International Socialists

Introduction

During the 1990s the bulk of the Western intelligentsia, both the right and perhaps more surprisingly the left, responded to the collapse of East European Stalinism by declaring capitalism and representative democracy to be triumphant, and socialism dead. There were some of us, a minority even amongst the left, who counter-argued that the classical Marxist vision of socialism had never been more than fleetingly realised in Eastern Europe, that Stalinism did not constitute the practical implementation of classical Marxism. We further argued that capitalism, even in the most highly developed countries, continued to be mired in prolonged economic stagnation and mass unemployment, was generating growing inequality both within and between nations, and was compatible with only very limited forms of democratic governance. But making such arguments was not easy. To deploy a metaphor such as "swimming against the current," would be to thoroughly understate the point. In the class war being conducted at the theoretical level (in economic, social and political theory), our side was under heavy artillery fire, resulting in a serious depletion of our forces, and consequently we were forced to adopt a largely defensive strategy aimed at the preservation of the central core of our position within the wider intellectual landscape.

The inspirational victory in Seattle from November 30 to December 3 1999, and the ensuing globalisation of revolt has fundamentally altered the historical terrain on which the intellectual war is being conducted. At the end of a decade in which the ideologues of neo-liberalism had repeatedly declared that the definitive victory of capitalism over socialism had been achieved, the combined forces of labor, students, farmers, environmentalists, and Third World activists shutdown the World Trade Organization, successfully resisting and defying the coercive might of the world's most powerful repressive state apparatus.

 

While the protests against the IMF and World Bank in Washington DC (April 2000) were unable to overcome the massive police presence and close the meeting down, the sheer scale of the protests over four rain-swept days, involving around 30,000 protesters, maintained the forward momentum of the movement. The S11 protests against the World Economic Forum being staged at the Crown Casino on the banks of the Yarra River in the heart of Melbourne, again involving around 30,000 protesters, closed it down on the first day. While the WEF convention was able to proceed on the second and third days, the scale of police brutality and the extra-ordinary measures required to get the delegates into the Casino (by boat and helicopter), ensured that it could do so only under siege conditions. Another significant victory for the anti-capitalist movement. This was soon followed by the S26 protests against the World Bank in Prague, bringing together anarchists and socialists from throughout Europe, which so successfully disrupted the convention that it had to be drawn to a close a day earlier than scheduled. There were many other significant protests during 2000, too numerous to discuss here (including mass mobilizations at Millau, Nice, Seoul).

 

The forward momentum of the movement has been maintained during 2001 with the mass and militant protests that successfully disrupted the FTA in Quebec and the reinvigoration of International Workers' Day as real day of action throughout the world. Further protests are planned for the European Union summit in Gothenburg on the 14-16th of June, and at the G-8 meeting in Genoa from the 20th to the 2nd of July 2001. (1)

 

 

New movement, New questions

Every new movement that emerges on this scale raises new questions on multiple levels. This is also true, to a lesser degree, for any major form of collective action, whether, for example, a protest, strike or occupation. At the most general or "macro" level questions are raised in relation to the issues that are the movement's raison d'etre, such as those pertaining to underlying causes and manifestations of social inequality, major social problems, the destruction of the natural environment, major employer and/or government attacks on the interests of workers, students and the oppressed, debt and poverty in the so-called Third World, and so forth. Consider, for example, the intellectual ferment generated by anti-racist, feminist and environmentalist movements since the late 1960s - the questions raised by these movements remain central to contemporary debates within social and political theory. But even a single issue campaign focusing on a particular legislative change, for example, will raise a broad range of questions: What are the central provisions of the bill? Who is promoting it and why? What will its likely impacts be? Who will be the major winners and losers following its implementation?

 

Broad political arguments must be made at this level for a variety of reasons. First, every movement requires a degree of intellectual clarification in order to enable it to define the empirical scope of problems, identify the underlying causes of these problems, and on this basis propose alternative solutions. Second, and perhaps most importantly, general arguments are required to persuade the undecided within the movement's potential constituency to become supporters and/or active participants in the movement. Third, those participating in a movement, strike or campaign must be armed with ideas and arguments to counter those being advanced in opposition to the movement, whether by governments and/or employers and/or right-wing intellectuals.

 

At an intermediate level there are questions of strategy and tactics. There is a need to define objectives, and determine the best way to achieve these objectives. Once objectives have been established and a broad strategy has been worked out, innumerable tactical questions come to the fore. Tactical questions often generate the most heat because differences over tactics are a common concrete manifestation of underlying ideological clashes between different groups participating in a large-scale action. Every major campaign involving collective action raises tactical questions at a "micro" level, on the street, in the workplace, on the picket line, and/or on the campuses. Related to tactical considerations are more mundane logistical concerns: How many placards and with what slogans for a particular march? What chants best express our anger and articulate our demands? Has the PA been organised and is it powerful enough? And as all experienced activists know strategy and tactics are irrelevant if the action is not sufficiently well organised, there being a strong positive correlation between the amount of advertising and build-up work for an action, and the numbers likely to turn up for it. Finally, individual participants are constantly confronted by questions at a personal level: Can I afford to lose or put at risk my job over this? Will I be at risk of arrest? If so, how costly will a conviction be for me? How committed am I to this particular campaign relative to the others that I am also involved with?

 

One of the most remarkable, and important, aspects of the newly emerging movement protesting against major policy agencies of global capitalism, such as the WTO, World Bank, and the IMF, is the growing recognition sweeping through many formerly disparate movements and organisations that it is global capitalism which is generating the world's major problems.In this respect one of the major achievements of the anti-capitalist movement is the extent to which it has pushed basic questions of crucial importance into the international political arena. Why is global capitalism proving to be so damaging to the world's workers, small farmers and indigenous peoples? Why is it also destroying the natural environment, to the extent of threatening the continued existence of human life on the planet? Why has inequality grown substantially in both the advanced capitalist societies and the so-called Third World since the mid-1970s? Why is the global capitalist system so evidently unstable and mired in economic stagnation and mass unemployment? To what extent do the governments of particular nation-states retain the degree of autonomy required to regulate the societies that they govern? Why does free trade only benefit the rich?What are the main policy agencies of global capitalism and why do they have so much power? Can the neo-liberal policy agenda that they push be opposed effectively? If so, then how and by whom? What role can and should the union movements of the advanced capitalist societies be playing in this regard?Is there a desirable and feasible alternative to the global capitalist order?

 

With respect to the broad strategic objectives of the anti-capitalist movement, there are clearly areas of general agreement (opposition to neo-liberalism and free trade, support for workers' rights, environmental protection, melioration of Third World debt and poverty), and other areas of profound disagreement (principally whether to reform or seek the abolition of the WTO, World Bank and IMF). While there has, thus far, been a considerable degree of agreement concerning the main tactical objectives of the major protests, this is likely to prove increasingly difficult to sustain as the bodies that are the principle targets of these protests make at least rhetorical concessions to the movement, seek to divide it by incorporation of the more conservative elements of the movement, and the host states increase the level of coercion directed towards the more radical wing of the movement. Unity will also be difficult to maintain if the forward momentum of the movement is lost.

 

The importance of the new questions being raised by this new movement demands sound answers, and Marxism is the intellectual tradition that is best placed to provide them, for reasons that will be articulated in the remainder of this article. The continuing relevance of the classical Marxist tradition is particularly clear with respect to explaining inequality, developing a theoretical and strategic conception of the potential power of workers, students and the oppressed, maintaining a close interactive relationship between theory and practice, and the contrast between democracy from above and democracy from below.

 

 

Their system, our suffering

The central contradictions of capitalism have intensified considerably since the collapse of the post-war long boom in the mid-1970s and onset of prolonged stagnation and mass unemployment. Of these, perhaps none is more obvious than the accumulation of massive wealth in the hands of a small minority, and the growing deprivation of the workers, peasants and their dependants who constitute the majority of the world's population. The contradiction between potential plenty, and actual poverty, for the workers who produce the surplus product in capitalist society has existed for nearly as long as capitalism, but it has never been more marked. Real incomes for the majority of workers have either remained largely stagnant or have declined.Income and wealth has become much more unequally distributed within the advanced capitalist societies.Government spending on health, housing, education and welfare has been subject to "fiscal restraint" throughout the advanced capitalist world. The majority who live in these societies have to sell their capacity to work on a labor market in order to maintain a reasonable standard of living. We spend a large part of our lives at work and our activity there is typically governed by undemocratic authoritarian administrative and managerial hierarchies. The experience of alienation from work, society and politics is pervasive. Poverty, homelessness, malnutrition, drug abuse, crime and violence are widespread in the midst of societies where labor productivity is higher and the social surplus product is greater than at any previous time in human history.

 

Marx's theory of surplus value provides a comprehensive and convincing explanation of growing inequality within and between nations. This theory has been subject to ongoing criticism ever since the first volume of Capital was published in 1867. But even the critics sometimes grudgingly accept that the central idea underpinning the theory is sound, even if they reject the overall conceptual architecture. (2) Actually, two of the strongest reasons in support of Marx's theory of surplus value are, perhaps, also the most commonly overlooked. The first is the theory's high degree of historical realism. The tremendous inequality generated by capitalism is obvious. In fact, capitalism has an historically unprecedented capacity to produce a surplus product over and above the subsistence needs of the workers who produce it, yet this underlying process of exploitation is hidden and obscured in the labor process by relations in the sphere of circulation that appear to involve free and fair market exchanges between capitalists and workers. The theory of surplus value explains how this inequality originates and how capitalism accentuates it over time. (3)

 

The basic preconditions of capitalism as a system of production include the collective separation of a class of wage laborers from the means of production which is owned by capitalists, the commodification of labor-power, and a situation where, because of the above, workers are effectively compelled to sell their labor-power to capitalists in order to subsist at a historical determinate level. (4) As McNally observes:

 

Central to the genesis of capitalism, therefore, are those historical processes which bring about the separation of a large and growing proportion of the laboring population from means of production which could provide them with an adequate subsistence. It follows that the emergence of a labor market is central to the rise of capitalism. (5)

 

In the capitalist mode of production labor-power (that is, the potential capacity which a person has to labor for a specified period of time) becomes a commodity that appears to be freely exchanged on the labor market. The worker owns, and is formally free to dispense with her or his labor-power as she or he sees fit. But this apparent freedom and equality between buyer and seller is illusory. Unlike any other commodity, labor-power in use is capable of producing value over and above its exchange-value. Marx termed this surplus-value, that is the difference between the necessary labor which the worker performs in order to cover the costs of his or her own reproduction and the surplus labor which is the labor performed in the labor-process over and above this necessary labor.

 

Surplus-value is the social form which surplus labor assumes in the capitalist mode of production and it is appropriated by capitalists, who own and effectively control the means of production within the labor process. (6) The principal phenomenal forms which surplus-value takes in the capitalist mode of production are profit, interest and rent. Hence Marx's theory of surplus-value demonstrates that "The historical specificity of capitalism arises from the fact that its relations of exploitation are almost completely hidden behind the surface of its relations of exchange." (7)

 

In general capitalists are subject to strong competitive pressures, from both capital and product markets, to maximise profitability. The necessity to remain profitable drives capitalists to battle simultaneously on a number of different but interrelated fronts. First, capitalists engage in an ongoing struggle with workers with respect to the buying and selling of labour-power, in which they try to keep waged and non-waged costs of employing workers to a minimum. Second, in the labour process, capitalist management struggles with workers over the production of surplus value. Battle on this front essentially involves attempts to maximize managerial control over productive labour in conjunction with the mechanization of production in order to increase the productivity of labour and hence the production of relative surplus value. (8) "Mechanization becomes the dominant form of technical change precisely because it is the production of surplus value, not use value, which is the dominant aspect of the labour process under capitalism." (9) Third, in the circulation process or sphere of market competition, capitalists struggle against other capitalists over the realization of surplus value in the form of profits through the sale of commodities. (10) Battle on this front essentially involves the increased capitalization of production in order to reduce unit production costs and thereby obtain a larger market share (assuming that a lower cost-price is achieved without any deterioration in product quality). (11) Beyond the level of the individual firm, capitalists battle on a fourth front, in the political sphere, by placing as much pressure as they can (individually and/or collectively) on governments to deliver policies favourable to their interests (tax cuts, subsidies, anti-union industrial relations legislation, free trade agreements, and so forth). The battles waged between capitalists and workers on these are crucial in determining the distribution of income and wealth within the society as a wholeincreasing inequality is thus ultimately the result of generalised capitalist victories over workers and their allies.

 

The second reason for continuing to utilize the theory of surplus value is the theory's remarkable degree of political efficacy. Marx interpreted the world in order to change it. The theory of surplus-value enables one to identify an enemy which all victims of exploitation and oppression share in a capitalist societythe capitalist class. It demonstrates that the overwhelmingly majority of people who inhabit advanced capitalist societies have a sufficiently broad range of shared social, economic and political interests to make large-scale collective struggles against the capitalist class and state both possible and necessary. In this respect, it provides the analytical foundation for militant trade unionism - highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of various kinds of collective industrial action, as well as unions as a whole. It also remains at the absolute heart of the revolutionary socialist critique of social democratic reformism. Any strategy that accepts the continued existence of capitalism thereby also accepts the continued exploitation of workers, who produce the world's wealth, by capitalists, who appropriate it.

 

The anti-globalisation protests have highlighted the fact that while capitalist governments always have money for war and weapons, they are not prepared to spend the equivalent of a small fraction of their military budgets to eliminate mass starvation in the so-called "third world." In fact, Western aid to Africa is considerably less than the total amount paid each year by African governments to Western financial institutions in interest payments on debt. At the same time that hundreds of millions suffer from malnutrition, food stockpiling and dumping is common in Europe and North America.

 

The Marxist tradition explains this, at the most basic level of analysis, by reference to the central dynamics of capitalist exploitation and accumulation. Hundreds of millions of the world's people go hungry, not because there isn't enough food to feed them, but because food is produced for profit, not need. The world's agricultural and fishing industries are driven by corporate greed rather than human need. Massive Third World debt not only yields a huge net surplus for western financial institutions, it enables the World Bank and the IMF to force Third World governments to shift agricultural production away from food production for the domestic market, towards the production of cash crops for export. Beyond these basic, and relatively uncontroversial points, there are rich debates within the Marxist tradition, that retain a high degree of relevance, concerned with the processes of colonisation, inter-imperialist rivalry, development and underdevelopment, uneven and combined development, and capitalism as a world-system.

 

The anti-globalisation protests have actively contested the fact that we live in a world of inequality and alienation, highlighting, in particular, the growing contradiction between privatised appropriation by a relatively small number of giant transnational corporations and socialised production by billions of workers and peasants throughout the world. Related to this is another contradiction within the process of globalisation - during the past century the world has "grown smaller" as transportation and communication technologies continue to advance, as the international division of labor continues to become more extensive, as labor becomes more geographically mobile, and as national capital and financial markets become increasingly internationalised. Yet, at the same time, the overwhelming majority of people feel that they have less and less control over the world they live in. This raises two further issues to be explored hereagency and democracy.

 

>> Part 2

 

 

 

References

 

1 References to be added.

 

2 See, for example, M.C. Howard and J.E. King, A History of Marxian Economics, Volume II, 1929-1990, Macmillan, London, 1992, p.282.

 

3 In addition to the broad historical realsim of the theory, there is the growing body of empirical research that has corroborated the theory, see for example: A. Shaikh and E. Tonak, Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994.

 

4 E. Mandel, 1976, op. cit., pp. 47-57; Marx, Capital, vol. 2, where in a famous statement he suggests that: "Whatever the social form of production, labourers and means of production always remain factors of it. But in a state of separation from each other these factors can be such only potentially. For production to go on at all they must unite. The specific manner in which this union is accomplished distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society from one another. In the present case, the separation of the free worker from [her or] his means of production is the starting point given...," chapter I, section 2, p. 34-35.

 

5 D. McNally, Against the Market, Verso, London, 1993, p. 7; see also p.31.

 

6 So many good expositions of this analysis exist in the Marxist literature that it would be impractical to cite them all here. Nonetheless, presuming that some readers may want to refer to more expansive and hence accessible accounts, cf., Harry Braverman Labor and Monopoly Capital, Monthly Review Press, New York and London, 1974, chapter 1; M. Burawoy, op. cit.; Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, Bookmarks, London, 1983, pp. 111-118; David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, pp. 20-24; Ernest Mandel, "Introduction" to the Penguin edition of Capital, vol. 1, 1976, 46-54 & Marxist Economic Theory, vol. 1, Monthly Review Press, New York and London, 1962, chapters 3 & 5; Ronald Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1956, pp. 177-186; Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx's "Capital," Pluto Press, London, 1977, chapter 15, pp. 220-230; Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1942, chapter IV.

 

7 A. Shaikh, "Exploitation" in J. Eatwell et al. (eds), The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics, Macmillan, London, 1990, p.167.

 

8 R. Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx's "Capital," Pluto Press, London, (1968) 1977,p.?

 

9 A. Shaikh, "Marxian Competition versus Perfect Competition: further comments on the so-called choice of technique," Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol.4, no.1, 1980, p.75.

 

10 A. Shaikh, "Falling Rate of Profit," in Bottomore, T. et al., (eds) The Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 1983, p. 159.

 

11 A. Shaikh, The Current Economic Crisis: Causes and Implications, ATC, pamphlet, Detroit, 1989, p.3.