Internationalist Perspective

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unknown or little published hitherto: “History and Class Consciousness” by Georg Lukács, the “Grundrisse”, and the “unpublished chapter of “Capital” by Marx; the interaction between students and thinkers and philosophical Marxists (Marcuse, Ernst Bloch) who had understood the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