Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 14:27:47 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: National in form, international in substance


Rakesh writes:

>I am not quite sure what Marx meant by having to settle it with their own
>bourgeoisie first--citation please.  In Marx's time the working class,
>unskilled and skilled, out of which the capitalists were making their
>profits was relatively more confined within national boundaries. I don't
>think it is reasonable to take a closed national economy as a reasonable
>approximation any longer, less true for the European capitals than the
>American ones--this is my hypothesis: is it true? At any rate, concerted
>action by a global working class against, say, a multinational corporation
>would be settling it with one's own bourgeoisie first.


This is one of the most fundamental principles of the Manifesto. The
passage reads:

	Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the
	proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle.
	The proletariat of each country must of course first of all settle
	matters with its own bourgeoisie.
	[About a page before the end of Pt I, Bourgeois & Proletarians]

Rakesh, and he is not alone in this, Rosa L did it and Bob M does it in
relation to the national question, for instance, misses the dialectical
interrelationship of national and international that was always present in
Marx's (and Engels's) thinking. Marx didn't take a closed national economy
as his starting point -- *EVER*. However, the world economy is organized by
individual capitals operating within individual national states, so any
workers or national liberation movements would be the nature of things have
as their immediate task the removal of their concrete exploiter, ie their
local boss, or their regional or national oppressor. But note that Marx &
Engels refer to this as FORMAL struggle. The substance of the capitalist
mode of production is international.

The way to defeat the capitalist mode of production and transform it into
first a proto-socialist one and then socialism is to defeat the concrete
exploiters and oppressors, fortify the conquests thus gained and fight for
the liberation of progressively more of the world, so that the formal
struggle more and more matches the scope of the substantial one.

This was the perspective shared by Lenin and Trotsky in relation to the
October Revolution. It is the perspective rejected by the Stalinist
ideologies of Socialism in One Country, the Two-Stage Theory of Revolution,
etc. It is the perspective underlying all of Marx's work, Lenin's State and
Revolution, and Trotsky's theories of the Permanent Revolution and the
Transitional Programme.

The struggle of the Liverpool Dockers is a very good example of how the
interaction between national and international can work. By fighting their
own boss in concrete fashion, they were compelled to extend the struggle
beyond the port of Liverpool to the whole of Britain and then to ports
around the world. And their fellow-dockers supported them in this because
they realized it was the same *substantial* struggle. And the way they
provided the most powerful solidarity was to take up the struggle against
casualization and de-unionization in their own ports, as happened in
Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, the Netherlands etc -- in addition to the
more *formal* solidarity of financial support and blacking scab cargoes,
etc.

You can't ignore the local, formal aspect of struggle. It's got to be taken
from this end. But formal struggles without an understanding of the
substantial international aspects lead nowhere. But then so does would-be
substantial struggle directly against the multi-national enemy in the
abstract -- and this is where Rosa and Bob fall down, and Rakesh, too, in
his scenario of direct global action against imperialism.

This is way too brief as I'm in a hurry. Hope it helps, anyway.

Cheers,

Hugh




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