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The last 50 years
It may seem odd that in my first piece I closed the historical discussion
50 years ago. There is, however, a reason for doing so. This is
that comrade Thomas’s reading of the structure of world economics
and politics today is based on a particular view of what happened
in the 1950s and 1960s. This implies that the AWL’s ‘imperialism
of free trade’ theory, and rival theories, are to be judged
for their predictive power in relation to the world system over
the whole period 1945-2004. In fact, we should also consider the
extent to which the underpinnings of the ‘imperialism of free
trade’ theory and other theories actually succeed in generating
an internally consistent and predictive account of the older period
of competing empires between the late 19th century and 1945. Is
each a scientifically superior theory which incorporates and subsumes
the data dealt with by the older Marxist theories of imperialism,
in addition explaining other data? Or is it merely an ad hoc add-on
to ‘save the phenomena’ (like epicycles in the Ptolemaic
theory that the sun and planets circle the earth)?
‘Imperialism of free trade’
The main distinctive features of the theory of the ‘imperialism
of free trade’ identified in my first article were:
1. That inter-imperialist military-economic competition in the Leninist
sense has been replaced by a “network of cartels between the
big-power governments” - the international institutions. These
are, however, not controlled by the US; rather, the US acts as a
reserve ‘globocop’ “in the interest of big capital
as a whole”.
2. That big-power state “assistance to their corporations in
the world market” within this framework takes the form of “market
forces and para-market forces”, rather than state-to-state
action (colonies proper, or Lenin’s category of ‘semi-colonies’).
The world is therefore “a world of capitalist nation-states”
and conflicts between states are often simply conflicts between
big and smaller capital.
How plausible is this as an account of the post-1950 international
order? The first thing that has to be said is that states as such
have almost disappeared from sight in Thomas’s analysis. They
merely reflect the interests of particular big or small capitals.
How they do so remains unseen. This was always a danger in the thesis,
common to the classical Marxist theories of imperialism, that monopoly
and finance capital was increasingly fused with the state. In Thomas’s
analysis the result is that both the relative coercive power of
states, based on their military capabilities, and state-to-state
relationships are marginalised.
Unlike a business firm, the state is an apparatus of direct extra-economic
coercion. The degree of genuine independence of states is given
by the degree of their autonomous war-fighting capacity. This involves
three elements beyond the simple possession of armed forces. The
first is a domestic arms industry capable of repair and resupply
for the duration of a war. The second is more general logistical
and administrative power capable of securing the feeding, etc, of
the troops and of the workers in the arms industry. In turn, it
entails a relatively ‘balanced’ domestic economy which
can stand up to blockade or ‘sanctions’: thus US and European
agricultural subsidies are motivated by military-strategic reasons
as much as by domestic political ones. The third is autonomous educational
and training facilities to supply skilled personnel and (linked)
ideological bases for the loyalty of the armed forces.
There is thus a contradiction between, on the one hand, the development
of the world economy and the material international division of
labour and, on the other, the independence of nation-states as states.
This is the point made (most clearly among the classical Marxist
theorists of imperialism) by Bukharin.
Relations between the ‘big powers’
With this in mind we can return to the internal relationships between
the ‘big powers’. It is far from clear that this is one
of ‘cartels’ based de facto on agreement on common interests.
Like the British state’s naval policy before the 1920s, the
US maintains an absolute predominance of its armed forces over potential
rivals. Since World War II the US has maintained and still maintains
a large ground army in Germany and military bases, mainly air and
naval, on the territories of all the ‘big powers’ in the
pre-1991 ‘capitalist world’ except France. It has dual
control of British nuclear weapons. Of the capitalist states, only
Britain and France are logistically capable of military action beyond
their own borders without short-term US support. The Nato organisation
is a hub and spokes arrangement with the US at the hub. Though France
has been semi-detached since 1966 and since the fall of the USSR
some western European Nato states have become increasingly willing
to resist US proposals, the US (and Britain) have vetoed any attempt
to create a ‘European pole’.
The US state has also applied considerable money and effort to developing
pro-US trends in the political life of European states; as was disclosed
for the earlier period after these funds and support efforts were
shifted, in the late 1970s, from right social democrats to neoliberal
politicians. The various ‘cartels’ on the economic front
are, and always have been, in substance subject to US vetoes. There
is a great deal more that could be said. The underlying point is
that the relationship between the US state and the other ‘big
capitalist’ powers is not a relationship between equals. It
is, in fact, far closer to Britain’s relationship to Portugal
between the 18th and the early 20th centuries.
In this context, the ‘consent’ of other capitalist ‘big
powers’ to US military interventions, which comrade Thomas
gives as a reason to suppose that these were in the interests of
capital as a whole, does not imply anything of the sort. It says
merely that US leverage is sufficient to secure ‘consent’.
If we are not concerned with a relationship between equals, a question
is posed. Why did the US state not, after its victory over its European
and Japanese rivals in 1945, consistently defend the interests of
US capital against rival capitals? It is not, in fact, a difficult
question to answer. In the first place, without Marshall aid and
the concessions which went along with it to revive western European
capital, the western European capitalist states would have gone
the way of those in eastern Europe (been overthrown by communists)
by the end of the 1940s. Secondly, the spoils of war were so great
that US capitals could comfortably afford not to exploit the power
of their state to its full potential. European and Japanese fixed
capital had been physically destroyed on an enormous scale, while
US capital remained substantially intact. The 1947 General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt), while it made substantial concessions
to Britain, considerably weakened the imperial protection systems.
US capital thus had very substantial space for expansion without
insisting on a full free-trade and hard-money regime which would
have reduced its rivals to semi-colonial status or - more probably
- led to their revolutionary overthrow.
If this is the origin of the post-war system in relations between
the ‘big powers’, does the fall of the USSR lead to its
becoming generalised, or to its withering away or mutating? Again,
the answers are not desperately difficult. On the one hand, the
military verdict of World War II shows no sign of being reversed
through large-scale rearmament and protectionism by a big-power
rival of the US. None of the European countries individually could
remotely embark on such a policy, and British membership of the
EU has since 1972 paralysed any moves towards closer political-military
integration which could create a rival to the US. (In contrast,
widening and deepening the free trade zone and the single European
currency are US interests which the US has supported.) Japan remains
utterly vulnerable to US pre-emptive military action and, indeed,
depends on US support against its Chinese neighbour.
In that sense there will be no return to the world of competing
empires, except in the very unlikely contingency that the Chinese
bureaucracy successfully manages the transition to capitalism (not
yet complete) and China becomes a military rival of the US.
On the other hand, since the 1970s the US has increasingly used
its leverage in the international ‘cartels’ to insist
that other states must pursue a hard-money and free-trade policy,
while the US itself continues to pursue a soft-money, protectionist
and Keynesian demand-stimulus policy. This turn is not primarily
driven by the direct interests of US capital as such. It does episodically
have the effect that a low dollar (to some extent) stimulates US
exports, but US big capital’s operations overseas are so extensive
that there is probably not much net gain. It is in the interests
of the US state as such - in the first place simply in financing
its operations at the expense of non-US capitals, and secondly in
securing domestic consent to its rule from the middle and working
classes. Since the fall of the Soviet Union this trend has accelerated.
The Bush administration’s overt ‘unilateralism’ is
merely more politically explicit than the practical conduct of other
recent administrations. US state actors, and the capitalists who
pay them off, decreasingly see the need for the concessions made
to European and Japanese capitals in the aftermath of World War
II.
‘Decolonisation’
What about relations between the ‘big powers’ and the
former colonies and semi-colonies? It must be said in the first
place that comrade Thomas is correct to say that we live in “a
world of capitalist ... states” (I leave out ‘nation-’
from the quotation because by no means all the existing capitalist
states can reasonably be called nation-states, as opposed to multinational
or sub-national states). Some orthodox Trotskyists and some ‘official
communists’ hold that imperfect national independence, or the
persistence within a state’s territory of pre-capitalist forms
of production and exploitation, means that we have an ‘incomplete
bourgeois revolution’. This is not seriously defensible in
the light of the historical origins of the capitalist ‘big
powers’.
However, it does not follow that the relations between the ‘big
powers’ and the former colonies are merely analogous to the
relations between big and small capital - say, between Ford (= US)
and Morgan (= Argentina). They are more analogous to the relations
between the Mexican maquiladoras, which merely assemble parts made
elsewhere, (= [most] former colonies) and the manufacturers of the
parts (= former imperialist powers). If Ford went bankrupt tomorrow,
Morgan’s business would be affected only by changes in demand
reflecting the macro-economic conditions which bankrupted Ford.
If the maquiladora’s supplier went bankrupt, the maquiladora
would close down. Similarly, the withdrawal of US support rapidly
collapsed the South Vietnamese regime, and if the French state were
to collapse tomorrow France’s former colonies in Africa would
be at the very least severely destabilised.
In the first place, the large majority of the former colonies are
actually dependent for arms on ‘big-power’ suppliers.
India and Turkey, for example, have quite significant levels of
economic and political autonomy. But neither has the independent
military production capacity which France or the US had in the first
half of the 19th century - the high period of British hegemony and
‘free trade’.
Secondly, there are also heavy levels of state-to-state financial
dependence of the former colonies on ‘big powers’ through
loans and ‘aid’ mechanisms, which are commonly either
explicitly or implicitly tied to purchasing arrangements. Machinery
of this type was characterised by Lenin as producing ‘semi-colonial’
status, and it governed the relations between Britain and Latin
America and Iran, and between Britain and France and the Balkans,
at the height of the colonial empires around 1900. From this perspective
the old ‘official communist’ tag, ‘neo-colonialism’,
was quite unnecessary: what happened in decolonisation was a shift
from full colonial to semi-colonial status.
Thirdly, the ideological-legal structure of the ‘decolonised’
states was very commonly given by the former colonial power and
the education and training of state officials, especially the higher
ranks of the military, has involved and very commonly still does
involve organised relations between the former colony and its colonial
power.
Fourthly and finally, direct military interventions by the big powers
in support of states in their former colonies have continued throughout
the last 50 years. A few examples which are not US ‘globocop’
actions: British intervention in the Indonesian-Malaysian Konfrontasi
in the 1960s and in Sierra Leone in 2000, and French interventions
in Africa through the 1980s and 1990s. The former colonies are capitalist
states, yes. But in the main they are dependent capitalist states.
Why then decolonisation? The answer is in fact fairly straightforward.
It reflects the changed relations between the ‘big powers’
discussed above. Britain, France and the Netherlands could no longer
afford the full-scale apparatus of a colonial state. Conversely,
formal colonial annexation in the later 19th century was primarily
a defence against big-power rivals and only very much secondarily
a means of managing labour in the colony. The US was so dominant
that it had no need to construct an imperial protection system,
and had elected for reasons of the struggle against Stalinism to
give the former imperial powers some slices of the cake. Decolonisation
conveniently expressed both these choices. It also incidentally
involved less stress on the political ideology of the US state than
a formal empire would have: though the contradiction between the
US state’s role as world hegemon and its political ideology
of ‘freedom’, democracy and national self-determination
became explosive in the Vietnam War and remain problematic even
today.
That said, decolonisation was a dynamic in the post-1945 world situation
and one that played out in rather various and by no means non-conflictual
ways. Suez in 1956 was the last British and French attempt to act
independently of and against the interests of the USA. However,
the US did not generally insist on immediate decolonisation. Wars
for independence continued through the 1950s and 1960s; Portugal
only decolonised as a result of the strains of colonial war provoking
a revolutionary crisis in the metropolis in 1974-75; Britain and
France retain a number of small colonial possessions at the present
date.
None of this proves that the Leninist theory of imperialism is right.
What it does show is that there is a large class of political phenomena
in the relations between states which are not and cannot be accounted
for by the theory of the ‘imperialism of free trade’.
The AWL deals with these issues as purely political ‘democratic
questions’ without economic grounds - in effect an epicycle,
or a violation of Occam’s Razor (theories should minimise unexplained
independent causes). Further, since the theory does not attempt
to explain what was wrong with Lenin’s theory of imperialism,
it also fails to explain (a) the empires and inter-imperialist conflicts
of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th, or (b)
the reconciliation of the workers’ movement to the capitalist
state - both of which Bukharin’s and Lenin’s theories
attempted to explain. It does not even attempt to deal with the
question of the epochal limits of capital.
Alternatives
If the theory of the ‘imperialism of free trade’ is thus
seriously problematic, the available alternatives raise other questions.
There is, of course, endless published output on the question both
from the academy and the far left. Here I can give only the barest
outline sketch of some of the positions which have had strategic
influence on the left or appear particularly theoretically illuminating.
They fall, essentially, into four broad camps. The first option
is simply to assert that nothing has changed and the apparent stability
of the world order under the cold war is merely illusory. The second
is to claim that the post-war order represents a deepening of imperialism.
As a strategic consequence, the ‘centre of gravity of the world
situation has shifted to the colonial revolution’, or it is
necessary to overthrow imperialism as a precondition to liberating
the minds of the working class of the imperialist countries. The
third option is to relax the hypothesis of classical Marxist theories
of imperialism that the phenomena of the late 19th century and the
first half of the 20th represent capital having reached its epochal
limits. The fourth option is the hypothesis that the global strength
of Stalinism as a result of World War II has stabilised capitalism.
The boys who cried wolf
The idea that nothing had really changed was the particular speciality
of the Healyites (Socialist Labour League/Workers Revolutionary
Party) but it was also a temptation persistently affecting organisations
which defined themselves by ‘orthodox Trotskyism’ or by
non-Maoist left Stalinism, and the Trotskyists more generally. The
result was a tendency through the whole period to predict that the
next cyclical downturn in the world economy would convert into a
1929-style crash and a ‘return to the 30s’. Even Ernest
Mandel, whose study of Marxist political economy had begun as a
critique of doom-mongering, in his later years succumbed to building
perspectives on predicting a rapid development of economic crisis,
leading to political destabilisation in the ‘big powers’
which has not (yet) occurred. These repeated failures of prediction
make the approach obviously scientifically valueless. They have
also, however, had the unfortunate effect of marginalising Marxist
political-economic analysis in the thought of the left.
The commitment of these forces to the dogmatic reproduction of ‘orthodoxy’
left out an important element of Lenin’s theory of imperialism.
This was the role of imperialist super-profits in ‘buying off’
the workers’ movement in the imperialist countries. In its
place, the whole explanation of the reconciliation of the workers’
organisations offered was the deficiency of the ‘subjective
factor’: the role in supporting capitalism, variously, of Khrushchevite
revisionism, Stalinism, Pabloism ... by this last we have reached
the reduction to absurdity of Trotsky’s claim that the crisis
of humanity is reduced to the crisis of proletarian leadership.
The ‘centrality of the colonial revolution’
If the orthodox Trotskyists and similar groups abandoned the theory
that imperial superprofits paid for concessions to the working class,
the Maoists effectively reduced the whole theory to this tenet.
Capital had become more centralised round the USA; the restabilised
regime allowed for concessions to the big-power working classes;
hence the centre of revolutionary struggle would be, for the foreseeable
future, in the colonial world. Leftists in the imperialist countries
were allowed at best an ancillary role of building solidarity with
this struggle. In the hands of the Maoists, this was a generalisation
onto a world scale of the strategy of ‘surrounding the cities’.
But there were plenty of other leftists who were either influenced
by Maoist ideas or held similar ideas: notably the Pablo-Posadas
wing of the Fourth International (International Secretariat) in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. Rather later, this became a form
of political collapse of ‘orthodox Trotskyism’ into forms
of left Stalinism. It affected the Marcyite Workers World Party
and the Spartacists from the late 1960s, the Healyite WRP in the
later 1970s, and the US Socialist Workers Party and its co-thinkers,
like the Australian Democratic Socialist Party, from around 1980.
In this version of the theory of imperialism the ‘actuality
of the revolution’, the epochal limit to capital, was the irresistible
advance of the anti-imperialist front, marked successively by the
Yugoslav and Albanian, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cuban, South
Yemeni, and so on, revolutions, as well as by the ability of the
‘socialist camp’ to ‘win allies’ (like Ba’athist
Iraq!) among the former colonies. The offensive of the European
working class in the late 1960s and early 1970s cast some doubts
on the theory, while Beijing’s pro-US turn in the mid-70s demoralised
the orthodox Maoists. However, the outbreak of the Afghan, Iranian
and Nicaraguan revolutions gave it a new lease of life. The fall
of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe and the market turns in China
and Indochina should have knocked it on the head, and certainly
shows that it is completely useless as a guide to action: clearly,
neither ‘surrounding the cities’ nor building up a ‘socialist
camp’ or global ‘anti-imperialist front’ leads anywhere
except back to capitalism by a detour.
World systems theory
World systems theory started from the perspective of the ‘centrality
of the colonial revolution’ to develop what is in substance
a critique of the theory of imperialism as the terminal stage of
capitalism. The classic books are Samir Amin’s Unequal development
(1973, translated 1976), Immanuel Wallerstein’s The modern
world system (1974) and Andre Gunder Frank’s World accumulation
1492-1798 (1978). Amin’s book is a theoretical argument for
the proposition that an international market-based division of labour
will entail the existence of a ‘centre’ which receives
most of the benefits of the division of labour, and a ‘periphery’
which is (in diverse ways) deformed and exploited. His conclusion
is the policy of the (colonial) south ‘delinking’ itself
from the north. In this form the theory is manifestly merely a variant
of colonial nationalism and Maoism and is disproved as a guide to
action by the course of events after the 1970s.
Wallerstein and Gunder Frank, starting from the same perspective,
set out to explore the pre-19th century history of world markets
and international divisions of labour. Both, in different ways,
trace the origins of a capitalist international division of labour
in which a centre benefits at the expense of a dependent periphery
to the 16th century development of capitalism out of feudalism.
The implication for the theory of imperialism is that the idea of
imperialism as the terminal stage of capitalism is indefensible.
Wallerstein wrote in 2003 that “imperialism is an integral
part of the capitalist world economy. It is not a special phenomenon.
It has always been there. It always will be there as long as we
have a capitalist world economy” (Monthly Review July-August
2003).
A great deal of academic ink has been spilt trying to reinstate
the fundamentally national character of early capitalist economies
and development against this hypothesis. It has to be said that
it has failed to do so. The most productive recent historical work
on the 17th and 18th centuries has worked with the assumption that
capitalism was from the outset an international phenomenon. Historical
work has also found in the early modern economy oligopolies (which
the classical theorists of imperialism called monopolies) central
roles played by financial intermediaries, and major interpenetration
of big capital and the state. The thesis of imperialism as being,
because of these features, the terminal phase of capitalism has
been substantially refuted.
If capitalism is from the outset an international order, and automatically
produces hierarchically uneven development, it follows that there
will from the outset also be a world hegemon state - initially the
Netherlands and, after the wars of 1688-1714, Britain. The theory
thus provides an alternative explanation of later 19th century formal
imperialism and the catastrophe of 1914-45. These reflected, not
the terminal stage of capitalism, but the decline and death agony
of British world hegemony. On this basis, we should see the present
situation as reflecting a relative decline of the US, which will
lead to a more ‘multipolar’ world before a new world hegemon
asserts itself.
The proletariat as the only limit to capitalism
If 1914-45 was not the terminal crisis of a capitalism which had
reached its epochal limits, it remained to account both for 1914-45
and for the subsequent period of dynamic stability. The most successful
approach to this problem was the re-appropriation, most prominently
by Ernest Mandel, of Nikolai Kondratiev’s theory of long cycles
in capitalism. It is familiar economics that capitalism is characterised
by short cycles of expansion and recession or crisis: Kondratiev
claimed that there was an underlying 60-year cycle, in the up phase
of which expansion was stronger and recession weaker, while in the
down phase recession was stronger and expansion weaker. Kondratiev
interpreted the ‘long cycle’ in terms of large-scale technical
innovations which reshaped world markets at a level deeper than
the usual short cycle driven by the turnover time of fixed capital
(machinery replacement).
At the time of Kondratiev’s original work, Trotsky was critical
both of the supposed regularity of the 60-year cycle, which he thought
tended to force the data, and of the technical driving force: he
thought that it was more probable that major world events in the
class struggle, like the revolutions of 1848 and their defeat, and
geopolitical changes reshaped the world market on this deeper scale.
Mandel’s revision of Kondratiev incorporates the class struggle,
arguing that major defeats of the proletariat enable a rise in absolute
surplus value, which, in turn, allows the widespread adoption of
major technical innovations driving a long up phase. The defeats
of the working class in the 1930s and 1940s then enable the up phase
of the 1950s and 60s. Other explanations of the up phase, like Michael
Kidron’s ‘permanent arms economy’ are less successful
in explaining the 1914-45 crisis. Like Mandel’s thesis, they
eliminate the idea that imperialism and the 1914-45 crisis represents
capital running up against the limit that the forces of production
outgrow the capitalist order and turn into forces of destruction.
The effect of these views is to reduce the epochal limits of capitalism
to one: the class movement of the working class. As with ‘the
boys who cried wolf’, the role of imperialist superprofits
in reconciling the workers’ movement in the imperialist countries
to capitalism has disappeared - this time, however, not in mere
silence, but because of the economic postulates of Mandel’s
and other accounts of the up phase. In their place Mandel put a
variety of mechanisms, but tended to fall back on the ‘crisis
of leadership’. The International Socialists/Socialist Workers
Party and other ‘new left’ theorists instead appropriated
Hegelian-Marxist arguments that working class consciousness is in
the everyday recuperated within capitalism, so that the class only
appears as a contradiction within capitalism in the moment of the
actual strike struggle.
The strategic result of this approach was forms of spontaneist and
syndicalist politics. These failed with the defeat of the workers’
offensive of the late 1960s and 1970s, but they are still with us:
they are a significant element in the character of the AWL’s
press and underpin, in an extremely distorted way, the SWP’s
adulation of ‘those who fight’. We have again a theory
which provides no worthwhile guide to action.
Stalinism stabilised capitalism
In a certain sense both the ‘crisis of leadership’ and
Kidron’s ‘permanent arms economy’ theories involved
the idea that the existence of Stalinism stabilised capitalism.
In ‘crisis of leadership’ the Stalinists held back the
masses; in ‘permanent arms economy’ theory the existence
of the Soviet threat enabled the state spending on armaments, which
mitigated the problems of underconsumption and disproportionality.
Theories which more clearly asserted that Stalinism stabilised capitalism
have been those of Hillel Ticktin and Wadi’h Halabi. All of
these allow the bulk of the classical Marxist theories of imperialism
to be left untouched. Imperialism remains the terminal phase of
capitalism. But its consequences are temporarily averted by the
role of Stalinist regimes over a third of the world.
Ticktin argues that the effects of cold war military expenditure
on underconsumption and disproportionality problems were necessary
but insufficient elements of capitalist restabilisation after World
War II. Also critical was Stalinism as a threat, which thereby provided
a “control mechanism over the working class” (Critique
35, p23). Any retreat from this orientation will ultimately let
loose the demon of the working class militancy in the imperialist
countries. Moreover, in spite of the ideology of the free market,
capital in fact needs planning: “The capitalist system today
can only exist in and through a form of organisation and management
of the market. That form is provided in part by the structure of
finance capital itself, but the main burden of ensuring the stability
of the economy rests on governments” (ibid p29).
It follows from these views that the fall of the Soviet Union leads
to an internal dynamic in the capitalist world order - in the first
place towards classical crisis, in the second place towards resort
to war, at least with third world countries.
Ticktin denies the existence of planning in any real sense in the
Stalinist regime. Halabi, in contrast, started with a ‘workers’
state’ view of the Stalinist regimes and maintains that there
was planning in these societies and still is - albeit more limited
- in China and Vietnam. With this starting point, Halabi’s
view of the stabilisation is very roughly that after the end of
the post-war ‘replacement boom’ (replacing capital goods
destroyed in the war) the sale of producer goods to the Stalinist
regimes functioned to stabilise the capitalist economies. In this
he follows Yevgeny Preobrazhensky’s The decline of capitalism
(1931; edited and translated by Richard Day, 1985). Preobrazhensky
had argued that quite small volumes of exports in department one
(producer goods) had a multiplier effect which tended to produce
capitalist growth.
Halabi argues on this basis that the planned or quasi-planned character
of the economy under the Stalinist regime had the effect that demand
for producer goods in these countries was smooth rather than cyclical.
Stalinist purchases of producer goods from the capitalists then
regularised the capitalist side of the world economy. As with Ticktin’s
argument, the result is an expectation that the collapse of the
USSR, etc will destabilise the world capitalist economy and hence
the systems of rule based on partial concessions to the working
class and to the colonial elites. There will follow a drive towards
pauperisation and war.
Both arguments are in different ways incomplete. The critical issue
is that neither provides an adequate explanation for the ‘downturn’
and ‘stagflation’ period of the 1970s and the turn - which
Ticktin describes but does not explain - of international capital
towards ‘finance capital’ and free-market ideology at
the same period. The difficulty is that, by leaving out the ‘long
cycle’ phenomena within capitalism which the Mandelite and
world-systems theories do address, the causes of the failure of
the international political-economic order of the 1948-75 period
become problematic.
The result is very imperfect perspectives for the political-economic
dynamics of the present. The tendency to attacks on the proletariat,
and hence the objective need of the proletariat for a Marxist international
movement, are correctly recognised, albeit in radically different
forms: Ticktin seeks a new movement, Halabi the political and organisational
revival of the old international ‘official communist’
movement. But there is undue optimism: the tendency to deproletarianisation
and to various forms of petty-proprietor politics is absent from
both perspectives. In addition, the weight of the ‘tradition
of the dead generations’ in the form of the existing organisations
of the working class and their structures and ideologies is similarly,
in effect, brushed aside. This flows from the role of Stalinism
in the theories: Ticktin overstates the irrationality of Stalinist
‘planning’, while Halabi, conversely, overstates its economic
strength.
Three fundamental points should appear from this article. The first
is that the AWL has hold of a fundamental truth. The ‘anti-imperialist
front’ does not work as a global strategy. The second is that
it has over-theorised this truth. Imperialism exists in the form
of imperialist and dependent states, super-exploitation and super-profits,
etc, not just the ‘imperialism of free trade’. The third
is that a theory capable of grasping both sides of this contradiction
will need to address the problems the alternative theories address,
and the ghost at the AWL’s feast: the state.
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