Break Their Haughty Powertag:www.munism.com,2007://12007-08-26T19:39:31Z"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common."
IWW Preamble, 1905Movable Type 3.34Fictitious Capital for Beginnerstag:www.munism.com,2007://1.552007-08-26T19:36:56Z2007-08-26T19:39:31ZImperialism, “Anti-Imperialism,” and the Continuing Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg...
Imperialism, “Anti-Imperialism,” and the Continuing Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg
In February of this year the Chinese stock market, which had long been suspected of being in a runaway bubble phase, took a plunge, and in the following days that tremor was felt in stock markets around the world. China in recent months has reached the “shoe shine boy” phase of popular stock speculation (a major American investor famously decided to get out of the stock market just before the 1929 crash when a shoeshine boy gave him advice on stocks), and after the (not so welcome) correction, the Chinese market resumed its upward rush to new highs, followed with relief by investors everywhere.
With the slightest historical perspective, we can see that the world shock set off by such a hiccup in a still relatively small market (what savvy people call “total market capitalization”) is something quite new, unthinkable only a few years ago. China’s stock market can have such an impact because people are aware that any pause, not to say downturn in the country’s economic boom (averaging over 10% GDP growth for years on end, whereas Britain in its 19th century heyday was considered quite impressive at 3 or 4%) could bring the contemporary worldwide financial euphoria to an end. Increasingly insiders and pundits talk openly of the “when, not if” of a global downturn, or even (for some) cataclysm.
With a bit more historical perspective, we can recall the late 1980’s myth of the Japanese economic juggernaut, when the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was briefly priced at a higher value than all the real estate in California. And we recall that juggernaut hit a wall in 1990 in a stock market and real estate meltdown that lasted some 16 years. It does not seem impossible that we will look back on a meltdown of the current Chinese juggernaut in somewhat the same way, but the consequences will be more far-reaching.
These, however, are relatively surface, almost journalistic observations about phenomena arising from the real issues of how the world economy actually works, or more precisely, doesn’t work for much of humanity.
In fact, what we are seeing today is just the culmination of a process underway since the late 1950’s, (the proverbial “from a scratch to the danger of gangrene”), whereby an ever-increasing mass of nomad dollars, corresponding to no real wealth in the world economy, are tossed around like a hot potato by central banks always counting on the “bigger fool” to be holding them when they finally deflate. The central banks of Asia (China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) currently hold over $2 trillion of these nomad dollars, and China alone is expected to have $2 trillion sometime in 2008.
We can call these dollars, which represent uncollectible debts arising first or all from five decades of chronic American balance-of-payments deficits, “fictitious capital”, a concept which, when unpacked, leads straight to the heart of fifty years of capitalist history and to the illumination of own our precarious present.
The following aims to show that, far from being a remote “economic” concept, fictitious capital leads us straight to the central political questions of today, and above all those questions confronting the international left.
Some ninety years ago, V.I. Lenin wrote a book, Imperialism (1916), which purported to explain the origins of the First World War and the abject capitulation of the socialist parties in 1914 (with a few noble exceptions) to “social patriot” support for their own bourgeosie in that war. Lenin portrayed a world economy of “monopoly capital” and giant cartels fighting for control of the planet. But the political payoff of Lenin’s analysis (quite apart from his questionable economics) was multiple: he argued that the imperialist powers (i.e. Europe and the U.S., and later the newly-arrived Japan) were “exporting capital” (an idea borrowed from the British Fabian Hobson) that could not be profitably invested in the capitalist heartland, and that the “super-profits” from this capital export helped to buy off an “aristocracy of labor” in the Western working classes, explaining the accommodation in each country of this “aristocracy” to its respective national bourgeosie.
Lenin’s little book would probably have been forgotten had he not led the Russian Revolution a year later, and helped found the Third (Communist) International in which Lenin’s theses, after his death in 1924, were enshrined as writ, with repercussions extending, through the international impact of Stalinism, for decades.
Lenin had already skirmished, and generally unhappily, with a revolutionary contemporary, Rosa Luxemburg. In her Accumulation of Capital (1913), a work much more grounded in Marx’s problematic than Lenin’s pamphlet, Luxemburg argued that imperialism expressed the continuing presence of what Marx had called “primitive accumulation”, a certain increment of “loot” which capitalism required to compensate for an internal disequilibrium internally generated by its dynamic. The implications of Luxemburg’s analysis were that the goods and machinery capitalism was exporting to peasants and petty producers in the heartland and in the burgeoning colonial world were in fact exchanged for a huge increment of unpaid wealth (cf. her unforgettable descriptions of the looting of American farmers, African tribesmen, Egyptian and Chinese peasants), a looting that was extended to capitalism’s own working class through taxation to pay for the pre-1914 arms race, driving real wages below the level required for the working class to reproduce itself. Far from constituting an aristocracy, the working class within capitalism was, for Luxemburg, increasingly subjected to a complementary form of the primitive accumulation which the system visited on petty producers of the non-capitalist world. These complementary aspects, inward and outward, of “looting” in fact anticipated the fascism which emerged in Germany and elsewhere two decades later.
I have minor differences with Luxemburg (as will be shown below) but her posing of the problem takes us much farther than Lenin’s in understanding today’s world.
This debate from 90 years ago is important because, despite the post-modern platitudes of figures such as Hardt and Negri, or e.g. the protestations of the much more rigorous orthodox Marxism of the school around Paolo Giussani in Italy, imperialism is still very much with us. While we might seem to some to be charging through an open door, the serious theoretical amnesia and retrogression on the international left in the past three decades oblige us to quickly sketch some recent history. Iraq of course speaks for itself. So let’s begin by pointing to the U.S. military presence, overt and covert, in 110 countries; its largely successful counter-insurgency in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1980's (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, the invasion of Grenada, military advisors for the Mexican government's military action against the EZLN, and its 2002 attempt to overthrow Chavez). We can include the various "revolutions" backed overtly or covertly by the U.S. in Serbia, Georgia and the Ukraine (the U.S. embassy in Kiev has 750 employees) All this is connected to a geopolitical strategy aimed at controlling the borderlands of Russia and China, a classic remake of the 19th century "great game". The U.S. backed the extension of NATO to include most of the former Warsaw Pact states, recreating the 1920’s cordon sanitaire (the latter having been aimed at containing the Bolshevik Revolution) at Russia’s doorstep. The U.S. ( sorry, I mean NATO) intervened in the wars in ex-Yugoslavia and militarily humiliated Serbia. Most recently, the U.S. is assuring everyone that its proposed anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic pose no threat to Russia.
The U.S., officially and unofficially, is “greatly concerned” about China's new presence in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World, particularly where oil is concerned. A great power rivalry over raw materials in Africa, Asia and Latin America? Haven’t we been here before?
In East Asia, the U.S. maintains 35,000 troops in South Korea, important bases in (and a close alliance with) Japan, naval fleets ready to defend Taiwan, all aimed at containing what the CIA openly identified as the main future rival of the U.S.: China. When China recently showed the world the efficacy of its new anti-satellite missiles, the U.S., with hundreds of nuclear warheads aimed at China, growled about the hypocrisy of China’s claims to be pursuing “peaceful emergence”.
And should I bother mentioning the Middle East? Support to the hilt for Israel, helping foment the (how short lived!) anti-Syrian "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon, close ties with NATO partner Turkey as a counter-weight to Iran. The U.S. has more military hardware in the little Gulf state of Qatar than in any other country in the world except Germany.
I have limited myself thus far to the merely military and counter-insurgent level, and also not considered the lesser imperialisms of Europe and Japan. But let's not forget the 200+ multinationals, most of them American, which still constitute the lion's share (and an increased share) of world production.
To this we can add the weight of the U.S. through "international" institutions such as the UN, the IMF and World Bank,the latter two imposing "structural adjustment" programs on 100 developing countries, producing 60+ failed state or near-failed states; we can add the "fact" that the income ratio of the West to the developing world has greatly increased in the past 30 years, in spite of important development in countries such as China, Brazil and more recently in India during that time. It is no secret that the military overreach described above is the 21st century extension of the proverbial gunboats of earlier times for the enforcement of IMF and World Bank writ. Capital, except in “free market” fantasy, never exists without a state and without the “special body of armed men” who, when necessary, collect debts for the state.
Some skeptics have asked what imperialism means when a country such as China, with an average per capita income of $1200 a year, has lent something rapidly approaching $2 trillion to the "lone superpower", and this takes us right back to Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.
Michael Hudson's excellent book, Super-Imperialism (1972; new edition 2002) anticipates, and answers that question. Hudson shows that U.S. imperialism since World War II has not, indeed, followed Lenin's model (which was always flawed), but has perfected the strategy of "managing empire through bankruptcy". The $1-2 trillion in the Bank of China consists of little green pieces of paper exchanged for real Chinese goods produced by the exploitation of Chinese workers, pieces of paper then re-lent to the “U.S. consumer” so he/she could buy those goods. That money will never be seriously repaid, particularly if U.S. policy makers get their way and the Chinese revalue their currency to the desired level of 4 renminbi=$1, cutting in half the value of those reserves to themselves. The Japanese, who saw their dollar holdings reduced in value by Nixon's dissolution of the old Bretton Woods system in 1971, can tell the Chinese a thing or too (and the Chinese know the stakes very well and have discussed them publicly).
Having therefore dispensed with the kind of military, geopolitical and current events phenomena that any vulgar leftist could point to, let’s get down into the "deep" economic questions.
Contemporary skeptics and willful amnesiacs throw Rosa Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital into the same historical dustbin as Lenin's Imperialism. Whatever her minor flaws (to be discussed momentarily), she was absolutely right about the permanence of primitive accumulation—what much of imperialism is about--in capitalism. Primitive accumulation means accumulation that violates the capitalist “law of value” i.e. non-exchange of equivalents, beginning with the emptying of the English countryside in early modern history (16th to 19th centuries) by what would today be called “economic reforms”.
(FOOTNOTE: The “law of value” was part of Marx’s qualitative break with the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo. All three emphasized the centrality of the social time required to produce a commodity, though Marx’s understanding was also quite different. All agreed in rejecting swindle and arbitrary price markups as an explanation of profit, but against Smith and Ricardo’s inability to explain capitalist profit otherwise, Marx demonstrated that it came from the time the worker had to work each day in excess of the value of his or her labor power. Later theories of “monopoly capitalism”, most famously Lenin’s, also threw the law of value and socially necessary labor time out the window as a phenomenon of Marx’s time which capitalism had transcended in their own.)
Much of the Marxist “economics” (an oxymoron for the Marxist critique of political economy, an undertaking having a different “object of study” than any “economics”) of the 1970’s and even some authors today focus on the mathematical formulas in the first part of vol. III of Capital to adequately describe the root cause of capitalist crisis. And as important as these chapters on the rate of profit are, they make the big assumption that the concrete processes of social reproduction to which they refer are in fact being reproduced. (Social reproduction, in a nutshell, means at replacing if not expanding used up machinery, materials and infrastructure, on one hand, and permitting today’s working population to raise a future generation of people capable of working with contemporary technology.)
Luxemburg, in her Anti-Kritik rebuttal to critics of her 1913 masterpiece (and on this I follow her 100%) argued that the issue here is not a matter of mathematics, but one of concrete analysis of real processes. When Western capital sucks Third World labor power, whose costs of reproduction it did not pay for, into the world division of labor, whether in Indonesia or in Los Angeles, that's primitive accumulation. When capital loots the natural environment and does not pay the replacement costs for that damage, that's primitive accumulation. When capital runs capital plant and infrastructure into the ground (the story of much of the U.S. and the U.K. economies since the 1960's) that's primitive accumulation. When capital pays workers non-reproductive wages, (wages too low to produce a new generation of workers) that's primitive accumulation too. Lenin never discussed these things (if I recall, he never once mentioned social reproduction) but Rosa Luxemburg wrote a whole book about it. To critics who want to dismiss these “old” ideas with a complacent wave of the hand, I can only say that it’s their loss.
(FOOTNOTE; Some people in other venues have objected to my use of the term “primitive accumulation” for contemporary capitalism, insisting that for Marx the term meant only the initial separation of producers from the means of production. I would just like to say that if primitive accumulation" is too specifically linked to that initial separation in the 16th-17th century, then we have to develop another term to describe the forms of capitalist loot (in contrast to profit generated by “normal” exploitation). In addition to Luxemburg, I also take the term from its usage by the Soviet left opposition theorist Preobrazhensky's (in The New Economics) argument for "socialist primitive accumulation" in the 1920's: organizing a managed decline of the Russian peasantry through selling industrial goods dear and buying agricultural goods cheap. (Let's not get distracted by the unhappy outcome of that strategy.) I'll say again that when capital interacts with nature and petty producers outside the wage-labor relationship, and when it pushes wages and capital expenditure below reproductive costs inside that relationship, it is violating the "exchange of equivalents" which Marx saw as the "heuristic" framework for separating capitalist profits and accumulation from swindle, monopoly, selling goods above their value, and other wrong-headed explanations of profit. And if we don't want to call that NON-REPRODUCTION “primitive accumulation”, fine, but let's first admit that such phenomena exist, and (since the 1970's) are increasingly important, and moreover indispensable to the system.)
The problem is that the contemporary international left has inherited from the years just before and after World War I a theoretical framework, which is now mainly a highly problematic “mood”, in which Lenin’s wrong-headed view, vulgarized by decades of further distortions by Stalinism, Maoism, Third Worldism and now by “alterglobalism” has largely if not totally eclipsed Luxemburg’s, particularly in its portrayal of the working class of the advanced capitalist sector (to my mind still the main force capable of positively superseding capitalism) as a quantite negligeable among the international forces for positive change.
Lenin’s theory of imperialism and its bastard offspring reached the peak of their influence in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when various national liberation struggles (Algeria, Indochina, Angola, Mozambique) and the Cuban Revolution constituted a “tricontinental” constellation that seemed to be fulfilling the prediction that “socialism” was the only way forward for the underdeveloped world. This ferment had taken off from the 1955 Bandung (Indonesia) conference of the “non-aligned” (non-aligned in the Cold War) nations, with the cachet of such early anti-colonial figures as Nkrumah (Ghana), Sukarno (Indonesia), Nehru (India), and Nasser (Egypt). Unfortunately, the bureaucratic development regimes that triumphed in the “tricontinental” countries were not socialist, and the Western working class, which could have removed the weight of imperialism from their path, was absent at the rendez-vous. The Third Worldist “trincontinental” world view was in shambles ca. 1978-79 when Cambodia, Vietnam, China and the Soviet Union which had all at various times claimed the “anti-imperialist” mantle, came close to going to war…with each other. What followed hard on this debacle was the past three decades’ triumph of the neo-liberal “Washington concensus” in which the state-centered development based on the old model was proclaimed unviable. During the high tide of the “Washington concensus” the world has witnessed both an assault on the Western working class and on the old “anti-imperialist” bloc.
I have invoked the good name of Rosa Luxemburg as the theoretical framework closest to my interpretation of Marx primarily because of her focus, inside and outside the pure capitalist system (cf. below) on the problematic of reproduction and non-reproduction. But, as indicated earlier, my framework differs somewhat from hers, and clarification imposes itself here. As will be seen, her framework has everything to do with the phenomena of imperialism and “anti-imperialism” in the post-World War II era.
Let's review what I consider some basics, which are not always self-evident. In this way we can go from contemporary history to abstract theory and back, and see the present in a new way. But to do say requires an examination of some basic ideas of Karl Marx.
Vol. I and most of vol. II of Marx’s Capital are a phenomenology of a closed capitalist system in which there are only capitalists and wage laborers, and most of the focus is on the single firm. When, in the last section of vol. II, Marx shifts to the "total social capital" and expanded reproduction, he is moving beyond that heuristic model. (FOOTNOTE: “Expanded reproduction” refers to normal capitalist accumulation, in which a part of the annual surplus is reinvested in new equipment and new labor power, in contrast to the heuristic “simple reproduction” assumed for most of vols. I and II, in which such expansion is artificially bracketed. )
That demarcation of the interraction of the "pure system" (capitalists and wage laborers) with, on one hand, the vast modern population of unproductive consumers who live off surplus value and do not produce it, i.e. the FIRE (finance- insurance- real estate) sector, state civil servants, managerial strata, the military sector, the law enforcement/ prison sector and, on the other hand, with nature and with petty producers (today found primarily in the Third World) is fundamental for clarity. None of the latter populations are present in vols. I and II, except for some interesting asides and the important chapters in the middle of vol. II dealing with insurance, bookkeeping and other “faux frais” (false costs) of production. Capital is a circuit (in vols. I and II, with simple reproduction, i.e. an abstract assumption of “zero growth”) and is a spiral in expanded reproduction, and a commodity, whether from Dept. I (what Marx designated as the production of machines) or II (consumer goods) ( a tank or a guided missile belong in neither department, but are an expense of the capitalist class) which does not complete the circuit, i.e. is not productively consumed in Dept. I (new means of production) or Dept. II (new labor power) ceases to be capital. These definitions, which have been laughed out of the mainstream theories of “economics” and which get surprisingly little attention even from some self-styled Marxists, allow us to reconceptualize the contemporary world economy and make clear distinctions between real wealth and costs that are merely costs of maintaining the status quo. (FOOTNOTE: Marx in vol. III introduces those factions of the capitalist class which derive their income from the financial markets and from rents, but the masses of people today who are outside the “pure system” in the capitalist heartland, such as FIRE employees, state civil servants or corporate managerial strata, are for the most part implicit in all of Capital. That hardly means that, today, they are any less important.)
Rosa Luxemburg also had the great merit of emphasizing capitalism as a transitional mode of production between European feudalism and socialism. This may seem a truism, but it is much more than that. In her survey of the rise and fall of classical political economy from the Physiocrats to the Ricardian school, she points out that only a socialist (i.e. Marx) could solve the problem of the source of profit and of expanded reproduction. To wit: capitalism must be seen as a necessarily incomplete, transient mode of production, which lives in part off the pre-capitalist modes it looted and continues to loot, and whose full crisis is only visible to someone seeing “beyond” it. Capitalism is therefore a system in which no practical viewpoint, either of an individual capitalist or of the total social capital, or finally of labor power as a commodity (the class-in-itself) can be “concretely universal”, that is capable of practically acting on real problems. All viewpoints on capital “within” the system, including “class-in-itself” struggles of individual groups of workers, are “negation of the negation” viewpoints, and only the perspective that looks prior to and beyond capitalism can be a “self-subsisting positive” with a universal (class for itself) program. From the Italian pirates of the 11th century to the slave labor in the Dominican Republic or Brazil today, capitalism has never stopped its “looting” of labor power and resources “outside” the closed (vols. I and II) system of exchange of equivalents. Thus the ongoing presence of capital’s initial looting of non-capitalist sources of wealth, for Luxemburg, also points to the possibility of its barbaric end (of which interwar fascism was more than a foretaste), if it is not positively superseded by proletarian revolution.
Next, and this is fundamental, capital does not appear to capitalists as “self-expanding value” or a “social relationship of production” (bedrock terms of Marx having no practical meaning or even existing for “negation of the negation” viewpoints within the system); it appears to them as titles to wealth, namely to profit, interest and ground rent, whose value is determined over the course of a business cycle not by the fine points of the opening chapters of vol. III but as a capitalization of anticipated future cash flow. Marx of course only introduces such titles to wealth--stocks, bonds, leases--after first presenting the heuristic pure system, setting it in motion in the final chapters of vol. II (expanded reproduction), and then discussing the determination of price and the rate of profit in the opening sections of vol. III. Capital as capitalists know it, up to and including all the new "financial products" of the past 25 years such as derivatives and hedge funds, are "liens" on the total cash flow representing, ultimately, the total surplus value produced in the "pure system" AND supplemented by LOOT (non-reproductive exchange) outside and eventually inside the system. We know very well that over long periods of a capitalist cycle these "liens" can depart widely from the price/value determinations that ultimately regulate the cash flow on which they draw, until they are deflated in the periodic crash.
But the source of that total profit/ total surplus value is an empirical question, not to be settled by abstract resort to different takes on the “transformation of value into prices” (an important but overplayed debate among Marxist academics) or possible flaws in the reproduction schema of vol. II. Are capital plant (means of production, infrastructure) and labor power being reproduced or not? Such a question immediately takes us from the realm of pure theory (however fundamental) to the concrete historical operation of the system.
The relationship between the value of the myriad capitalist titles to wealth and the surplus value and loot on which they draw is, of course, not an arbitrary one.
Let's go back to the pure system, only capitalists and workers, no banks, no other distorting "titles to wealth". Let us further imagine that the entire world is capitalist and that everything exchanges at its value. In such a world, with rising productivity over time, a greater and greater mass of capital is set in motion by a smaller total amount of living labor, the exploitation of the latter being (for Marx) the source of all profit. Hence (with many ups and downs along the way) the rate of profit capable of sustaining all those titles declines, unless adequately supplemented by what I have called “loot”, declines historically.
But, as Luxemburg points out in her Anti-Kritik, the falling rate of profit does not prompt the capitalists to “hand the factory keys over to the working class”. Her framework enabled her to see how capitalism could ultimately destroy society—barbarism, in her words, or the “mutual destruction of the contending classes” as the Communist Manifesto put it in 1847—by being required to turn more and more to primitive accumulation and non-reproduction, a prophecy we see materializing before our eyes today.
Capital, for Marx, (and here we open up a dimension not discussed by Luxemburg) through the pursuit of profit by a myriad of individual capitalists, ultimately destroys itself, becomes a barrier to itself, by pushing the productive forces to a point where the socially necessary time of reproduction, based on the reproductive value of labor power, can no longer serve as the "numeraire", the common denominator, for the daily functioning of the system. Capital requires living labor to exist, and for labor power’s value to be the numeraire, and it simultaneously, through innovation, expels living labor from the production process and undermines the numeraire. That is the pure model’s fundamental contradiction.
Of course, the pure model of capitalism has never existed and never will exist. As we know, titles to wealth (profit, interest, ground rent), central banks regulating the markets of such titles, and a state enforcing such titles all pre-existed the full-blown triumph of capitalism, i.e. the transformation of means of production and labor power into commodities as the dominant source of wealth.
Once we add titles to wealth to the pure model, as Marx does in the middle and concluding sections of vol. III of Capital, we see a different picture. It is precisely because of these titles and because of capitalism’s ability to loot non-capitalist populations and nature that we do NOT , over long cycles, see any mechanical fall in the capitalist rate of profit. Such titles tend to correspond to the underlying value, or fall below it, mainly at the end of one cycle (through deflation) and the beginning of the next one. The deflationary crisis acts as a form of “retroactive planning” that re-equilibrates the capitalists’ titles to wealth with the underlying rate of profit generated within the pure system. This was obvious in the 19th century, when such a crisis occurred every ten years or so (1808- 1819- 1827- 1837- 1846- 1857- 1866- 1873, etc.) It is less obvious in the period since 1914 when the state has much more actively attempted to preserve capitalist valuations against devalorization by techniques usually associated with "Keynesianism”. We are of course, in 2007, in the midst of probably the biggest fictitious credit bubble in the history of capitalism. What we have been living through, particularly since the early 1970’s, has been a huge operation of credit pyramiding, managed by the world’s central banks, aimed at PRESERVING the paper value of existing titles to wealth, and a significant transfer of working class wages and capital not invested in either plant or infrastructure to help prop up those titles. That latter phenomenon is what I call the “self-cannibilization” of the system when the “primitive accumulation ”mechanism turns inward, i.e. non-reproduction, as referred to above.
Luxemburg of course did not live to see either the post-1933 American or German versions of quasi-permanent military production, supported by the taxation of the working class, and still less the post-1944 Bretton Woods system, in which the U.S. financial markets and the U.S. state acquired the ability to tap wealth from every part of the capitalist world (until recently, minus Russia and China) through dollar seigniorage (the latter referring to the “free lunch” acquired through the U.S.’s “maintaining empire through bankruptcy”). And quite obviously, credit has increased a thousand times in significance since Luxemburg’s time, as a way of temporarily prolonging business cycles, while changing nothing of the fundamental contradictions of the system.
The implicit final stage of this process is, once again, the self-cannibalization of the system, if and when the sources of loot outside the "closed system" are exhausted. We have not yet seen this in dramatic form in the case of the era of U.S. world hegemony. But history does provide the example of the Nazi period in Germany, when Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s finance minister, ran up a huge debt pyramid to finance German rearmament in the 1933-1938 period, while holding real wages at 50% of 1929 levels. The difference between Germany then and the U.S. today is that Germany had been shorn of most of its external sources of loot after its defeat in 1918, and hence had to seize some new ones militarily after 1938.
Something similar could happen in the U.S.-centered system if and when the U.S. loses its ability to tap wealth throughout the world with dollar-denominated accumulation, and one can, without exaggeration, see U.S. foreign policy today as a worldwide extension of the underlying dynamic of German expansion under Hitler, minus the total internal implosion of American society—so far.
Thus I would “correct” Luxemburg to the extent that the external relations of the “pure system” are not so much about the sale of a surplus product on the model of the sale of industrial goods to independent farmers or peasants (though that of course also takes place) as the more important circulation of an ever-increasing fictitious bubble (fictitious capital) through international loans in exchange for whatever loot can be acquired from petty producers’ labor power or from nature. I argue that this fictitious bubble is initially lawfully generated WITHIN the pure system and is discussed in Marx’s middle chapters of vol. III. This is the NECESSARY, internally generated reason that the system requires permanent primitive accumulation.
Let’s see why this is the case.
Back to the closed system, to which we have added capitalist titles to wealth, capitalizations of an anticipated cash flow. These titles of course go together with a capital market, a central bank and a state enforcing them, and ultimately a state debt (again, all vol. III phenomena)
Because capitalism is an anarchic system, (a “heteronomic” system in Kant’s sense) a practical perspective on the total social capital which could keep these capitalizations (most immediately, stocks) rigorously in line with the underlying (current reproductive cost) value of the assets on whose cash flow they depend is a chimera. Increases in labor productivity, particularly those which ripple quickly through the whole system, such as canal and railroad construction in the 19th century, or the air, shipping and communications innovations of recent decades, are not immediately registered in the capitalized value of all assets. Over time, such innovations create, rather, a fictitious increment “f” of overvalued capitalizations (titles to cash flow) which must be periodically purged in a deflationary collapse, as we saw in the dot.com frenzy of the 1990’s and the dot.com crash of 2000. The actions of the central bank in regulating credit markets aim at preserving at least some of the capitalized titles to wealth from the devalorization (deflation) demanded by increased labor productivity. The credit markets, the central bank and the state debt are all designed to “manage” the increasingly disparity between total titles to wealth—the fictitious bubble—and their pure system value as long as possible, though official ideology would rarely if ever state the problem so baldly.
I would argue, therefore, that this internally-generated, “pure system” ball of hot air, FICTITIOUS CAPITAL (fictitious relative to the real current reproductive value of assets) is, more than real goods, what is “exported” in exchange for loot. As long as sufficient loot compensates for the fictitious gap, accumulation can continue. This is my (minor) disagreement with Luxemburg.
The fictitious bubble in the contemporary world is first of all the huge ($3-4 trillion, at current, conservative) estimates) dollar “overhang”, the net U.S. external debt ($11-12 trillion held abroad, minus $8 trillion in US assets overseas), held mainly in central banks. Everything, from a capitalist viewpoint, must be done to prevent its deflation. The U.S. government is busy depreciating it “managing empire through bankruptcy”, and its foreign holders fret at the erosion of their holdings. But they relend the money to the U.S. government and U.S. financial markets, making possible more domestic U.S. credit, more consumption, and more imports from America’s creditors, because the collapse of the dollar would be their collapse as well, and they as yet see no alternative.
If the preceding is correct, it constitutes an alternative view of imperialism to that of Lenin (still upheld today by myriad Trotskyists, for starters). The political issue for the left as I see it is not so much imperialism, which I take as a given, but the ideology of "anti-imperialism", in which a diffuse “Porto Alegre”/World Social Forum mood today enlists such "progressive" forces as Hugo Chavez, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Iranian mullahs, the Taliban, the Iraqi "resistance", and perhaps tomorrow Kim jong-il; yesterday it included Saddam Hussein. Post-1945 and particularly post-1973 developments have been blurring the lines on the old 'anti-imperialist' road map.
We see U.S. world hegemony disintegrating faster than we generally imagined possible (almost recalling the speed of the collapse of the Soviet bloc). Out of this disintegration, what will emerge? Proletarian revolution? I hope so. But what could also emerge, as the U.S. emerged in 1945 on the ruins of the British empire, is a new center of world accumulation. My favorite candidate for that new center is East Asia.
Suppose, in some yet to be concretized scenario, China and Japan (who, despire rhetoric, have ever-closer economic ties), along with the tigers (e.g. Korea, Taiwan) and the 'flying geese" (Malaysia, Thailand, etc.) manage to constitute an economic bloc, an Asian currency. Given geopolitical realities, it’s hard to imagine this happening without some equivalent of World War II, in whose outcome the U.S., Russia and India will all have a stake. If this reorganization became the basis of a new phase of capitalist expansion, comparable to the U.S. centered expansion of 1945-1975, would it somehow be any more "progressive" than the U.S. dominated phase? I don’t think so.
The question, then, along the way, is how to situate the various world forces in play as the U.S. declines.
Chavez, the latest “anti-imperialist” hero, recently made a world tour that included such…progressive…states as Belarus, Russia, Iran and China. Latin America is booming right now because of exports to China. Parts of Africa are reviving for the same reason. This currently comes back to the "indebted U.S. consumer" and a collapse of the dollar empire would stop the music...for a while. But as a Japanese minister, weary of the growing dollar reserves in the Bank of Japan, said not too long ago: "give us 15 years, and we won't need the U.S.". With the dollar declining by the day on world exchanges, how much longer will the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese, the Middle Eastern oil sheiks, the Russians, the Venezuelans, and the Medillin drug cartel--all major holders of dollars--be willing to hold onto a depreciating asset? And if out of this debacle emerges a new pole of capitalist accumulation, whether or not it includes "old" imperialist powers (e.g. Japan and Russia) will it be "progressive"?
I don’t think so.
That, to me, is THE question today for the theoreticians, still working off the Leninist model, of "anti-imperialism" have to answer. How much longer can the international left be offering "critical support' or "military support" to the Taliban before it finds itself, as so many times in the past, the ideological midwife of a new reactionary constellation?
Left Communism and Trotskyism: A Roundtabletag:meriadoc.grokthis.net,2007://1.332007-03-25T19:18:04Z2007-04-01T22:10:42Z
The following is a round-table which took place in March 2007. The common thread is the question of whether the terms of the debate emerging from the years 1917-1923, codified today in different variants of "left communism" and "Trotskyism" have any practical meaning today. Three of the participants (Loren, Amiri and Will, live in the U.S.; the fourth, Yves, lives in France. We decided to make the proceedings public in hope that they are of use to others interested in these questions.
Loren, 3/3/07
I wanted to share some thoughts with you, which have been swirling around in my head recently. I recently read most of Martin Glaberman's (ed.) Marxism for our Times (1999), a slightly preposterous book of his master James's writings, since no text is later than 1969, and naturally, like the intro thirty years later, makes no mention whatever of de-industrialization or anything else that has happened to the working class since the 60's. Nonetheless, James is almost always interesting, though some of it, such as the internal correspondance of the Facing Reality group in the 1960's gets a bit tedious, particularly when you realize that they had six members in 1962 and the same number when they dissolved in 1970. I mean, even SDUSA (the right-wing Schactmanites) grew in the 60's. But I digress.
You are familiar with James's rather unusual take on the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, expounded here but actually stated better in his masterpiece Notes on Dialectics (which I highly recommend). For James, Lenin was almost a spontaneist, a party-builder yes, but after he bit the Hegelian apple in 1914, was in another universe from What Is To Be Done?, which he repudiated ca. 1909 (following the events of 1905). James sees TROTSKY as the problem, for having continued Lenin's pre-1917 conceptions into the new period in which they were superseded (all this is laid out in the two texts on James on my web site http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner). For James, bureaucratic capitalism after the defeat of the Russian Revolution teaches "everyone" the truth of capitalism, so the party is no longer necessary, as witnessed by Hungary '56, France '68 and Poland 80-81. It's so simple it's charming, I guess. But the Marxist organization, for reasons never explained well, is still necessary, not to organize the workers, mind you, but to organize the Marxists. This is (as I say in those two texts on my website Break Their Haughty Power) where they lose me, namely saying on one hand that the "whole class has become (and therefore superceded) the party" but at the same it is necessary to organize the Marxists because the working class needs them. For what?
But again, I digress. What I really wanted to write you about is my inability, 90 years on, to shake free of the Russian Revolution. Symptoms: in Ulsan (South Korea) in December, the worker group there asked me to speak on the differences between Rosa and Lenin, which I did (not terribly well, and with a very mediocre interpreter). In no time we were deep into a two-hour discussion of what happened in Russia in the 20's (the agrarian question). And this was not some cadaverous nostalgia piece as might be served up at an Spartacist League meeting, but with intense back-and-forth and questions and furious note-taking. The point is that no matter where you start out, somehow the question of "what went wrong in Russia" comes front and center. (In January, the Kronstadt debate erupted in Korea. A leading member of the British SWP-affiliated All Together group published a large theoretical work with a defense of Trotsky. This resulted in more "hue and cry over Kronstadt" in the press.
Is this just me or is it still contemporary reality?
Another symptom: upon returning to New York in December, I began to read seriously about Korea. Because I don't read Korean, I'm limited to the rather meager work available in Western languages, in contrast to the shelves of books on China and Japan. And since both China and Japan had such influence on Korea (particularly on the formation of the communist movement before 1950) it was easy to shift over to Asian history broadly speaking. Then as the question of Islamic fundamentalism began to loom, I started on my hobby horse of the struggle for control of the world taking place on the borders of Russia and China, from the Baltic states to Korea. In no time I was into the history of the Marxist and Islamic movements in the Central Asian states (check out a weirdly remarkable book on this by Delugian called Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucusus). Fascinating. There was a whole Tatar etc. Marxist intelligentsia by 1910, headed by Sultan Galiev, whose acquaintance you should also make.
In short, there I was back again on the Russian Revolution. About that time a friend passed on the Glaberman book, and I found the portrait of Lenin so interesting that I went back to Moshe Lewin's Lenin's Last Struggle, and began to feel (again) some sympathy for the guy (James makes a big deal of Lenin's speech to the 1922 Comintern 4th Congress, in which he seems to repudiate many of the theses of the 3rd Congress as "too Russian". It was his last public speech.
You recall Lenin's eulogy for Rosa Luxemburg after her death: "she was wrong on the question of organization, of nationalism, of economics, but she shall always remain for us an eagle". Somehow I feel I could say the same thing about Vladimir Ilyich. In 1971, in the funk after the collapse of the New Left, I traded in my complete works for the complete Remembrance of Things Past of Proust. I unloaded another set in 2000, this time into the garbage can, since my local used bookstore wouldn't trade it for anything! I then acquired a third set in Paris in 2003, I'm not sure why. Do you know Valentinov's portrait of Lenin (Oxford UP 1968)? He was not--how shall I say?--a nice guy. But I do buy the idea, reiterated many times, that he was, in contrast to Trotsky, not overly taken with himself and utterly without vanity. He wrote about philosophy, about literature, about the Russian economy. He was a hack in philosophy, not terribly inspiring about literature, quite problematic in his economics. He did write an entire book on American agriculture (1913, a whole volume of the complete works). The key books: What Is To Be Done?, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Imperialism, Left-Wing Communism, the Philosophical Notebooks (if that can be called a book) taken individually or as a whole, are deeply flawed. But I guess he lingers with me as the supreme example of a certain coherence of theory and practice, however one criticizes both. Trotsky is more appealing--I basically become a Marxist reading Deutscher's bio in 1967--and has a wider range. One cannot easily imagine Lenin collaborating with Breton and Rivera in 1938. The History of the Russian Revolution is a masterpiece. But one cannot (as Eastman points out in his 2 vol. memoirs, quoted at length in my 2006 article) imagine Trotsky without Lenin backing him up, as evidenced by what happened after 1923. Lenin owed a lot to Trotsky, to be sure, but the dependence was not mutual. Luxemburg is a third figure, undoubtedly the most humane of the three, and so much more right about so much.
There were a number of people of the historical ultra-left--Bordiga, Pannekoek, Gorter, Mattick, Ruehle, Canne Meier, Cajo Brendel--who produced important oeuvres, but, I ask you, when one sets them side by side with Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, does one see the RANGE of the latter three? CLR James, who to my knowledge never repudiated his interpretation of Lenin, also had that range. In one essay in the 1999 Glaberman book, James says in passing that there was nothing comparable to Russia as it prepared the revolution, not merely in the Marxist tradition, but also in literature, painting, music. The pressures that produced the revolutionary movement and then the revolution also produced a unique culture, a hot house to be sure (I'd have to argue with James about whether Russia really deserves primacy over Germany). And what do we have to show in our own time? Of course there is an endless list of creative people, from Debord, Camatte via EP Thompson--you can fill in your favorites. But as Thompson said in his polemics with the Althusserians, all this heavy theory has not produced one practical mouse. THAT's what pulls me back, I think. I recently saw the Warren Beatty film Reds again. Is there anything since 1917 comparable to that brief moment of hope in which everything seemed possible, on a WORLD scale? 1968, of course, comes close, without the practical success (such as it very briefly was).
I recently told a good friend (who's pushing 70, and who is no slouch) that I experience the pull of the Russian Revolution like a bear trap from which I cannot extricate my leg. Am I living in the past? Not in the sense of Faulkner's remark that "the past isn't dead, it isn't even the past" , but in the sense that one's sensibilities (I'll be 60 in October, f'chrissakes) almost necessarily become superannuated, in the way 1930's survivors struck us as superannuated in the 60's.
Yves, 3/4/07
There are three different problems in your letter
1) the historical role of Lenin and his status as a theoretician. It seems quite obvious that Lenin's works only had such a lasting political influence because of the existence of a "totalitarian" (1) State which published and used its works internationally in all sorts of social and political contexts. Note that the Russian state never published in other languages the complete works of Marx. That says much about the difficulty in using Marx for the same aims as Lenin... Hopefully Marx was not a Marxist and did not build a system, or a State or a "totalitarian" Party (although he used all sorts of maneuvers to kill the First International).
The fact that the Russian state was a counter-revolutionary state, which made possible a huge primitive accumulation, gave birth to an imperial power, gave its full meaning to the concept of totalitarianism, persecuted everywhere revolutionaries, manipulated national liberation movements, etc, all that in the name of Lenin, points to the weaknesses and ambiguities of Lenin (and the party he contributed to build) both as a theoretician and as politician. There are elements of continuity between Leninism and Stalinism, and the 1917-1924 period enabled these elements to take a decisive negative form which has influenced our history until now.
2) the Russian Revolution as an exceptional event in history. No doubt about that. But I don't think we should underestimate other failed insurrections, nationalist insurrections, long general strikes, democratic revolutions, massive factory occupations, which happened since 1917.
Unless one is obsessed by state coups and the building of a new so-called « socialist » state (which you are not), history gives us many examples of the creativity of the exploited to resist by all sorts of means. And that is what fuels my optimism; not the nostalgia of 1917, 1919; 1921 or 1936. It's also the continuous attempts of the exploited to find a way to counter all forms of oppression (the fight against racism and sexism has made huge historical progresses, and these questions were totally underestimated before the Second World War and even during the early 60s)
3) Camatte, Debord, the Situationists and other fakes, both as intellectuals and as revolutionaries.
I'm sorry, I can't take seriously these guys and the comparison with Lenin is just laughable. I can't express myself more politely.
If you want to name intellectuals who have written important books about world history, functioning of world economy, changes of the social structures, social psychology, class struggles, etc., and whose books have been and are still useful to revolutionary militants to understand the world since 1917 and to fight against Capital, there are many names both among non revolutionary or even reactionary intellectuals, and among so-called Marxists whose works will remain. But the Situationists and Camatte ?!
Since 1917, there has been only small groups of revolutionary militants who often were preoccupied by their own survival and did not have much time and energy to devote to illuminating new perspectives. Very often they just repeated what has been written in the sacred texts with an uncritical mind or picked up some trendy new idea and made a strange cocktail between rigid literal Marxism and some fashionable ideology.
Instead of being nostalgic about past revolutions or bowing in front of fakes like Debord or Camatte or the Situationists, I think those who want to help revolutionary militants to get out of their present mediocrity should analyze today's world and offer new and inspiring perspectives to them and all those who care about changing this world.
(Note: I don't like the word "totalitarian" but at the same time, I think concepts like "state capitalism" or "bureaucratic collectivism" don't describe the complex process which happened in the Stalinist States. So I use totalitarian by default, hoping one day those who endured and fought Stalinism will come with a better theoretical model.)
Amiri, 3/4/07
In what respect were Debord/Situationists and Camatte fakes? That's a pretty hostile stance!
Yves, 3/4/07
Debord and the Situationists, on one side, and Camatte on the other, never tried to unite theory and practice ("The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it" said Marx 160 years ago), to contribute to any workers struggle.
The Situationists have posed themselves as theoreticians, despising all the revolutionary groups and militants of their time. They presented themselves as saviors who should be revered. They took most of their truly interesting ideas from revolutionary thinkers and groups which preceded them and were never preoccupied by getting the media's attention. They have hidden their main sources of inspiration and not explained the differences between their own "contribution" and what they had understood from previous revolutionary thinkers.
If you can read French and get hold of these texts I can only recommend you to read Henri Simon's booklet about the few contacts between the Situationists and ICO (Informations correspondances ouvrières was a group of workers coming mainly from the Socialisme ou Barbarie group). That would certainly cure you of any illusions of this petty small milieu. Or the booklets written by Guy Fargette about his experience with these fakes over a number of years.
As regards Camatte, he is a "marxologist". A guy who read Marx (a positive thing that many Marxists don't do) and wrote long and obscure texts about his own interpretation of Marx. But was never bothered to bring his ideas to a larger public, in a more concrete and usable form. On this level, he had and still has the same elitist attitude as the Situationists even if he never looked for the media's attention. To my knowledge he never wrote a text based on original data gathered in the economic, historical, sociological field or a text based on a concrete experience of the class struggles, or on specific strikes.
Camatte on one side, Debord and Co. on the other, are a typical French intellectual product. Their originality is that they did not belong to the academic milieu but they had the same flaws as Althusser, Lacan and the icons of the 60s: they loved to use sophisticated concepts and words most of the members of their court ignores. They loved to discuss about abstract notions, "philosophy" and "problematics" (this word has even become trendy now among high school teachers) and never turned to militant action, because they did not want to dirty their hands. And anyway militantism for them was and is a form of alienation, so they had a good excuse for going on drinking good wine and gossiping about the others groups or intellectuals. And most of their political heirs today have the same elitist-bohemian attitude about revolutionary militants and the working class as their spiritual fathers. Nobody took the Situationists seriously in 1968 because they were totally unknown and had no influence on the general strike, on the action committees, in the growth of the revolutionary groups of that time, in the important political discussions of that period. As regards Camatte his intellectual influence was even more minute because he never got attention of the media or of any important publisher. A fact which makes him rather sympathetic to me compared with the Situationists. But he never bothered uniting theory and practice. The only period when the Bordiguists (PCI, his former grouplet) grew from 20 to 200 militants was a time during which he was not active with his comrades anymore.[...]
Where are the decisive political tools you can find in the Situationists or in Camatte which enable you to understand present problems such as the constitution of the EU, the growth of capitalism in India and China, mass word unemployment, decline of Stalinist parties, disappearance of the Soviet Bloc, rise of political Islam, workers' difficulties in organizing outside bureaucratic trade union organisations, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and their place in history, etc. ?
These guys are not useful for me to understand this world and to fight against it. That does not mean one must not read them. One should read or try to read everything—if one has time. But I just don't see any connection between their writings and any form of revolutionary activity today or yesterday.
I can't remember of any text written by Camatte or the Situationists about
—the state in France, its historical and economic role —the history of the workers movement in France, its evolution —the concrete role of the different trade unions, —the main classes of French society, their alliances and contradictions —the main political parties and their role Etc.
Even Lenin, with his dogmatic texts written a century ago for a very different society and world is much more useful than all the Camattes, Debords, etc...
These intellectuals were never preoccupied to forge theoretical tools which could be used in daily political fights in the society they were living in. Just "philosophical" dissertations with pretentious playing with words (the Situationists) or endless dissertations about some aspects of Marx's thought disconnected from present problems or related in such an abstract way that it was almost impossible to understand what it was leading to.
Will, 3/5/07
Allow me to begin with a little levity as a point for departure for otherwise serious discussion: I must say, Yves, that Loren "elicit[ed] some feedback from" with his recent piece...
There are, indeed, somber and critically significant points you make in regard to Loren's "reminiscences" (e.g., I would not dispute elements of a continuity between Leninism and Stalinism or, for that matter, Lenin and Stalin, and perhaps even along the lines you suggest. Loren can speak for himself), but I also think there is an underlying tenor, Amiri identified it as "hostility," that goes back to an unresolved problem at the origins of our conversation, and that is in my view not entirely unjustified.
I offer the following elaboration.
Yves, you have of course told us these opinions previously. You questioned the validity of the inclusion of Debord, the Situationists, and the concept of the spectacle as, taken together, a point of focus. You provided your reasons, not the least of which (as I recall) revolved around the fact that contemporary French intellectual life is suffused with obfuscatory debris which passes itself off as sophisticated, Situationist analysis. (If my formulation is inadequate, please forgive me.)
A number of us responded, and we in turn affirmed Debord, the Situationists and the analytic value of the concept of the spectacle. (I believe I followed Amiri in this.) I, while noting my hesitation in regard to mentioning Debord et al, contrasted the intellectual climate here in the United States to that in France and suggested that here the concept of the spectacle remained of critical import.
I still hold this position, and though I think I could mount a forceful theoretical defense of Society of the Spectacle and a similarly vigorous defense of Situationist practice as well, I simply think that at this point, here and now, it is irrelevant and perhaps even meaningless... for several reasons:
First, I don't think the United States is the center of the universe.
Second, as a matter of fact in our discussion to date Debord, the Situationists and the concept of the spectacle have played at the very most a minimal role.
Third, my own focus (which differs somewhat from the framework Loren initially suggested) resolves itself into this: I think there are three knots that must be unraveled before we can effectively develop a new revolutionary synthesis that can adequately mediate the whole ongoing era of capital's development. Without regard to an order of prioritization, I've in mind the following: (a) at a historical junction in which abrupt climate change is becoming an ever more pressing societal issue, we must rethink the whole of the "man-nature" relation; (b) forced upon us by the failure of revolutionary movements of the past, central and decisive theoretical assumptions concerning agency and consciousness must be critically addressed and reconsidered; and (c) our relation as revolutionary communists to what Loren has aptly terms "reactionary anti-imperialism" (at which the heart of which lies religious fundamentalism, in particular the Islamic variety) must be clearly resolved. My sustained contributions to this discussion center on (a) and (b)...
While this focus is certainly moot, I am further convinced that, if it does not neatly dovetail with, it is nonetheless consistent with your call (at the end of your most recent intervention) "to forge theoretical tools which...[can] be used in daily political fights in...society...[not] disconnected from present problems..."
Fourth, I think (returning now to our earlier exchanges) that the objective outcome, which I suspect you inwardly lived, of the series of Situationist-affirmative posts that followed yours was to pour it on, to (using an idiom that I cannot find a polite counterpart to) trash you... This, I believe, was an injustice perpetrated, mostly unconsciously, at the origins of this discussion.
It was an outcome that I deplore and that I, vaguely recognizing, should have gotten back on-line and apologized for. I am apologizing right now: Whatever our difference over the Situationists, they simply do not appear to be germane to the tasks at hand as I understand them (and, if I understand you and I may not, they do not appear relevant to you either)... If, and if then when, they become significant, I, for one, am in favor of full-scale debate, argument and polemic in which they are thrashed out...
While I can only speak for myself, I want to finish by saying that (recognizing your work with Ni patrie ni frontiers limits your involvement in this exchange) I miss the contributions you might make since your continental vantage point is unique to this list.
Yves, 3/5/07
[...] As regards the Situationists' influence today, maybe the most irritating thing is not the fact that some of their concepts are used today by the bourgeois media ("la société du spectacle" is a commonplace among TV journalists and even TV "animateurs" today, imagine TV clowns flirting with the critique of spectacle. The worst is that the young people I meet today have a totally uncritical attitude towards the Situationists, their texts, their version of their role in 68, etc. [...]
The introduction of the "Bureau of Public Secrets" website says it all when it presents the Situationist International as the group that "helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France".
This sentence already points to a legend : the IS did not "help trigger the May 68 revolt in France". As they say themselves in one of their texts, they were 4 guys in Paris when May 68 started. (For the use of the myth of May 68, you can read my article "Let's get rid of some myths about May 68" on mondialisme.org or read recent Mouvement communiste's booklet about May 68) on their website [...]
There is a permanent reconstruction of militant history, and 40 years later some unconnected facts and events can become--by a magical operation on paper--the fruit of a very coherent strategy, or a very coherent fairytale, even if the people who participated in these events had no common consciousness and often no political links between themselves. The funny thing about the Situationists is that they try, like any trivial Leninist group they hate, to claim they had a specific role in "triggering" the events, while at the same time they hail workers' initiative and creativity.
—the OCI (Trotskyist) helped "trigger" the general strike because Sud-Aviation (where they controlled a rightwing trade union) was the first factory to get on strike and to start a local strike committee
—the JCR (Trotskyist) helped "trigger" May 68 because they had an influence outside Paris ( in Caen, Rouen and other towns) where young workers fought against the cops before 68 and also in the Parisian 22nd March Movement and in the Comité Vietnam National which politicized students before 68
—the 22nd March Movement (and whoever participated to this heterogeneous movement from J-P Duteuil, to Daniel Cohn Bendit, two anarchists, or Daniel Bensaid, a Trotskyist) helped "trigger" May 68 because they started the fight in Nanterre University
—the UJCML (Maoist) helped "trigger" May 68 because they participated to some factory struggles in the provinces before 68, to some immigrant workers struggles and had a leading role in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which contributed to politicize the student youth.
There is a long list of groups and individuals who pretend to have helped "trigger" May 68 general strike. Boris Fraenkel had a funny statement in his autobiography when he wrote that being the translator of Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich he was one of the main secret artisans of May 68.
Maybe the content of the expression "they helped trigger a general strike" should be carefully analyzed and criticized when it comes from people who pretend to defend "autonomy", "spontaneity" and other nice-looking concepts.
Loren, 3/6/07
I'm a bit startled to see that the weight of responses to my reminiscences of a few days ago focused not on Lenin, or James's Lenin, but on Debord and Camatte.
Yves's and Will's posts have naturally got me thinking. I think Yves is right that Debord and Camatte wrote from Olympian heights, generally contemptuous of the day-to-day problems of militants and activists, and at the same time proposing no viable alternative kind of activity. (With Camatte, I think we should be charitable and distinguish between phases of his writing: his 1974 pamphlet on the French postal strike was certainly an attempt to analyze a concrete situation and see a way forward.)
On the other hand, I don't think it's fair to call the most important writings of Debord and Camatte "fake" because they fail the "militancy" test. We all know that militantism itself is often an ideology and I had my fill of organizations and activities in which "what are we going to say at next week's trade union fraction meeting" occupied ALL discussion, relegating theory and culture to window dressing and Sunday morning edification, and generally favoring "practical" people who had no use for theory of any kind, but who pursued a mainly "gate receipts" kind of strategy.
When I first read The Society of the Spectacle in 1970, I felt it was one of the first Marxist texts in which I clearly "saw" the world I lived in, of high-rise apartment buildings, suburbia, freeways, television, mass consumption, and white-collar work in a way (to use Marx's words) that "made the reified relations dance". I had had a somewhat similar experience with Paul Cardan's (Castoriadis's) Revolutionary Movement in Modern Capitalism and--excuse me--Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. Debord, Castoriadis and Marcuse all had serious flaws (in ascending order, I think) but in the late 60's context. in which "economic issues" (not to mention economic crisis of the type that erupted in 1973) were almost nowhere in the general climate of the New Left, and almost no activists, myself included, read the 3 vols of Capital seriously, those texts were important in "making it new" (to use Ezra Pound's phrase). Today, some of the historical sections of vol. I of Capital seem to be written about the present, whereas in the late 60's they seemed to conjure up more the world described in Engels' book on the English working class.
A few years later, as I said two months ago about Lyn Marcus, it was easy to go from the "spectacle" to fictitious capital.
Camatte is another story. I should have been more specific in that I was referring mainly to the early Camatte, prior to "The Wandering of Humanity" (1975). In particular, the early issues of Invariance (late 60's/early 70's) and the masterpiece Gemeinwesen et Capital introduced an analysis of workers' struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries in terms of formal and real domination of capital, absolute and relative surplus value. For the first time, in my experience, it became possible to connect 20th century working-class history not merely to "bureaucracy" but to the shifting nature of capital accumulation that produced and required bureaucracy. Camatte (in his writings on Bordiga) also made known the centrality of the Russian peasant commune and the agrarian question which, in my own experience, no one had ever talked about before. As mentioned earlier, Camatte also wrote about specific struggles such as the 1974 French postal strike.
Thus my basic point is that theoreticians such as Debord and Camatte can write things of real value that may have no, or wrong-headed implications for day—to—day practice, but which can be very suggestive of the nature of the epoch and point toward general trends in the present. Slightly farther afield, we can get insights about social relationships from Balzac or Proust or Dostoevsky which have no immediate programmatic or practical use, but which in the long run give us a clearer idea of what we are against than many long-winded theoretical treatises.
Yves, 3/07 1. Loren wrote " I don't think it's fair to call the most important writings of Debord and Camatte "fake" because they fail the "militancy" test."
That's not my point. The Situationists are fakes because they spent a lot of energy presenting others' ideas as theirs. That is not intellectually honest. And the worst is their young followers today: as we live in a society where only what was produced today is valuable to their eyes (the rest is corny, outdated, boring, etc), they think they dont need to read Marx, Pannekoek, Bordiga or Luxembourg, because everything is in Debord, Vaneigem or Sanguinetti. And tomorrow they will read the heirs of Debord and probably ignore where these ideas come from.
As regards Camatte (who had and has a minute influence compared to the Situationists), his writings belong to a form of "marxology", an activity usually developed by academics of CP "intellectuals" but also by some Trotskyists (Daniel Bensaid is the worst example; compared to the dwarf Bensaid, Camatte is a Giant : at least, in his initial works, he was truly interested by communism and did not take Russia for a "degenerated workers State"; and if you read his texts you get to know the importance of the Grundrisse and 6th unpublished chapter of Capital).
2. "Militantism itself is often an ideology", wrote Loren.
Obviously but Marxism has no interest for me of if is not related (in whatever form) to my daily life. The first writings of the Italian operaists were obscure and difficult to read for an ordinary militant with no academic and Marxist background but at least they were addressing Italian reality in the 1960s. They could not be reduced to the 1567th analysis of the law of value, alienation or fictitious capital in Marx's writings
3. Loren criticizes the fact of "relegating theory and culture to window dressing and Sunday morning edification, and generally favoring people who had no use for theory of any kind".
He is right but this situation is also linked to the very abstract and difficult character of the writings which pretend to produce new theories or new interpretations of old theories. It is linked to the unwillingness of their authors to address ordinary militants, to give lectures, to confront other militants in the streets, in struggles, etc.
If a radical author writes for a small audience who has to know and understand all sorts of mysterious concepts, then he should not complain if people don't read his writings. If he never confronts other militants or ordinary working class people to explain his ideas, then he has no reason to complain about the small impact of his ideas. But usually academic or radical Marxologists don't bother with these details. They like to have a court of admirers around them and that's enough to satisfy their ego.
4. Loren wrote: "I clearly "saw" the world I lived in, of high-rise apartment buildings, suburbia, freeways, television, mass consumption, and white-collar work."
There are many sociologists, novelists, filmmakers who described all these realities. They did not claim to be revolutionaries—but who cares ? What is important is to find good sources of information about the world we live in. And so-called radical philosophers and marxologists are perhaps not the most useful ones for people who can only devote 45 min per day to reading—as a working class militant told me recently.
The Situationists were not only people who described the world, like Loren says ; they were a group which pretended to have a form of political activity, which pretended that this activity could change the world or has effectively changed the world . That's why we should be much more demanding than if we were discussing about an interesting novel, film or piece of sociology which has no militant or political aims.
5. Loren praises Camatte for having underlined : " the centrality of the Russian peasant commune and the agrarian question which, in my own experience, no one had ever talked about before".
Did not Marx write about Russia and the importance of the Russian peasant commune in his letter to Vera Zassoulitch ? Camatte may have dwelled on this idea but it did not come from him. And the centrality of the agrarian question in a country where 90 % of the population is composed of peasants does not seem to me a very original idea. After all, Lenin spent a lot of energy discussing about the importance of peasantry, the possibilities of class alliances between the working class and the peasants, and he defended the idea of the "democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants" at least until April 1917 (according to Trotsky) and even later (according to the Stalinist version of history). If you dont concentrate your attention on the bolsheviks and the Putilov factories and start looking at the other political parties during the Russian revolution including the anarchists and the narodniks or left revolutionary-socialists, if you analyze what happened during the Civil War, it's not difficult to see the importance of the agrarian question ! You will "discover" the same basic element, if you try to understand the mass resistance against the collectivization of agriculture launched by Stalin.
6. Loren wrote : "Thus my basic point is that theoreticians such a Debord and Camatte can write things of real value that may have no, or wrong-headed implications for day—to-day practice, but which can be very suggestive of the nature of the epoch and point toward general trends in the present. Slightly farther afield, we can get insights about social relationships from Balzac or Proust or Dostoevsky which have no immediate programmatic or practical use, but which in the long run give us a clearer idea of what we are against than many long-winded theoretical treatises."
Exactly. But Balzac or Proust were not Marxists or revolutionaries. They did not form groups or belong to groups who pretended that all the other groups were stupid activists, alienated individuals, small foremen, counter revolutionaries, agents of Capital, etc. That's the big difference .
What interests me is not only the content of Debord or Camatte, it's their social function in certain so-called radical circles. The same with Cardan-Castoriadis and the "Castoriadisology" which may replace "Marxology" in academic and radical-chic circles.
One has to confront all these young people who discover Castoriadis or X, consider themselves as very radical but think they have to read some more years before taking any political position... They are often looking for a modern guru who will give them all the answers quickly. And "Marxists" should be very cautious with radical gurus...
Loren
I do not wish to make a big deal of my bout of nostalgia, if that's what it was, for "1917". When I say 1917, I don't just mean Russia, I mean the world moment of 1917-1921, just about everywhere. Which took to its paroxysm the world revolutionary wave 1905-1914. Of course, as Yves says, there have been many movements and general strikes and creative moments, large and small. But I frankly don't think that capitalism has been on the defensive at any time, in face of a world movement, as it was in those years.
Second, on Russia itself. The thread that ties me to the complex of events, people, etc. conjured up by "Russia" is the contemporary importance of Trotskyism. This may sound strange, to some people on this discussion and in the broader left. Not too many people at "Porto Alegre" (for example) give a damn about Trotskyism.But I frankly think that "Trotskyism" in the broad sense is still the "team to beat" in the contemporary period.
Let me explain myself. Let's start with Great Britain, where the SWP (Cliffites) is the largest group to the left of the Labour Party. Let's go on to France, where the three dominant Trotskyist groups (LO, LCR and OCI) got 11% of the vote in 2002 and, much more importantly, are capable of putting thousands of people on the streets in large mobilizations. And more important that that, they have a presence in the trade unions, as trade union militants at least, which is not negligeable.
(Of course, France is an exceptional country, seen internationally.)
Before I elicit the kinds of criticisms which I myself could make (and agree with), let me say myself that, already in 1968, developments showed that the movements were much bigger than any organization, a tendency that has only intensified since (to the extent that there have been movements). But, for example, in France in May-June 2003 I saw the Trotskyist groups, and particularly Lutte Ouvriere, skillfully influence (i.e. manipulate) the mass assemblies that arose in the public sector strikes of that year, as well as the trade union apparatuses. France being what it is, they could not (as they tried in 1968) present themselves directly as what they were, but postured as "honest trade unionists". But there they were, and no "libertarian alternative" seemed capable of ousting them.
I'm less informed about the weight of the British SWP in UK realities.
In 2003, at the demos just before the Iraq war in Washington, New York and Paris, I was struck by the fact that, after more than 30 years during which I had been influenced by and involved with "left communists" or the broader ultra-left (the Situationists, Socialism or Barbarism, Bordiga, and many journals from around the world) that the weight of those currents in these events wasn't much different from 1968. In 1968 as in 2003 the "traditional left groups" seemed to have the ability to capture the high ground(in terms of the ability to "set the tone"). The work of the "old mole" in undermining the conditions for the "bureaucrats" did not seem to have progressed much.
I'll give another example, this time indeed from the U.S. Since 1968, there have been (to my knowledge) three important left-wing interventions in the organized labor movement: the role of TDU (Teamsters for a Democratic Union) in the Teamsters, the more muted triumph of\ the "reformers" around Toussaint in the New York transit workers, and most recently, the triumph of a
left-wing caucus in the Los Angeles teachers' union. The first two seem to have been largely fiascos, we'll see about the third. But it is undeniable that none of them would have happened without the central role of the (neo-Trotskyist) Solidarity group, one of 8 tendencies to spin out of the Independent Socialist Clubs of 1969. (I call them neo-Trotskyists because they reject the Trotskyist theory of "workers' states" for the Stalinist (class) regimes, but their methodology of trade union intervention is strictly Trotskyist.) Why, when I want to know what's happening on the ground with the New York muncipal employees or the subway workers, do I ask the Trotskyists I know and not the left communists? What's wrong with this picture?
Perhaps I am flaying my own wounds.
Finally, in America. events like these periodically force me to ask why (as EP Thompson said in the quote I used in my recent intervention) that "all this heavy theory has not given rise to one practical mouse". I left the ISC milieu because it was philistine, anti-theory, anti-intellectual. That seemed to point to opportunism, and that certainly was the case in TDU and with the New York TWU. They had no interest in Guy Debord, Jacques Camatte, Lyn Marcus, the best of Italian workerism, or any of the other people whose work seemed much more interesting. The ISC was workerist, You weren't taken seriously unless you worked in a factory, and the sole focus of every meeting was the line to take at the next trade union meeting. And yet, there they have been, having a real impact (such as it has been) in the labor movement.
Sorry to be so long-winded. I look forward to comrades' feedback.
Loren (Addendum)
Yves has supplied us with some excellent insights into the realities "on the ground" in France and to some extent in the rest of Europe. But does this material really undermine what I said? I refuse to consider myself a dinosaur. I mentioned earlier the feeling of superannuation, somewhat analogous to the way we in the 60's looked at the people still around from the 30's.Certainly there is a "style" in Marxism that resonates with the contemporary world in which it is expressed. But when all is said and done, there is also an "invariance" which is transgenerational. Yves doesn't participate in Meltdown, but that list serve attempts to be an almost day-by-day dissection of the unfolding of the capitalist crisis. It actually exasperates me that the "cultural" writings on my web site get far more hits than the critique of political economy stuff. When one thinks of a figure like Hal Draper, no one could have been more out of sync with the "cultural style" of the 1960's, yet he was the only adult "over 30" hailed by the 1964 Free Speech Movement and his overall oeuvre influenced hundreds of people, beyond the small circle of militants he personally formed. Lyn Marcus, too, with his bow ties and business suits, cajoled his ex-New Left following (1000 members, including in Europe, at its peak ca. 1973) into giving up Bob Dylan and rock for Beethoven and Spinoza, and into reading Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital instead of Marcuse.
But we have been arguing about Trotskyism per se. Here's how I see it. Trotskyism in different varieties today (Yves admits that LO is Trotskyist, which is the only thing he has to concede where France is concerned to make my case) asserts the following: that the surviving CPs and SPs are "workers' parties" that should be pushed into united fronts to expose them; that the trade unions are workers' organizations that can become revolutionary with the correct leadership; that national liberation fronts are broadly progressive. The French Trotskyists (I believe differently from Trotsky himself) sometimes support "reformist" candidates such as Mitterand, but there are many variations on that theme.
The left communist "scene" in the world today, however incandescent (as I myself outlined in a previous intervention) looks at the Trotskyists and says: the CPs and the SPs are parties of "state capitalism"; that the unions are instruments of capital which cannot be captured fo revolution; that national liberation fronts etc. are reactionary, the "left wing of capital". In fact, for the left communists, the Trotskyists themselves are the "left wing of capital", a role they have certainly played in Chile or Nicaragua or (with the exception of LO) in France during the Mitterand years.
I ask Yves: are these questions dinosaur questions? I don't think so. I threw out three examples of fairly impressive (initially) Trotskyist interventions in American unions (the Teamsters, the New York TWU and the LA teachers), even as at least the first two turned to fiasco.
Perhaps to some extent this debate is due to the fact that Yves' point of departure is France, whereas mine is the U.S. He makes a distinction between Trotskyists facing big CPs and Trotskyists dealing with little CPs. I myself would say that big CPs themselves have existed where the agrarian question (as in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Chile) remained a major issue well into the 20th century, and small CPs existed where (as in Scandinavia, Holland, Britain, the US) where the agrarian question was settled earlier. But I think Yves underestimates the importance of the American CP and thus of American Trotskyism. At its peak, in the Popular Front, the CPUSA had only 100,000 members: perhaps 0.1% of the population. But does this tell us anything about the real weight of the CPUSA? Something, of course, but anyone who knows the history of the American 1930's first or second hand knows that the CP's influence reached far beyond its numbers, in the Democratic Party, in the CIO, in a "climate" deepened by CP and left-liberal Stalinophilia in publishing, in Hollywood, in academia. I argue that the shape of the American New Deal is incomprehensible without an understanding of the weight of the CP and CP fellow travelers, up to the highest levels.
Ca. 1940, American Trotskyism had a few thousand militants. Or perhaps 2% of the CP's membership. Was their social weight comparably small? How about the Minneapolis Teamsters' Strike and the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, both in 1934, two of the most important battles of the American 30's and again, unthinkable without Trotskyists? How about the waves of wildcats against the no-strike pledge during World War II in which the (Schactmanite) Workers' Party, just off its split with Trotsky, played a leading role? How about CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper, and Lyn Marcus, who at their best (we can discuss exactly where this was) influenced thousands of people in the 60's and 70's?
And let's not forget that EX-Trotskyists became key figures of the post-World War II intelligentsia, on the "left" (the Daniel Bells and Irving Howes and Michael Harringtons) and on the right (some of the neo-cons).
There are of course much larger populist formations afoot today. But when I say Trotskyism remains the "team to beat", I don't trouble myself overmuch with these more visible, obviously bankrupt groupings. However much in the past, the question of Stalinism still hovers over the international left like a shadow, something that billions of people instinctively point to when the question of "going beyond capitalism" is raised. Isn't going beyond capitalism still the issue, Yves?
Isn't the abolition of commodity production still the goal? And if it is, are the questions I outline above (above all the character of trade unions) central to any strategic appreciation of the present?
Yves, 3/8/07 Trotskyism is almost dead. Has neo-trotskysm a future?
I would give another meaning to the term "neo-Trotskyism".
The neo-Trotskysts are those (the Fourth International headed by the French LCR) who have abandoned
—the perspective of building a revolutionary party around their program (transitional or not). Consequence: the presence inside the Brazilian PT, Die Linke in Germany, the PRC in Italy, presented not as a temporary move, a raid to steal some militants (the traditional "entrism) or split the Party, but as a long term perspective of building parties with "undelimited programmatical frontiers". Probably tomorrow if new Left wing parties like the French PSU or the Italian PSIUP of the 60S-70s reappear the Fourth International will jump in the wagon and stay there for a long time with the idea of dissolving itself progressively. At least that is their perspective and best hope...
—the idea of a revolution as an insurrection. There is a public debate in the LCR with people defending Gramscian or/and reformist ideas. Preparing a military insurrection in Europe is overtly seen as nonsense inside the LCR today and inside the Fourth International. —the opposition to participation to a bourgeois government (Rossetto was Minister of the Land Reform in Lula's government; Besancenot in France is not hostile to participate to an "anticapitalist" government under certain conditions) —the reference to Trotskyism as a main element of their political identity (in France it's quite obvious and reinforced with the alliance of the LCR with some fractions of the CP apparatus and CP intellectuals and trade union bureaucrats). —democratic centralism as a main reference (this is in process so we shall see if they are able to function one day like the Anarchist Federation, each local group having its own politics including anarcho-individualists, anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-communists, etc; but already the LCR has a very "cool" and "democratic" functioning compared to all the other groups) —the dictatorship of the working class. The LCR and the 4th International have made their turn towards the defence of democracy, a move which impedes them to defend the dictatorship of the working class.
So I would call Trotskysts those who in words, on paper, maintain much more references to their political origins. Outside the tiny sects of 20 people, the only big group in France which could be assimilated to a purer form of Trotskyism is Lutte ouvrière. It uses a kind of Comintern-Third period (1) vocabulary but only inside the group and here and there in some non electoral meetings and some booklets which have a restricted circulation. During the rest of the time, its propaganda is a left reformist one in the name of "pedagogy"
And the OCI-PT, the 3rd big group (each of the 3 main Trotskyist groups having around or more than 1000 militants), is on a more nationalist-republican line, defending the Nation, the local "communal democracy", making alliances with the free-masons, rightwing social-democrats and Stalinists of the worst kind (those who regret the "good old times" of Stalin and the Soviet Bloc). And even for the OCI-PT trotskyism is an almost clandestine reference for insiders who read their theoretical magazine but not for a large public.
We have to get accustomed to the idea that "our" (at least Loren and I) past Trotskyist references discovered 40 years ago are totally un-understandable today, including for the new generations of Trotskyists and neo-Trotskyists. As Trotskyism was always deeply interlinked with Stalinism for all sorts of reasons (both as mortal enemies and competitors claiming the same heritage: the October Revolution and Lenin), it's quite normal that as Stalinists die or change skins, Trotskyists follow the same biological and political process.
The whole generation of Trotskist leaders who have known the October Revolution has disappeared. The next generation who lived at the time of 1936 in Spain and France and the Second World War will soon die. And the third generation in Europe has only known a long period of peaceful development (at least in Western Europe) obviously with some serious political and social crises in the 60s in Italy, and France and later in Portugal (factory occupations and self-management) but that's already too far away to be a concrete reference for the militants who arrived in the revolutionary milieu in the late 80s, 90s and later.
As regards the other grouplets of the communist Italian, German and Dutch Left (2), their references are even more esoteric and unknown today, as their publications (when they are published more than twice or once a year) are almost impossible to find not to speak of their non-existent "militants" or clandestine meetings. The web may be a source of information but I doubt ideas which are not defended by frequent face to face contacts and discussions can last very long...
Dear Loren, I hope this won't make you more nostalgic, but we are already dinosaurs...
1. "Third Period" refers to Trotsky's description of the "third period of mistakes of the Communist International" roughly between 1928 and 1936 (and in some cases for a shorter time). The Komintern had a pseudo radical, "ultraleft", vocabulary ; it supported the creation of "soviets everywhere" and characterized Social Democracy as "social-fascist" and had this "brilliant" prognosis about Germany: "After Hitler, it will be us" (i.e. we'll come to power). The "third period" has always been a reference for Mao-Stalinist groups who wanted to be more "radical" that the traditional pro Russian CPs. And it was also a reference for European terrorist groups like AD, BR and RAF whose comprehension of the class struggle did not go farther than denouncing "fascists" and "fascism" all the time, and assimilating all political forces and bourgeois democracy to fascism.
2. The "Communist Left" does not refer to the left tendencies of the official Communist Parties but to the Revolutionary oppositions to Stalinism in the Communist International which appeared even before Trotskyism: Bordiga in the Italian CP which he contributed to found, Korsch and the KAPD—a split from the official KPD—in Germany, Pannekoek in Holland. Each of these oppositions was politically defeated and expelled from the Communist International and has given birth to small grouplets of "council communists", "Bordiguists", generally called "ultralefts" by journalists and lazy historians. Being in a total isolation, these groups and intellectuals have spent most of their time restoring Marxism against its Stalinist distorsions, describing the USSR and the Stalinist States, and sometimes even new trends in capitalism (Paul Mattick). They generally shared the point of view that a long period of counter revolution started in the 20s and lasted at least until the 60s if not
later.
Trotskyism is almost dead (2)
To continue on Loren's interrogations, I think there is a big difference between the countries where the CP was a mass party, often as important or more important than the SP, and the countries were it was reduced to small party or a grouplet.
Trotskyism was built in opposition to Stalinism. Very roughly speaking it took radically two opposite directions when it faced a mass CP:
—Some Trotskyists chose to see the local CP and Stalinism in general on a world scale as their main enemy; in France concretely this line led the OCI-PT to make a tactical alliance with Social Democracy, to denounce very violently what was happening in the Soviet bloc, to defend Soviet and Eastern European dissidents and even to try to build groups in Eastern European countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall. So their violent anti-Stalinism had first rather positive consequences, but on the long run it pushed them more and more in the direction of right-wing Social Democracy and adaptation to bourgeois democracy.
One could say roughly the same thing about people like Cornelius Castoriadis or Daniel Mothé who chose to cooperate with the journal of the CFDT trade union just after 1968 (when this former right-wing Catholic trade-union progressively evolved in the direction of a "left-wing" Social Democracy after 1968; later the CFDT evolved more and more to the right, even of Social Democracy and Castoriadis took his distance with traditional political or trade union circles).
The strong anti-Stalinism of these groups and intellectuals had a positive aspect (they did not have illusions on the exploitative nature of the Soviet bloc, they supported the 1956 Hungarian revolution, they did not fall in the trap of the Chinese cultural revolution or the Cuban revolution) but on the other hand they were not able to maintain a radical position after the crisis of the 1960s and went more and more politically to the right.
Another aspect of this strongly anti-Stalinist current: all these groups and intellectuals were very critical towards national liberation movements when everybody else hailed them in the 1960s. This was positive in a way, but it did not lead them to propose an alternative policy to immigrant workers in France or to the "colonial peoples" in French colonies.
—Some Trotskyists chose to enter clandestinely the CPs (the majority of the Fourth International) or to oppose it openly (Lutte ouvrière triggered the Renault strike in 1947 which obliged the French CP to leave the government and abandon its open pro-bosses and national unity policy; after 1956 they started distributing factory bulletins in front of the factories which provoked numerous fights and even battles with the Stalinists) before 1968 but they always considered Stalinist militants and Stalinist states as "comrades in error" and at least "anti-imperialist" states which had a positive role. For them there was only one imperialist power: the USA. Therefore they were much more critical towards Social Democracy, generally much more "anti-American" during the Cold War, They criticized the formation of the EU as an American plot (1) to struggle against the Soviet Bloc, and they supported uncritically the national liberation movements (Lutte ouvrière being an exception on this last theme).
Today this soft anti-Stalinist tendency leads them to be allied, uncritical or soft towards the neo-Stalinists (in Germany, France, Italy at least it is the case) and to be much more antisocial-democrat that anti-CP. These tendencies openly regret the positive influence of the USSR in international politics and have illusions about Cuba, Chavez, Hamas, etc (with the exception of Lutte ouvrière).
This primary option (who is our main enemy ? Social Democracy or Stalinism ?) may help to explain many splits and differences inside the Trotskyist movement. I took this idea from Philippe Raynaud's book (L'extrême gauche plurielle) who applies it to France and I tried to apply it internationally. It would be interesting if comrades from other countries say if it fits within their national reality or not.
But we have to go further. In the countries where the CP was not a mass party, or was not the hegemonic force inside the workers movement, the Trotskyists had a big problem. They did not have the same monstruous enemy (Stalinism) to define themselves against.
But maybe we can apply the same division between:
—those who decided to be, from the start, ferocious anti-Stalinists and to ally themselves with Social Democracy, the Labour Party or whatever moderate "anti-communist" forces. Here I'm thinking of Schachtman's Workers Party, Gerry Healy's SLL, the Lambertists in Portugal, and certainly other groups. —and those who decided to be more or less soft on the Russian camp. The Spartacists and the American SWP being a good example of this soft anti-Stalinism in the Anglo-Saxon world where the CPs were never a significant force. And this soft anti-Stalinism has progressively led them to be a pro-Stalinist force today.
As regards the British SWP (first called IS) it grew inside the Labour Party as a strong anti-Stalinist and Luxemburgist group, but strangely enough when it left the Labour Party, when it grew by itself and later when it made its "Leninist" turn, the positive aspects of their anti-Stalinism progressively disappeared: they started supporting a Third Worldist Party in Portugal in 1974 (the PRP), then they discovered the radical aspects of political Islam and today they look like any confused Maoist group of the 1960s: Third Worldist, anti-working class (supporting the Iraqi resistance, which kills workers everyday), building the Respect Coalition with the MAB, a group linked to the ultra-reactionary and anti-Communist Muslim Brothers. In international politics the SWP and its International Socialist Tendency defend the same so-called "progressive anti-imperialism" that the USSR, the Stalinist CPs or the Maoists defended in the 1960s and 1970s.
As regards the Maoist groups their anti-Russian Stalinism pushed them
—towards Social Democracy (In Holland today the ex-Maoist SP is supporting anti-immigration laws and it's on this political basis that they got MPs; in France they went into the CFDT when they exploded, to the SP and also later to ATTAC, which is a front between left-wing Social Democrats and fractions of the CPs with Christian leftwing people) —either to join the remnants of the CP like in Italy where, after building big groups like Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua, they are now in the PRC-Rivoluzione comunista which is clearly not an anti-Stalinist Party and has attracted the old-style Stalinist workers and petty bourgeois.
It would be very useful if other people could add some information to this picture or criticize its flaws. Or propose another picture... Obviously it is a way to see large tendencies in the International Trotskyist movement and they are many national exceptions to the general picture. But I think it can help us to stay less focused on the past political heritage of the "revolutionary" groups, their so-called Trotskyism, and interpret their evolution in relation to the evolution of the big forces of the "workers movement" (Social Democracy and Stalinism) and of the powers and States (today for example Russia, Iran and Venezuela) competing with American and European imperialism on a world scale.
1. This first analysis of the EU as an "American plot" explains why still 40 years after the creation of the CECA (the ancestor of the EU) the Stalinists and the second kind of Trotskyists still defend roughly the same point of view: the return to national barriers is more progressive and pro-working class than the progressive disappearance of national barriers. There is a common incapacity to analyze the new situation opened by the attempts to create a European imperialist State, Army, etc. Whether this project will fail or not is another question.
Reversely groups like the AWL, which belongs more to the first category of "Trotskyists" I described, has a more subtle analysis of the EU. One can see how this position towards the EU is related to their softer point of view towards social-democracy, which is ferociously pro EU (even if the picture is more complex in Britain's Labour Party).
Yves
To start with I think there is a little misunderstanding. We (Loren and I and may be others who would like to join the club) are not dinosaurs because we are asking ourselves how to change the world, we are dinosaurs because (or if) we think young militants today have the same references as we had 30 or 40 years ago (and that's one of the reasons I attacked the Situationists so much, because they are the worst theoretical link between the experiences of the 60s and today that I can imagine; with their confused writings about "alienation", "consumer society" and "spectacle industry" they provide intellectual justifications to all those who don't want to fight against this society today: the exploited are so dumb and alienated, the system's ideology is so pervasive and subtle, let's just have a bohemian lifestyle and be proud of our isolated esthetic radicality).
1. Loren writes that Trotskyists want to push the CP and SPs to power to then expose them. That was true in the 1970s and 1980s. That's no more true today.
The LCR is ready to participate to an "anticapitalist government" (including Lula's government in Brazil which is considered as progressive). The Italian comrades of the LCR stayed in the PRC when it was in power, when it was in the opposition and still today when the PRC is once more in power. They don't have people in the government but they have had MPs and senators (Livio Maitan their main historical leader was member of the Senate before he died; I don't know right now what their parliamentary situation is).
LO does not want to push any party to power, they have always publicly criticized the others for doing so. And when they call for a vote for the left (they don't do that at every election like the other groups) it's always without illusions (obviously the picture is more complicated, but what I want to say is that until now they are considered by the Left and Far Left as non-integrable in the political game. The sole fact that they refuse to shake hands with SP mayors and MPs caused much scandal.)
Only the OCI-PT (sometimes) and small micro-sects coming from the PT still ask for a "workers government" with a less and less precise content.
The LCR has broken officially with all this 3rd and 4th international rhetoric about the United Front and never uses the term anymore. They shout "Everybody together" (Tous ensemble) or "100 % to the Left" (100 % à gauche), or they use the no-global rhetoric ("Another world is possible"); that's all.
LO never uses the word united front, at least in its weekly newspaper and factory bulletins. Only the Trotskyist mini-sects and sometimes maybe the PT do so.
So for different reasons the "United Front", the "Workers Government", and even the "CP-SP government without bourgeois parties" formula (which was used before 1981) have disappeared from mainstream Trotskyism. This is why we are dinosaurs if we discuss Trotskyism today, as it had not radically changed.
And the British SWP has not used all these Trotskyist slogans in its daily propaganda for years, if it has ever used them in Socialist Worker or its leaflets, which I doubt.
2. According to Loren "Trotskyists think that the trade unions are workers' organizations that can become revolutionary with the correct leaders."
We are dinosaurs if we think Trotskyists are still worried by socialist revolution ; and we are dinosaurs if we think that they are worried by transforming the trade unions into revolutionary organisations.
The LCR occupies some positions in the trade union bureaucracy either in the old trade unions (CGT and FSU mainly a teachers trade union) or in the new SUD trade unions (splits from the CFDT in the state sector and sometimes from the CGT, supposedly on the left of the more official unions; in fact not very more radical, just a bit more democratic to a certain extent)
From what I know in the Post Office sector, and maybe in other sectors, LO has a kind of unofficial pact or gentleman's agreement with the bureaucrats of the CGT and the CP fake "Left" : you let us animate the trade union at the rank and file level and we let you have the apparatus and do whatever you want with it. We won't fight for leadership, won't build any national opposition to you, as long as we can use the local trade unions. This enables LO to denounce the other revolutionary groups (because the other Trotskyists build tendencies with fake left bureaucrats to climb in the apparatus) and to maintain their working class militants and periphery in the illusion that they are more radical.
(To be honest, in my personal trade union and political experience and observing what other groups do either in France or in other countries today, I have never heard of any long-term group of workers which succeeded in having a permanent activity on their factory and outside the trade unions in Europe. And that poses many questions about the just but abstract criticism of the trade unions put forward by the left communists for decades.)
The PT is well set inside FO's bureaucracy, a right-wing trade union, and does fight not for any revolutionary transformation of the trade unions. It fights to defend the Nation against Europe and America ! For more details about the CP you can read on mondialisme.org in the Ni patrie ni frontiers section the articles of Karim Landais about the OCI-PT and Europe and about "lambertisme", in French. Or the volume 1 of his book "Passions militantes and rigueur historienne" where he analyses the OCI-PT and interviews 14 former OCI-PT members.
3. About the CPUSA.
More than a question of size of CPUSA, my interrogation was what choice did the Trotskyists make in the US ? Did they desperately look for an alliance with the CP ? Or did they choose to make an alliance with other forces to fight Stalinism as the main ennemy ?
This strategical choice is very important. And I think you can find the same division and dilemma inside the American Trotskyists as in France, Italy, Portugal (after 1975), etc.).
4. "Isn't going beyond capitalism still the issue?" asks Loren.
Yes, but not in the terms posed by the Third or the Fourth International or the Communist Left.
Obviously knowing the past is important. The journal "Ni patrie ni frontières" reproduces and translates old texts in almost every issue. So I agree that there are "trans-generational" problems, concepts, etc, as Loren writes, but we also need to produce NEW answers to these old questions. Often the left is blocked by old answers—when it knows them, which today is less and less the case (the radical left culture including among the anarchists and Trotskyists is much more oriented towards trendy sociologists—Bourdieu—or American imperialism critics like Chomsky, than towards Trotsky, Marx, Bakunin or Proudhon).
5. "Isn't the abolition of commodity production still the goal?" asks Loren.
Well for the mass of the no-global young militants, for the Trotskyist young sympathizers, NO, unfortunately. And we are dinosaurs if we discuss as if we had a common culture with these guys even if they are vaguely interested in the radical left.
That's the big difference with the 60s and 70s. We have lost (and this is not our choice) a common ground of discussion, a common set of references, with the rest of the revolutionary left and even with the reformist left.
We have kept and cherished very important ideas, but the young generation does not care. And not because it is interested in "cultural politics", as Loren writes (although rap or comic books or movies are a source of politicization of the youth), but because it is engaged in massive humanitarian actions, from the defence of illegal workers (you may have heard about the RESF network in France) to solidarity work in Palestine or elsewhere. International solidarity work in the 60s and 70s was 100% political. Today it is totally centered around humanitarian micro-projects and refuses to discuss political issues (like for example what are the political forces in Israël, Lebanon and Palestine, outside the ones the media talk about ? are there political discussions inside the Left of these countries ? etc.). If we deal with Third Worldists (that is in modern terms partisans of the no global movement) today as we did 40 years ago, then we are dinosaurs.
As some of you who are familiar with my situation know, for me composing some remarks does not always present itself with the opportunity for posting them. The comments below fall under that heading. They were composed, but not posted, prior to my most recent post.]
Will, Death Agony of Trotskyism?
While I have certain reservations, I am going to defer to Yves' judgments on the various (neo)Trotskyist tendencies in Europe.
I do not, however, think Trotskyism is entirely dead. In fact, I would suggest that in some places it is quite alive and well. (This is, I believe, what Loren had in mind when he spoke of contemporary Trotskyism as the major tendency to which we are opposed in today's revolutionary milieu.) I think, further, this points to the different social and historical contexts in which Trotskyists rooted themselves. So in this regard I would like to say a few words about a Trotskyist tendency in the United States. I am speaking of the Spartacists...
In general, I think that Yves has really hit on the core of the issue when he notes that Stalinism and Trotskyism are linked phenomena, each developing with reference to the other. This situation goes back to their respective origins in which both were born, so to speak, sharing the same head. While none of the really crucial issues (the developing agricultural crisis, the Chinese Revolution, the expulsion of Trotsky, Zinoviev and other Oppositionists) were and are separable, I'm not going to develop this perspective here except to say that it was the situation in the countryside, in particular, the grain crisis of late 1927—early 1928, that forced the party of Stalin out into the open, precipitated an explicitly Trotskyist tendency (and, to boot, crystallized the Right Opposition around Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky).
Trotsky remained tied to the regime because as long as there was a chance he and his faction could regain power, he would not openly criticize the party. Stalin, on the other hand, was tied to Trotsky in a different manner altogether: For Stalin, Trotsky was his theorist. (At the same time, he, for example, ordered them suppressed, Stalin studiously read Trotsky's analyses prepared for publication in party journals, papers, etc.) This situation did not change until Stalin was able to deal with the deteriorating situation in the countryside on his own terms, that is, until that moment at which he had fully digested the Left's program and, on the basis of his 1928 experience, entered on a brutal course of action centered on crash program of industrialization and agricultural collectivization.
The underlying orientation that made Stalin's theoretical appropriation of Trotsky possible was the identity in their perspectives on, if perhaps not the meaning of then, the road to socialism. For both the singularly decisive criterion that really enabled a society as socialist was collective ownership of the means of production and a planned economy, viz., a statification that allowed for, so it was hoped, unlimited development of productive forces. The entire complex of ideas can be summarized in one term, namely, the "workers' state."
So that when Yves suggests those neo-Trotskyists who have abandoned the concept of the "workers' state" have abandoned their own past, I could not agree more. But what happens when a Trotskyist organization refuses to forsake its own past?
Here, in the United States, unlike as in Europe, Trotskyists pursued a revolutionary course at a time by which Stalinists were fully and openly committed to reformist pursuits. While, for example, the CPUSA was "critically supporting" Roosevelt, Trotskyists organized the Teamsters on the basis of an open confrontation (which they won) with an armed employers' organization and the regionalized incarnation of the State (that political-administrative unit called the state of Minnesota and its armed force, the state police) in a bloody struggle, the Minneapolis general strike of 1934, that saw serious injuries and deaths among the workers. In the thirties, there was no counterpart among Trotskyists to, say, Leon Blum's Socialist Party in France: "Soft" or reformist impulses in the Trotskyist movement in the United States did not emerge until after the end of the last imperialist world war...
The Spartacists have not abandoned this legacy. While I see no need to describe their origins (suffice it to say that they explicitly trace themselves back to the struggles inside the Russian party on the terrain of the Soviet bureaucracy in the twenties, and count James Cannon as one of the effective, if not actual, founders of their tendency), what is really fascinating is the contradictory manner in which they combine a "hard" Trotskyist commitment to a rigid theoretical framework (the transitional program, workers' state, centralized planning, Leninist norms of organization, etc.) with subtle, insightful political analyses of contemporary developments.
It is the latter that interests me, and apparently others...
I have watched over the years as the Spartacists have lost members, a loss confirmed, for example, in the closure of sections across the country. While I do not know how large the organization is (and while Loren might, I would be surprised if it numbered one-hundred and fifty active members), and though it is tiny, it's political weight on the left in the United States cannot be related to the size of its membership. The Spartacists have, relative to their numbers, a much larger, sympathetic periphery and a presence in the American left which, considering this otherwise insignificant political force, is in my view is unrivaled.
This I attributed to a compelling sense of the major issues of the moment, to the analyses presented of theses issues, positions taken on them (all as expressed in Workers Vanguard, the organization's newspaper) and, in a limited way, to a small number of actions especially with regard to the Klan Spartacists have played a major role in organizing.
The Spartacists have taken "advanced" positions on a host of contemporary issues. These positions range from an opposition to Islamic fundamentalists that doesn't situate them indistinguishably alongside the bourgeois State, to the defense of democratic rights in opposition to that State and to their view of the centrality of a black proletariat for a revolutionary movement that has yet to unfold in the United States. In my estimation, the "large" theoretical concepts upheld by the Spartacists (again, for instance, the concept of the workers' state and all that it entails at the level of the world) are not only sclerotic, not only belong to a different historical era and were not even adequate to an emancipatory project in that era, but must in the end reach into and shape organizational positions and practice. Yet, and this is the contradiction, those positions and that very limited practice have the appearance, in my opinion, of being revolutionary....
Thus, I think that our different evaluations of Trotskyism's "death agony" reside in good measure in the different societally-based situations that Trotskyists grounded themselves in both immediately before and after Trotsky's death. I am not attempting to relativize different claims (Loren's and Yves'), merely to suggest that, if we are ever to assist in advancing development of a revolutionary tendency that functions as a pole of attraction within the workers movements where they exist in the capitalist world, we require a subtle, differentiated analysis of those, hard as well as soft Trotskyists, counterposed to us.
Yves
I think Will points to a very crucial problem, and not an academic one, namely the problem of the role of small groups and the role of their political heritage in their possible development.
The first issue for a group is its "programmatic references": whether they refer to traditional Trotkyism, to anarcho-syndicalism or to the Communist Left, these small radical groups have great difficulties not degenerating into a microsect. So they have to find a "niche" in order to get some political oxygen. Will tells us apparently that the fight against the Klan may have been such a niche for the Sparts in the States, at least from what I understand from his mail. The "Bordigists" in France have had their niche for a while : it was solidarity work with Palestine and support to migrants workers' struggles (but they were unable to manage their growth and exploded very quickly to become once more a micro sect). The anarcho-syndicalists had no niche for 30 years and had a weekly meeting with three people in a Parisian café when suddenly a group of 200 migrant workers cleaning the tube contacted them and that was the spark with enabled them to grow (they have around 1500 militants on the national scale but have a larger periphery, on a radical trade unionist basis with no reference to anarcho-syndicalism anymore, at least for their sympathizers).
A small group can grow, that's obvious. But it needs people who have other abilities than just nice or coherent programmatic references. It needs
—a set of efficient organizational techniques inherited from the past: the Comintern or the Spanish CNT techniques can be quite useful. I think that's one of the reasons of the long duration of some small and medium groups. They have had good teachers. But most of these teachers are dead now and sometimes their pupils were not to the level required (Saturday night I printed 4000 leaflets for a student nurse who is trying organize a strike in all the hospitals of Paris. I had to do it—I have the technical means to do it—because the trade unions offices were closed and her organization, the LCR—which has supposedly 1500 members, full timers, a bookshop, headquarters, etc.—was not able to help her quickly—the leaflets had to be handed to the different night shifts. A good example of how amateurism pervades Trotskyist groups today...)
—an acute sense of opportunities, a sense which can be close to the art of maneuvering, but is a linked to —a capacity to put forward new tactics, make some right prognoses about the evolution of the class struggle or the importance of new social problems, etc. —a group of leaders with a certain charisma not only inside the group but also outside: in political or trade union meetings, in spontaneous street gatherings, etc. —a capacity to manage internal and personal conflicts, —the capacity to find a milieu where there are no left competitors and it can attract people who in other cases would have gone to the CP or to any radical left group, but come to this group, because it is there and proposes them action and politics
And certainly many other qualities I can't think of right now.
So I think the development of a tiny group into a group of a reasonable size is not only linked to a "good" program or some "good" programmatic elements.
And there is also the opposite situation : microsects with lunatic politics which train people who, when they leave the sects, use some of their political and organizational heritage to become efficient trade union leaders or... SP senators.
So to come back to the subject, I doubt Trotskyism will have a long life for the above quoted reasons, on an international scale, but that does not prevent many exceptional exceptions and surprises, obviously.
PS.: I add 3 texts to my last answer to Loren ; two I wrote about Trotskyism and one about the spontaneist and confusedly pro-Situationist idealogy in recent movements in France. Maybe they can be useful for our discussion.
Some hypotheses for a balance sheet of « Trotskyism »: Four prerequisites for a useful discussion
1. One should not discuss Trotskyism as Trotskyists do (and as most of its adversaries do) : as a coherent and unified ideology or theory, as the continuation of « Leninism » (for its partisans) or « Stalinism » (for its adversaries), as the « revolutionary Marxism of the 20th or 21st century », etc. This method may seem useful for polemics but it's a lazy and unproductive way of dealing with Trotskyist ideas and practices.
2. One should differenciate between Trotskyism as a rather coherent ideology or theory until 1940 (Trotsky's assassination), and what it became afterwards. Today one can't talk anymore of Trotskyism, but only about very different forms of « Trotskyisms » which have very little in common in theory and practice with their origins. What is left of the original Trotskyism today among its present followers, is mainly a cult of the personality of Trotsky and a general incapacity to make a balance of his theoretical work and actions when he was in power on in exile.
3. For the same reason, the fact of reducing Trotskyism to a form of « centrism » (this ideology which allegedly hesitates between reform and revolution) is just a lazy way to deal with the complex and multiform evolution of different political currents. Unless one has a very simplistic vision of the political world as divided into three basic forces : the revolutionaries (ourselves), the counter-revolutionaries and those in between : the centrists. This kind of vision is a simple copy of what Lenin wrote during the First World War 80 years ago when he analyzed the positions inside the international Social Democracy and can't be seriously applied to all non-100 percent-revolutionary political groups since then. For the same reason, comparisons between the different political Russian tendencies before 1917 (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Narodniks) and present revolutionary groups are not of any use today.
4. Today, it's more important to pinpoint what Trotskyists do,