Internationalist Perspective

Crisis

The following article will appear in the next issue of IP.

The global financial crisis of 2008 is truly a milestone event. No other since the crash of 1929, and subsequent great depression, has shown so clearly that the capitalist economy, despite its solid façade, can unravel very quickly and collapse. No other has illustrated so clearly the absurdity, the obsolescence, of letting the needs of capital accumulation determine humankind’s fate. The sudden panic of capital owners, the sudden disappearance of trillions of dollars, the great difficulties with which the governments of the world have wrestled to get a grip on the situation, cannot but have a great impact on the consciousness of the working population, which now will see its living conditions substantially deteriorate for no other reason than that human needs are subservient to the needs of capital.

Too much can be produced too cheaply so that massive layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, attacks on the environment in order to further reduce costs, etc., must be imposed so that capital, abstract value, can grow again; because that is the real, determinant, purpose of the capitalist economy.

Although a total collapse is unlikely in the short term, this event marks the beginning of a period of protracted crisis, from which there will be no escape. There will be temporary recoveries but not a new boom period. Either the crisis will run its course, which means allowing depression and war to destroy so much value that the conditions for profitable expansion can be purportedly restored, or a global revolution, and the abolition of value production will occur.

By the time you read this, you will have read or heard countless explanations of this crisis, most of which blame it on capitalist greed, bad management and Anglo-American “neo-liberalism.” Such “analyses” come mostly from the left of the capitalist spectrum. The right struggled to say anything coherent at all about the mess, and at times even parroted the left (as when John McCain railed against “Wall Street greed”). It’s clear that at times like this, the left becomes very important for capital. A critique of unfettered free market-capitalism and of the stupidity of giving tax cuts to billionaires, is the only narrative left open, if blaming the capitalist system itself is to be avoided. It’s not capitalism but bad capitalists that have caused the problem, the left is essentially saying. The system can be saved through more regulation.

But while capitalist greed is permanent, capitalist crisis is not. While the bourgeois consensus has now nimbly shifted from “neo-liberalism” to “neo-keynesianism” (in truth, Keynesianism, as it is commonly understood – state-intervention in the economy and deficit-spending — have never gone away) and yesterday’s guru Greenspan was heaped with scorn and left making mea culpas on TV for having kept interest rates kept too low for too long, thereby allowing the US housing bubble, and its extension to Europe and other parts of the world, to swell, it is conveniently forgotten that this housing bubble, and the consumption it fueled, played an essential role in keeping the global economy humming over the past two decades.

IP predicted this crisis, but we were far from the only ones. Even some bourgeois economists saw it coming from afar. You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand that, when financial assets appreciate at a breakneck pace while there is no corresponding growth of the underlying value created in production, the exchange value of these assets will fall. Its fictitious character will at some point be revealed. The current recession is not caused by the financial panic, rather, it was the other way around: the economic downturn burst the financial bubble. The question is why, despite today’s tremendous productivity, the growth of value fell so short of what the credit expansion required. Or, to turn this around, why this financial expansion occurred in seeming indifference to the much slower pace of real economic growth. To these questions, the best answer bourgeois commentators can come up with is “human failure”: greed, sloppiness, stupidity, shortsightedness…which with better leaders, and with more oversight and regulation, will be cured…It’s not the system that’s at fault… The system pays them well to say just that.

And they may well believe it. Only Marx’s analysis of the value form and its immanent tendencies, allows us to answer the above questions.

Globalization, made possible by information-technology and the restructuring of the world economy following the end of the cold war, did give capitalism a new lease on life after the post-World War II boom ended in the 1970’s. Some say that the impressive expansion of the world economy since then was only caused by an expansion of credit, by an accumulation of debt. If that were true, the crash would have come much sooner. The credit expansion was indeed disproportionate, but the fact that it could go on for so long needs to be explained. This would not have been possible without a real expansion of value creation; “of productivity,” some would say, “resulting from technological innovation.” But if that is all there was to it, why are we in such a deep crisis? They do not see that a general rise of productivity not only means that more goods are being created, but also that these goods are made with ever less labor and that, the more surplus labor is already taken from that labor, the more difficult it becomes to squeeze more out of it. An acceleration of the general rate of productivity growth resulting from technological innovation tends to make the value of what is produced fall below the value of the capital advanced for its production. That threatens the very purpose of the economy: capital accumulation.

The expansion of real value creation took place because the rate of exploitation of labor power increased. Globalization not only made the capitalist world market more unified and thus wider and more efficient, but it also restructured production on a global assembly line, shifting an ever growing part of industrial production to what used to be backward areas that had barely participated in the global market. In this way, capital not only could expand the exploitation of cheap labor power but also, because of its very mobility, discourage working class resistance to exploitation everywhere, despite the falling value (labor time) of wages.

Moreover, globalization accelerated a redistribution of value in the market place. In the global economy, the most developed capitals, with the fastest rate of technological innovation and productivity growth, have a competitive advantage that allows them to sell their goods at a price above their value. In other words, much of the value they realize, is not really in their products, they get it on the global market.

Globalization therefore created huge profits in the most developed parts of the world, which encouraged capitalization under the assumption that their growth would continue unabated. But, as technological innovation spreads and generalizes, the quantity of labor, and thus of surplus value, in commodities also falls. Globalization was eating away at the roots of the expansion of profits. What became decisive to obtain then, more than ever, was access to, and dominance of, markets. Many companies, from shoes to semi-conductors, began to spend more on marketing than on production.

It was the hope of capitalism’s apologists that globalization would generate its own expanding market. And indeed, to some extent it did just that, the multiplier effect enriched and expanded the size of middle-income strata in many parts of the world. That too, encouraged a credit-expansion on the assumption of its continuation. However, the limit to the expansion of the market, generated by globalization, was revealed in the Asian crisis ten years ago. It showed that much of the profit resulting from exploitation in low wage countries could not profitably be reinvested in those countries.

The same issue arises today. Some are saying that countries such as India and China have made a lot of money through globalization. At the same time, the needs are great there. Why don’t they invest their surpluses in the expansion of their domestic market, which could stimulate the whole world economy? Yes, there are huge amounts of capital in places like India and China, and there are hundreds of millions of small peasants and land workers, and unemployed there, who possess nothing. But they have nothing that Chinese and Indian capital owners want, not even their labor power, unless it can be used to make goods for another, foreign, market.

The Asian financial crisis, which spread to Latin America and Russia, showed that the expansion of the domestic market in the countries recently embraced by globalization is strictly dependent on the expansion of their foreign markets. It also showed that deflation increasingly becomes the hallmark of the economic picture. The implosion of financial bubbles, the sharp devaluations and falling prices during and after the Asian chain event announced the return to center stage of capitalism’s insurmountable economic contradictions. In a context in which just about everywhere both the labor force and the means can be available to make almost anything very cheaply, overaccumulation, and thus prices falling below their value, becomes inevitable. This touches the weakest competitors with the least access to the global market first. The twin, contradictions, each reinforcing the other, of capitalism’s incapacity to generate a market that keeps pace with the expansion of its productive capacity, and the tendency of the value of what it produces to fall, first attack their profits and wages. So owners of capital in the weaker countries, confronted by the limitations of reinvesting their profits at home and by the danger of devaluations, increasingly moved their savings to where they would be safer in a deflation wave. In 2004, according to the figures of the Morgan Stanley bank, 80 % of the net-savings of the world were flowing to the US.

And there, it was more than welcome. The US, through its foreign policy, the projection of its military power, but also through its stable political system, now adorned with the friendly face of Barack Obama, is cultivating its status as the safe haven for capital. Even the implosion of the dot-com bubble in 2000, with its trillions of evaporated fortunes, hardly interrupted the stream of capital. A pattern had developed: the US economy lived, every year a bit more, beyond its means, buying more than selling, paying by printing more dollars, backed by public debt notes bought by the countries who sell more to it than they buy from it. Neither side can withdraw from this relationship. A swing to protectionism would plunge the US in depression, but the loss of the American market would be equally devastating for China and Japan.

At the same time, the profits made in the developed countries sought a safe haven where they could maintain and expand their value. After the dot-com-implosion revealed that the value of high tech companies was wildly overrated and with many traditional sectors such as automakers suffering from overcapacity, where could they go? The combined demand of international capital for safety pushed up the price of all assets in the US, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, that are part of “the hoard”: the part of capital that is not directly engaged in creating new value, but that is kept in reserve to move in or out of the productive process, depending on the profits, and the promise of profits. The rising demand for them in turn pushed up their prices. Their fast rate of appreciation attracted more capital, which again raised their prices and so on. The fundamental reason why financial assets expanded so much faster than the real economy is that the demand for them is unlimited while the demand for all other commodities is not. In a context of global overcapacity and a growing deflationary tendency, the effective demand for cars, computers or any other commodity is severely limited, but the demand for financial capital is not, because while “ … all commodities are perishable money; losing their value if they are not sold, money is the imperishable commodity. ”

The financial sector in the US and beyond was all too happy to accommodate this thirst for assets in which value could be “safely” parked, through the creation of all sorts of new financial commodities. The appreciation resulting from the rising demand for them seemingly confirmed that they lived up to their safe haven promise. As in all pyramid schemes, it was essential to keep that demand rising. The policies of the US, under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, were aimed at just that. The feeding of the housing bubble played an essential role in this. The increased “equity” in property values was used to underpin the exponential rise in both consumer and business debt that kept up global demand and kept deflation at bay in the most developed parts of the world economy. But to keep the demand for property values rising, the financial sector had to take increasingly desperate measures, such as sub-prime loans to buyers without means. Although it was clear from the onset that such loans would never be paid back and would be subject to default in the first downturn, there was no alternative to feeding the bubble.

Globalization expanded value creation but value can only remain value if it continues to valorize. Capital that does not mobilize, directly or indirectly, productive forces for the creation of new value, is bound to devalorize. This crisis shows that there is too much value requiring valorization, that the value of assets in which profits sought refuge is fictitious. But if the illusion had not been there, where would these profits have found refuge? The housing bubble postponed the crisis, if only for a few years.

Tens of trillions of dollars, euros, and other currencies, have disappeared since this credit crisis began and it’s far from over. This is terrible for those who lost them, but for the conditions of accumulation of capital this is, in itself, beneficial: less capitals crowd each other out, some big ones enrich themselves by swallowing the smaller ones at a bargain price, costs (oil, wages) are falling. But this isn’t enough to stop the unraveling. It can only be stopped (temporarily) when a massive creation of new debt backed by the lender of the last resort — the state – props up the debt-saddled financial system and interest rates are lowered. So the crisis of fictitious capital is “solved”… by the creation of new fictitious capital.

To the trillions spent to save the financial system will be added trillions in spending to contain the recession and prevent deflation from spreading to the strongest countries. The approval of Fed-Chairman Bernanke to an Obama-type stimulus program shortly before the elections already indicated where we’re heading. The left will clamor for a new “New Deal,” but “stagflation” – the combination of stagnation and dangerously rising inflation that brought the world economy to the brink of collapse in the 1970’s — would be its best possible outcome. However, there will be increasing public spending to fight deflation. There will be a more direct intervention of the state, more state capitalism. But in the end, nothing will have changed: more debt will be created to counter-act the devalorization of old debt.

This will move the problem from confidence in banks and other financial enterprises to confidence in the lender of last resort, the state. In many countries that are in the grip of deflation, this confidence is already shredded. But in stronger countries, with big financial reserves, such as Japan and the US, the anchor and guardian of the global system, it is strengthened, at least in the short term, as capital seeks refuge from the uncertainty of the financial storms in state-backed securities. Thus, the demand for US treasury notes rose, despite its low yield, and so did the dollar. But in the somewhat longer term, as state debts swell to ever more enormous proportions, this confidence will become increasingly fragile. The capacity of the concerted action of governments to stop a collective run for the exit and thus prevent a collapse will become more doubtful, as the quantity of debt-notes and other money sloshing around will increasingly dwarf their combined financial reserves. The crisis will return and will likely make the present one look like child’s play.

Sander
November 6, 2008

…AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

The present financial crisis, with its threats to the existing international banking and credit system, and the underlying economic crisis, the global crisis of overaccumulation, which is its basis, is the greatest challenge to the functioning of world capital since the early 1930’s. Given the gravity of this crisis, the current recession will most likely be a very deep and protracted one, striking all sectors of the global economy.

It’s impact on the working class will be devastating, leading to a vast increase in unemployment as the economy contracts, both in the advanced capitalist countries and in the emerging economies, lower wages as well as significant cuts in the “social wage” and pensions, together with the loss of homes due to foreclosures, which hits the working class especially hard. Yet this is no “death crisis” of capitalism; it will bring no automatic collapse, the expectation of which is a significant barrier to revolutionary struggle and to the development of the consciousness of the collective worker. Capital possesses enormous resources, economic, political, and ideological, upon which it can draw. One such resource is to blame the crisis on the greed of the bankers and capitalists, to focus anger on “Wall Street,” and its agents whose avarice has supposedly brought this crisis upon us. From the US and Germany, to Russia and China, that ideological campaign has already begun. It is important, then, to recognize – as Marx insisted — that the capitalist is simply the functionary or executor of capital, and not the responsible agent of the economic processes to which he or she responds: For Marx, “… individuals are dealt with only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers [Träger] of particular class relations and interests.” The executor or functionary of capital, the capitalist class, acts consciously, but without an understanding of the complex of networks and interests that it personifies, without a full understanding of the exchange mechanism, and the objective or real abstraction in which value is incarnated. As Marx pithily said, “they do not know it, but they do it.” It is capital and the logic of the value form that has produced this crisis, and not the capitalists, and their cupidity or stupidity. And any “solution” short of the abolition of value production will only prepare the way for new and even more devastating crises. Within the confines of capitalism and the value form, we can expect a provisional end to the policies of neo-liberalism and deregulation that were ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980’s. As the steps already taken by capital to respond to the credit freeze and the need to re-capitalize the banking system indicate, regulation will now become the mantra of the most powerful elements of the capitalist class. It is not just left-liberalism and Social Democracy which now rejects neo-liberalism, and which seeks to save capitalism through regulation and Keynesianism. In its lead article this October, the New Left Review sees promise in “financial regime change,” and holds out the prospect that more scope for government regulation of the financial system “may give the new regime that emerges from the current upheavals greater stability than its predecessor.” That is surely the aim of capital, though it ignores the fact that this is not just a financial crisis; it is rather a global crisis of the value form and its insurmountable contradictions. Moreover, an end to policies of deregulation does not mean an end to globalization, which is separable from neo-liberalism, though it was the latter that historically made possible the former. For the moment, the time to dismantle the policies and institutions of globalization – the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, — and with it a robust populism of the left or right, has not yet come. Indeed, capital, for the moment, needs to reinforce the bonds of globalization: the advanced capitals, the EU, Japan, the US, need the markets of the emerging economies (China, India, South East Asia, Brazil) if the slackening of domestic demand, even with lower interest rates, is to be offset, and the emerging economies need the open markets of the advanced capitals to prevent a collapse of their own newly industrializing economies. Moreover, deflationary tendencies in the periphery of world capital, and ever cheaper wages there, will lower the wage bill in the advanced capitals, by keeping the flow of cheap consumer goods coming in the midst of unemployment and declining wages in those sectors of world capital. The most intelligent functionaries of capital, from the US to China understand this. Just as they understand the need of capital to further degrade the natural environment in its unceasing quest for surplus-value, in its determination to reduce the costs of variable capital as it seeks to raise its rate of profit, a process that the present economic crisis will exacerbate, as the conversion of left liberals and even some of the left to an expansion of offshore drilling for oil and the building of nuclear reactors makes abundantly clear.

Those very “needs” of capital, mired in a deepening economic crisis, are a significant reason why, even before the credit crunch this past September, leading sectors of the capitalist class in the US had already made it clear that it preferred a Democrat to a Republican as president; that it preferred Obama to McCain. The future of American imperialism was one reason: Bush’s unilateral foreign policy had proven an obstacle to the support of allies in policing the world and its global economy. Bogged down in Iraq, incapable of making progress in bringing about an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the debacle in Lebanon, where Syrian influence was growing, the danger of unilateral American moves against Iran, the need to increase troops in Afghanistan, and the task of restoring some kind of order in Pakistan and preventing its descent into civil war, all made some kind of “intelligent” imperialism, to replace the discredited Bush doctrine, an imperative need. It was precisely Obama who was made to order to be the functionary of such an intelligent imperialism, of the sort represented by Zbigniew Brezinski or Colin Powell, though the replacement of Donald Rumsfeld by Robert Gates as American Secretary of Defense had already signaled the beginnings of such a shift by the Bush administration. The financial and economic crises, and the moves already undertaken by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, and the Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, signaled the need for capital to reverse the course towards deregulation of financial markets, and engage in robust Keynesian economic policies to reflate the economy, without sacrificing the “gains” for capitalism made possible by globalization. The ideological commitment of much of the Republican Party to lower taxes, Reaganomics, and opposition to the Paulson plans for re-capitalizing the banks, all made it clear that in the present situation, Obama, and a Democratic Congress, was a better choice to implement the economic policies that capital required than McCain. While the exact course of the economic crisis cannot be predicted, it would seem that Obama and the Democrats are best suited to wear the mask of capital at the present time; indeed, Obama’s capacity to mobilize popular support for “change” is one reason why that is the case. Should the policies of an Obama administration fail, should popular discontent significantly rise, populist movements of the left or right will probably grow. In such a case, the right-wing of the Republican Party, with an anti-Washington, anti-Wall Street, ideology, and calls for anti-immigrant legislation and protectionist economic policies, may well resonate with both the middle class and elements of the working class too (as will similar calls in the EU countries too). But for the moment, capital has the functionaries it needs in charge of both the executive and legislative branches of the American republic; functionaries who can best assure the kind of international cooperation that the continuation of American hegemony requires.

While capital needs the best functionaries to assure its continuation, it also requires something else: the ability to control the population, to guarantee its hegemony over the collective worker, which entails an ability to mold the human population as subjects. One facet of the shift from the formal to the real domination of capital, is a concomitant shift from a reliance on force or coercion to control the working class to a reliance on its capacity to ideologically shape the human “material” that it needs to control; to shape humankind as a certain kind of subject. We are not speaking of simple mystifications, tricks, by which the working class is induced to accept the rule of capital. Rather it is a matter of profoundly shaping and re-shaping the very culture, needs, psychology and anthropology, of the human being; its subjectification. The value form is not some kind of coat that humankind can simply take off when the weather changes, certainly not in the epoch of the real domination of capital, where its rule, cultural, economic, and political, becomes totalitarian. Theodor Adorno added to Marx’s concept of the rising organic composition of capital, the concept that the “organic composition of man” is growing: “Only when the process that begins with the metamorphosis of labour-power into a commodity has permeated men through and through and objectified each of their impulses as formally commensurable variations of the exchange relationship, is it possible for life to reproduce itself under the prevailing relations of production.” Adorno’s rising organic composition of man grasps the immanent tendency of capital in its phase of real domination to extend the changes in the technical composition of capital, the relation of dead to living labor, into the very constitution of the worker: his needs, her affects, his vision of the world, her perceptual universe. While Adorno may have captured one of the immanent tendencies of capitalism in its phase of real domination, we believe that his vision of the rising organic composition of man is too pessimistic; that it virtually forecloses any possibility of revolutionary struggle or the development of class consciousness on the part of the collective worker. We do not want to underestimate the capacity of capital to subjectify the population that it rules; its successes have been historically compelling. Indeed, the power of nationalism, in both left and right forms, and the recrudescence of religious ideologies, which have quite literally re-shaped a considerable portion of humankind, are a warning to those who might underestimate this power of capital, and the extent to which the exchange relationship has penetrated most aspects of human existence. However, it also seems to us, that there are counter-tendencies to capital’s power to bring about the subjectification that it needs and wants; counter-tendencies inherent in the value form itself and its laws of motion. Capital has not succeeded in expunging the collective memories of humankind’s struggles against exploitation, embedded in the history of every culture and social order, and especially the struggles of the working class, memories that the very globalization of capitalism spreads universally; memories that can be re-actualized, particularly in an era of crisis. Moreover, one of the means that capital must wield in order to escape its downward economic spiral is to accelerate the development of the productive forces, including especially the productive force of humankind, of the collective worker. That requires the creativity and innovation on the part of workers, without which scientific and technological stagnation will prevail. On the one hand, capitalism needs the creativity and innovation provided by the collective worker in order assure its own economic bases, the competitiveness of capital entities; on the other hand, that creativity and innovation has the potential to escape the control of capital, to extricate itself from the prevailing modes of science and technology integrally linked to the law of value, to re-animate the very tendencies to resistance and rebellion that capital seeks to expunge from creativity and innovation, but that may be inherent in it.

There is no inevitability of communism attendant on a devastating economic crisis — the 1930’s should have demonstrated that – and the real domination of capital has proceeded over the course of the past eight decades. Yet, revolutionaries will not shout “here’s to the crisis,” aware as they are that crisis does not necessarily result in revolution, that it causes enormous suffering for the working class, and can lead to ever-greater “barbarism,” to xenophobia, war, and genocide. The crisis itself is inevitable; its outcome is not. One effect of the present crisis will be to shatter the “normalcy” of economic growth, of faith in the benefits of the prevailing science and technology. To the questions that arise as the processes of normalization breakdown, capital will try to provide its own answers. Yet none of those “answers” can resolve the necessity that lies at the heart of the value form, that “ … its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage in its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension. … Ricardo and his entire school never understood the really modern crises, in which this contradiction of capital discharges itself in great thunderstorms which increasingly threaten it as the foundation of society and of production itself.” The task of revolutionaries is to show where the horrific logic of the value form leads, in this epoch of social retrogression, to provide different answers to the questions that are beginning to be asked, to intervene in all the cracks that open up in the edifice of capitalist normalcy; to devote themselves to the work of that old mole of revolution, and to the possibility of creating a human community.

Mac Intosh
November 7, 2008

Marxism and the Holocaust

The following exchange took place after a reader of IP wrote with some comments on the article “Marxism and the Holocaust” which appears in the latest issue of IP.

Letter to IP

I’ve been working through the ‘Marxism and the Holocaust’ article and found it surprising that Postone was never mentioned in it. His essay ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’ seems pretty fundamental to mapping out a Marxist response to the Shoah.

The article in IP does not answer two major questions: 1) Why Germany? and 2) Why the Jews?

“In that sense, the Nazi vision of a `racially pure community,’ a Volksgemeinschaft, was directly linked to the effects of capitalism’s destruction of all genuine communal bonds, and to the void that it left in its wake.”

Capitalism has destroyed genuine communal bonds everywhere. Why was there no holocaust in other countries? Why did other states not attempt to create a “racially pure community”?

I strongly disagree with the Aly and Heim argument about extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe being done out of economic interest in destroying surplus population. How was it in the interest of the German state to divert huge amounts of resources to the holocaust in the midst of a two-front war? What was utilitarian about the holocaust? The fact that it was not utilitarian (in fact, it was against the immediate economic and military interests of the German state) is what is so terrifying and also unique. As Postone wrote - “No functionalist explanation of the Holocaust and no scapegoat theory of anti-Semitism can even begin to explain why, in the last years of the war, when the German forces were being crushed by the Red Army, a significant proportion of vehicles was deflected from logistical support and used to transport Jews to the gas chambers.”

Because the attempted extermination of the Jews was not utilitarian - and because of the specificity of anti-semitism, I do not think the Shoah can be compared to the other genocides mentioned at the end of the article. (That is not to say, of course, that these other genocides are not horrible). I think y’all are correct in saying that the Shoah requires us to reexamine Marxism (I would add: and raise serious questions about the optimistic conception about the struggle for communism), but I don’t think y’all went far enough.

How could a working class that not too many years before was engage in the most intense wave of class struggle in history, perhaps even a ‘revolutionary wave’, between 1917 and 1923, so actively participate in the extermination of European Jewry - oftentimes with brutality that surprised even Nazi leaders who encouraged it? Why were there pogroms even within anti-Nazi partisan forces?

It’s also confusing to me why Callinicos is referenced. Isn’t he the main “theorist” (ideological party hack) for the British SWP? I think that Callinicos has a particularly uninteresting formulation of Marxism in keeping with his Trotskyite politics. It’s also ironic that he’s quoted in an article about the holocaust, since the SWP openly supports and has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a militantly anti-semitic organization that worked hand-in-hand with the Nazis during the holocaust (one of the MB leaders actually organized SS divisions during the war).

Reply by IP

Thanks for your thoughtful comments on my essay, “Marxism and the Holocaust.” I will try to respond to your specific comments and criticisms, and to situate them within the overall perspective that animated the essay.

Let me start with your objections to including references to Callinicos (or I might add, Mandel too). The thinkers to whom I refer in the essay, with the exception of Goldhagen, use Marxist categories to grapple with the phenomenon of the Holocaust. None of them share my “politics;” none of them — not Marcuse, Adorno, Anders, Aly, Geras, etc. – draw the “class line.” And the same is true for those thinkers to whom I refer in terms of theoretical constructions of Marxism – Bloch or Althusser, for example. I would not turn to any of them for an understanding of the nature of Stalinism, nationalism, or inter-imperialist war, for example, where it is precisely the class line that must be clearly drawn. But, I have no hesitation, when discussing the Paris Commune or Marx’s Grundrisse, for example in utilizing thinkers, Henri Lefebvre, for the Commune or Roman Rosdolsky for the Grundrisse, to take two examples, whose politics I reject, but for whom I have a high regard when it comes to wielding Marxist theory in specific domains. I cannot imagine, for example, grappling with Marx’s understanding of the value form without seriously reading I. I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Yet Rubin was an old Menshevik! In the specific case of Callinicos, however, the point was simply that here was a self-professed Marxist for whom the Holocaust constituted a challenge to orthodox Marxist theory.

Now to Postone. I have a very high regard for Postone’ work on the value form, as well as for some of his insights about modern anti-Semitism and its links to the trajectory of capitalism. With more time and space I would certainly have included a discussion of Postone, and of several other thinkers, such as Mosse and Mayer. But my primary goal in this essay was to do two things: first to link the Holocaust to the trajectory of capitalism, and second to show that genocide, of which the Holocaust is emblematic, but not the exclusive “case,” has become a hallmark of decadent capitalism. Postone’s focus is on the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and he clearly shows that it was not utilitarian (a point that I also make), and that the ideology of modern anti-Semitism was both central to it, and linked to the trajectory of value production. However, I believe that the specific link that Postone forges between modern anti-Semitism and the dual character of the commodity form; with anti-Semitism focusing on the abstract value linked to finance capital, and connected to the Jews, while ignoring industrial capital, is too limited to account for the Nazi genocide. I have no doubt that distinctions between the two types of capital characterized many anti-Semitic thinkers, and provided an “explanation” for the need to rid Germany of its Jews, but I also think that that factor is not sufficient to account for the power of the ideology of Jew-hatred that propelled the Holocaust. In that regard, I stand by my effort to expand the factors that made modern anti-Semitism so potent an ideology in Germany, and indeed in Europe during the 1930’s and ‘40’s.

However, it is in attempting to show that the Holocaust was but one link, especially horrible, in a chain of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, that constitutes an immanent tendency of decadent capitalism, that I seek to go beyond Postone’s analysis. You ask, “Why did other states not attempt to create a ‘racially pure community’?” My point is that other states have: Cambodia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Serbia, Sudan, Burma, for example, where ethnic cleansing and genocide are clearly linked to ideologies of a racially pure community. And as economic crisis deepens, we can expect to see this tendency expand, both in its violence and its geographical scope – from which I fear even the most advanced capitalist states will not be immune. The point is not to claim that Sudan or Serbia is the same as the Holocaust, but rather that it exemplifies similar tendencies inherent in capitalism at this historical stage. Too exclusive a focus on Nazism and modern anti-Semitism, while necessary in examining the Shoah as a determinate event, can obscure the very tendency to which I seek to call attention in my essay, what I have termed “the futural dimension of the Holocaust.”

Comradely greetings,

Mac Intosh

Suicide Note

Recently, there was an uproar in Germany about the death of Bettina Schardt. It was not the fact that she died which provoked strong feelings, but the way in which she died. The 79 year old woman, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, chose to end her life through assisted suicide. She was neither sick nor dying, but she was old and worn out; she needed help. She had no alternative but to sell her home and move to a nursing home. No alternative but death. Death seemed far preferable to Bettina than to be institutionalized in a warehouse for the dying.

How many millions of people in the world are in exactly the same situation as Bettina? How fast are their numbers growing? All around the world, governments are cutting budgets for social programs. Everywhere, the wages of the nursing home personnel are being squeezed. Everywhere, they are forced to take care of more patients with fewer people. There are surely many dedicated people amongst those caregivers, but they are powerless to resist the squeeze, the urge of capital to get rid of unproductive costs to protect the nation’s profitability, which translates in the life of nursing home patients to more misery.

Meanwhile, the world has close to 2 billion unemployed people. Could it be that amongst them, there are many who would gladly spend their days making the lives of old people happier? When I visited a nursing home in Belgium a couple of years ago, I met several refugees who worked there and were much beloved by the patients. While waiting for their cases to be handled, they were not allowed to work for money. Rather than watching daytime TV, they worked for free in the nursing home. Doing nothing is not what most unemployed prefer to do. Most of them would like to do something useful and creative, and it just so happens that there is so much useful and creative work to do: So many needs which could be met; so much pain which could be avoided or erased. If only we stop letting value and profit dictate what we do and what we don’t. If only we understand the obvious: that we should employ our resources directly to meet human needs. We may think that we do so already but the means – production for profit, the market, the accumulation of capital- has become its own end which employs humans as its means. If you are of no use for the accumulation of capital, you have no job, you are nothing.

What unites all forms of bourgeois thought is the idea that capitalism is a given. That it is part of the unmovable forces that condition our lives, like the forces of nature which we must accept and make the best of it. That is the essence of their message. Capitalism must be accepted. Whether they are from the left or the right, their disagreements are minor compared to this common point of departure.

The reactions of the right and the left to Bettina’s suicide illustrate this point. Predictably, Germany’s conservative chancellor Angela Merkel condemned all forms of assisted suicide as “inhumane,” and the rest of the right agreed, all in the name of “the sanctity of life”, which in no way prevents them from imposing austerity measures which make life unbearable for so many, nor from waging war in Afghanistan or selling weapons around the world. Roger Kusch, the promoter of assisted suicide who helped Bettina to kill herself, received praise from the left side of the political spectrum. They defended his practice in the name of “the right to die in dignity”.

What about the right to live in dignity? The implicit assumption of Kusch’s defenders is that people like Bettina don’t have such a right; that the loneliness, alienation and poverty that is increasingly the fate of people who are unproductive for capital is unavoidable, so that the best that can be done for them is to assist them in making themselves disappear.
‘Assisted suicide’ is an apt metaphor for the role of the left as a whole at a moment in which global capitalism, compelled by its contradictions becomes increasingly destructive. There is too much capital that cannot be profitably invested and that includes ‘variable capital’, people. From the point of view of the needs of the accumulation process, it needs to be discarded. Capital needs the superfluous to commit suicide and the left stands ready to assist them so that they can destroy themselves “with dignity”. Capitalism’s crisis provokes massive unemployment which the bourgeois left accepts as unavoidable, but it wants the layoffs to occur “with dignity”. It accepts wars as unavoidable, but it wants them to be waged “with dignity”. And so on. The left is the proletariat’s suicide assistant.

Sander

Post-script: Two days after the article that inspired the lines above, The New York Times had more ‘suicide news’ on its front page: “Despair Drives Suicide Attacks By Iraq Women” (July 5). To say that in this case too the suicides are assisted, is an understatement. Here the role is carried out by Islamists, who promise Heaven to an exhausted depressed woman who means nothing to them. She is just one more cheap commodity to be consumed in the struggle for Islamic power. That is a struggle of a capital to make room for itself in a world already crowded with capitals and whose inner dynamic leads to an ever greater concentration of capital. The more the system’s tendency to breakdown becomes pronounced, the more cracks appear in the global order and the more sensible an investment violence becomes. While chasing only their narrow capitalistic power dream, the Islamic suicide assistants are loyal agents of capital as a whole which is bent on destruction to make room for itself.

Theses on State Capitalism vs. Real Socialism

The following article was sent to us by the Chicago Revolutionary Network for discussion

THESIS ON STATE CAPITALISM VS. REAL SOCIALISM (Expanded Version)

Dave, Diana and Perry of Chirvenet, December 23, 2007

The CENTRAL question for every “Revolution” is WHICH CLASS runs the major means of production and government. If the major means of production is run by a state bureaucracy, that’s STATE CAPITALISM. Of course, there are other forms of STATE CAPITALISM such as in Sweden (social welfare state), and the U.$.A. (social welfare and regulation of the class struggle – NLRB and Taft-Hartley Law). However, if the major means of production is run by the working class, then that’s REAL SOCIALISM! If the economy is based on money, wages, prices, profits and commodities, then that’s CAPITALISM. But if the economy is based on ‘FROM EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR ABILITY [and desire], TO EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR NEED [and wants]’ (Marx & Engels, ‘The Communist Manifesto’), that’s REAL SOCIALISM or communism! If there is a state, standing army, police, prisons, etc. then it is a CAPITALIST STATE. But if the voluntary government is of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers, then the government is REAL SOCIALIST! REAL SOCIALISM can only work if it is a GLOBAL ON-GOING REVOLUTION! As Gil Scott Heron said in ‘The Revolution will not be Televised,’ “the revolution WILL put you in the driver’s seat.”

Obviously, there are no contemporary examples of heroic working class attempts at real socialist revolution. But what about historically? Below we list several, including the key reason for their demise:

THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871 French workers seize control of Paris, abolish the State and institute communism economically, but don’t disarm the French ruling class, who, with the aid of the German army, create a bloodbath of Parisian workers. Marx adds to his theoretical arsenal the famous, or infamous, depending on your viewpoint, “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

THE RUSSIAN PROLETARIAN, OCTOBER REVLOUTION Under the false banner of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” Lenin et al shut down the revolutionary factory committee movement in favour of the trade unions, which they controlled , and the Bolshevik Party hijacked the revolutionary Soviets, leading to “the dictatorship of the party.” The last attempt at revolution by the Russian working class was the Kronstadt rebellion in the early 1920’s, which was drowned in blood by the so-called Red Army led by Trotsky and approved by Lenin. Stalin’s murderous State Capitalism followed and the rest, they say, is history.

THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION OF 1956. The Hungarian working class creates revolutionary worker councils that run production throughout the country, and essentially govern. The Russians invade Hungary with tanks etc., and put down the revolution militarily.

THE FRENCH WORKING CLASS GENERAL STRIKE AND MASS STUDENT REVOLT OF 1968. The “masses were in motion” so to speak, revolutionary motion, how empowering and exhilarating that must have been! But lacking the goal of Real Socialism to march forward, this revolutionary upsurge was co-opted through clever reforms by the French ruling class.

THE CHILEAN AGRICULTURAL WORTKERS EXPROPRIATION F OLANDOWNDERS IN 1973. Unfortunately, these revolutionary take-overs did not find a timely echo among the industrial workers, which resulted in the CIA-led fascist coup of General Pinochet against reformist President Allende, murdering Allende and thousands of revolutionary workers.

All we can do now is take revolutionary inspiration from the spontaneous revolutionary actions of these heroic revolutionary workers of our international class, and convey what REAL SOCIALISM means to our working class engaging in a revolutionary dialogue with other REVOLUTIONARIES and REVOLUTIONARY-MINDED WORKERS.

New issue of Internationalist Perspective

Internationalist Perspective 49 is now available.

The new issue contains the following articles:

May 68 to May 08

Elements for an understanding of the Class Struggle Today

Marxism and the Holocaust

Value Creation and the Crisis Today

Review: Communicating Vessels

May 1968 - May 2008

The following article was the basis of a presentation at a public meeting in Paris earlier this month.

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“It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us” (Walter Benjamin) “all is possible”, “the power of imagination”.

For the generation after the war, May 68 constituted the first “strong” signal of an immense hope.

All the structures of capitalist society seemed to be turned upside down, all social layers seemed prey to a bubbling over never before seen, all countries seemed affected by the change, and political consciousness seemed to link–up again with the roots of Marxism:

* The working class, in the first general strike since 1936 in France, in the hot autumn in Italy in 1970, contradicted the idea of the “disappearance” or “integration” of the proletariat; millions of strikers protested that a different world is possible, without advancing wage claims or claims based on a particular type employment; the worker’s in struggle confronted the trade unions, and self-organized their movements. The worker’s assemblies where everyone could speak served as a crucible for the decisions, including the dynamic of extension towards other factories; the rejection of the trade unions integrated into the State is visceral;

* The student movement, in France, in Italy, in Germany, in Belgium, in the United States, in Mexico disputed, on the political level, imperialism related to the struggles of “national liberation” (Vietnam War), racial discrimination (segregation of blacks in the United States), sexuality (development of feminism), and questioned the general orientation towards a standardized society and the penetration of the University for the needs of big business;

* The policy of the French Communist Party, the policy followed by the USSR (crushing the movement of revolt of Hungary, 1956) were firmly denounced, and a partial craze for the models of autarkic “socialism” ( Chinese, Albanian, Yugoslav, Algerian) developed;

* The rediscovery of the fundamental writings of Marxism, which had remained unknown or little published hitherto: “History and Class Consciousness” by Georg Lukács, the “Grundrisse”, and the “unpublished chapter of “Capital” by Marx; the interaction between students and thinkers and philosophical Marxists (Marcuse, Ernst Bloch) who had understood the historical potential of the events.

* There reigned an atmosphere of euphoria, “everything is possible”; the couple, the bourgeois family, parental authority, rigid education, were questioned; the generalization of contraception modified the attitude towards sexuality. The development of technologies initiated the appearance of the “consumer society”; one didn’t want to exchange the certainty of dying from hunger for that of dying of boredom!

Did May 68 announce the revolution? If not, why?

In ‘ 68, twenty years after the end of the Second World War, after reconstruction, capitalism was again confronted with economic crisis. According to a mechanistic Marxist vision, that crisis should have irremediably brought about a slackening in the growth of the productive forces, a rapid increase in unemployment, a generalized impoverishment of the proletariat, and thus an upswing of struggles. May ‘ 68, accordingly, was only one precursor of a teleological movement, which could only grow, towards revolution. Reality proved much more complex. May ‘ 68, which expressed “everything is possible”, was foreclosed again during the following years an iron grip which appears today even more difficult to shake.

Some will endeavor to sort the “good” from the “bad”, to separate the “purely worker’s” movement from the “student movement”, the “revolutionary struggle” from the “reformist struggle”. We will not do anything like that. The movements of May ‘ 68 were a global response of revolt in a still not yet revolutionary period. It is necessary for us to grasp the “not yet revolutionary” character of the period of ‘ 68 and the years ‘ 70, and to see how this period still expressed illusions of being able to escape from the increasing grip of capitalist technology, and on the imminent character of revolution. It is also necessary to grasp how capitalism transformed its economic, ideological, political, and ecological mode of domination since then, to understand how the conditions of a period and of revolutionary consciousness are maturing, and to give to a meaning, neither triumphalist, nor defeatist, to that gigantic warning signal which was ` 68.

The technological changes, including the digital revolution, allowed capitalism, within a context of crisis, to profoundly modify production, the employment of the working class, its living conditions, and the ideology related to these material conditions.

In ‘ 68, we still lived in a limited world, for all, where everything was scarce, expensive: cars, television, travel, higher education. Since then we have passed, in the industrialized countries, to a generalized, but apparent, abundance. The increase in productivity had as a consequence a reduction in production costs, therefore the production of cheaper goods allowing the reproduction of the labor power at cheaper price.

‘ 68 mark also the end of the Fordist period, based on the great proletarian concentrations (blue collar workers) in factories like FIAT Mirafiori or Renault Billancourt. If the working class could still count in the ‘ 60’s on its traditional bastions in the iron and steel industry, the mines, the assembly lines (automobile), since then, these concentrations have been largely dismantled in the central countries, whereas they developed on a scale even larger in the Asian countries. The proletariat, composed of those who have only the sale of their labor power to survive, finds itself in very different situations (short time, temporary employment, etc.). The reorganizations, the dislocations of companies, have destroyed the physical, geographical fabric of the Western proletariat, which must find other criteria to identify itself and to come together.

In ‘ 68, the wind of change seemed to blow from the periphery of capitalism, from the countries in struggle for their independence, against colonial domination or imperialism. The “revolutionary forces” of Vietnam, of China, of Cuba seemed, from their youth and their enthusiasm, to be able to shake the cover of the old world which had buried any inclination of revolt under the reconstruction after the war. Some Maoists Western intellectuals propagated their passion for the “cultural revolution” as living alternative to socialism of tanks and of the Soviet Un

In ‘68, the wind of change seemed to blow from the periphery of capitalism, from the countries in struggle for their independence, against colonial domination or imperialism. The “revolutionary forces” of Vietnam, of China, of Cuba seemed, from their youthfulness and their enthusiasm, to be able to shake the iron grip of the old world, which had buried any inclination to revolt under the reconstruction of the post-war period. Certain intellectual Western Maoists propagated their passion for the “Cultural revolution” as an alternative to the socialism of tanks and steel of the Soviet Union. Those who dared to openly criticize this capitalist, brutal, totalitarian, terror campaign, which counted its victims in the tens of millions, such as Charles Reeves (“The Paper Tiger”, Editions Spartacus, 1971), or Simon Leys (“Chronic of the Cultural revolution”, written from 1967 to 1969) were a tiny minority. Twenty years after, in 1989, in front of all the cameras of the world, the massacres of the Tianmen Square (testified to the true nature of “Chinese communism”: that of a “government which declares war against its own people and launches an army of murderers against a disarmed and peaceful crowd in its capital” (S. Leys, Préface of 1989 with the “Tests on China”, Editions Books, p. 3). The invasion of Cambodia by its Vietnamese rival, in 1978, put an end to the atrocities of the “Khmer Rouge” of Pol Pot and left the country drained of blood, prey to devastation equivalent to that of some of the temples of Angkor Wat. Today, the confrontations in Tibet show the persistence of the Chinese regime: its use of the most brutal violence to preserve the totality of its political power.

‘68 also saw the emergence of ecology, and the political “Green” parties. Rudi Dutschke and Daniel Cohn Bendit are emblematic figures of this concern for the state of the world. Forty years later, the hope to save the planet from ecological catastrophe has considerably diminished. Ecology, as a political ideology, has been recuperated for purely commercial goals, by becoming the source of new markets for “green” products. Ecology is even used in the inter-impérialist struggle. The motivation for the production of bio-fuels is not so much the rescue of the planet, but the liberation of the United States and Europe from the influence of imported fossil fuels. The indifference related to the effects of this production on the emergence of new imbalances in the production of the food and the increase in the suffering of an ever-larger part of the world’s population, can only shock us. “When one launches, in the United States, thanks to 6 billion dollars in subsidies, a policy of bio-fuels which drains 138 million tons of corn out of the food market, one provides the bases for a crime against humanity to serve its own thirst for fuel (…) and when the European Union decides to raise the share of bio-fuels to 10% in 2020, it shifts the burden onto small African farming communities…” (Jean Ziegler, advisor to the UN on food, April 14, 2008).

Mai’ 68 saw a challenge to the representative institutions of bourgeois ideology, the Church, marriage, standardized education, the democratic lack of participation in the universities. The student revolts against the Vietnam War constituted an attempt to reverse the depoliticization of public life in advanced capitalist society. Post-68 society is no longer governed by an ideology “coherent in itself”, perhaps because this was replaced more and more by a “falsification of activity” (Gunther Anders): rationalized work goes beyond our imagination, we do not see or we do not know what we do. Our political thought is skillfully controlled thanks to a systematic and organized work of propaganda, just as any other sector of production. The control of opinion, the foundation of any government, the most despotic along with the most free, “is infinitely more important in “free” societies, where one cannot maintain obedience by the whip” (Noam Chomsky, Dominate the world or save planet, ED. 10/18, p, 15).

Lesson of May 68: the loss of the illusions

Over the past 40 years, the following lessons can be drawn from this rich historical period, which constituted May 68:

* The question of the material and intellectual agents of the upheaval. Although student combativeness was in the foreground in ‘ 68, the students remained impotent to change the world. What “was lacking”, and which “is still lacking” today, is the emergence of the proletariat as a revolutionary collective worker;

* The absence of any “substitute” in the struggle against advanced capitalism. Contrary to the theories of “displacement of the conflicts in advanced capitalist society”, on the bond between a student movement in the metropoles and “liberation” struggles in the Third World, the proletariat, as revolutionary collective worker, must confront capitalism, and the law of the value, in the most developed countries.

* The “the liberation from taboos” as regards sexuality, equality between women and men, the access to education, did not mean a “liberation of human potential”, but went hand in hand with the perpetuation of a repressive society while making it possible for capitalism to extend the law of the value to then still unoccupied domains of social life: the commodification of the emotional and relational aspects of life.

* The inadequacy of the equation between industrialization, unlimited technological development, and communism. As the theorists of the Frankfurt School gleaned, the unlimited technological development which has characterized the production of value during the twentieth century went hand in hand with the subjugation of humankind: “the encasement of man within a fixed and ossified universe by commodities of comfort and well-being, increasingly accessible to the members of advanced industrial society and especially constantly increasing, occurred at the expense of another human dimension: possibility (…) According to the principle of a negative dialectic, the techniques of industrialization, supposed to liberate men from alienated work and struggle against scarcity, condemn them even more to the antiquated anathema consisting of earning their living, of struggling to survive. Today still, the most elementary needs (food, housing, clothing) are not satisfied except in exchange for the submission of labor to the production of value, to the point of rendering superfluous the greatest part of humanity, no longer necessary to fulfill that exploitation ” (F Ollier, Foreword: “Marcuse or the Combative Dialectic,” Critical Horizon, 2007, p. 18-19)

A different world is possible

Forty years after May ‘ 68, the idea of “possibility” is still, indeed increasingly, on the agenda. The proletariat, far from having disappeared, has expanded. The past four decades were also characterized by a massive loss of illusions in the future of the Third World countries, in the possibility of liberation for the human condition under capitalism, in the unlimited development of technology and consumer goods. How the collective worker will be able to oppose the law of the value, to pass from the “subject of work” to the “subject of freedom”, to save itself and escape from the death of the world, remains still indecipherable. But that path becomes increasingly necessary. The “possibility” announced by May ‘ 68 remains to be created.

Profit Still Kills

Profit Still Kills

The following article “Profit Kills” was published in 2000 by Internationalist Perspective. In light of the recent cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquakes in China, it seemed timely to republish it. Albert Einstein is reported to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It seems amazing to many that these “disasters” take place with such frequency; yet, despite these seeming natural disasters, an all to human side emerges. According to local reports from China the building that collapsed were known locally as tofu buildings, because of their softness. Contractors and corrupt party officials cut corners and diverted funds into their own pockets leading to results that could surprise no one. The Chinese media will ask questions. Trials will take place. Local party leaders and businessmen will receive death penalties for cheating the people. Will the practice change? Unlikely. From China to Canada and everywhere in between, destruction is built into the heart of the capitalist system. It will only end with the death of the system.

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The engineer was interviewed amidst the rubble of the earthquake in Turkey. “How many of these buildings would still be standing if the proper materials would have been used in their construction?” the TV reporter asked. “All of them”, the engineer answered with a tired voice, “all of them”. Thousands were killed in Turkey and hundreds of thousands made homeless, not by an earthquake but by profit. The purpose of building houses in this society is not to shelter people. It is to make profit. If this can be done by providing people with a sturdy home, fine. If not, the cheapest materials are used to knock together houses that are doomed to crumble when the earth moves in Turkey or Taiwan, when a hurricane hits Florida or when rivers overflow in Mexico or China. The builders plead innocence. If they followed proper procedures, they say, their rates of profit would be so low that investors would shun them, and they could build no more houses and millions more would have to live in shanty towns. Would that be any worse?

The purpose of producing medicine is not to fight disease either. When, earlier this year, South-Africa started to make cheap medicine to slow the AIDS epidemic which had infected millions of South Africans and killed millions there and in neighboring countries, the entire pharmaceutical industry of the US rose in protest and the Clinton administration threatened economic sanctions. No matter that people are dying like flies because they can’t afford the prices which the pharmaceutical multinationals are charging, intellectual property rights were infringed! If this became a common practice, so these companies say, they would be greatly discouraged from investing in the development of new medicines, and diseases would spread. Would that be any worse?

Similar examples of the crazy dilemmas which capitalism is imposing on society can be found in any sector of economic activity. The purpose of agriculture is certainly not to feed the hungry. Otherwise, how can it be explained that the most productive countries are sitting on mountains of agricultural surpluses, and are paying farmers not to farm, while each year 30 million people die of hunger and hundreds of millions suffer malnutrition?
And so on, and so on. Producing for profit, the basic rule of our society, has become truly absurd, completely irrational. To hide this absurdity has become the prime function of all mass media and assorted ideologies. In the US, where this article happens to be written, it has become customary, even on the left, to characterize the present state of the economy as ‘good times’, while in fact statistics of the Congressional Budget Office show that, for the majority of Americans, net income has shrunk considerably since 1977 and homelessness and hunger have risen. Only through the window of the ruling class are we allowed to look at the world.

Profit kills. That is nothing new. It always has, throughout capitalism’s history. Not because capitalism is blood-thirsty per se, but because, when faced with a choice between profit and other considerations, it doesn’t hesitate. Nothing is more fundamental to this society than the drive for profit. That doesn’t make us nostalgic for pre-capitalist days. For centuries, the drive for profit was also a creative force, unleashing a tremendous growth in productivity and human development, freeing mankind from the inevitability of scarcity and all its implications. Even in human thought, capitalism brought “enlightenment”, the establishment of the rational progress of humanity as a conscious goal for society. The slogans “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” or “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” were never to be taken too literally and always were subordinate to the preservation of profit, but still they represented a giant step forward.

Then came the bloody turning point of 1914. Just as capitalism had enlisted all social forces in production, it now enlisted them all in destruction. The purpose remained the same: profit. More then three quarters of the war fatalities of the last 500 years have occurred since 1914. And the number grows every day, in the Balkans, in Timor, in Ethiopia, in Chechnya to name but the most recent slaughterhouses…

Something had changed drastically in the early part of this century. Through the development of science and technology and their generalized application in production, capitalism had created a system of mass production, capable of eradicating scarcity. Yet capitalism was born out of scarcity and cannot function without it. Its absence, in a capitalist context, does not mean abundance but overproduction. Because the market mechanism is based on measuring the exchange value of commodities by the social labor time that is required for their production, global demand, purchasing power, can grow only to the degree that more labor time is expended in production. Yet the growth of supply was now no longer based so much on adding more labor-power as on subtracting it, replacing it with technology. This fundamental, insoluble contradiction between supply and demand, between the creation of real wealth and the creation of capitalist exchange-value, became a deadly threat to what capitalism is all about: profit.

The preservation of profit now required a steep loss in the exchange value of all that is traded, a drastic cheapening of capital and labor power. That’s why the decadent phase of capitalism is so destructive: the greater the contradiction, the more value must disappear to make newly created value more profitable, so as to rekindle the flame of production.
Contrary to what some expected, this new phase did not spell the end of capitalism’s development. Devalorization made room for new growth, reorganization and technological progress extended capitalism’s scale and reach, which alleviated its contradictions. But these contradictions continued to build up subterraneanly, again forcing massive devalorization, violent destruction.

Today, capitalism’s potential for extension is nearly exhausted. The global assembly line is humming but precisely because it is so productive, there’s ever less room on it. Only the strongest competitors can maintain a relative prosperity, but even for them there are ominous signs as more and more capital shuns productive investment to seek refuge in financial assets, building up a bubble that is doomed to burst. The fact that a third of the global workforce, more than a billion people, cannot find work testifies to the degree to which global production is blocked by dwindling profits. More and more, the preservation of profits requires cutting corners, lowering production costs through any means possible, even when this means devastating the environment, subjecting workers to unbearable living and working conditions, or sacrificing quality, regardless of the consequences for the safety of consumers, as crumbled buildings in Turkey and dioxin-laden chickens in Belgium illustrate. In more and more places, the shrinkage of profits invite violence, corruption, and mafia practices. In the weakest, least cohesive countries, states are fracturing as different segments of the dominant class fight each other over the shrinking pie. Or else the state tries to defend its cohesion by creating, with genocidal rhetoric, a hated common enemy, a scapegoat minority. Capitalism’s own crisis provides the instruments for these battles in the form of millions of uprooted people, many of them young men who were never integrated into a working life and are vulnerable to the erotic seduction of an anything-goes culture of violence. Meanwhile, the stronger countries try to contain the rot where it threatens their own profits by intervening militarily, advancing their own particular interests against their rivals at the same time.

Left unchecked, this destructive dynamic will gather steam and engulf the world in a new holocaust. Not a replay of World War II, not one giant nuclear holocaust (although that danger can’t be discounted forever) but one in which bloody conflicts multiply and combine into an unprecedented orgy of self-destruction. Some of this is explored in this issue of IP. The alternative to this grim perspective is at the same time very simple and enormously complex: to produce for human needs instead of for profit. Technically, this is more possible than ever. The fast development of information and communication technology has made it a lot easier. There is no doubt that it is feasible to create abundance in regard to the basic needs of all humans, and not just the basic needs, and to organize production so that all able-bodied people can work and there is a lot of free time for everyone — and to find in the exploration of that leisure-time itself an endless source of creative activity. Of work, you might say, although it’s not imaginable that ‘work’ would still resemble what it is today, when the elimination of drudgery becomes the conscious goal of society.

But what this requires above all is the conscious will of humanity to make it real, to organize and control this revolution. We believe that this can only be forged in struggle, in revolt against the class whose existence depends on the perpetuation of the absurdity of production for profit. Only the autonomous struggle of the working class, the great majority of society whose work makes the wheels of the world economy turn and whose will can stop them and change their direction, provides this hope. But the working class cannot realize its potential until it puts itself in the picture. To see what it can do, it must see itself.

We revolutionaries are here and must come together to tear away the curtains of ideology that hide the absurdity and truly horrendous perspective of continued capitalist rule, and to hold a mirror to the proletariat: see clearly, see the danger, see yourself, see your power. Recognize the necessity and the possibility. They’re here. Now.

IP introductory statement

The following is the statement which appears on the back cover of each issue of our magazine.

Internationalist Perspective is a publication defending Marxism as a living theory, one that can go back to its sources, criticize them, and develop hand in hand with the historical social trajectory. As such, if Internationalist Perspective bases itself on the theoretical accomplishments of the Communist Left, IP believes that its principal task is to go beyond the weaknesses and the insufficiencies of the Communist Left through an effort of incessant theoretical development. IP does not believe that that is its task alone, but rather that it can only be accomplished through debate and discussion with all revolutionaries. That vision conditions the clarity of its contribution to the struggle and to the development of the class consciousness of the proletariat. IP does not aim to bring to the class a finished political program, but rather to participate in the general process of clarification that unfolds within the working class.

Capitalism is a transient product of history, not its end. It came into being in response to conditions that no longer exist: inevitable scarcity, labor power being the only source of social wealth. Capitalism turned labor power into a commodity to appropriate the difference between its value and the value it creates. For centuries, this hunt for surplus value allowed for a relative harmony between the development of society and capitalist accumulation. Then it gave birth to a new production process, the real domination of capital, in which no longer labor power but the machine stands at the center of production. Science and technology, set in motion and regulated by the collective worker, became the primary source of the creation of social wealth. The giant productivity this unleashed, allowed capitalism to grow both inwards and outwards. It spread over the entire planet and absorbed all spheres of society –including the trade unions and mass parties that arose from the struggle of the working class.

Scarcity was now no longer inevitable, but instead of freeing humanity from want, it condemned capitalism to overproduction. Wealth-creation was no longer dependent on the exploitation of labor power but this plunged capitalism, imprisoned by the law of value, into a crisis of profit. These obstacles to accumulation force capitalism to increase the exploitation of labor and to create room for new expansion through self-destruction, through massive devalorization in depression and war. Capitalism entered its decadent phase when such cannibalistic destruction became part of its accumulation cycle. It is decadent, not because it doesn’t grow – it has developed tremendously and profoundly modified the composition of social classes and the conditions in which they struggle in the process — but because this growth, in its rapacious hunt for profit, became itself destructive. It is decadent, because it is forced to hurl billions into unemployment and poverty because it cannot squeeze profit from them; by the very productivity that could meet all needs. It is decadent, because its need for devalorization impels it to war and unceasing violence. Capitalism cannot be reformed; it cannot be humanized. Fighting within the system is illusory: capitalism must be destroyed.

Capitalism is also decadent because it has generated the conditions for its own replacement by a new society. Science and technology, yoked to the operation of the law of value, and its quantification of the whole of life, are not liberating in themselves. But the working class who sets it in motion, is by its very condition within capitalism impelled to free itself from the alienation that capitalism, as a social relation, subjects it to, and is, therefore, the bearer of the project of a society freed from the law of value, money, and the division of society into classes. Such a project has never before existed in history. If the Russian revolution was a proletarian one, it did not result in the emergence of a communist society. The so-called “communism” of the former Eastern bloc, like that of China or Cuba, was nothing other than a manifestation of state capitalism. Indeed, the emergence on an historical scale of a new society can only be realized by the total negation of capitalism, and by the abolition of the laws that regulate the movement of capital. Such a new society entails a profound transformation in the relation of humans to themselves and to each other, of the individual to production, to consumption, and to nature; it entails a human community at the service of the expansion and satisfaction of all human needs.

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Internationalist Perspective is a pro-revolutionary organization which publishes a journal of the same name twice a year in English and French. We hope that this blog will be the start of fruitful discussions.

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I.P.