Date: Sun, 25 May 1997 13:39:55 -0700
From: Mark Jones <majones@netcomuk.co.uk>
To: jim@cag1.demon.co.uk
Subject: The Final Crisis
Comrades
When I said
> The whole history of world capitalism since 1917-19 has been conditioned
> by the perceived truth of Lenin's arguments and by October.
I meant that the world bourgeoisie under US leadership has been obsessed
by the spectre of communism to the exclusion of everything else, ever
since 25 October 1917.
The red thread was twined with a blue thread: of counter-revolution,
containment, Cold War, and everything they have ever said and done, and
the whole FORM taken by US imperialism in its post-war cultural
(Hollywoodisation of the mind, the reflex of McCarthyism etc.) as well as
social and political structures: the institutionalising of Cold War lines,
geopolitically, as well as in people's minds; the Bretton Woods system,
the creation of the CIA, the emergence of the military-industrial
complex; the wholesale reconstruction of American
intellectual life, accelerated especially after the Soviet launched Sputnik I,
et cetera: what lay like a nightmare on the brain of the bourgeois,
was COMMUNISM and that in manifold, profound ways
completely conditioned the American popular and elite psyche.
After World War I, capitalism, its leaders and spokesmen
disoriented, traumatised, struggled to restore the 1914 status quo
ante: meaning liberalism, colonialism, a strong reserve currency, the Gold
Standard etc.
But in the uneasy interregnum between the Pax Britannica
and the Pax Americana, there was also a certain institutional awareness
of what, after 1945, was to become the dominant theme of anticommunism.
Thus, Woodrow Wilson wanted a League of Nations which would incorporate
the USSR within a framework of international law (containment) and the
US wanted a non-vindictive peace without reparations; Wilson even
offered loans to Weimar Germany to help it reconstruct, again
foreshadowing Marshall Aid post-1945; but then Congress rejected US
membership of the L of N and the vengeance-seekers (Clemenceau,
Lloyd-George) had their reactionary hands untied.
So the Entente powers demanded reparations, and at the same
time twisted the predominant view of the L of N to the support of
colonial adventures, not self-determination, and used the L of N as
an anti-communist Trojan Horse, orienting German revanchism towards
an anti-Soviet Crusade. Thus Wilsonism had failed and another war
became inevitable: the Wilsonism at last became the triumphant
post-1945 policy of Roosevelt/Truman, soon to be endorsed by the GOP.
Thus the world bourgeoisie, reeling from the shock of 1917 and the
first war, had staggered catastrophically from containment to
open-aggression and back again, but always THESE WERE CADENZAS
TO THE ONLY, ALL-PREVAILING THEME: ANTI-COMMUNISM
WAS THE ONLY SHOW IN TOWN.
After 1945 there was to be no attempt to restore the liberal verities
of absolute capitalist virtue: the Gold Standard was abandoned,
inflationary Keynesian demand-management was adopted, and thus western
capitalism was launched on its long boom but ONLY BECAUSE OF
THE MATURE ANTI-COMMUNISM of post-1945 US hegemony.
Obsessional fear of communism; and the total armlock which anticommunism
had over every social and economic policy: between these two things,
post-war world capitalism took shape.
There had to be: high defence spending; low unemployment; rising living
standards; a lack of currency perturbations; a commitment to Keynesian
growth.
There had to be: the liquidation of colonial empires and
self-determination.
Most significantly within that conspectus of 'anti-communist liberation'
there had to be a universalising of the 'social benefits' of capitalism:
all the public goods (medicine, food, water) which transformed GLOBAL
MORTALITY AND MORBIDITY INDICES.
All of these went against the grain of classical capitalist economic and
social liberalism. But the justification was always the same: "without
these policies, we risk social unrest, a collapse of our defence
efforts, and the advance of world communism."
Now here is an interesting thing.
Keynesianism was always seen as a tactical retreat, like containment
itself. The world bankers, financiers and high Tory or GOP politicians
hated that policy-set. They always hated the UN, too. But they accepted
that this was TEMPORARILY a necessary price to pay in order
to destroy communism and defeat the world working class.
Of course, they like everyone enjoyed the somewhat unexpected benefits
of the boom which lasted until 1973 and fuelled the most explosive
growth in capitalist economies and corporate wealth EVER (a boom
literally fuelled by the highly-entropic burning of a hydrocarbon
resereve which it had taken life on earth 500,000,000 years to
accumulate).
But they were never reconciled to it. What they wanted, in order to
feel secure, was the complete and final defeat of the working class
across every front: ideological, cultural, geopolitical, social (they
never understood, did not see, that in the smoke and flames was consumed
not just -- in a single human lifetime -- ALL the oil, but the very
future of world capitalism itself).
And this is what is odd: they have done it, have destroyed world
socialism, smashed the trade unions, punctured working class militancy
and combativeness; restored the untrammelled working of the law of
value, ended Keynesianism, restored the cruelties of liberalism, ended
welfareist social policies, reasserted the absolute sovereignty of
private property...
The victory is total.
AND YET...
And yet, they are STILL obsessed by that old spectre, the spectre of
communism. STILL have not woken up to the overarching fact that
by the turn of the century the engine will start to judder and cough
as the fuel runs out.
Yes, they are still fighting the old battles, most noticeably in
Russia, where they are so concerned to do to Russia what Scipio did to
Carthage, namely, plough it flat at any price, that they have not
noticed that while they are busy refighting these old wars, history has
backed down on them and declared that, without any
assistance from the communists, the Final Crisis of capitalism has begun
and there is no escape from it.
And what most hatened the final crisis was the Long Post-war Boom,
whose principal achievement was the fourfold increase in the
global reserve army of labour.
The explosive growth in global population, predicted by Marx and stated
by him to be an absolute constraint, barrier, on the capitalist
accumulation, has proven to be so.
If there had indeed been World Revolution after 1917, the liquidation of
the capitalist world system would have forestalled the population growth
which did occur, and whose irreversible effects already doom capitalism
to inevitable destruction within the next half century.
[to be continued]