Tory front bench articulate the interests of the least competitive sections of capital and play on little Britain xenophobia. Iain Duncan Smith’s Tories ride towards their Valhalla committed to maintain the pound in perpetuity.

If Europe and European unity has divided the two main establishment parties, it divides the left too, including the Socialist Alliance. Nationalism runs deep. Concern for national sovereignty, setting interest rates and the value of the pound have in some quarters replaced the language of working class solidarity and international socialism. Concretely this finds expression in markedly different attitudes adopted towards the forthcoming referendum on the euro. Some on the left will willingly play second fiddle to the Tories in the name of saving British sovereignty and building the “widest possible” opposition to the euro. Others, such as ourselves, argue for an independent working class agenda for Europe and therefore an active boycott of what is effectively a rigged referendum. The Socialist Alliance’s conference on October 12 decided by a majority of two to one to opt for a ‘no’ stance and a non-xenophobic campaign. The Greens, the trade union left, the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain and the old Labour left are already spoken of as allies - nationalists all.

The argument has begun but clearly has a long way to run. Though I will do more than touch upon the immediate issue of the forthcoming euro referendum, my overriding aim is to open up wider vistas. The working class can win its own, social, Europe. That is why there is such a heavy emphasis on theory and in particular the ideas of key communist thinkers such as Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. The modern prince must learn from the past in order to make the future. The lead on European unity has been taken by the liberal and social democratic parties of the bourgeoisie for too long. Frankly, since 1945 the working class has by and large been politically silent or content to repeat the nationalist slogans of others. That can and must change. The living reality of a hostile continental unity made from above demands an alternative continental unity forge from below.

This short book is a contribution to debate and will hopefully help to bring about the hard battle lines of clarity. Naturally that means being unashamedly polemical and combative. Whether or not this approach violates bureaucratic, soft left and outdated notions of Socialist Alliance membership - which “assumes a commitment to the anti-sectarian and cooperative way of working, looking to build unity rather than set out to create discord, positively supporting and encouraging the notion of alliances and ensuring that any critical debates are conducted in a positive manner without personal attacks” - is for others to judge. Either way, communists come not to negotiate a rotten compromise with what is wrong but to wage war for what is right.

Jack Conrad

October 2002

1. National and international socialism

Though it may appear somewhat paradoxical, our discussion on Europe necessarily begins with the world and the process now commonly called ‘globalisation’. As the reader will quickly appreciate, neither Euronationalism nor any kind of regional jingoism holds out any prospect of working class liberation as far as I’m concerned, only playing out George Orwell’s 1984 for real.

‘Globalisation’ is responsible for a great deal of confusion and consternation. Most fret and worry; a few celebrate. On the one hand there is a strange mixture of conservatives, liberals and national socialists. Alike they feel threatened by what they see as stateless capital - ie, the subordination of the nation-state to the power of giant corporations, faceless currency dealers and institutions such as the World Bank, World Trade Organisation and the European Union. The UK Independence Party and the British National Party, the Labour left and rheumy-eyed ‘official communists’ huddled around John Haylett’s Morning Star; George Monbiot and other modern-day Proudhonists, the trade union ‘awkward squad’ - Bob Crow, Mick Rix, Billy Hayes and Derek Simpson; Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party in England and Wales and Alan McCombes in Scotland – all of them would, if only they could, turn back the wheel of history.

On the other hand there are those who welcome what they believe is the decline and virtual disappearance of nation-states. Globalisation subverts not only the nation-state but the “traditional” cultures and even the family, claims of Tony Blair’s favourite ‘third way’ propagandist, Anthony Giddens.⁷ Another New Labour thinker, the former Marxism Today writer Charles Leadbeater, is also full of praise for globalisation. “We should take it forward” from “markets and trade” into “society and governance”, he says.⁸ From the left comes Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri with essentially the same message. According to this best-selling duo the end of imperialism and the emergence of what they call “empire” “broke and buried” the nation-state.⁹ Parliament, trade unions and national legislation are obsolete or irrelevant, they say. Any revolt or protest by the “multitude”, no matter how isolated or parochial, immediately touches the global level. The erudite but silly ideas of Hardt and Negri find fitting political expression in headlining but ephemeral groups such as Ya Basta! Various anarchists and left communists too maintain that the days of the nation-state as an effective site of struggle are long gone. Capital now exists unmediated, in pure form, and freed from the constraints once imposed by governments. Or so they say.

Of course, from its origins capital has striven to overcome all boundaries: national, cultural and geographical. Capital knows no rest. It must ceaselessly revolutionise the means and circumstances of production.

In the Communist manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels describe the capitalist mode of reproduction as joining the whole world into a single metabolism. Capital’s need for unlimited expansion sent it hunting far and wide. No country, no person remained unaffected. Raw materials came back to the metropoles in enormous quantities from the most distant places. Finished commodities are in turn exported to the “world market”.¹⁰

Many decades later, prior to and during World War I, Rudolf Hilferding, Nikolai Bukharin and Vladimir Lenin concluded that capital had reached a new, higher, stage. Imperialism and finance capital denotes the merger of banking and industrial capital, the colonial division of the world, the domination of monopolies and interventionist state controls. There is also the export of capital itself.

Indeed the export of capital, from being a barely noticed exception, comes to colour the whole system. Instead of simply marketing finished commodities, big capitalists augment their profits through oversees lending, running infrastructural projects and establishing manufacturing plant in other countries. The global market condenses, ripens and hatches out into the global economy.

So globalisation is hardly a novel phenomenon. Nevertheless over the last two or three decades there have been important shifts in the circumstances of reproduction which do mark a firther intensification, integration and spread of the capitalist system. There can in short be no doubt that the post-World War II period has been superseded. There is a new world order. For purposes of illustration I shall highlight four interrelated areas.

One, class struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Keynesian methods of managing the national economies of the major capitalist countries hit the buffers. The needs of capital clashed with the needs of the working class. Full employment and the provisions of the social democratic state boosted working class self-confidence. Falling profit rates necessitated a ruling class offensive. Monetarism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, neoliberalism.

It took many battles. Ideological, legal and physical. In Britain, with a venal and incorporated top leadership and lacking any clear-sighted vision of an alternative, communist, society, the organised working class suffered defeat after defeat. Steel, cars, mines, docks, print. Unemployment soared. Anti-trade union legislation cowed. Solidarity crumbled. From this politically constructed vantage point capital could be gallantly rescued from the reviled clutches of taxation - which siphons off surplus labour to provide social housing, health, earnings-linked pensions and other such useless and irresponsible forms of expenditure. The social democratic consensus is slain. As is right and proper, capital is kept for capital in order to produce yet more capital.

Unprofitable concerns, including nationalised industries, are either elevated into predatory transnationals in their own right or are snuffed out in the gale of international competition. Restrictions on the movement of capital are lifted. Profit rates increase. Inequality widens. The rich have certainly done well. Whereas in the 1970s the top one percent of households owned 20% of personal wealth, now it is close to 40%.

Two, spread. Meanwhile the irresistible dynamic of global capital erodes and eventually prevails over even the immovable might of the most despotic ‘socialist’ state. Universal money subverts the anti-cosmopolitan nomenklatura. The cornucopia of commodities lures every stratum into support for democratic counterrevolution. Neither KGB nor Berlin Wall can save the national socialist dystopia.

To preserve its power the bureaucratic elite must become bourgeois. Seclusion and self-sufficiency implodes before the capitalist mode of reproduction. Over two years, 1989 to 1991, the ‘second’ world vanishes. State industries limp on in hopeless obsolescence or fall into the tight fist of bureaucratic thieves and asset-strippers, the oligarchs. That, or they are cherry-picked by western capitalists.

China remains officially a people’s democracy. However, the heirs of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaping actively encourage wage slavery and the rapid accumulation of capital in the special economic zones. The bureaucracy merges with capitalism to form a single alloy. Vietnam wants to emulate the Guangdong model. Starving North Korea worships Kim Il Jong as a beneficent and all-powerful god but relies on South Korean and US handouts. Even in Fidel Castro’s Cuba the dollar functions as a parallel currency. Capitalism stares in on these ‘socialist’ states from every window. In short, all countries now lie within, or are subject to, the capitalist metabolism. There is no outside.

Of course, despite ‘globalisation’, the state has not gone away. Far from it. Nowadays the USA operates as a superimperialist power. It won the Cold War. Economically the EU stands on a par. But militarily the US has no serious rival. Not Russia, the EU, China nor Japan. Administrations, be they Republican or Democrat, confidently unleash, or threaten, overwhelming force when faced by a recalcitrant, small to medium-sized foreign regimes. Existing treaties, pacts and protocols are arrogantly torn up or simply ignored: Rio, ABM, Kyoto, landmines.

As a result of US hyper-imperialism, old institutions are given new roles. The World Bank and the IMF rule Africa, southern and eastern Asia and Latin America with a callousness comparable to colonial times. Structural adjustment means destitution and starvation for millions. Nato polices the Balkans, the UN throttles Iraq and the WTO guards US DNA and GMO patents. Meanwhile anti-terrorism is presented as an ultimatum - you are either with the USA or against the USA. Those who are against will, of course, suffer dire consequences.

That is the temporary new world order. Temporary, because capital is a system of antagonistic rivalry. The present-day balance of power is bound to alter and its corresponding structures are bound to be challenged. Surely, here lies a significant aspect of the EU and European unity. “An enormous gulf has opened up in American and European perceptions about the world, and sense of shared values is increasingly frayed”, worries US political thinker Francis Fukuyama.¹¹

Three, increased interlinkage and velocity. Between 1970 and 1997 the export of commodities has risen enormously, by something like 200%. Everyday items are produced by single companies across different countries and continents. Designed in Italy, owned in the US, assembled in Taiwan, sold everywhere. During the same, 1970-1997, period the export of capital has, in comparison with the export of commodities, shot through the roof, increasing by nearly 1,400%. Take another set of statistics. In 1980 cross-border trade in bonds and equities were equivalent to 8% of Japanese GDP. In 1998 that figure was 91%. For the US the increase has been even greater: from 9% to 230%. And for Germany the rise was from 7% of GDP to 334%. International bank lending has shown a similar expansion. Gross international bank claims went from $315 billion in 1993 to $1.2 trillion in 1997. Overall bank lending in 1998 reached a record $11 trillion. Meanwhile daily currency trading reached $2 trillion in 1998, or an annual turnover of over $600 trillion.¹² Central banks can easily find themselves overwhelmed. Chronic instability results and the possibility of turmoil and a devastating crash go hand in hand with untold wealth. According to the UN the three richest billionaires have assets worth more than the combined GDP of the world’s poorest countries, the inhabitants of which number 600 million people.

Both phenomena - interlinkage and velocity - are in part facilitated by staggering decreases in the value and prices commanded by the means of communication: sea freight, air transport, telephone calls and computers. IMF statisticians estimate that between 1920 and 1990 the real cost of sea freight went down from an index of 100 to 30. Figures for air, telephones and computers are in comparison breath taking. From a 1930 100 index air transport stood at just under 20 in 1990; over the same period telephone calls dropped to almost zero. The same feat has been performed by computers - but from a 1960 base line.¹³

Four, structure. As a result of all the above, the internal structure of the world economy no longer simply consists of oppressed and oppressor nations: ie, a handful of great imperialist powers who produce and sell finished commodities and an underdeveloped periphery, often colonies, which supply raw materials. The picture is considerably more complicated and multi-layered.

Capital as a metabolic system of reproduction always was universal and social. Now only more so. The metropolitan countries remain economically, politically and militarily dominant but account proportionally for fewer and fewer finished commodities. Jobs in manufacture have not disappeared. They have been exported. Increasingly the metropoles are characterised by banking, insurance, transport, research and development, advertising and what might be described as immaterial commodities, frequently called knowledge and information. The typical worker in Britain is no longer in heavy industry and male, but female and in administration or services.

There is no scramble for Africa. On the contrary, apart from South Africa, the countries south of the Sahara are being left to rot. Aids, petty wars, famine, debilitating debt. Russia is a huge exporter of oil and gas but still haemorrhages wealth on a chilling scale. Average life expectancy has fallen by 10 years. The Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc, have fared even worse. Afghanistan, Argentina, Colombia, Iraq and most of former Yugoslavia lie wrecked. As a concomitant impoverished parts of Latin America, eastern Europe, Russia and the ‘third world’ are reproduced in the great cities of the metropoles - Los Angeles, Houston, New York, London, Rotterdam, Berlin, Paris, Marseilles.

On the other hand Ireland, Spain, Greece and Portugal have joined the EU and adopted the euro. They can hardly be regarded as backward or semi-colonies. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are set to follow as are Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Malta and Cyprus. China, India and Mexico are no longer mere exporters of raw materials but finished commodities too. And at a significant level. Something like 80% of the world’s footwear comes from China. Places such as Turkey, Singapore, Chile and South Korea have also undergone a qualitative shift. These medium-developed capitalist countries have their own monopolies, export capital as well as finished commodities, and face large, often militant, working classes.

Yes, of course, the national sovereignty, so treasured and venerated by conservatives and national socialists alike, has been sapped, undermined and revealed as dependency. Europe’s nation-states must join together in a federal superstate or admit impotence. The “unprecedented and unequalled” US has well known relations of dependency too. Saudi Arabia ensures cheap oil for gas-guzzling Americans. Latin America supplies an endless supply of worst-paid, often illegal, labour. The Clinton boom could only be sustained through a huge influx of foreign capital - mainly German, British and Japanese. The US of George W Bush now runs on a black hole of chronic indebtedness. Not surprisingly then, even the most populous state on earth, China with its 1.2 billion inhabitants, can only satisfy its needs by ensuring all manner of reproductive and political relations with other countries. China has its special economic zones – Hong Kong, Guandong, etc - and is now a full member of the WTO, with all that means in terms of loss of autonomy and subordination to the capitalist metabolism.

What do these changes mean for the strategies and programmes of liberation? Though the spread and universalisation of capital is motivated by needs of self-expansion and are often carried out in a thoroughly inhuman and brutally destructive manner, there is an objectively progressive aspect. Despite all the human suffering the growth of capitalism means that today the working class is in all probability the biggest class on the planet. Due to globalisation for the first time in history there are more proletarians than peasants. Capitalism has also created the abundant wealth upon which alone socialism can arise.

However, though capital shows its continued technical dynamism, its intrinsic limits are impossible to ignore. Ecological destruction, financial crisis, the gap between actual and potential production, waste and crowning everything the role of the hypertrophic state in setting prices, ensuring profits and providing military protection from encroachment by foreign competitors. Arms contracts, reliable utilities, subsidies, tax breaks, import controls - all are vital to keep the sphere of circulation functioning in the interests of capital accumulation. Capitalism puts off socialism by organising itself and re-organising itself again and again. Irrespective of Thatcherite nostrums the bureaucratic state apparatus assumes an ever greater importance. Certainly without the state and its legal framework - laws, courts, prisons and police - capital would find it impossible to exercise its dictatorship in the workplace. They are few, we are many. The state also provides capital - which is internally fractured by its very nature of being many capitals - some kind of overall cohesion it must otherwise lack.

Capitalism still operates as capitalism. But its essential laws are historically in decline - value, money, free competition, the labour market, private ownership - and contradictions pile up and become ever more intractable and fraught with danger. Society, if it is not to descend into barbaraism, must control the wealth it produces in such fabulous quantities.

The way forward lies not in appealing to the supposed common sense or humanity of the self-interested personifications of capital. Leave that to archbishop Rowan Williams, Bob Geldof, Bono, Oxfam, Jubilee 2000 and the myriad other NGOs. However naive, here is the reformist wing of global capital.

The task of communists is to programmatically equip and politically train the class that capital itself recruits and economically organises. The global working class is alone capable of constituting itself a viable alternative material power that can overcome capital’s apparatus of repression and reorganise the world according to human need and the goal of fully rounded human development. Labour both stands immediately opposed to capital economically and has the potential collective strength to turn rational theories and demands into socially transforming deeds. No other class, social stratum or protest movement can do that - hence goodbye obituaries to the working class are not only wrong-headed, but are declarations of abject political surrender.¹⁴

As to national socialism, owing everything to Otto von Bismarck and Alfred Marshall, nothing to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, it was always palpably anti-socialism. State control of the individual capitalist or state expropriation of private capital leaves intact capitalism as a reproductive metabolism, along with its hierarchical system of control. Workers remain exploited workers and the system continues, of necessity, to blindly maximise the extraction of surplus labour from them as producers.

Thankfully programmes for instituting socialism within, through or over a single national class state now increasingly appear to be what they are - crass, cynical and ugly. Much to the chagrin of our national socialists, neither a Stalin-type command economy nor the social democratic state any longer represent a coherent alternative to existing neoliberal capitalism. Hence the wailing against globalisation and gnashing of teeth by Stalinite and left reformist organisations. Showing a maudlin attachment to auto-Labourism, the SWP’s Chris Harman mounted a gallant defence of “old fashioned” trade unionism and “reformist governments” when it served.¹⁵ But it never convinced.

Global production and global economy mercilessly punish antiquated and blinkered notions of local exclusiveness and isolation. Humanity is inescapably interdependent. Exploitation links workers everywhere. They still speak national languages but mutual conditions, their radical chains, make them a world class. In the stirring battle cry of the Communist manifesto the emancipation of the workers requires a world revolution, the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”.¹⁶

Yet within neoliberal establishment circles ‘globalisation’ is more than the latest buzzword. It serves as an ideological drug to lull workers into acceptance of permanent wage-slavery. In a world where capital is meant to be stateless and comprehensively mobile, demands on governments for improved conditions are patronisingly and poisonously attacked as self-defeating. Higher subsistence levels, so the story goes, will simply see capital swanning off to where labour-power is dirt cheap. China, Burma, Mexico, Indonesia. Hence, the apologists of capital insist, ideas of launching a socialist challenge to the system and its logic of accumulation for its own sake are a chimera.

We do not, for one moment, accept the new-old ‘iron law of wages’ theory peddled by the political and academic servants of capital - like the nonsense about complete automation and artificial intelligence, it is a fiction, albeit a useful one, invented in order to sustain the socially constructed image of a capitalism without history and without end.

Through class struggle, gains can undoubtedly be won. Capital cannot locate just anywhere. Even amongst transnationals production and sales rely predominantly on the home country. Moreover supplies of “skilled workers and efficient infrastructures” are vital.¹⁷ So while there is a tendency to equalise wages and conditions, there can come into effect - especially through international coordination and organisation - real improvements and gains. There is no need to bid each other down. Workers can still limit competition between themselves.

The self-serving economic determinism of the neoliberals is not only contemptible - morally and intellectually. It makes an easy target for those wanting to rescue the flailing reformist project. A useful example is Ron Bellamy’s ‘Fighting the myth of globalisation’ articles in the Morning Star (published over the three days of June 25, 26 and 27 1997 and defended against a hapless critic in an August 8 letter).¹⁸ By setting up and duly knocking down absurd and crude formulations, in general from unnamed people and/or institutions, Bellamy tries to give the kiss of life to ‘official’ communism’s cadaverous version of national socialism - the British road to socialism programme. It remains dead if not buried.¹⁹

Evidently the modern state is not “powerless”. Nor do transnational companies exist in mid-air detached from “country”.²⁰ Ford is rooted in the US, BMW in Germany and Toyota in Japan. These mighty states have a long and very effective record of ruthlessly defending their transnationals at home and abroad: “At least 20 companies in the 1993 Fortune 100 would not have survived at all as independent companies if they had not been saved by their respective governments in the last decade and a half”.²¹

Neither does it follow that within the framework of the global market “national agents and governments have no role”.²² Diverse they may be but the Bank of England, the CIA and the Communist Party of China are far from irrelevant when it comes to ensuring the production and reproduction of capital.

“Where are the armies, police forces, courts and prisons” of the world capitalist state? Bellamy artfully inquires. There are, of course, none. There is no world state and nor can there be one under capitalism. Diversionary questions aside, common sense tells us that there is no “world state”, nor a non-national “world capitalist”.²³ Nato, the UN and the EU are by definition intra-state organisations.

What of a supra-national capitalist class? Most boards of transnationals are mono-national. Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Silvio Berlusconi are respectively British, American and Italian. And, yes, seen from that angle, capital is “owned by capitalists of one state which they export from their own nation-state to others”.²⁴ Calling transnationals ‘multinationals’ is certainly a complete misnomer. There are few if any multinational companies. Capital is not stateless.

Furthermore, capital cannot spread evenly throughout the world. There is, Bellamy triumphantly points out, a strong regional bias. Before him Trotsky called it combined and uneven development. Most exports and overseas investments are between capitalistically advanced countries. For instance, in the early 1990s three-quarters of British foreign direct investments were concentrated in North America, the EU and Japan. A representative pattern. In 2001 68% of foreign accumulated direct investment went to “developed” countries.²⁵

It is also right to stress that, “though there are new features” - the end of free movement of labour, for example - international or global capital, in the sense of capital being exported from one country to another, is in itself “no way new”.²⁶ Just prior to World War I, when Britain was at its imperial zenith, investments abroad amounted to 13% of GDP - roughly the same as today, though the destination of those investments included a greater proportion to Asia, Latin America and Africa. Between 1880 and 1913 British overseas capital increased fourfold to some £4 billion - “total income from foreign investments reached close on £200 million”.²⁷ And I hardly need to add that international trade in commodity capital considerably predates industrial capitalism²⁸. Nevertheless, though there was a crash in capital exports and global trade with World War I and then the autarky of the 1930s, there have been rapid changes in recent decades. Foreign assets accounted for a mere five percent of world GDP in 1945. By 1995 that figure had risen to an “astonishing” 57%.²⁹

The neoliberals indulge in hyperbole. Yet so do their national socialist opponents. The neoliberals maintain that the state is powerless. This excuses questioning the social democratic consensus and rolling back working class gains. Bellamy in turn maintains that, because globalisation has been much exaggerated by the neoliberals, ipso facto the existing state can be used as the vehicle for his neo-Keynesian alternative economic strategy and in due course a British socialism. He needs a non-global capitalism to justify this programme.

There is, as the noted Marxist thinker István Mészáros suggests, a “mismatch” between capital’s reproductive structures and its state.³⁰ National capital is by definition tied up with the national state. But, as freely admitted above, global capital has no state formations proper. Nevertheless global capital exerts itself, albeit “in an extremely contradictory form”.³¹

Capital exists as a single world metabolism but within a system of national states. Capital by its own logic demands the unlimited exploitation of labour. The national state cannot allow this, observes Mészáros - neither economically nor politically. The masses would rebel and, that failing, starve. Therefore other solutions are sought out ... at enormous cost in terms of human suffering. The 20th century witnessed two world wars, the rise, decline and rise again of imperialist parasitism, the capitalist national socialism of Adolf Hitler, and the post-capitalist national socialism of JV Stalin.

In this last named context Bellamy transparently entertains another, unstated, agenda. Implicitly the national socialism of the USSR, despite its abject failure, is exonerated - along with his own record as one of its toadying propagandists. Stalin’s USSR - naturally minus its proletarian and revolutionary genesis - actually remains Bellamy’s model.

Total nationalisation for Bellamy and many others, Trotskyites included, is monstrously equated with socialism or/and a workers’ state. The result can be run bureaucratically or democratically but “property relations” are for the national socialist school the bottom line. Such a viewpoint not only involves mangling Marxist theory and the programme of democracy and social liberation. It is an unsolicited gift for capital’s paid persuaders. The USSR’s terror, mass oppression, censorship, gulags, irrationality and poverty are turned into a dire warning. This is what happens if you epsilons dare interfere with the natural order of things!

Bellamy was particularly mindful of those left labour bureaucrats who after nearly two decades of Tory governments looked to the EU in the forlorn hope of salvation. Ken Livingstone and John Monks still do. In the attempt to return them to the true national socialist fold he cites figures showing that the UK government spends 56 times more on goods and services than a proposed EU job creation programme: £2,300 per head, as opposed to £41 per head. Bellamy’s substantive conclusion is, however, that reformist social change via the EU is a fantasy.

Not only would “scrapping the Rome Treaty” be necessary but so would a “majority of left national governments” on the council of ministers. “How long should the people of one country wait for that” Bellamy asks, “when they can obtain their own left government?” A British socialism that weakens “transnational big businesses”, pulls out of the EU and restores welfare, would, he sincerely believes, inspire others and thereby prove to be the most effective form of “international solidarity”.³² Exactly the same argument is used nowadays by the Scottish Socialist Party’s Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan to justify their “tartan revolution”.³³

We have seen on numerous occasions what follows reformist experiments in national socialism. They are hardly inspirational. Spain in the mid-1930s and Chile in the early 1970s ended in bloody tragedy. France in the mid-1930s and then again in the early 1980s saw a flight of capital and an almost instant programmatic reversal - both Leon Blum and François Mitterand presided over popular fronts with the Communist Party of France.

Theoreticians and apologists of national socialism explain away history by insisting that the state’s powers to impose restrictions over capital were not used forcefully enough. Chris Harman doubtless imagined he was very audacious when he appendixed a call for “direct action of workers from below” to prevent moves by capital designed to “sabotage attempts to improve the condition of the mass of the people”. Suffice to say, this is an echo of the British road to socialism and shows just how far the comrade had strayed from revolutionary Marxism. Only “in the long run” would an attempt to supersede capitalism in one country “succumb to its pressures”, he argued.³⁴

By imposing draconian restrictions on capital - or even by abolishing capital negatively - the isolated revolutionary regime might well survive for some considerable time. Yet, in so doing it inevitably and very quickly becomes its opposite - a freak society like Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. Year zero marks not the birth of real civilisation but horrendous barbarism. No single country - not even the richest - has within it the means necessary to positively supersede capital. Individual capitalists can be expropriated through a political revolution. But creating a sustainable and dynamic alternative mode of production is a universal task.

For Marx and Engels there could be no socialism in one country because socialism must break out of capitalism positively, an outcome “which presupposed the universal development of the productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them”. The capital relationship cannot be positively superseded within the narrow framework of the national state. It exists at the level of the world market and world economy - and here and only here are the necessary material conditions for socialism and communism. That is why in The German ideology, written way back in 1845, Marx and Engels savaged all notions of national socialism.

Universal capital produces in all countries a mass of propertyless workers and makes “each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others”. If by foolish design or unfortunate accident the workers’ revolution remains national, “want is merely made general, and with it the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored”. So “empirically”, communism is only possible as the “act of the dominant peoples ‘all at once’ and simultaneously”.³⁵

Socialism - as the stage of revolutionary transition between capitalism and communism - begins on the terrain of the state. We cannot agree with Simon Clarke’s paralysing insistence that the “class character” of a state is not “defined on national terms” but by the “transcending” system of capitalist law and contract and world money.³⁶ The transition from capitalism to communism finds its first decisive expression with the revolutionary seizure of state power at a national level and working class administration over what is to begin with still an essentially capitalist metabolism. Nevertheless there can be no staying still. Settling for, or attempting to build, a national or local socialism is doomed to disaster. Global capital must be brought under human control and superseded as a totality.

The fundamental mistake made by national socialists is the notion that capital is a thing - money, mines, factories, food, jewels - in the grip of a class of very wealthy individuals. For example, Militant had its 200 top monopolies for a “socialist” Labour government to nationalise. Ownership for them is all. In this way the modern capitalist class is, so it is said, no different from the ancient slaveowner or the feudal lord. Remove them from the levers of the state, take away their companies, and - hey presto - there is no capitalism. Marx held all such ‘socialist’ magic in contempt. The idea that we “need capital but not capitalists is altogether wrong” he explained. “It is posited within the concept of capital that the objective conditions of labour - and these are its own product - take on a personality towards it”.³⁷

Capital is no mere thing - like land or chattels - but a “social relationship”, whereby alienated, dead labour dominates and feeds off living labour. Capital is in essence subjectless. It is its own cause. Its determination runs from capital to the capitalist, not the other way round. The individual owner is no more than the personification of an exploitative relationship; a relationship that can be assumed by anonymous fundmanagers, a friendly cooperative or Harman’s reformist state.

Production under capitalism is separate from control. Production is not about satisfying wants. Production takes place for the sake of production. In this subjectless system capital’s objective requirement for unlimited self-expansion must overcome the subjective wishes of any of its personifications. Thereby control is alienated from everyone. Decision-making simply becomes finding ways to allow capital to expand. Profits have to be realised. Accumulation must proceed. Either that or face certain extinction. The personification is in actual fact controlled by the system.

Capital has to be superseded in its totality and replaced by an open-ended communist totality. Without the positive supersession of capitalist society’s division of labour and its domination of living labour by dead labour the power of capital will reassert itself directly or indirectly. That is why for Marxists, though the workers’ revolution starts politically on the terrain of the national state, the content of our project is to bring the product of humanity back to humanity. What decides the matter is control. Does control over the worker continue to be the unlimited self-expansion of dead labour? Or do the associated producers control the products of work and thereby stop being workers?

Mészáros explains that any attempt to “gain control over capital” by treating it as a “material thing” tied to a “simple relation” with its private owner - instead of instituting a sustainable alternative to its dynamic process “in whose various movements it is always capital” - can only result in catastrophic failure.

No act of parliament can by itself remove capital from the “social metabolic process as the necessary command over labour under the historically long prevailing and after the revolution unavoidably inherited circumstance.” So it is not possible to “resituate” the alienated power of command over labour to labour itself by “simply targeting the private capitalist personification of capital”. That can be done only by replacing the established “organic system” as the “all-embracing and dominating controller of societal reproduction”.³⁸

We communists take universal capital as the real point of departure for humanity. If capital is grasped as an overarching social relationship, then questions such as whether workers are paid in pounds or euros, or the degree to which governments are sovereign and can fix exchange rates or borrowing levels stand, revealed as secondary issues at best, or as nothing more than smelly nationalist red herrings.

2. Extreme democracy and the limits of capital

Our movement has long been riven by profound disagreements over democracy - its origins, significance and relation to the struggle for socialism and communism.

There are always timid ‘possiblists’ who stress democracy to the point where it becomes for them something almost for itself within the bounds of existing society. That was true in the mid-19th century of moral force Chartism and a few decades later the nascent trade union bureaucracy. It is also true nowadays.

The pages of the Weekly Worker have on occasion been graced by a certain Dave Craig and his argument that the Socialist Alliance should be programmatically self-limited to the extension of democracy under capitalism: abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, self-determination for Scotland and Wales and a federal republic, etc. The maximum programme for socialism and communism should, he says, be put aside.

From the Marxist standpoint such advice, if taken, would have placed the Socialist Alliance on the far left - of bourgeois radicalism. Liberalism thereby replaces socialism and suggests its own craven methods.

Indeed instead of socialism (communism) being vigorously promoted - for example in the anti-capitalist milieu - as the only feasible alternative to capitalism, it is regarded quizzically or even as a threat. The merest programmatic mention of the rule of the working class and communism will supposedly have militant trade unionists and former Labourites scurrying away from us in a blind panic. Ipso facto the plan outlined in the book Towards a Socialist Alliance party is unrealistic and unworkable. In lieu of a revolutionary Socialist Alliance party - ie, a communist party - the best that can be obtained is a “communist-Labour party” which tolerates the snug communist minority and advocates socially circumscribed reforms. That is all that is possible under today’s pinched circumstances.

Ironically the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is deployed in a thoroughly dishonest manner precisely to scare militant trade unionists and former Labourites. After all, communist parties are “by definition” committed to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ - and ‘dictatorship’, it is falsely implied, is the opposite of democracy, and therefore a rather dangerous thing; certainly not for the consumption of the benighted masses outside the charmed circles of the initiated few.

Suffice to say, for Marxists, ‘dictatorship’ means nothing more frightening than the ‘rule’ of a particular class. The term derives from the Roman dictatura - a temporary form of government voted for by the Senate during times of dire emergency. And this is how the word percolated down into English and French and into the heads of the great figures of the American and French revolutions in the 18th century. George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximillian Robespierre and Louis-Antoine St-Just all dressed themselves in the costume of the Roman republic and borrowed its political phrases.

So Marxism did not invent dictatorship as a way of describing a form of the state. Marxism did nothing more than ground all state forms in the palpable existence of class and the struggle of one class against another. Hence in the lexicon of Marxism there can be the rule, or dictatorship, of an exploiting minority, or the rule of the overwhelming majority: ie, the working class. Put another way, democratic republics like the USA or France - depending on the class struggle - could have a proletarian or bourgeois content.

Only in the 20th century did bourgeois ideologues try to shift the linguistic meaning of dictatorship so as to make it synonymous with absolutism or tyranny. That way the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Republic could be damned as the self-confessed antithesis of democracy. Evidently contemporary Marxists therefore have every reason to dispute this semantic sleight of hand.

Leaving aside the problematical statements of Lenin and Trotsky on this subject, the works of Marx and Engels contain a dozen or so now famous - infamous - references to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Unless we are going to allow Marx and Engels to be traduced by bourgeois society and portrayed as anti-democratic advocates of absolutism or tyranny then there must be an ongoing battle to reassert and defend the unambiguous content the founders of scientific socialism gave to the phrase, which, as Engels remarked in March 1891, has always “filled” the philistine “with wholesome terror” because it means taking democracy to its extreme limits, ie, implicitly beyond capitalism.³⁹ Obviously, as we had to tell Martin Thomas of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, because of the combined effect of cynical drip-drip bourgeois propaganda and the monstrous crimes of bureaucratic socialism carried out under the name of Marxism, the same goes for other hotly contested terms - ‘communism’, ‘Communist Party’, ‘Bolshevik’, etc.⁴⁰

In contrast to comrade Craig’s democracy without socialism, on the other wing of our movement we find those who counterpose democracy to socialism, or who at least say that socialists should maintain an “ambiguous attitude” towards democracy - the latter phrase surprisingly coming from Hillel Ticktin.⁴¹ Democracy is considered to be either positively harmful or an optional extra, hence their socialism without democracy.

Such a viewpoint amongst communists and leftwing revolutionaries dates back to at least the first half of the 19th century: ie, to a time when the governing classes freely expressed an almost visceral contempt for the idea of democracy and loathing of those who advocated such an ‘unnatural’ and ‘ungodly’ system - “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, god made them high and lowly, and ordered them their estate.”

The term ‘democracy’ was subject to much less dispute than today - no government apart from perhaps the USA pretended that it had established itself on the basis of a democracy. As Hal Draper points out, in those days it had not yet become necessary, or fashionable, to “redefine democracy out of existence”. Hence the enemies of popular sovereignty attacked the democratic idea openly and forthrightly, “instead of embracing it in a crushing vice”.⁴²

The British ‘liberties’ celebrated by arch-conservatives like Edmund Burke and syrupy liberals such as Charles Dickens owed far more to the rights of land and money than the rights of the common man. Even with the extension of the franchise in 1832 only a tiny minority of the male population could vote. Property qualifications did what they were intended to do - exclude the vast majority and prevent democracy.

When they were excluded the bourgeoisie - ie, the class of medium-sized capitalist farmers, middle-ranking civil servants and the burgeoning manufacturers - still in the main considered themselves to be part of the people. This was the case in Britain. It was especially the case in mainland Europe. Hence during the revolutions of 1776, 1789, 1820, 1830 and even 1848 the crowned heads of Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia had ranged against them on the other side of the barricades the people - a political concept which embraced many outstanding bourgeois revolutionary democrats. Only in 1848 did the bourgeoisie begin stage by stage to decisively exclude themselves from the camp of democracy and separate off from the people.

Understandably the extreme left of democracy had little love for the bourgeoisie. An exploiting class, it was, they knew, prone to vacillation. However, certain ultra-radical elements, including the precursors of the modern-day anarchists, despised the bourgeoisie and their commercial and money-grabbing spirit to such a degree that they willingly lined up with the autocracy. Ferdinand Lassalle, the famed German socialist and would-be labour dictator, was one such figure. Mikhail Bakunin another. The former secretly entered into negotiations with the kaiser’s iron chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, with a view to cementing a proletarian-Hohenzollern united front against the bourgeoisie. The latter similarly tried to secure himself a royal patron and thus a short cut to the social utopia - with everyone from Charles XV of Sweden, Louis Bonaparte in France and even the tsar of all the Russias himself, Nicholas I.

Marx and Engels frequently had to deal with ultra-radicals who thought nothing of firing off propaganda articles aimed directly against democracy and objectively siding with the autocracy. In The German ideology they lambasted the “old thesis” and accused its advocates of working gratis for the monarchy. But there existed another, more fundamental, reason why certain leftists shunned, or actively opposed, the fight for democracy.

Apart from proletarian socialism - which is the forward, self-liberating movement of the great mass of the population as it breaks free from the confines of capitalism - there are many other kinds of anti-capitalism: namely, varieties of elitist socialism. These socialisms - statist, feudal, bureaucratic, military, etc - owe everything to the scheme-mongering of certain would-be universal reformers or self-selected bands of revolutionary conspirators.

The desired reconstruction of society could hardly be entrusted to the ignorant multitude, mentally crushed, befuddled and circumscribed as they were by pulpit, yellow press and popular culture. Instead of the masses liberating themselves from the shackles of capitalism and remaking society according to their interests and wishes, the far-seeing genius, the revolutionary clique, the benign elite would preside over the envisaged transformation. For such schools of thought, democracy is a danger to be guarded against or carefully rationed. The stupid masses might after all prove less than enthusiastic about the fantastic blueprints dreamt up by the enlightened minority.

Marx and Engels believed that with the growth of working class confidence and the formation of the workers into a party such elitist socialisms would prove to be passing phase. Put another way, an infantile, or childhood, disease. As we know that was not to be ... yet.

The 20th century witnessed the complete surrender of social democracy to bourgeois society. But it also saw the degeneration of the USSR and Stalin’s counterrevolution within the revolution. This anti-capitalism was spread to, or was copied in, many other countries - half of Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, etc. Stalin and all the local Stalins - Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Tito, Pol Pot, Castro, et al - paid lip service to democracy. Stalin even declared that his 1936 constitution was the “most democratic in the world”. In actual fact the masses languished under a tyranny far more deadly, draconian and all-pervasive than anything seen in 19th century Europe.

Despite routine claims to practise the full list of basic democratic rights - right to free elections, right to organise, right to publish, right to demonstrate, etc - reality was altogether different. There were no free elections nor right to publish or demonstrate. The democratic rights won and maintained through popular struggle in the advanced capitalist countries - North America and western Europe - were far more substantive. People could organise independently of the state in the USA. In the USSR they were organised by the state. Bureaucratic socialism was anti-capitalism but it was also anti-proletarian socialism.

Marx and Engels took an altogether different approach to their liberal reformist and ultra-radical contemporaries. They viewed democracy neither as a thing in itself nor as threat. Rather than counterpose democracy to socialism they saw their task as to integrate the two objectively (in terms of programme and, crucially, the real mass movement). In general, Marxism as a programme, says Hal Draper, can be defined as the “complete democratisation of society, not merely of political forms”.⁴³ Like the revolutionary democrats of the 19th century Marx and Engels began by prioritising the fight to democratise political forms. But for them this was an integral part of the fight for socialism and communism.

For them democracy meant unrestricted popular control over all aspects of society. Practically that meant the successive removal of all juridical, structural and socio-economic restraints on, or distortions of, control from below. That is why for Marx democracy points to socialism and communism. To use a negative formulation: without a social content there can be no consistent democracy; without democracy there can be no socialism.

Marx and Engels did not come to this conclusion simply through quiet contemplation in their book-lined studies. The revolutions of 1848 - in which they were active participants - were key to solving the correct relationship between socialism (communism) and democracy - an analysis fully rounded off by the Paris Commune of 1871 which produced a new kind of state, a semi-state, with a definite working class content, along with truly democratic forms. Far from taking an “ambiguous attitude” towards democracy, the Commune showed that democracy must constantly be broadened and taken to new heights so that society comes to be fully controlled by the masses. As democracy steadily advances, the state - a special body for administration and force - withers away, as its functions cease to have any purpose or are simply absorbed into society itself.

The revolutions of 1848-49 temporarily put power into the hands of the bourgeoisie in Germany and France. In terms of programme and social composition their governments were bourgeois and, compared with the previous regimes, were more or less democratic. Marx and Engels did not operate through a specifically workers’ party - the workers’ movement was still at an elemental level and their Communist Party consisted of no more than 30 secret local sections with a membership of under a thousand. Instead they launched a daily paper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as an organ of extreme democracy: “a democracy which everywhere emphasised in every point the specific proletarian character”, as Engels said many years later in 1884.⁴⁴

Marx and Engels mercilessly attacked the Prussian monarchy but did not flinch from criticising the shortcomings and pretensions of the opposition movement, left and right. Opponents were treated with deserved “scorn”. Eg, the ultra-radicals around Andrew Gottschalk - a member of the Communist League and leader of the Cologne Workers’ Association - were given short shrift. Gottschalk urged his supporters to shun any participation in the broad democratic movement and he soon clashed with Marx. Marx and Engels likewise rejected the ‘left economism’ of Stephen Born, who sought to keep working class demands within the narrow confines of “occupational economic goals”. This would have diverted workers from the democratic tasks that faced the German people - above all founding a centralised republic and waging a liberation war against the tsarist bulwark of reaction.

Neither Marx nor Engels doubted, even for one moment, the advantages of democracy under the bourgeois system of production. Rather they sought to overcome those limits imposed upon democracy by the bourgeoisie: eg, property qualifications. Popular influence and control had to be maximised. That included arming the masses and thus the right to overthrow an unacceptable or oppressive government.

For Marx and Engels German society stood between an uncertain future and an overhanging past. While constitutional assemblies had been established in Frankfurt and Berlin and wide freedoms gained by the revolution, Prussian absolutism remained intact and exercised executive power. Alongside the citizens’ militia there stood the Prussian army. The police state had been weakened but lived on. There was then a dual power monarchy.

The workers and the extreme left of democracy had therefore to unite their efforts in order to sweep away the monarchy using the most revolutionary methods conditions allowed. Things would though not stop there. Democracy had to be given a social content and the rights and power of those below pushed forward again and again. What became known as the permanent revolution.

That necessarily meant combating the backtracking tendency amongst liberals and other inconsistent democrats to seek a compromise in the form of a British-style constitutional monarchy. Indeed, everywhere the representatives of the bourgeoisie shrank back from a direct clash with the Prussian monarchy.

With that in mind Neue Rheinische Zeitung encouraged popular pressure on, or intimidation of, parliamentarians. A motion proposed by the radical Johann Jackoby to the effect that all decisions made by the Frankfurt assembly should automatically have the force of law without needing consent by the monarch saw the conservative deputies Hansemann, Reichensperger and von Berg jump to their feet in order to denounce this outrageous attempt by the leftwing minority in the assembly to rouse outside support, an attempt which was “bound to lead to civil war”.

Engels replied to such objections that the “outsiders” in question were the people, the voters, who made the assembly through the March revolution. He denounced von Berg and other such worthies for wanting to abolish political propaganda, which is nothing more than the freedom of the press and the right to organise in practice. Whether these rights do or do not lead to civil war is “not our concern”, said Engels. It is sufficient that such rights “exist” and “we shall see where it ‘leads’ if they continue to be infringed”.⁴⁵

Engels took obvious delight in excoriating one particular deputy - a former young Hegelian opponent. Speaking to the Frankfurt assembly, Arnold Ruge made his political direction all too clear: “We do not want to quarrel, gentlemen,” he politely announced, “over whether we aim for a democratic monarchy or a pure democracy; on the whole we want the same thing: liberty, popular liberty, the rule of the people.” With such hollow catchphrases Ruge sought to simultaneously please the right and subsume the programme of the left into that of the right.

Such cowardice was typical of the liberal left and encouraged reaction to go onto to the offensive. As soon as it could, the autocracy began to “cheat the revolution of its democratic fruit” by chopping back on the rights won on the March barricades. Democratic clubs were closed, free assembly compromised, the democratic press hauled before the courts. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung fought back at every stage before constitutional phrases were transformed into Prussian realities and full blown counterrevolution was imposed. The revolution was put to death in the name of the fatherland. Marx and his family sought safety in Paris.

In the decade that followed the European-wide defeat of the 1848-49 revolutionary wave Marx wrote extensively on constitutional forms. Hal Draper concludes that for Marx the distinguishing feature of a “truly democratic constitution” was the degree to which it “limited and restrained the independent scope of the executive power”.⁴⁶ Democracy is only genuine to the degree which it means popular control from below.

The first constitution Marx analysed was the French constitution adopted in November 1848. Marx showed how worthless were the democratic guarantees enshrined in the constitution. Every one of them could be nullified by subsequent laws enacted by the government. Freedom of movement, freedom of the press, the right to hold opinions and to associate are all there. However, the constitution stipulates that the “enjoyment of these rights has no other limit, than the equal rights of others, and public safety”. For Marx “public safety” was the joker in the pack and he showed how the enjoyment of constitutional rights has in fact been systematically violated. Press freedom was taken away by the imposition of a mass of financial hurdles - stamp duty, etc - while the right to associate and assemble were effectively removed through decrees which put everything under police “supervision and caprice”.⁴⁷

Voting and other such rights were undermined using similar devices. Labour books and internal passports were made obligatory so as to make the worker dependent on the employer and the police. Under the facade of freedom, freedom was repressed.

In other articles discussing the draft constitution of Schleswig Holstein and the Prussian 1850 constitution Marx showed with devastating effect the gulf that existed between fine phrases about liberty and the sorry practice which reduced all the rights of the people to a “dead letter”.⁴⁸ Under the Prussian constitution most of the population was denied the franchise. Those privileged enough to be allowed to vote were, however, subject to all manner of restrictions. Elections were indirect, constituencies could be altered at a whim and gerrymandered and each of the tax-paying colleges of electors - high tax-payers, middling tax-payers, lower tax-payers - were given equal representation despite their unequal size.

Marx wanted to curb bureaucracy and the powers of the executive. As Hal Draper lists, he consistently stood for a wide range of freedoms - opinion, the right to assemble, organise and demonstrate. He also railed against all property and educational qualifications put in the way of voting and each and every gerrymandering measure. Marx generally advocated a unicameral representative assembly. No upper house to delay legislation and block change. The single-chamber parliament can more effectively stand up to the executive and is subject to greater and more immediate pressure from below.

However, Marx was fully aware that parliament and the whole political system of what we call ‘bourgeois democracy’ could be used as a “safety valve” which dissipated the anger and passions of the population. That did not imply that democracy as such was a swindle but that democratic forms were used by capitalism - the plutocracy - to “frustrate genuine democratic control from below”.⁴⁹ The highest example of this was the USA. Not because there was less democracy there, but the contrary. Unlike the monarchical and Bonapartist pseudo-democracies of Europe, the USA had, through the revolution of 1776 and its aftermath, taken the formal structures of democracy to highly developed forms - referendums, the election of judges and local sheriffs, etc. The USA was therefore the least unfree country in the world.

To successfully dominate through such a system establishment politicians had to perfect the art of lying, double-dealing, corruption and divide-and-rule manipulation to the highest degree. Tricking the masses, persuading them that they are masters of the country’s destiny, assumes cardinal importance. Again it should be stressed that such an assessment led neither Marx nor Engels to shrink from the struggle to remove all obstacles, shortcomings and perversions imposed upon democracy by the bourgeoisie. Equally it should be stressed that for Marx and Engels the working class should not only fight for formal democratic rights but for a society that would satisfy the wants of all. Engels called this a “social democracy” in his 1845 book The condition of the working class in England.

That class agenda was summed up by the physical-force wing of Chartism, led by George Harney and Ernst Jones, which proclaimed that it wanted the “charter and something more”. That is, the vote plus the social programme which challenged bourgeois property and wealth. That battle could not be fought on the narrow ground of democracy or politics. Another principle must gain a hearing - the principle of socialism, which transcends everything that is merely political.

“Merely political” as Hal Draper states