A SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE ON THE IRAQ WAR, PART ONE
BOB NOWLAN
Presented at the April 15, 2003 Iraq War
Teach-In Organized and Conducted
by Eau Claire Staff and Faculty for Peace and Justice
(Part Two Prepared and Presented by Professor Stacy R. Thompson)
Socialists unite with the majority of the world’s population,
and the rest of the global left, in condemning the U.S. War versus Iraq
as unnecessary, illegal, and unjust. At the same time, socialists
shed no tears for the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime,
firmly rejecting the claim by his Baath Party that these people have been
“socialists” to be not only absurd but in fact obscene – an appalling slander
against socialists and socialism of all kinds. Now, however, that this
regime has collapsed, and the initial military conquest of Iraq is completed,
a socialist critique of the actual motives and logical consequences of this
latter action becomes all the more urgent, especially because socialists
agree that the United States represents the principal rogue state and the
greatest threat to world peace due not only to its enormous military power
but also its repeated willingness to use this, demonstrated again and again
over the course of the past 110 years now, by forcibly intervening within
foreign nations, and especially their economies, to insure these countries
become, and remain, subject to U.S.-based capitalist hegemony.
What distinguishes socialist approaches toward making
sense of this current Iraq war from other leftist critiques are thus the
ultimate contexts within which, as well as the fundamental perspectives from
which, we do so. Socialists argue that the Iraq War must be understood
as an imperialist war launched by the most powerful capitalist state in the
world today, the U.S. state, to advance capitalist interests; it indeed makes
logical sense to us as a necessary response, from the vantage point of capital,
to the current as well as the perpetually ongoing crisis, indeed to the fundamental
contradictions, of capitalism itself. This war serves the interest
of capital in class struggle with the working class both at home in the United
States, and abroad, not just in Iraq and the Middle East but also around
the world–in fact it represents a significant offensive action on the part
of capital in this struggle. In addition, the Iraq War also represents
a powerful offensive on the part of primarily U.S.-based capitalists interests
versus capitalist interests based primarily in Western Europe and East Asia.
U.S.-based capital seeks to maintain principal control and reap the primary
benefits from the continuing, and especially forthcoming, exploitation of
the natural and human resources of Iraq, as well as throughout potentially
much of the surrounding Middle East region. Most immediately, not
only profits from oil but also from material contributions to the massive
task of rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq as well as arranging employment
for Iraqi labor will greatly benefit primarily U.S. capitalist interests.
In effect, even if the U.S. does not remain directly in political and military
control of Iraq, it will set up a puppet regime that means Iraqis will,
in effect, work for American-based multinational capitalists, and American-dominated
transnational capitalist interests and institutions will, likewise, in effect,
own Iraq.
At home, in the United States, continuing sizeable expansions
of military, security, and intelligence expenditures will benefit capitalists
catering to these needs while the substantial reduction, across all levels
of government, of payment for social services combined with continuing,
and ever-increasing, tax breaks and other varieties of corporate welfare
for the rich, will continue to transfer more and more money from the vast
majority of the population to a 1% minority that already clearly owns over
40% and a 5% minority that already effectively controls 95% of this nation’s
social wealth. Likewise, the successful mobilization of the majority
of the American working class to identify their fundamental interests with
that of American capital, as represented by the American state, means that
social antagonism and disaffection caused by the continuing relative decline
in working class standard of living and control of social production will
increase tendencies for workers to blame each other for this state of affairs,
leading to increasing fracturing of the American working class along all-too-sadly
predictable lines, such as those of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality,
region and subculture, service and industry, occupation and profession –
not to mention also increasing tendencies to undermine working class unity
and solidarity across international lines. As a result of this
division, opposition to increased exploitation of U.S. labor will tend to
weaken, allowing capital more easily to conquer in the constantly ongoing
class struggle between labor and capital inherent in capitalist society.
When capital inaugurates a major offensive, by means
of its state, to expand its control over means of production, to increase
the size and rate of its exploitation of labor, and to enhance its control
over the accumulation of social wealth, this means that capital is responding
to a crisis in its ability to maintain its average rate of profit, and,
as a result, it is pursuing new–and renewed–avenues that will allow it to
compensate for this decline. Many are familiar with the fact that
Lenin famously described imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism,”
but do not know, or recall, that he also suggested, at the same time, that
this was an essentially “moribund” capitalism, a capitalism that had begun
to globalize its ultimately unresolvable contradictions, and its recurrent
tendency toward massively destructive crises, especially appallingly in the
direction of anarchic overproduction (production of goods and services
in kinds and numbers that cannot not be sold at a satisfactory price to profit
the capitalists who control their production and provision). Once capitalism
entered the imperialist stage, its progressive contribution to the world
historical progress of human culture and civilization began to fall short
of its stifling and reactionary constraint upon this development.
Capitalism is in fact no longer absolutely historically
necessary, and has not been for close to one hundred years now; however,
like past dominant modes of social production, such as feudalism, it may
well take several centuries for it to pass away before a new dominant
mode of social production takes its place. One of the most telling
indictments of global capitalism today is the huge disparity in social wealth
across the globe, and especially the enormous number of the world’s people
who live severely impoverished lives–of hunger, disease, and slave-labor
or destitution–at the same time as the richest of the world’s people amass
enormous amounts of wealth under their control. In the United
States, the fact that Bill Gates alone personally owns more than the bottom
45 % of the American population points to the extent to which this imbalance
shows up even in this, supposedly, one of the world’s “richest” countries.
Likewise, the fact that the U.S. military budget itself exceeds the combined
total of all of the rest of the military budgets of all of the rest of the
world’s nations, and that this budget alone exceeds the gross national product
of the world’s poorest nations in Africa, Central and South America, and
Asia proves a telling indictment of this global system. Furthermore,
virtually all governments across the globe, as well as the vast majority
of individuals throughout all of these countries, maintain combined huge
debts to an ultimately very small core of super-powerful finance capitalists.
The system is clearly out of whack, and these are just a few signs of it.
Perhaps even more telling than what I have just mentioned is that the vast
majority of the world’s wealth remains unavailable for direct expenditure
on collectively decided, genuinely real social needs, as the capitalists
who control this wealth will only invest in the creation and provision of
use values where the exchange value of doing so can enable them not only
to achieve a profit and to enrich their accumulation but also to enhance
their power in competition with each other. At the same time, the World
Trade Organization continues to maintain the authority to prevent people
locally, regionally, or nationally from passing virtually any law that might
interfere with capitalist profit by reducing capitalists’ percentage share
through such costs as minimum, not to mention living, wages, occupational
health and safety protection standards, pollution controls and environmental
clean-up responsibilities, consumer labeling and right of legal redress,
guaranteed pensions and retirement benefits, along with the right to unionize,
the right to collectively bargain, and, as need be, the right to strike.
Capitalism begins with competition among many capitals.
As a result of the victories and defeats this competition brings about,
capitalist competition leads, ironically yet logically enough, to concentration
of capital which leads in turn to centralization of capital which leads
to the formation of monopolies which leads in turn to imperialism.
Imperialism refers to capitalism that has reached the stage of development
in which capital expands beyond national boundaries; the home nation now
provides markets for commodity exports and investment of capital that prove
insufficient to satisfy the needs of large monopoly capitalists. Under
imperialism, capitalist production and circulation begin to become transnational
and the world as a totality becomes subject to the needs of capital, supported
by the power of the imperialist state. The imperialist state conquers and
maintains conquest of markets for export of finished goods, sources of raw
materials and supplies to be used in capitalist production, markets for investment
of excess capital, and sources for cheaper production that make use of cheaper
labor and are largely freed of the environmental, health and safety, and
tax restrictions faced in the “metropolitan” nations from which imperialist
capital originates.
The needs of—and the competition among—imperialist monopoly
capitals provides the ultimate framework for understanding all wars fought
by the capitalist nations of the First World ever since the latter half
of the nineteenth century. In the case of the United States, this
includes the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II, the Korean
and Vietnamese Wars, the Iraq War, and over 100 other uses of military force
by the United States government in the nations of the Third World, primarily
in Central and South America, since the end of the 19th century.
Nominal political independence did not free the nations
of the Third World from domination by First World, imperialist monopoly
capital. Imperialist capital continues to own and thereby control much of
the production in these now formally independent nations while supplying
the financial means of operating both domestic-based production as well
as local government in these nations. This financial “support” is extremely
costly for the people of these Third World nations. Not only is money
loaned out to Third World industry and government at exorbitant rates of
interest, making repayment extremely difficult and forcing the Third World
nation to transfer a great proportion of all wealth generated within its
borders for decades to come to First World financial capital, but also this
money is only loaned on draconian terms that usually require the economy
of the Third World nation be restructured so as to provide an easier and
more profitable location for further imperialist exploitation, including
subjecting the people of the Third World nation to a program of “austerity”
that causes the vast majority to experience terrible pain and hardship.
"Financial assistance” from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank,
and other First World capitals and capitalist institutions ostensibly designed
to assist in the “development” of the Third World quite rightly have long
been identified with development of Third World “underdevelopment”—with development
that serves to enhance the profit of imperialist capital while simultaneously
maintaining and even extending poverty within the Third World as well as
the dependence of the Third World upon the First.
Under neo-imperialist conditions, in which imperialist
monopoly First World capital towers over indigenous Third World capital,
often swallowing this indigenous capital up entirely and making it a subsidiary
and complementary part of First World capital’s transnational field of operation,
Third World governments must continue to cater to the needs and wants of
imperialist capital, and those of their chief political and military agent,
the imperialist state; if they refuse to do, they generally suffer dire consequences.
The fate of attempts to develop diverse kinds of semi- autonomous national
economies in Chile under Allende, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and Iraq
under Saddam Hussein all testify to the costs of not playing by the rules
set by imperialism and agreeing to act at the virtual beck and call of imperialist
masters. The Kuwaiti state, supposedly saved by imperialist forces
in 1991, is a perfect example of a state that has accepted its place and
in so doing has become a good and useful servant of imperialism: Kuwait has
long invested its profits where they have been needed in the United States
and Britain—rather than in the Arab world—and has routinely agreed to adjust
the price of its oil to suit the interests and needs of First World capital.
Yet, once again, and even more so than in the first
Iraq War of 1991, the fact that the United States has felt the need to make
use of massive military force, at huge expense, in the time of a serious
national and global economic crisis, against a nation, a government, and
a regime that for decades was a U.S. ally and long received a significant
amount of U.S. aid, makes it clear that, once again, just as in 1991, this
war is a war not one of triumphant imperialism but rather one of desperate
imperialism. The fact that the limited autonomy of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi
regime could not be allowed to interfere with the need for total subservience
by the Persian Gulf states to imperialist interests indicates that First
World, transnational capital is now so pressed by the stagnation and decline
in the average rate of profit —and by the current global economic crisis—that
it cannot afford to lose any important avenue for profit from the Third
World at this time and that, furthermore, a deepening of current imperialist
exploitation of the Third World has become necessary, to the point where
the U.S. seems at least on the verge of returning from neo-colonialism to
full-fledged colonialism.
In a period of stagnation and decline
in capitalist profit—and each successive long wave of stagnation and decline
in the history of capitalism becomes even more difficult and costly for
capital to overcome—capital must intensify its assault on labor, on social
welfare, on Third World colonies and neo-colonies, and on non- (pre-, semi-,
and post-) capitalist production to compensate for its loss in profit.
At the same time, inter-capitalist competition becomes even more ruthless.
In the age of late capitalism, during which transnational capitals dominate
over smaller capitals that compete with each other for the most part within
national industries, this inter-capitalist competition increasingly takes
the form of inter-imperialist rivalry among transnational regional blocs,
today American, European, and East Asian.
In the age of late capitalism, the Third World is no
longer principally simply a supplier of raw materials and supplies to the
First World and an additional site for export of finished goods and investment
of excess capital; the Third World has also become increasingly the primary
location for the production of goods in labor-intensive industries dominated
by transnational capital. Today, transnational industrial capital
operates a global factory in which production of a single product can be
easily divided into multiple separate stages carried out across many different
nations and moved rapidly from one nation to the next in the constant search
to reduce the cost of production to the lowest possible amount: an urgent
necessity for capital that has grown so huge, producing so much and so rapidly,
that it becomes increasingly difficult for capital to realize and maintain
continuing high levels of profit—to sell all it produces at or above the
price of production. The emergence of this global factory over the
past thirty to forty years has contributed to a growing full-scale industrial
development of much of the Third World and to the proletarianization of an
increasingly large percentage of the population of the Third World.
And yet, once again, this is Third World labor subject—now even more subject—to
First World command and control.
At the same time, the struggle and competition for profits
in a period in which this becomes increasingly difficult and all kinds of
other avenues have been pushed to the breaking point—intensified imperialist
exploitation and intensified superexploitation of the various proletarian
substrata whose labor is effectively devalued due to their lower social
status; vast assistance from the state in the form of loans, tax breaks
and credits, public works programs and a renewed permanent arms–and intelligence
and security–economy; the invention of a whole new set of markets in the
new post-World War II “consumer society” and the acceleration of brand differentiation
and of planned obsolescence; permanent inflation, the extension of government
deficits and of industrial and consumer credit, the increasing turn-over
time required to transform surplus value into profit along with the greater
proportion of labor involved in the realization as opposed the direct production
of surplus value, at least within the First World, etc.—has meant that capital
increasingly cannot tolerate sectors of the global economy even partially
isolated from and limitedly subject to capitalist control.
Because the Iraq War ultimately responds to the logic
of capitalism, and fundamentally serves capitalist interests, socialists
propose that the only ultimately effective way to respond to this initiative
is to build an international revolutionary socialist mass movement that will
prove capable of usurping power from capital and transforming capitalism
into socialism–and to do so, of necessity, on a global scale. Protest
and reform can contribute usefully toward this ultimate objective, but they
will always prove insufficient in stopping, let alone preventing, the continual
recurrence and future resurgence of imperialist war. We believe that
movements of protest and reform can provide the vital initial conditions
of possibility as well as forces of generation for the necessary revolutionary
socialist movement, so we fully support and encourage these, as socialists
believe that socialism represents the revolutionary movement of self-emancipation
of the international working class, but we also believe that it is necessary
to engage in these movements with a consciousness of the need to push yet
further beyond this stage, to seize control and take charge ourselves of
what we are fighting against. We also believe that the struggle requires
a continuously ongoing effort, as well as a form of organization, to maintain
the forward movement from one temporal instance and/or spatial location to
another.
Capitalism provides primarily highly alienated kinds
of freedom for the vast majority of its population–this is a freedom largely
defined, in practice, as a “freedom from” or a “freedom against” others
rather than as a “freedom with” and a “freedom for” others.
Few decisions in social life under capitalism, moreover, are actually carried
out according to genuinely, substantially democratic mechanisms, and those
in fact cited as the hallmarks of our democracy–e.g., voting for official
elected “representatives” in government–only disguise the extent to which
plutocracy and autocracy perpetually trump democracy in the formation and
constitution of capitalist governments as well as in the ways and the directions
these governments proceed to carry out the social responsibility of the state
to manage and contain class divisions and antagonisms within the larger society.
The fundamental responsibility of the capitalist state is to insure law and
order so that business as usual will prevail; this means the state’s ultimate
function is to insure the reproduction of the general conditions of production
necessary for the exploitative expropriation of surplus value from surplus
labor by capital, the subsequent realization by capital of this surplus value
as profit, and the further accumulation of this profit by capital as wealth
that it privately owns and privately controls. The state also assists
in making sure that capital maintains effective monopoly control over the
means and processes of social production as well as by assuming a privileged
role in the reproduction of qualified labor power and of compliant laborers.
The vast majority of the population living under capitalism enjoys its greatest
real economic freedom in fact only insofar as it is able to sell its labor-power
to capital so that capital can in turn exploit this labor to satisfy its
own private interests and needs. The capitalist economy is intrinsically
anti-democratic, and the freedoms available to those engaged within practices
of capitalist production, consumption, distribution, exchange, and reproduction
differ fundamentally in terms not simply of relative market power but, even
greater than this, of relative class position. Only, in fact, under
socialism and especially under communism, will the great majority of humanity
be able to enjoy a social life actually permeated with freedom and driven
by democracy.
The absolute prerequisite for the creation of a realm
of genuine freedom is the minimization of time spent providing for the fundamental
or primary necessities of life. Only when these needs have been met
for all individuals can every individual develop a full and rich individuality.
The struggle to create a communist society is most immediately a struggle
to provide for these needs on a global scale so that the material foundation
is laid for a global federation of egalitarian and democratically self-managed
communities in which, as Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto,
"the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all." With the subordination of the forces of production
to the conscious direction of the associated producers, the conditions of
alienation that characterize social relations under capitalism would begin
to wither away and with this a clearer understanding of the real relationship
between human labor and its products would emerge: the fact that labor represents
the fundamental, initial exercise of human creative power, and the foundation
for the development of a human culture that develops out of and extends
beyond what nature itself provides. For the first time in history
human beings would be able to direct and design their destiny in a comprehensive
and rational fashion.
Genuine freedom is in fact more than merely the opposite
of necessity–more than simply freedom from necessity. Only a communist
society in which the ownership and control of the forces of social production
are subordinated to the general will and conscious plan of the whole of
society will it be possible not only to minimize the time spent providing
for basic needs and create a space for human associations freed from the
constraints of economic necessity, but also to make available to all the
possibility of an extensive experience of as well as participation in a realm
of genuine freedom: a realm of genuine free play and free creation, of self-direction
and self-control of one's own activity in remaking and transforming nature,
culture, and oneself. Within capitalism, as in all other forms of
class society, the enjoyment of free time is limited not only by the level
and pace of development of the productive forces of society but also by narrow
minority control of these productive forces, and use of this control against
the interests of the vast majority. The freedom to develop and cultivate
a richly fulfilling, multi-dimensional cultural experience, that human beings
create and re-create of, for, and by themselves, is therefore largely limited
under capitalism to those who direct and control the means of social production:
the ruling class (although greater or lesser "scraps" are granted to allies
in intermediary classes and strata to buy them off). Socialism
prepares the way for communism; communism ultimately requires the emergence
and development of a new modes of subjectivity, that is new ways of conceiving,
defining, and practicing relations between self and other, individual and
community, and community and society. Socialism transforms capitalism
human nature into communist human nature.
For Marxists, an objective socio-economic crisis of
the capitalist mode of production, and the capitalist social order that
this mode of production founds, is a necessary but not sufficient condition
for socialist revolution and transformation. In short, while Marxists
do not believe that socialism can be achieved simply at any time and place
a group of people seek to will it into being, as Marxists believe socialism
must develop at the point where the contradictions of capitalism can more
readily and easily be resolved through transformation and supersession than
restoration and dissolution, Marxists do not believe that capitalism can
or will inevitably fall all by itself. It is crucial therefore
to focus considerable energy not only to the development of the objective
conditions of possibility for socialism but also the subjective means sufficient
actually to take advantage of what these objective conditions make possible.
In other words, the possibility of successful socialist revolution depends
upon the development of organization and consciousness among the exploited
sufficient to take advantage of the objective contradictions of capitalism
at points of objective crisis for the accumulation of capital–and to do this
in order to push "crisis" towards revolution.
We live at a time in which global capitalism, as aforementioned,
despite its apparently triumphal domination, suffers from deep-seated, ever-growing,
and in fact ultimately unresolvable crisis. The prospective return
from neo-colonialism to a virtually direct colonialism in Iraq, as well as
potentially elsewhere beyond Iraq in the immediate years to come, along with
the mobilization of this nation’s military and security forces, as well as
media and public consciousness, in a state of virtually perpetual fear, and
prospectively constant war footing, results ultimately from weakness, even
desperation, rather than any of this manifesting the essential strength and
stability of the capitalist social system. Likewise, the political
and ideological use of the neo-conservative war on terrorism to displace
and disintegrate the worldwide anti-capitalist movement mobilized in opposition
to neo-liberal capitalist globalization has in fact only succeeded in helping
foster the emergence of a potentially much larger, ultimately even more threatening–to
capital–global peace and justice movement. We believe that it is from
this new global movement that a proletarian vanguard must emerge, develop,
and work inside of the international working class so as to assist this
class in its efforts at realizing revolutionary self-emancipation; the mass
movement makes the revolution, yet the vanguard serves as a critical catalyst.
Of course, it is true that many obstacles confront making
socialism appear a vital–and viable–entity to broad layers of the international
working class today. Yet the difficulty of current conditions for
socialist struggle does not eradicate the necessity of this struggle, but
in fact increases its urgency. In late capitalism today,"technological
development based on the whims of competition and profit, or bureaucratic
irresponsibility–and not any ‘uncontrollable perversity’ of technology or
of science in and of themselves–is leading us to disaster," and, this state
of affairs "results from the subordination of science to the narrow imperatives
of short-term profit expectations," such that "in capitalist society decisions
which seem rational given the limited concerns of individual capitalists,
corporations, regions, etc., can turn out to have totally irrational and
destructive consequences for society as a whole" (4th International 6).
In the late–global–capitalism of today, the growing internationalization
of the productive forces has lead towards the increasing internationalization
of capital, which "implies above all a growing globalization of the main
problems of humanity," and the impossibility of the (re)solution of these
problems on a world scale other than by the means provided through the establishment
of a world socialist federation. As the 4th International indicates,
"despite its broad temporary hegemony on the international political scene,
imperialism is incapable of mastering this internationalization."
Today, it is bourgeois society and not any "experiment" in creating a "socialist
utopia" "which strangles the unfettered development of individuality for
the overwhelming majority of the planet's inhabitants–not only in the ‘Third
World’ but also in the richer countries" (37): it is, in other words, the
restrictions and constraints of the capitalist system of production, distribution,
appropriation, and accumulation of social wealth that results in vast and
increasing social inequality, continued and expanding alienation in and
beyond relations of wage labor, the manipulation of consciousness through
the stultification disseminated by means of the "mass culture" which is mass
produced for mass consumption under the narrow control of the denizens of
the "culture industry," and the reduction of "freedom" to choice of brand
of consumption among various products of alienated and exploited labor.
It is all of these that are the actual causes of the "strangling" of the
potential for human development for the vast majority of people living in
the late capitalist world of today. It is certainly true that the
struggle ahead for socialism–and communism–will likely prove long and difficult,
yet the only alternative to this struggle is accepting passively or fatalistically
the perpetuation of capitalism in decline and, in fact, the rise of an even
far more brutally dehumanizing post-capitalist form of barbarism.
Contrary to post-Marxist attempts to substitute movements
for "radical democracy" for "revolutionary socialism," we believe the proletariat
(the working class) remains central to any struggle which hopes to achieve
fundamental transformation of capitalist society. This is in part
due to the fact that a vast proportion of the membership of these supposedly
"post-class" new social movements–in particular the "rank-in-file" of these
movements–are most often themselves at least objectively, if not always simultaneously
subjectively, proletarian (i.e. they are proletarian in terms of their objective
position in relation to the ownership and control of the means, processes,
and ends of their own and of others' social productive activity). Yet
the continuing centrality of the proletariat to the struggle for socialism
is also, and ultimately much more importantly, because the transformation
of capitalism into communism is fundamentally a transformation in the dominant
mode of social production through the elimination and supersession of the
fundamental contradictions of capitalist society. Resolution of contradiction–of
a relation which involves the simultaneous unity and struggle of opposites–requires
that the subordinate term in the contradiction overtake and overthrow the
dominant, replacing it as the new dominant within a new, more inclusive
(more universal) relation organized at a higher level and in a form which
maintains what was necessary and beneficial in the previous relation while
eliminating what was not (or, more precisely, no longer) necessary and beneficial
and, at the same time, introducing new constituent elements as well, for
a more rapidly, comprehensively, and substantially progressive development
of this new reality. The proletariat represents the subordinate term
in the fundamental contradictions of capitalism and in the resolution of
these contradictions.
Only the proletariat, moreover, has the capacity to
abolish capitalism since its combined power (combined across industries,
branches, sectors, departments, regions, and nations) constitutes the major
productive force in capitalist society. Because of this central position
in the production of the wealth of capitalist society, the proletariat is
potentially able to attain practical control over all of the economic institutions
of capitalist society: it already occupies the objective position in capitalist
society which makes this attainment a real possibility. This attainment
is in fact a necessity if the proletariat is to emancipate itself from subjection
to and subjugation by capital. In order to end capitalist exploitation
and alienation of its labor, the proletariat must gain genuinely effective
control over the means, processes, and ends of its own productive activity,
and it can only do so by forcibly seizing this control from capital and
abolishing capitalism.
At the same time as the proletariat must abolish capitalism
in order to emancipate itself, abolition of capitalism is insufficient,
in and of itself, to effect this emancipation. The abolition of capitalism
will only lead in the direction of proletarian emancipation if a revolutionary
working class–a working class engaged in leading the entire process of revolutionary
destruction, replacement, transformation, and reconstruction of capitalist
society–is able to extend and generalize the tendencies toward socialization
of production (and ultimately towards communism) developed within and begun
under capitalism. There are two principal reasons for this.
First, unlike, for example, land in a peasant revolution, factories (and
other enterprises organized to carry out a discrete production process)
cannot be subdivided into entirely separate "parcels" which are effectively
controlled by entirely different individual workers or groups of workers.
You cannot effectively control only part of an assembly line–at least not
without participating in the effective control of the line as a whole (and
genuinely effective control of its own production is, after all, the principal
goal of proletarian self-emancipation). Second, emancipation of the
proletariat from the exploitation and alienation of its labor can only be
secured if it is established upon the foundation of a quantitative extension
and development, to the point of qualitative enrichment and transformation,
of modes of economic cooperation, planning, unity, and association already
begun under capitalism–extension and enrichment, in other words, of capitalist
cooperation, planning, unity, and association in the social production of
goods, in the social deployment of services, and in the social reproduction
of the general (pre)conditions of this production and deployment. The
proletariat must therefore, if it is to secure its own emancipation, drive
forward objective tendencies toward the supersession of capitalism within
capitalism itself to the actual realization of this supersession. In
this way, the proletariat is not only objectively positioned but also objectively
interested in a way that is not true of any other group to lead the process
of creation of socialism and communism out of capitalism. No other
social group in capitalist society maintains this same objective interest
in the realization of communism. For no other social group is communism
the only kind of society in which it will be possible for the group to free
itself. The proletariat cannot free itself other than by creating a
society which altogether eliminates exploitation and alienation of labor:
this society is communism, and the process of its revolutionary construction
from out of capitalism is socialism.
Many contemporary critics of orthodox Marxism, including
many radical critics, in recent years have suggested that socialism and
communism as envisioned by orthodox Marxism is no longer possible because:
1. of a decline in the size and strength of the proletariat in contemporary,
"post-industrial society" and 2. because the remainder of this declining
proletariat has been so thoroughly coopted and contained, so thoroughly
"bourgeoisified" and integrated into acceptance of and conformity with the
logic of capitalist commodity production and consumption that the proletariat
no longer and never again will constitute a significant source of opposition
to bourgeois hegemony. [This is especially true,
of course since the collapse of Stalinism -- a model of "post-capitalist"
society which we do not by any means equate with either socialism or communism,
but rather with a counter-revolutionary bureaucratic usurpation of the right
and power of self-determination and self-rule from the collective working
class -- Stalinism deserved to fall and needed to be superseded; this is
the only legitimately, genuinely socialist, as well as communist, position
on that matter, as we see it.] Both of these
claims are, simply put, false. The so-called "post-industrial society"
not only ignores the vast industrialization of the "Third World" which has
taken place over the past 35 to 40 years, but also exaggerates the degree
to which industrial manufacturing has declined in significance in the "First
World." Furthermore, service workers are, by and large, proletarian;
the proletariat is not defined by the kind of work it does–nor by the nation
or region in which it works–but instead by the fact that it must sell its
labor power to capital in order to obtain access to the means by which it
can it support itself, and by the additional fact that the wage it receives
to provide for this subsistence is determined by the law of value: the quantity
of labor socially necessary to produce the proletariat as a proletariat, as
labor power in and for capitalist production (and this value of labor-power,
as is well-known, includes both a biological minimum and a moral-historical
component which changes as a result of changes in the balance of forces in
the class struggle between capital and labor). By orthodox Marxist standards,
the percentage of proletarians in the world today is in fact far higher than
ever before in the history of capitalism. Moreover, as Marxists since
Marx have long noted, simultaneous (and interlinked) increases in the organic
composition of capital and the industrial reserve army of labor do temporarily
decrease the relative size and strength of the (actively laboring) proletariat,
yet this does not mean that either the proletariat as a whole or tendencies
toward increasing proletarianization have decreased in absolute terms.
As for the second claim, it is admittedly true that
revolutionary proletarian class consciousness has to be developed and does
not arise spontaneously as a result of the mere experience of exploitation.
It is also certainly true that the proletariat can be misled, can be divided
and set against itself, can be coopted and at times even politically marginalized.
And yet the opposite is also true as well: the proletariat is the only social
group that maintains a clear objective interest in the successful achievement
of socialism and communism, and it is also ultimately the only agent capable
of leading a complete and successful revolutionary reconstruction of the
totality of capitalist society that can end, once and for all, the division
of human society into classes: only the revolutionary proletariat can provide
the leadership sufficient to develop a genuinely and substantially egalitarian
human society. Besides, any account of the history of late capitalism
that ignored the extent to which proletarian men and women have fought and
continue to fight back against their exploitation, albeit often unsuccessfully
and often in short-sighted and misguided ways, would be a travesty of historical
accuracy. Even in the United States today, where organized labor has
been decimated by decades of cutbacks and concessions and where unions now
represent only approximately 12% of the workforce, wage workers continue
to struggle in large numbers, often quite valiantly, against extremely powerful
political-ideological as well as socio-economic opposition, not only to
save what they can from past gains in struggle with capital but also to
achieve whatever further gain they can whenever and wherever they can.
Moreover, this resistance is often–even increasingly often–rooted in the
collective action of local, grassroots, independent, and rank-in-file organizations
and community coalitions, which in turn suggests that new forms of organization
of labor struggle are continuing to emerge and develop in the face of new
conditions of contest with capital in 21st century late capitalism dominated
by multinational and transnational capital, massive restructuring and downsizing
programs, the decimation of public sector hiring, the exponential growth
of the routine deployment of temporary and part-time labor including through
the extensive use of outsourcing and subcontracting, the extensive de-skilling
of labor through rationalization and automation of skilled labor tasks in
the "new electronic sweatshop," and the further routine stratification and
division of workers at the workplace through mechanisms which integrate
workers into management and policing functions–such as “merit pay,” "quality
circles," "focus groups," and "team concepts."
The proletariat will need allies in its struggle against
capital. Today, these potential allies chiefly include groups organized
within the so-called "new social movements" along lines of gender and sexual
orientation, race and ethnicity, age and physical or mental (dis)ability,
peace and justice, and ecological commitment. Unlike previous kinds
of allies in previous revolutionary struggles for proletarian emancipation,
the chief allies of the proletariat in future revolutionary struggles will
not be classes that represent the vestiges of pre-capitalist (or even semi-capitalist)
modes of production and forms of social organization such as the peasantry
(especially because late capitalism has brought about an increasingly rapid
proletarianization of remnant peasant classes in the "Third World").
Instead, the principal allies of the proletariat in the late(r) capitalist
revolutionary struggle for proletarian self-emancipation will be those social
groups that represent–at the least in a logical development of their most
advanced and radical tendencies–the anticipation of a future mode of production
and a future mode of life in a new form of social organization beyond capitalism.
Members of the petit-bourgeoisie, or of the so-called
“middle” classes, can play a highly useful role in contributing toward revolutionary
socialist transformation by allying their struggles with those of the proletariat.
In the late capitalism of today the petit-bourgeoisie includes both the
(remnant) "old petit-bourgeoisie"–the independent artisans, commercial traders,
and shopkeepers, remnants of the epoch of transition from feudalism to capitalism
in which the logic of simple commodity production prevailed–and the (emergent)
"new petit-bourgeoisie"–or the "new middle classes" of professionals, managers,
scientists and technicians, academic intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats
(among others). These various sectors of the new petit-bourgeoisie
all work in relatively privileged positions within bourgeois society (often
as the highest level and most powerful servants of capital) due to their
ability to maintain (although often quite tenuously) a relative monopoly
on valuable skills and/or knowledge (including the means of validation and
accreditation which supply and confirm this relative monopoly) such that
these groups of petit-bourgeois men and women are able to extract themselves
from the workings of the law of value in the determination of their wages
and salaries. The new petit-bourgeoisie is compensated in pay at a
rate in excess of the socially necessary labor it produces and is, at the
same time, able to exercise a kind of real (although ultimately limited)
effective control over the means, processes, and ends of its own and others'
productive activity. The petit-bourgeois enjoys a real and often quite
substantial advantage (and privilege) versus the proletarian in income and
wealth, status and power, freedom and autonomy, as well as access to and
exercise of natural and cultural resources. The objective (class) interest
of the petit-bourgeois is to maintain this privilege and prevent proletarianization.
This leads often to a quite desperate struggle on the part of the petit-bourgeoisie
due to the fragility of the intermediate position which makes possible this
privilege. The proletarian is thus often perceived as not only an enemy
which must be fought down and kept in her "proper" place below the petit-bourgeois
but also as representing what the petit-bourgeois fears most: the image of
what he might yet become and what he seeks most strenuously to avoid.
Commitment to radical and revolutionary change by members
of the petit-bourgeoisie is, as a result, at least initially, always largely
the product of ethical and intellectual as well as aesthetic and even moral-religious
rather than directly economic or even political motives, and this petit-bourgeois
influence has in fact frequently distorted the direction and limited the
effectiveness of revolutionary struggles for proletarian emancipation dominated
by petit-bourgeois elements. Nevertheless, this is not always the case.
In fact, in late capitalist society the petit-bourgeoisie plays an inescapably
predominant role in the intellectual leadership of virtually all radical
and indeed even all (proto-)revolutionary movements conducted in the interests
of the exploited and oppressed. This is due to the severe constraints
upon time, energy, and access to intellectual and technical resources that
confront these exploited and oppressed members of the proletariat.
Thus, in sum, and to conclude my contribution to today’s
presentation, socialists welcome and encourage representatives of middle
class-based social and political movements of protest and reform to join
the struggle for revolutionary socialist transformation, yet also maintain
the conviction that these petit-bourgeois elements must be ready to engage
with the most extensive and searching critique, as well as self-critique,
of their own socio-economic position and interests. Nevertheless, we
do believe that the actual prominence and significance of the new petit-bourgeoisie
and of petit-bourgeois ideology in late capitalism and indeed also in movements
of “liberal,” “progressive,” and “radical” resistance as well as opposition
to the late capitalist social status quo mean that a concrete strategic
program for the development of a 21st century international revolutionary
socialist movement requires that this movement critically appropriate from
the creative, insightful, and stimulating contributions of various oppositional,
and especially anti-capitalist while perhaps not yet pro-socialist, forms
of contemporary petit-bourgeois ideology while assisting many from at least
the most radical sections of the petit-bourgeoisie to become "proletarian
revolutionists."
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