Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 00:44:59 +0100
From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell)
Subject: Rollback of working class privileges


Brad wrote:

>What of the working class in this period, today? One of its salient
>features has been the relentless rollback of precisely these privileges
>within the imperialist countries. Why this is occurring now is an
>interesting theoretical problem that needs to be solved (I have my own
>ideas on this).  But if this trend continues, an explosion of class
>struggle is inevitable. In this case, the LAST thing needed is Maoist,
>New Left or Postmodern pessimism concerning the proletariat.

Basically, I would reply that the rollback is due to the growing crisis of
capitalism. There are several factors that gave capitalism an artificial
lease of life after the second world war, and most of them can be summed up
under the heading of a Stalinist sell-out of the international revolution
in the name of socialism in one country and peaceful coexistence - a
counter-revolutionary alliance of Stalinism with imperialism. Besides such
glaring examples as the Soviet diplomats accompanying Chiang Kai-Shek to
Taiwan when Mao took power in China, and the opposition of the Cuban CP to
the Cuban revolution, there were more subtle aspects to the deal. A
fundamental characteristic of the post-war period was the administration by
counter-revolutionary leaderships of enormous concessions to the workers
and the 'popular masses'.

1.       Petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships administered the newly
liberated
        colonial nations, whose revolutionary movements had made them
impossible for
        the imperialists to retain - India, Indonesia, Ghana, Kenya etc.
(In passing,
        Indonesia 1965 is to Maoism's internationalism what China 1927 was to
        Stalinism's).

2.      Stalinist bureaucracies administered the expanding bloc of workers'
states,
        including relatively autonomous variants in countries where an
independent
        revolutionary movement had swept away the imperialists -
Yugoslavia, China,
        Vietnam and Cuba, for instance.

3.      Social-Democrat governments introduced and administered welfare
states in a
        number of imperialist countries, such as Britain, Sweden and others.

This class collaboration, orchestrated from Moscow, gave the imperialists
the chance to exploit the fantastic destruction of capital during the war
by producing for reconstruction and then for the huge new market opened up
for them courtesy of Stalinism. Ironic, isn't it - capitalism was dead on
its feet, and instead of a new world for the workers, Stalinism came up
with new markets for the imperialists!

Well, one by one these concessions have been reeled back in.

First the semi-colonial nations were forced into submission and then
gang-raped. Their subsistence-farming rural populations have been brutally
torn from the land and driven into vast urban slums as a classic
proletariat with no ties to the land or any other means of production, and
only their labour power to sell.

Then the Stalinist bureaucracies themselves became unable to bear the
antagonistic tensions mounting between the craving for profits and
expansion of post-boom imperialism and the class pressures of a
working-class demanding its birthright in the workers' states. They caved
in to imperialism and attempted to make over the workers' states to the
bourgeoisie, just as Trotsky had predicted they would in the Transitional
Programme of the Fourth International in 1938:

        'The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the
        bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie
in the
        workers' state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the
        country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the
bureaucracy
        and open the way to socialism.'

The problem was that the working class was beginning to move, and although
it didn't crush the bureaucracy, it was in no mood to just have a whole new
bourgeois class foisted on it, especially when the new bourgeoisie was
composed of its old enemies the bureaucracy and the imperialists, and its
new enemy the mafia. The battle is still on in relation to the character of
the new states emerging from the ex-Soviet bloc. Property relations rooted
in a mode of production cannot just be wished away or signed away with a
stroke of the pen. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the political
relations underlying the Stalinist regimes were not identical with the
economic relations that constituted the foundations of the workers' states.

And now - in the period of the most splendid victory for the world
bourgeoisie in its history, namely the humiliation and destruction of the
Soviet Union, born of the socialist revolution - you'd think they'd be
cock-a-hoop and leading the world in joyful celebrations! But no. In its
finest hour, imperialism without the Stalinist counterweight to restrain it
is once more revealing its true features of limitless greed, brutality and
bloodlust. And chaotic instability - it's lurching about like a crazed
elephant and god help anyone in its path.

And in the process it's starting to attack the material concessions in
terms of wages and welfare ('prosperity' - if you compare it to the
conditions that Engels described in England in 1844, or that workers and
the poor have to endure in semi-colonial countries today) that have bought
off the working class in the imperialist heartlands for so many decades. By
'bought off' I mean been a significant part of the material pressure
preventing the workers from chucking the union and Labour bureaucracies off
their backs and using their organizations to fight for their own class
interests.

So with the national independence movements down the tubes, workers' states
under Stalinist management a nostalgic CP dream (no more junkets to
Georgia!), and the imperialist welfare states going to the dogs,
irreversibly, what can the working class do?

Any ideas?

Cheers,

Hugh





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