Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 16:58:47 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Wars and Revolutions.


G'day Dave,

A thoughtful and bloody useful essay, mate.  It deserves better than I
could do, but I'm gonna try to answer it.

>The question of leadership is THE question today. The history of the
>20th century proves to us time and time again, that given imperialism
>and recurring wars and crises,

Let's start by delimiting the imperialism/war link.  Polanyi (*The Great
Transformation*) and Kautsky's 'superimperialism' thesis are simply not
that easy to jettison.  Both allow for the direct link between
business/finance imperialism and wars.  Both also see this very process
(ghastly as it is) as self-limiting.  A plethora of third-world tragedies
(I was gonna call 'em minor but we're killing each other a million at a
time in these places so I won't) does not a major conflagration cause.

The domestication of irksome Asia, by an admittedly contingent alliance of
corporate capital, is comfortably read within a Kautskian context (and my
take on the CM too), for instance.  After all, security markets generally
plunge with imminent war, don't they?  There's a quid in flogging the
government death-dealing technology, but none in deploying it.

>In what way does the characterisation of the imperialist epoch as one
>of wars and revolutions  still apply today? Since the end of the
>post-war boom, world capitalism has been in a period of
>under-accumulation. A lack of profits has forced much capital into
>speculative outlets which creates additional instability in a
>globally integrated economy.While some of the cheer leaders of the
>bourgeoisie may think superficially that capitalism is in good condition,
>not every one of the top dogs agrees. Some of the more `enlightened'
>bourgeois like George Soros recognise the need to bring about firm
>regulation of international finance to forestall anarchy.

Are we sure there is a three-decade pattern of underaccumulation?  There's
capital about aplenty, isn't there?  If use values are not being produced
with this capital, it might merely be time for corporate capital to
domesticate more of the world geographically (through, inter alia, the IMF)
and more of our lives (cultural life as 'information industry').
Certainly, loads of capital is now funnelling through bailouts, buyouts and
a/v terminals.  We dunno how this is playing out yet, do we?  Certainly as
concentration of capital; certainly as imperialism - but not as impending
war and not necessarily as instability (I mean there is instability in all
this social dislocation, but I remain to be convinced there's now any more
than there was - globally - in other post-war periods.

>People like Soros dimly fear  what we understand. World capitalism
>cannot enter another period of sustained accumulation without further
>wars and the opening up of new revolutionary opportunities?

Maybe I'm just being dense - but why must wars be so necessary - they seem
well on the way to 'revolutionising' their menu of opportunities now!  Now,
I don't say new crisis tendencies aren't coming into being - they
definitively do with every new complex of relations.  The one I keep coming
back to is that of automated production.  The OCC in much first-world
production may now transfer to much of the rest of the world.  Soon, we'll
no longer be creating an industrial class of gravediggers, but an
unemployed class!  Marx's logic applied to post-industrial scenarios,
leaves us with little work for us to do, a very small bourgeois class, a
very small middle class of technical supervisors, and a huge class of
suddenly supernumerae people with a most pressing and unavoidably obvious
interest in finding a way to guarantee their own material existence and
need for recognition.  We ain't there yet - capital will cop the benefits
of differentials in labour costs for a while, but they could only achieve
this by extending their hegemony over the periphery - that this will
ultimately create pressure for standardisation in wages and conditions too
(and hence extension of automation) is a matter of some dialectical
probability.

>Don't we see the current crisis in Asia in these terms? A lot of
>surplus finance capital looking for super-profits invested in hot
>Asian companies that could  not continue to extract enough surplus
>value to return short-term super profits.   So the resulting disinvestment
>creates a regional depression in which the weakest capitals go to the wall.
>Constant capital and variable capital is devalued through concentration and
>centralisation of capital in the hands of MNC's so as to restore a
>reasonable >rate of profit.  Predictably, the intervention of the IMF is
>designed to >protect the investments of imperialist,  mainly US banks and
>not local >investors.

Well, I think this is happening too.

>IMF austerity measures are designed to cut taxes as a
>drain on profits.  All of this proves that the imperialist states
>dominate the Asian semi-colonial economies, and expose them to
>mounting imperialist trade war.

But the confluence of business and finance is everywhere, isn't it?  One
'bloc's' money is tied up in another 'bloc's' fortunes!  The degree of
financial globalisation is already at this state of affairs, isn't it?

>Doesnt this prove that the imperialists are still using their state
>apparatuses to prop-up the big capitalists? That these states
>still play  a key role in protecting their own capital in its search
>for super-profits?

Yeah, but what the US state can do for US capitals is not at one with what
the Indonesian or S. Korean state can do for its capitals.  From Islamabad
to Taipei, the state with which extant domestic capital has to reckon is
not its own any more.  This victory has been won in six months, with hardly
a drop of blood spilled.

>So in what way does what we have learned since
>1917 invalidate the Lenin's theory of imperialism? Or his "Revolution
> and the State"?  Finance capital merges with  industrial
> capital as it concentrates and centralises globally still under the aegis of
>the imperialist states? What is becoming obvious today is just how far that
>process has gone. The  USA and its proxy organisations the IMF and
>World Bank today act  as a world centre in concentrating capital, further
>winning control over semi-colonial economies, in Asia and the former
>Soviet Union,  and in the process gaining an advantage over its
>Japanese and EU rivals.

As Boddhi warns, we must not expect competition at all levels of capital at
all times.  It is at once the default setting for capitalism and the public
relations of capitalism - it is not what I think I'm seeing just now.
Isn't there NewsCorp money in European media, Chase-Manhatten money in
Euromergers, and a bucketload of Euros on Wall St?  Isn't this more like
Kautsky's superimperialism scenario?  Haven't Australia and Singapore given
money to the IMF to help domesticate Asian economies?

>Despite Soros, the bourgeoisie don't really know what's happening.
>But do Marxists? They should do. We know that to return to a period of
>sustained capital accumulation, much constant and  variable capital has to be
>destroyed to allow the massive amount of capital in existence to return a
>profit.

They're doing this just north of us now - and they may be doing it here
very shortly.

>We know that this struggle will take the form of each imperialist power
>attempting  to destroy its rivals capital rather than its own. This means
>the opening up of a new period  of wars and revolutions. Those who
>think not should say why not.

Well, I don't know this.  They seem to be doing it to the periphery, not
each other.  There may be (typically nationalist) revolutionary indignation
in this, but not intra-core warfare.  And the gap in material conditions of
core proletariats and their counterparts in the periphery is probably gonna
increase in the short term.

>A new period of war and revolution will pose acutely once more the
>question of socialism or barbarism  i.e. of revolutionary leadership.

Well, the 'socialism-or-barbarism' question does become more pointed.  But,
as I write, I seem to be convincing myself of a third-worldist scenario for
the short-to-medium term.

>We know that both  periods of war and revolution in this century
>were won by the imperialists only with the help of the social democracy
>and in the second case, the stalinists. That is, the reformist
>leadership of the labour movement and its social democratic and
>labour parties, and the stalinists' control over the communist parties.

That's not the whole story.  Australian social democrats defeated
conscription both times it was put during WW1.  Social Democrats did help
fight Nazis and the like in WW 2 (good on 'em).  They and the unions also
stopped the Netherlands reclaiming Indonesia after WW2.  As for the failed
revolutions, well, you may point to Luxemburg's execution and the
Comintern's unrealistic recipes for German agitation (preStalinist, btw)
but I remain confused exactly as to what Luxemburg et al would have done if
they had managed to unite the German left and overthrow the government.
Certainly, Luxemburg voiced fundamental reservations about bolshie practice
du juour.

>In the first case, the only victory that we can point to resulted from the
>organisation of revolutionary parties. The Russian revolution was
>only possible because of the Bolsheviks. The German revolution failed
>because of a lack of Bolsheviks. While the Russian revolution
>survived it suffered a counter-revolutionary reverse at the hands of
>the Stalinists.

So you disregard all those arguments about undeveloped economy, undeveloped
proletariat, the relative probability of hijacking that seems to me always
attends the structures that must attend 'democratic centralism'?  The idea
is not just to capture the government, it is to stay there long enough to
make socialism.  And the longer an elite resides in the trenches and
fortifications of government, the more 'democratic centralism' affords them
the opportunity to entrench and enrich themselves.  Occasional bolshie Leon
Trotsky saw some problems with the revolution itself that he predicted
would have long-term costs.  He was right, wasn't he?  And didn't his
critique require the authorship and execution of any revolution - from go
to woe - by well-developed, highly democratic workers' soviets spanning the
whole gamut of production?  Anyway, enough on that - our time is a
different one.

>The failure to generalise the revolution was in the
>last analysis the failure of revolutionary leadership and  set the
> scene for the next period of war and revolution.

You can not know this.  Given Luxemburg's ambivalent pamphlets, and the
recent war, would Germans not have had an ambivalent picture of the Russian
bolshies?  Would they have not recognised in their own material conditions
a very different set of circumstances than pertained in Russia.  For all I
know, and I'm at my limit (or well past it) here, Luxemburg's revolutionary
plan might have been a very different, if not incompatible, one.

>The next period of war/revolution confirmed revolutionary marxists
>analysis of the first. Trotsky thought it would be a bigger war with
>bigger revolutionary opportunities. He was right. The defeat for the
>world's workers was also bigger. This was because the stalinist's
>role destroyed the ability of workers to take up these opportunities.
>>From China in 1924, to Germany 1933, and Spain in 1936,
>and the post-war uprisings in Greece and Indo-China,
>stalinists acted as agents of the bourgeoisie to physically
>smash revolutions. The degenerate workers states which arose in
>Eastern Europe,  China and Vietnam and Cuba were creations of the
>stalinist bureaucracy as part of its payoff for betraying real
>workers revolutions.  All this proved was that imperialism was
>in a desperate situation and had  to concede territory to
>the stalinists as the price of defeating genuine worker revolutions.

And maybe the menshies were right.  Maybe Kautsky was right.  Maybe a
sustainable revolutionary socialism was not on the cards in these places at
these times.  Revolutionary sentiment by itself ain't enough.  Maybe you do
need certain material conditions in place.  Maybe they're here now ... only
there ain't much revolutionary sentiment about.  That means any leadership
today has almost opposite problems (and opportunities) to those faced in
SU, China etc.

>Appealing to "democracy" without "centralism" in a workers party is the
>recipe >for bureaucracy, because each individual is left to do what they
>like, and the >leadership usurps democracy by substituting its own
>policies.

History tells me this describes pretty well what 'democracy' with
'centralism' amounted to.

>Shit happens
>because Menshevism is based on  bourgeois impressionism, the belief
>that the working class can arrive at a spontaneous consciousness of
>class interests.

No, I'm with Kautsky and Lenin there (they agreed a lot once): you do need,
*initially*, a specific theoretical practice outside the proletariat, which
must be 'imported' into the working classs movement.  I know how this
sounds, but how else do we get around the ever more depressingly
demonstrable gap between objective dynamics and the ideology of the
proletariat?  Pedagogy is the go.  And concrete wins in the field of
politics and industry might be how to do it.  The workers must author their
actions, but a bit of well-expressed theory from those fortunate enough to
have the time to theorise might just be the precondition for such actions.

>Bolshevism, on the other hand is based on Marx's method which employs
>a scientific approach to knowledge and practical struggles. Only
>those members who are trained in this method become members, so only
>those members who can draw marxist conclusions from their experience
>contribute to democratic decisions. This experience is gained in a
>disciplined way so as to put these decisions to the test.  Correct
>programme [which Justin seems to think falls out of the sky] is
>constantly being debated. Just look at the debates which took place
>in the Bolshevik party. Disagreements may lead to splits as with the
>Bolsheviks and Mensheviks which are then also judged in practice.

Yeah, the debates were good.  Meanwhile the need for specific responses in
specific circumstances was forgotten.  A decentralised practice/structure
might help get around this.  It's not a bad model for democracy either.

Sorry, gotta make the dinner.

Cheers,
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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