Weekly Worker 368 Thursday January 25 2001

1. Our epoch

[Global economy] [The danger of war] [Why not capitalism?] [The battle of ideas] [Internationalism]

The present epoch is one of the transition from capitalism to socialism and communism. The main contradiction in this our epoch is between decadent capitalism and immanent socialism.

As imperialism superseded the period of competitive capitalism at the dawn of the 20th century, the world as a whole became ripe for socialism - ie, the first stage of communism. Imperialism is monopoly capitalism and in the drive for profit it globalises production and creates an international division of labour and its own gravedigger, the working class. In this way capitalism lays the material basis for socialism and, despite itself, human freedom.

The October 1917 revolution in Russia marked the beginning of the epoch. Socialism was transformed from the realm of theory to that of practice. However, the workers’ state in backward Russia was, fatally, left isolated. The workers could not exercise direct control. Under these famished conditions bureaucratic deformation was inevitable. The eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 confirms that there are no national roads to communism nor any sustainable alternative between capitalism and genuine socialism. Socialism is international and democratic or it is nothing.

1.1. Global economy

The world capitalist economy is an organic hierarchy based on exploitation and force. Depending on where they stand in the pecking order, countries play different roles within the imperialist system.

Though they remain viciously exploited, the backward and medium-developed countries now occupy a significant place in the world division of labour. And not only as suppliers of raw materials and agricultural producers. Such countries now produce a wide range of industrial goods. As a result the working class objectively exists globally, and subjectively has the possibility and self-interest to become a consciously international class.

A prerequisite for the final victory of the international working class is winning socialism in the main advanced countries. Only here has capitalism fully proletarianised the mass of the population and socialised production to the point where real socialism is immediately realisable. The working class can come to power in backward or medium-developed countries. But such political gains will prove short-lived unless revolution follows in the advanced capitalist countries. The decisive battles will be fought in the heartlands of imperialism, not its periphery.

Capitalism develops through a series of booms and slumps. With the global economy, the massive extension of the credit system, state regulation and intervention, the period between boom and slump tends to grow ever longer. Yet, in direct proportion to the height and duration of the boom, slumps prove ever more devastating and protracted. Once the boom peters out, seemingly permanent reforms obtained by workers during the period of prosperity become subject to sustained and unremitting attack.

1.2. The danger of war

War is the continuation of politics by other, violent, means. War is a sustained conflict on an extended scale. War is the product of class society. War, and the potential for war, will only end with the ending of class society itself.

The main source of war in our epoch is imperialism. Imperialism has incorporated war into its economic cycle of boom, stagnation and slump. For imperialism, war is an attempt to escape from insoluble socio-economic problems by means of mass slaughter. The existence of imperialism therefore means the danger of war.

Under capitalism, peace is only a period of ceasefire. It is only the freezing of the division of spoils arrived at through war.

Capitalism goes hand in hand with uneven development. Hence there is an increasing pressure for the redivision of spoils. Rising ‘have not’ powers sooner or later challenge the existing imperialist hierarchy and seek to offset their own crisis at the expense of foreign rivals. When diplomacy and trade wars fail, military might eventually decides. Trade blocs become military blocs. So imperialism means the preparation of world war.

Capitalism possesses weapons capable of destroying the whole planet. The struggle to end the danger of war by the working class is therefore a struggle for the survival of our species and its culture.

Under communism the word for ‘war’ will become redundant. So will the word for ‘peace’. The absence of war will gradually render obsolete its opposite, as humanity leaves behind its pre-history.

1.3. Why not capitalism?

The world economy and the tremendous dynamic of capitalism makes the existence of countries and borders thoroughly reactionary. Capitalism, however, cannot contain the wealth it creates, neither within the nation-state nor as a global system.

The continuous accumulation of capital means the social nature of production becomes ever greater and more cosmopolitan. In contradiction, the ownership and control of capital is increasingly international, institutionalised and concentrated.

Capitalist accumulation in no way implies the development of a rational system. Under capitalism, production becomes production for its own sake. Capitalism never rests, driven as it is by the unquenchable, vampire-like thirst for surplus value. It is a system of chronic overproduction that knows no intrinsic limits to the exploitation of labour power. It is a system where dead labour turns against living labour, where money and profit are primary and need is incidental. It is a system of extreme alienation that dehumanises every human relationship.

As the capitalist class accumulates more and more wealth, workers suffer relative pauperisation. Compared with capital, wages and state benefits shrink. As the world of things becomes ever greater, the world of people becomes ever more insecure and atomised. Capitalism, despite the abundance of its commodities and the wonders of technology, is unable to allow human beings to fulfil themselves as human beings. Work is a clock-watching torture - a daily drudge, not life’s prime want. Much hyped though it is, leisure is no more human. These pinched moments of recovery, so-called hobbies, holidays or club land hedonism are used by capitalism as just another marketing opportunity.

Moreover, during periods of stagnation and crisis, through unemployment, wage cuts, intensification of labour, longer hours, temporary contracts, etc, capitalism assaults the existing cultural level of the masses - meagre and impoverished though it is. Hard won wage rates, trade union rights and legal restrictions imposed on exploitation are damned as economic heresy by the high priests of the dollar, pound, euro and yen - hence capitalism threatens the workers even as a slave class. The more capital accumulates, the more antagonistic it therefore becomes to humanity.

Distorted by relations of exploitation and the lust for profit, national economies become not only anachronistic, but lopsided.

In the imperialist countries huge numbers are engaged in unproductive labour such as banking, insurance, advertising and marketing. In backward and medium-developed countries capitalism’s destruction of peasant agriculture leaves hundreds of millions destitute and eking out a precarious existence in sprawling slums and shanty towns.

Thus imperialist capitalism, even during its periods of peaceful development, can only advance the productive forces in a grossly inefficient, wasteful and inhuman way. Capitalism ruins the ecological balance with its ruthless disregard of the planet and the life on it. City air is polluted, rivers turned into sewers, the countryside cleared of wildlife, and food is constantly degraded in quality and even made unsafe. As a species dependent on and part of nature, the full development of humanity’s powers requires a sustainable ecological balance which can be achieved only through direct planning and social control of production, not merely on a national, but international scale.

1.4. The battle of ideas

Socialists and communists operating in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, one of the key metropolitan centres of capitalism, are fully aware that the class struggle cannot be separated from the struggle against opportunism.

Capitalism is objectively approaching socialism and communism. Yet socialism and then communism can only be achieved as conscious self-liberation by the working class. Our class needs the truth. Therefore the battle of ideas - crucially against the elevation of short-term or sectional interests over the general interest - is fundamental to the supersession of capitalism. The part must be subordinated to the whole, not the other way round. No country, no party, no trade union, no leader, no section of the working class should take precedence over the global struggle for socialism.

Because socialism begins as a political act by an oppressed class, its inevitability in no way implies that the negation of exploitation, alienation and unfreedom is mechanically assured.

Though, for example, the capitalist class is tiny, it possesses huge power - and not only in the form of wealth and the state machine. As the ruling class, its ideas are the ruling ideas. Capitalist ideas are spontaneously generated and, in the battle for minds, are carefully cultivated by a paid army of permanent persuaders - the media, education, the arts, religion, establishment parties, etc.

In contrast the working class is huge in numbers. It can, like any slave class, economically and politically fight to better its conditions within the existing system. Yet to realise itself as a class for itself, a class with an historic mission to free humanity, it must acquire for itself a scientific world outlook. That cannot be gained except through an open struggle against wrong ideas. This openness must encompass the struggle against manifestations of short-termism within our own, national and international, ranks.

1.5. Internationalism

The socialist revolution is the global fight to liberate humanity. It is a process whereby capitalism is replaced by a society of freely associated producers: ie, communism.

The victory of socialist revolution in one or more countries is only partial until the balance of forces has tilted decisively against capitalism. That means socialism must triumph more or less simultaneously in most of the advanced countries if it is not to suffer deformation and counterrevolution in one form or another.

The struggle for socialism is a unified world struggle and must be based upon working class internationalism. The revolution must be coordinated and to the largest possible extent centrally planned.