Jay Hanson wrote:
> I asked what Marxists propose as a solution?
>
This do?
-- Mark Jones http://www.geocities.com/~comparty--------------------------------------------------
The capitalist world system is sinking into turmoil and chaos.
Imperialism won a decade more life for itself by plundering the fallen socialist world. The 'fire sale at the end of history' consumed a staggering accumulation of values and assets, the hard-earned achievement of decades of sacrifice and labour by generations of Soviet men and women. By some estimates more than three trillion dollars was pumped out of Russia and eastern Europe between 1990-1998 -- a sum equivalent to the gross national product of France, Italy and Britain combined. No-one knows what the true losses are, and the haemorrhage continues to bleed this vast territory white, at the costs of millions of lives, of the despoliation of the Soviet resource-base, the ransacking of nature and unrestrained environmental destruction, and by stealing the futures of hundreds of millions of lives; stealing even the food from their mouths (Russian nutritional levels have fallen drastically) (see Russia).
Such a catastrophe has few historical precedents: the annihilation of the native American civilizations after the 16th century is one. But the conquest of the Americas, the genocidal extirpation of at least 70 million native Americans slaughtered or dead through famine and disease, the wholesale enslavement of African peoples and their mobilization in the greatest flowering of slave-production since ancient times: all this bloody massacre and plunder, which formed primitive accumulation and allowed 18th century protocapitalism to launch the Industrial Revolution: this was the work of three centuries! And the equivalent plunder of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been the work of less than a decade...
Such is the frantic acceleration of capitalism's moloch-machinery, such is the intensification of the frenzy of exploitation which sucks whole peoples and generations into its maw; and still it is not enough. The sacking of socialism released vast new resources, in particular energy (oil above all) and enabled a dramatic hike in the profit-rate in the imperial centres. It has directly fuelled the boom in asset-values in the Anglo-Saxon centres and helped stabilize the German-led European Union.
Newly-unified Germany could afford to spend $800 bn incorporating east Germany (the former German Democratic Republic), to power the new revanchist German imperialism, yet even this vast sum has proven insufficient to overcome the profound dynamic of centralisation and concentration of capital which is the hallmark of the area. The German revanchists tried to swim against the tide which sucks value out of the neocolonies into the metropoles. For historical and chauvinist reasons they tried to incorporate the East German working class but this politics has been negated by the main trend at work in the world today, namely to leach out value from the peripheries. This is a most striking evidence of the elemental force of the dynamics of imploding capitalism. US imperialism is the heart of the vortex, and this is the pole which draws profit and superprofit to itself, bleaching white the world system. Germany, the second-strongest imperialism, was unable to resist the centripetal process and today, despite its huge subsidising of east German reconstruction, the wasteland of unemployment and despair which capitalism creates in all its neocolonies is as much in evidence in east Germany as anywhere else. (see BasicFacts)
China, too, under the neofascist Deng Xiaoping clique, has become fully incorporated into the circuits of world capitalism. The Chinese revanchists have raised the banner of renewed Chinese imperialism and aspire to compete with the existing imperial powers. Explosive social contradictions have opened up in the space of former Chinese socialism but the drive to construct a world-centre of capitalist accumulation in the Shenzhen-Hong Kong axis has failed. China cannot escape the dramatic crisis unfolding in Asia, as cannibal-capitalism gnaws its living tissue. China is inescapably caught in the apocalyptic spiral of crisis now dragging the capitalist world system down into chaos, disintegration and war. And a terrible price has already been paid by the Chinese working class for the benefits its parasitic rulers hoped to gain from joining the imperialist club.
The achievements of Chinese socialism have been demolished, the assets painfully accumulated since 1949 are being gutted with the same frenzy as in the former Soviet Union, while tens of millions of dispossessed Chinese workers -- robbed of their socialist birthright -- are conscripted into the cauldron of the Chinese coastal enclaves. The collapse of the world system is proceeding at an ever- increasing pace, and the tempo of Chinese accumulation has proven wholly insufficient to drag Chinese capitalism free of the vortex. At the same time, a whole new dimension of crisis is revealed beneath the growing rents and tears of Chinese capitalism. It is daily clearer just what terrible price future generations of Chinese workers will pay for the alleged benefits of economic growth experienced in China since the fall of Chinese socialism. A terrible whirlwind of environmental and resource depletion has been sown by the so-called Green Revolution which has produced agricultural growth in China and throughout Asia.
The mechanism of boosting crop-production also led directly to the dispossessing of hundreds of millions of peasants, decanting these discontented, hungry masses into the vast new megacities of Asia, from Bengal to Shenzhen. But this Green Revolution was won not only at terrible social cost; it has resulted in a wholly-unsustainable agriculture which is ravaging the environment and depleting water resources and soil fertility at an unprecedented rate. At the same time, environmental pollution has created a nightmare world for the multimillioned Asian masses.
'Booming' Asian capitalism has created this stinking environmental hell, characterised by the pollution of water bodies, coastal seas and the land, covering vast regions with global-warming induced forest fires, turning the megacities into uninhabitable death traps.
The 'Keynesian' reformers seek to refuel Asian capitalism, but if they succeed then these fundamental resource and environment crises will only be intensified to an intolerable degree; in the next decades the collapse of Asian ecosystems will only accelerate, made worse as global warming raises sea levels and inundates coastal regions where almost a billion people now live. Thus Keynesian reforms, insofar as they are implemented successfully, will serve only to exacerbate the underlying crisis and to hasten the final day of revolutionary reckoning.
The contradictions of Asian capitalism are ripening at a furious pace and this is producing political aftershocks which are already beyond the capacity of world imperialism to direct or control. The mechanism of crisis has assumed a capricious, uncontrollable character and this tendency itself is accelerating. Imperialism, which in the past has eagerly sought to intensify crises, in eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere, is now in a desperate struggle to slow down and contain evolving crisis, but does not know how. Whereas crisis has always been welcomed as a mechanism for destroying the working class, for increasing the tempo of exploitation through constant speed-ups and restructuring and the retirement of 'obsolete' capital (i.e., the productive systems painfully built-up in the course of development and often perfectly suited to the specific conditions in the neocolonies), today imperialism wants to apply the brakes to a world crisis spinning out of control.
The political confusion this abrupt change of direction produces is best evidenced in the response of the West to the Asia meltdown. The shock troops of world imperialism -- its parastatal organs such as the World Bank and the IMF - responded to the Asian crisis by applying the tried and tested' methods of crisis INTENSIFICATION. Thus the IMF introduced shock-therapy regimes designed to intensify the rate of exploitation in Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere and to further bind these neocolonies into the straitjacket of world capitalism; but the immediate result was to exacerbate the crisis and further destabilise these states and the Asian economy as a whole.
This has led to turmoil, confusion and loss of political direction within imperialism, evidenced by the astonishing public criticisms voiced by leading IMF and World Bank bureaucrats and their political masters in Washington, who now openly prescribe the sort of 'Keynesian' social reforms they previously strove with might and main to bury forever. Now the IMF itself speaks of 'labour rights' and 'social protection', and has begun to address the need to reflate collapsing economies and to stimulate demand, all of which flatly contradicts the mission given to these policemen of finance capitalism.
Such is the terrible fear felt in high places, now that the working class has begun to stir and to waken from its slumbers. Do the new reformers ave any chance of success? With their vocal and enthusiastic supporters in the whole gallimaufry of Non-Governmental Organisations, 'left' social democrats, trade unions, and so-called 'Communist' Parties, these craven lickspittles of world imperialism are seizing their chance, voicing loud 'critiques' of the IMF strategy and urging their imperialist masters to 'relent', to be more 'forgiving' -- i.e., to forgive not just the debts run up by their fellow predators, the banks and speculators who have got caught in the collapse of Asian financial markets, a collapse their own greed catalysed, but also to 'forgive' the peoples of Indonesia, Korea and elsewhere the doubling and tripling of food and fuel prices and the other usurious exactions the IMF and Washington sought to impose.
But the crisis of world capitalism has no precedent since 1945, and not even since the shattering dramas of finance capitalism and imperialism which destroyed the Pax Britannica in 1914 and which led directly to both the Russian Revolution of 1917 and to the installation of the United States as the 20th century's imperial hegemon. Thus we can say with certainty that the whole historical cycle which began in 1917 has ended, and that the collapse of the USSR was only the harbinger of still more striking and apocalyptic events, in which the stake is not just the safety of US imperialism, but the survival of world capitalism itself. Therefore it is clear that the present world crisis is still in its early stages and that its further development will be marked by a rising tide of working class resistance.
This is the real significance of the disarray and confusion now visible in the councils of imperialism. The stench of decay is growing; the dissolution of world-capitalism's structures and institutions is profound and unstoppable and therefore it will be the proletariat which will increasingly make the political running, as the crisis continues to deepen and the inexorable decomposition of morbid capitalism, the gangrene which has already begun to kill off its extremities, accelerates. The malevolent heart of vampire-imperialism beats inside the Washington Beltway. Here are the arrogant institutions of imperial power. Here are the great services -- the dark forces -- of its increasingly-open criminal rule. From here will belch forth the foulest, hitherto unknown technologies of repression, control, assassination, genocide and global war waged by US imperialism against the whole of humankind, including the US working class which itself has suffered much under the iron heel.
For during the past two decades the US proletariat has experienced a decline in wage-levels and living standards with no precedent in US history. Now the politics of rotten imperialism will be torn to pieces by the same vast forces that are wracking the capitalist world system. The neoliberal-globalist politics of the past decade is already foundering as its theoretical models and practical policies come under increasingly bitter attack by the forces of the capitulationist-left (the NGOs, academics, labour unions and soft social-democrats mentioned earlier). Keynesian reformism is being feverishly dusted off, the long-discredited politics of social reforms and demand management being hurriedly refreshed in the face of a catastrophic world deflation which is already exposing the brittle, shallow foundations of post-war 'miracle' Japan. Vamped-up Keynesianism, as we have seen, would only propel world capitalism deeper into the historical impasse from which there is no escape anyway.
New cycles of capitalist growth, which can only be brief and local in any case, will only deepen the underlying contradictions between capitalist development and the environmental and resource-depletion costs which are the true source of the superprofits sucked by vampire imperialism from the material world which workers have to inhabit: the world of relentless exploitation and environmental degradation, with few of the promised compensations of consumerism.
But in any case, political incoherence in the face of uncontrollable crisis does not permit imperialism to implement any single sustainable restructuring process. Thus in opposition to the 'soft- face of reforms, there is already visible the hideous mask of outright, bloody repression. While the beleaguered elites argue matters out inside Washington's Beltway, the dark forces of US imperialism are already taking matters in their own hands. While the 'humanistic' reformers bleat, the CIA and the Pentagon plots. The conscience stricken reformers have now begun to issue their pleas to the IMF and the World Bank, arrogantly claiming for themselves the right to speak on behalf of the world's oppressed and exploited, wringing their hands and venting crocodile tears for the fate on millions of lives imperilled by their own greed -- for none have so benefited from the merciless exploitation of the working class as the milk fed priesthood of US culture, as the harlots of the US intelligentsia, including the so-called left intellectuals - and it is nothing else but their own skins and their comfortable lives that they fear losing and shed tears over. (see 11m.Children Die)
Meanwhile the dark forces have begun their campaigns of assassination, torture, 'disappearances', political pressure, harassment and the like. And this is only the first claw of the monster lurking in the heart of imperialism.
There can be no illusions that imperialism will ever give up freely what cannot be torn from its death grip by force. If history teaches anything, it teaches this: imperialism knows no limits.
Imperialism will destroy the world sooner than surrender supremacy. The enemies of humankind and of all life on earth are already chafing at the bit, and they will be the first to sweep aside the bleating platoons of reformists blatherers. As the tides of class struggle rise and the fire of people's war meld together, imperialism will convert the politics of the neoliberal 'New World Order' into war. Secret war waged with all the unscrupulous, inhuman zeal of which the Pentagon and CIA are past masters: 'anti-insurgency' low-intensity operations designed to decapitate the proletariat by slaughtering its leaders. Proxy wars waged by the imperial satraps against one another, at Washington's behest. Irredentist and intercommunal wars fomented and instigated by the dark forces whose masters understand the vital importance of divide and rule and hope to save their skins by generalising a Hobbesian war of all against all, outside their own borders. Religious wars instigated by the fanatics who are often the sons and daughters of small tradespeople and the lower professions, and who seize on bigotry and xenophobia to vent the rising frustration and anger of the submerged masses, and thus guarantee their own leading positions within obscurantist theocracies which allow scope for massive personal corruption and the 'good life' for their leaders.
In the past two decades imperialism has shown its mastery of this politics, shunting petit-bourgeois political elites away from the developmental, anti-colonialist politics of the 50s and 60s and towards the most, brutal, inhumane and totally senseless forms of sectarian and intercommunal strife, which are always tolerated and supported by imperialism: even when states are declared 'pariah', such as Libya, Iraq and Iran, imperialism does nothing to damage their regimes and even goes out of its way to defend them, as US imperialism has always vigilantly defended its client, Saddam Hussein and his murderous Iraqi regime. Compare this with the fate accorded petit-bourgeois led anticolonial movements a few decades earlier. In Africa, Latin America and Asia, such states and leaderships were always surrounded, isolated, destabilised, and bled white in silent, mostly unreported wars.
The allegedly anti-imperialist regimes of the Middle East and elsewhere which are led by professional fanatics, soldiers of fortune or religious zealots, are as much the enemies of the people as are their secret imperial masters; they, like revanchist religious movements, including those castigated as 'terrorist' by imperialism, are roadblocks in the way of world revolution.
The imperialists never cease to meddle in the affairs of the neocolonies. US imperialism gave the green light to the Indian government of the right-wing religious BJP fanatics to detonate nuclear devices. They did not just turn a blind eye to the Indian tests, they permitted them, and the hollow White House sanctions rhetoric does not disguise the truth. The imperialists' objective was transparent. The Indian bomb is designed to warn both Islam and China. US imperialism is terrified of risen Islam; this was the whirlwind of jihad which the imperialists themselves encouraged and fostered, for if not Islam, then what else can the West Asian and Middle Eastern masses turn to? Only socialism, only communism, only Leninism. The imperialists did all they could to push Arab nationalism in obscurantist, theocratic directions in the 1950s and 1960s. World capitalism is dependent on Arab oil. This is the secret they dare not speak, although it shouts out its own name loudly enough. To safeguard oil supplies, imperialism has for many decades skilfully sought to create endless instability, local wars and geopolitical 'churning' throughout the Middle East. Now it has raised the stakes still higher, for an apocalyptic endgame approaches: it was time to give Hinduism its bomb, and to let Islam flex its nuclear muscles in the shape of Pakistani reciprocal tests. (see Energy)
Thus imperialism sets the stage for fascism in the neocolonies and for war between Islam, Hinduism and China.
At the same time, this unleashing of the dogs of war further evidences the disintegration of US hegemony, announced with such arrogant triumphalism only a few years ago as the Cold War ended. The global New World Order is giving way to its opposite -- a world of terrifying disorder in which vast forces have accumulated ready to crash down on humankind in apocalyptic landslides of terror, reaction and mass death at any moment.
Will such occasions come to pass?
A better question is how will they be avoided, given the deepening systemic disarray of hurrah-capitalism and geopolitical formations and political instances. Economic collapse is being chased by apocalyptic horsemen of eco-catastrophe, hunger, revolt and war. Globalism, neoliberalism, have collapsed almost as soon as they have been announced: the universal hegemony of the markets, a thin screen for rapacious finance capitalism, will dissolve away at the first cold blast of a general, world-wide slump and depression. US imperialism already knows that the choice is not between 'Keynesianism' on the one hand and globalism on the other. The choices are incalculably grimmer and starker.
Will the world war be confined to Asia and the Middle East, and fought to the death between imperialism's proxies: India, Pakistan, China? Or will the US game plan to cut the head off Asian resurgence by smashing down Chinese and Japanese capitalism, and by the threat of nuclear war, be only the prelude to a general war, a new and final world war?
For it must be said that allowing India to have nuclear weapons would be unthinkable if US imperialism did not face still more abysmal challenges. It is obvious to any competent observer of the world energy scene that capitalism's dependence on fossil fuels, primarily oil, is as great as ever. There are no substitutes which can allow capitalism to continue in anything like its present form, and the collapse of oil supplies will, in the BEST case, be the preliminary to not years but decades of turmoil and reconstruction within the world market. But oil is more scarce than is ever admitted, and the future energy scenarios now published by the US government are more fraudulent and full of barefaced lies and statistical manipulations than anything ever attributed to the mendacity of the Soviet Union. An unsustainable situation already exists with respect to energy supply.
It is absolutely clear that if world growth continued on the high trajectory evidenced before the 1997 Asian meltdown, then instead of the present glutted energy markets, an oil-famine was already a looming prospect as world oil production peaks and then inexorably declines. Peak production at present rates will occur in the next few years: far too short a time scale for crisis to be forestalled, even if any of the long touted 'alternatives' (cold fusion, nuclear power, photovoltaics etc.) came to fruition, but NONE of them has. Production is geared to cheap oil, even if there were alternatives it will take two decades at least to relaunch the world economy on a different energy path. But there are no alternatives.
Imperialism cannot permit the Chinese economy in particular to grow at 10 percent a year. Within a decade, such growth would create Chinese demand for oil equivalent to present day total world production! And if the Chinese growth engine dragged Asia in its wake, then demand would increase still further, but the truth is that world oil production is close to peaking and can never be doubled.
The Indian bomb is one of imperialism's answers to the Chinese threat. And it is more evidence of the unscalable historical impasse capitalism has entered.
World capitalism is in the early stages of its deepest crisis, embracing all spheres of society, culture and production, all social classes, states, nations and regions. The capitalist world has entered a cul-de-sac from which there can be no escape. The beast is writhing in its death-agony. Its politicians, apologists and strongmen have no viable renewal policies. Beneath the triumphal mask of hurrah-capitalism are the steel teeth of what the Russian communists call samoyezd -- cannibal -- capitalism. Behind the soft words and polite smiles of its salons and academies, where the liturgy of neoliberalism was crafted, with its talk of open markets, democracy and 'one-world' hides a policeman with a truncheon, and behind him are the torturers with their shock-batons. World capitalism is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't. Damned to economic meltdown, conflict and war if it fails to launch a new accumulation cycle and to jerk free of the fetters now dragging it down.
Damned to run into unassailable obstacles if it does recommence accumulation, for the energy and resource deficits which have dogged the world-system for more than two decades are now gigantic impediments to renewed growth.
The optimism of hurrah-capitalism is based on nothing more solid than the hypnotic repetition of mindless mantras: 'technology will find the solutions'; 'the Information Revolution will sweep all before it'; 'virtualisation and dematerialisation will solve its resource problems' and last and most baleful: There Is No Alternative.
For if the doomsayers are right, and continued growth is unsustainable, threatening the integrity of the biosphere on which all life depends, and if resource limits are insurmountable, then what IS the alternative to capitalism? What OTHER way from the impasse but the relentless pursuit of technology, and if this is so, then surely it is necessary -- however regrettable -- to allow the markets to work unimpeded, retiring old, energy inefficient, polluting capital, and concentrating capital in the imperial heartlands whose powerful science and technology complexes offer the only hope of survival, of feeding the next century's hungry masses, of leapfrogging over technical obstacles?
In a word, if generalised prosperity is impossible with existing technology -- and most now agree that it IS impossible to give the Asian masses, for instance, Western living standards -- then surely it makes sense to bow to the inevitable and acknowledge that the only hope for these billions of people, is to put their trust in the galvanic powers of western technology, and wait quietly for better times as capitalism refreshes its cornucopia-machinery. The present generations in the neocolonies will be sacrificed, true, but not for the benefit of the hardworking West, but for the sake of their own unborn generations.
It is necessary to tax from these people the wealth necessary to refuel the engines of innovation, strengthen and stabilise markets and western socio-economic systems, and prepare to 'reculer pour mieux sauter'. In any case, Socialism has been tried, has it not? Who seriously suggests that the example of planning Soviet-style offers anything other than monumental waste, bureaucratic corruption and stagnation, shortages, grey uniformity, lack of dynamism and economic vitality? If the problems are really so serious, who is better placed to solve them than the enlightened social theorists of Harvard, Yale and Oxbridge, or the powerful scientific enterprises of the metropoles? To throw away the unquestioned benefits of freedom and capitalist enterprise in pursuit of revolutionary will o'the wisps promoted by power-crazed sociopaths -- this is not sensible is it? What after all, does Communism mean, but gulags, queues and unfreedom, in the midst of terrible pollution and environmental disregard?
The mantras of capitalist apologetics will be heard until the moment the ship finally sinks and the waves close over their heads. First of all, it is capitalist science and technology, capitalist rapacity, and the vast overgrowth of surplus population ('the most general law of capitalism', as Marx called it) in the form of a colossal reserve army of labour, which has created the world we now live in. It was precisely the capitalist Green Revolution which triggered a second population explosion among the dispossessed of the world, in just the same way that the population of the first industrial countries exploded, as peasants were made landless and forced into the cities.
In fact there is no surplus population in any absolute sense: there is only a population which is surplus to capitalism's requirements. Nevertheless world population will double to more than 10 billion in the coming decades; and these new members of the world proletariat will not be satisfied with virtual food or dematerialised roads, cars, homes, schools, hospitals.
Crisis has its inescapable logic. It exhausts one potentiality for growth after another. And in the same way, the working class and its allies inevitably progress on a learning curve which contains as many troughs as peaks. Communism is not just one option among others. If that was the case, we should be wasting our time hoeing such a hard furrow. Communism is inevitable because capitalist crisis is inevitable. Nevertheless, its inevitability will only become transparent to the people when all the other options have been tried. That is just in the nature of things.
Left to itself capitalist crisis can only deepen, its contradictions become still more explosive. Nothing can stop the deepening of capitalist crisis or the sharpening of its contradictions; that may still not be so evident in the first class salons of the west, but in the barrios and megacities of the rest of the world, it is self-evident. The contradictions will continue to ripen, and setbacks and defeats suffered by the proletariat only intensify the process. That is the entire lesson of the fall of the socialist world and what followed: the sequel was not the end of history and the final triumph of the capitalist system, but a fantastic acceleration of the necrosis of the tissues and fibre of capitalist society, world-wide. And it is the lesson of the whole 250-year history of industrial capitalism, this Lazarus which has stumbled by many zigzags and deviations, and many unsuspected resurrections, into the present and final crisis.
Whether the world likes it or not, we will have Communism because the alternative is barbarism and the extinction of life. There is no alternative... to Communism.
Whatever hardship the Soviet people endured, besieged and hounded by the West and under the yoke of a Party which ceased to be Communist and degenerated into one of humankind's most corrupt institutions, nothing prepared the Soviet people for the holocaust of lives, hopes and living standards which capitalism has brought them. The only glimmer of hope in the nightmare visited on the world by capitalism, is the hope offered by socialism: the hope of a world without capitalism, without markets, without warring classes, and without a Sword of Damocles hanging always over our heads. This is the only future open to humanity. All other roads lead to ruin and despair. Only communism offers hope, only communism offers life.
"No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society." [Karl Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)]
That point has now been reached. We must bury capitalism because if we don't, it will bury us. Communism is not a utopia, but a material necessity. This, the fundamental truth of scientific socialism, is no longer a prediction, but a palpable fact.