The Cercle de Discussion de Paris (CDP), comprised of longstanding comrades of the ICC, having broken with that organization, has published its reflections in a pamphlet, Que ne pas Faire? (What not to do?) In their introduction, these comrades tell us that: "Les textes qui constituent cette brochure sont l'expression d'une reflexion critique sur une experience traumatisante: l'evolution d'une organisation revolutionnaire en secte paranoiaque. Mais pas uniquement. Au-dela de cette experience, les textes ... abordent ds questions plus generales, en particulier la facon dont les revolutionnaires ont compris et analyse la realite du siecle qui s'acheve."(p.1) As the title of the pamphlet indicates, the experience in the ICC has taught the comrades essentially a negative lesson: how the struggle for communism should not be waged. A first article gives a vivid description of the suffocating and hallucinatory atmosphere in the ICC at the time of their split. A second one shows how the ICC’s incapacity to question its positions made the gap between its analysis and reality ever wider. A third one, searching for the organisational roots of the degeneration of the organisation they so passionately believed in, very clearly demonstrates, as IP did years earlier (see “The decline of the ICC” in IP #9, Spring 1988) “le risque mortel que court une organisation qui tend a faire de sa propre existence la raison ultime de son combat” (p.3)
Beyond their fascinating, and very disturbing, account of the degeneration of a revolutionary organization into a sect, both theoretically sclerotic, and increasingly engaged in brutal and obnoxious campaigns of harassment against its own members, what is especially significant about these texts is the honesty and theoretical rigor with which they confront the actual trajectory of capital over the course of the twentieth century. That trajectory, as we have also argued in the pages of IP, has followed a radically different course than that inscribed in the core texts of the ICC. Nowhere is this more clear than in the absolute disconnect between the dynamic of capitalism and the core concept of decadence, which for the ICC has always been the key which unlocks the doors to a theoretical comprehension of that dynamic.
In this review, we want to focus on the arguments with which the comrades of the CDP repudiate the concept of decadence as it has been wielded by the ICC since its inception. These arguments shatter the theoretical house of cards upon which the platform and politics of the ICC has been based. However, in rejecting the concept of decadence as the veritable basis for understanding the trajectory of capital in the twentieth century, the comrades of the CDP also call into question -- perhaps inadvertantly -- the very class lines which have been theoretically linked to the concept of decadence proffered by the ICC. Thus, we will also inquire into the political implications of the very effective work of theoretical demolition which the comrades of the CDP have engaged in -- implications which are themselves potentially very disquieting for revolutionary Marxists. In addition, the CDP also rejects the theory of imperialism which has guided the analyses of revolutionary Marxists, a point about which we will have much to say below. Finally, we also want to consider the vexing question of whether the ICC's complete failure to comprehend the actual development of capital in the twentieth century means that the concept of decadence is not integral to Marxism, OR that the moment at which capitalism enters its phase of decadence has not yet arrived, OR that the trajectory of capital requires a different conception of decadence than the one offered by Marxists until now.
While the theoretical progenitors of the ICC, Bilan
(Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left) and the Gauche
Communiste de France, claimed that the decadence of capitalism, inagurated by
the outbreak of the imperialist world war in 1914, is characterized by a halt
in the development of the productive forces, the ICC, incapable of a complete
denial of reality, in its own pamphlet on decadence (1981) asserted that
decadence (in capitalism as in pre-capitalist modes of production) "ne
peut donce etre characterisee par l'arret total et permanent de la croissance
des forces productives, mais par le ralentissement definitif de cette
croissance." The conclusion that the comrades of the CDP have reached,
after a thorough investigation of the actual development of capitalism in the
twentieth century, is that the theory of decadence, either in the form
elaborated by the progenitors of the ICC or by that organization itself cannot
result in an understanding of the trajectory of capitalism since 1914. Moreover
the disconnect between the theory of decadence and the reality of capitalist
development, apparent throughout the twentieth century, becomes especially
striking in the period since 1945.
Let us start by following the main argument of the CDP concerning the theory of decadence. The theory of decadence, with its vision of a definitive slackening in the growth of the productive forces, has two prongs: first that the outbreak of the imperialist world war in 1914, which marked the onset of capitalist decadence, was the result of the saturation of the world market such that the rapid growth of the productive forces characteristic of capital's ascendent phase was henceforth permanently blocked, a moment of economic crisis to which capital's only response could be war; second, that the continued existence of capitalism, now decadent, would be characterized by a ceaseless cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction and a permanent slackening in the growth of the productive forces, which could only be ended by proletarian revolution. The comrades of the CDP demonstrate that far from there being an economic crisis which provoked the war in 1914, "les donnees chiffrees montrent que la periode precedant la Premiere Guerre mondiale ne connait ni crise, ni meme ralentissemnet economique. Au contraire, les dernieres annees avant la guerre constituent au niveau mondial, et notamment pour l'Allemagne, la France et Angleterre, une periode de developpement economique sans precedent."(p.33) Moreover, the CDP also shows that in 1914, the possibilities for the continued development of capitalism were still enormous, both in terms of the existence of immense territories and huge populations still untouched by capitalist relations of production, and the fact that the real domination of capital was still in its infancy -- even in the most industrially advanced nations, where artisans, petty shopkeepers and peasants, not yet fully integrated into wage-labor, still constituted a significant part of the population. With respect to the growth of the productive forces since 1914, the comrades of the CDP clearly show that in comparison with the nineteenth century, the rate of growth in the twentieth has been faster! If the claim of a permanent slackening in the growth of the productive forces, the veritable basis of the ICC's conception of decadence, is to have any meaning, then the rate of growth since 1914 must be significantly less that the rate of growth of the productive forces during the ascendent phase of capitalism -- the bulk of which was in the nineteenth century. The figures provided by the CDP show that while the annual rate of growth for world production in the period 1800-1900 was 1,0%, the annual rate of growth for the period 1900-1995 was 2.7% -- almost triple! While the claims for a slackening in the growth of the productive forces were not unreasonable for the period between 1914-1945, with its two world wars and the great depression, for the period since 1945 only those unable to face reality could claim that such a slackening in the rate of growth of the productive forces has occurred. Indeed, the vertiginous advance of the real domination of capital over the past half-century, with its incorporation of vast territories and population into the wage-labor relation, a development which can be seen in the depopulated countrysides of Europe and in the teeming industrial metropoli of Seoul, Shanghai, and Bombay, is merely the other side of the coin of the prodigious development of the productive forces during that same period.
The political implications of the CDP's repudiation of
the ICC's theory of decadence are, however, staggering. Indeed, the CDP appears
to recognize them: "que deviennent les positions qui trouvaient leur
coherence dans la theorie de la decadence (et donc dans la these de l'arret ou
du freinage du developpement des forces productives): positions ... contre les
syndicats, le parlementarisme, les luttes de liberation
nationale?"(p.46) In the ICC’s
theory, each of those class lines is integrally linked to a vision of
decadence; a conception of capitalism no longer capable of developing the
productive forces; a mode of production which has completed its "historic
task." If capitalism had not reached the limits of its expansion in 1914,
if it has continued to develop the productive forces, without any slackening,
then don't we have to raise the possibility that there have been "des
`reformes durables' depuis 1914?"(p.46) And if such durable reforms have
been possible, on what basis can we continue to insist that participation in
the unions or in parliaments constitutes a crossing of the class line into the
camp of capital? How can we continue to argue that support for national
liberation struggles constitutes a betrayal of the proletariat and an
enlistment in the camp of capitalism? After all, such positions were consonant
with the struggle of the proletariat, the struggle for socialism, during the
ascendant phase of capitalism -- or so Marx, Engels, and the first and second
Internationals argued. If capitalism in the twentieth century has continued to
develop the productive forces as it did in the nineteenth, then on what basis
have the class lines been so thoroughly redrawn? The CDP correctly recognizes
that their rejection of the ICC's concept of decadence raises questions about
the class lines that revolutionaries have insisted separates the proletariat
from its class enemy, but it does not -- at least in this pamphlet -- attempt
to resolve the dilemma. For our part, the class lines defended by revolutionary
Marxists since 1914 remain valid, but they must be uncoupled from a vision of
decadence based on a halt or slackening in the growth of the productive forces,
and uncoupled too from a vision of a capitalist mode of production no longer
capable of conceding improvements in the standard of living of the working
classes. We shall elaborate on this below.
According to the CDP, "la theorie de la decadence s'appuie sur l'analyse de l'imperialisme."(p.33) In rejecting the ICC's vision of the former, the comrades of the CDP are also led to reject the classic Marxist vision of the latter. Far from being inherent in the very logic of capital and its development, as Marxists have long maintained, the CDP asserts that "L'imperialisme (tel qu'il a existe jusqu'en 1945) n'exprime pas les veritables tendances de fond du capitalisme, mais a constitue dans les faits un frein a l'extension du mode de production capitaliste et a abouti a une impasse."(p.36) The victory of the United States in World War Two, and then in the Cold War, shattered that impasse, and the subsequent development of capitalism, an expression of its "true" tendencies, according to the CDP, has proceeded in the direction of a "capital devient `apatride,'" in which the very "cadre de l'Etat-nation, d'un point de vue economique, est depasse"(p.45) -- the very antithesis of imperialism as it has been understood by Marxists. If imperialism, as it incontestably presided over the policies of European states in the period leading up to 1914, was not an expression of the developmental "logic" of capital, then what accounts for such a phenomenon? The answer of the CDP deserves serious consideration: "Si l'imperialisme n'est pas une tendance inherente au capitalisme, il faudrait expliquer pourquoi il s'est developpe. Ce n'est probablement pas reduit a un seul facteur; c'est un ensemble de causes, mais on peut penser que celles qui dominent sont liees a un retard et a une autonomisation relative des superstructures par rapport aux conditions economiques: confrontation entre developpement economique et persistance de superstructures arrierees, persistance d'un secteur agricole important, ..."(p.36)
In itself, the CDP’s acknowledgement that the economy
doesn't explain everything, the its implied repudiation of the crude economic determinism that presides
over so much of Marxist theory, its recognition of the active role of factors
such as politics and culture (the "superstructures") in the shaping
of history , are a welcome and necessary corrective to the dominant strains of
Marxist thinking. But if its position
on imperialism at first sight seems a rejection of such a schematic approach of
history, closer consideration reveals quite the opposite. For the comrades
cling to a vision of a quasi-mechanical
"logic" of capitalist development which explains the unfolding
of all
historical events (except when it doesn't!); a logic from which they
claim imperialism was a deviation. Such a conception smacks of a teleological
philosophy of history more in keeping with Hegel's than with a Marxist
analysis, which is more sensitive to the aleatory, the contingent, in history,
and which recognizes that a historical trajectory always contains several
possibilities, and that its result is only appreciable a posteriori. The CDP on
the other hand, argues that capital has an "historic mission" to
create the world market, and to subject the world and its population to
capitalist relations of production -- what we would designate as the real
domination of capital. The teleological
overtone is clear here. It is one thing to say that the outcome of capitalist
development has been the real domination of capital; quite another to impute to
it a "mission." As a metaphor, Marx's reference to a mission is
unimpreachable; but in a world suffused with Hegelian teleology and philosophy
of history, and visions of economic determinism, it can be extremely dangerous.
The logic of capitalism is that capitalists are
constantly seeking a higher profit, even in those cases where it can be
demonstrated, again a posteriori, that this occured at the expense of capitalism’s
“historic mission”. We won’t explain here again why imperialism and other
phenomena which, in the CDP’s view, were deviations from capitalism’s logic,
such as the protectionism preceding world war one, were in fact very much in
concordance with it. We have analysed
quite extensively the circumstances in which the incentives for imperialism and
capital-exportation were greater than those for industrial development at home
(see: “The law of value and the world market”, especially the last part, “Ascendance,
decadence and the world market” in IP #37, p. 17). The comrades of the
CDP are of course not obliged to agree with our analysis but they should at
least consider the arguments. In their hunt for higher profits, capitalists
have often created obstacles to the spread and the health of capitalism and
they continue to do so today. Indeed, the insoluble contradiction between the
interests of capitalists and those of capitalism is an indelible feature of
this mode of production, especially in its decadent phase, as we have argued
before. So while the CDP is right when
it sees a detrimental effect for capital in the imperialist policies of
European powers in the period before 1914, where the construction of vast
colonial empires, as the pamphlet shows, led to a slower rate of growth in
England and France than in its capitalist rivals, and to see a linkage between
imperialism and underdevelopment, imperialism was no less a facet of capitalism
than the phenomenon of globalization that -- for the moment -- is dominant
today. And while the CDP seems mesmerized by globalization, which for them is
the antithesis of imperialism, it seems to us that they overlook the extent to
which this "apatride" capitalism is, in fact, shaped and directed
primarily by Washington, the extent to which it is a manifestation of American
imperialism, albeit an imperialism very different from the traditional
imperialism which the CDP identifies as the "essential" imperialism,
as well as tendencies within a number of nation-states or proto-states
(nation-Europe) to oppose globalization. As IP has argued before, “the present
imperialist policy does not revolve around territorial conquest, as in the
past, but rather around the control of globalized capital.” (IP #36,
p.11). It may be noted that this point was made in a debate on the war in
Kosovo, to which the CDP contributed a text which argued that imperialism has
remained unchanged: “The new war over Kosovo is but the continuation of those
confrontations in which the great powers try, always in the name of their
‘humanitarian’ concerns, to expand their zones of influence.” (IP #36,
p.8) If there is a coherence between this position and the one in the
CDP-pamphlet, we don’t see it.
The CDP insists that the evolution of the human species
rests on a "law of progress," which determines a succession of modes
of production, each one consisting of an ascendant and decadent phase, with the
former permitting a development of the productive forces and the latter
blocking that self-same development. It is this teleologic vision of
history which frames their view of
capitalism’s decadence. Since economic
development manifestly was not blocked in the 20th century and is
not today, the inevitable conclusion would be that capitalism’s decadence has
not yet begun. So it does seem that for the CDP the problem with the theory of
decadence, as a halt or slackening in the growth of the productive forces, is
merely its dating; that the ICC's insistence that 1914 marked the onset of
decadence is wrong, and that capital has yet to exhaust its possibilities for
expansion, but that that point must necessarily come sometime in the future,
that such a phase in which the growth of the productive forces permanently
slackens is historically inevitable. If that is indeed the conclusion they
draw, it is difficult to see how these comrades could -- with any theoretical
consistency -- today defend the class lines that have been the hallmark of the
communist left.
While the CDP never claims this position explicitly,
the effort to prove that “the era of
war and revolution” has not yet arrived, despite what the history of the
20th century suggests,runs like a red thread through several texts
in the pamphlet. The world wars fall under imperialism and have therefore nothing
to do with the fundamental tendencies of capitalism, and the revolutionary wave
is reduced to the October-revolution only, which itself is described as
“utopian” and “voluntaristic” (p.67), to be explained “essentially by the
particularities of Russia” (p.55). Today, China still “constitutes a gigantic
field of expansion for capitalism” (p.46) and the terrain still being
prepared with “immense technological
progress” which “favorisent les
conditions generales pour l'eclosion d'une nouvelle societe,"(pp.51-52)
that is, communism.
First something on this last point. It is one thing to assert that specific technological developments, e.g. the computer, can also facilitate the advent of communism, but it is quite another to see technology as neutral, a tool that can be utilized either by capital or by the proletariat. That would be to fail to see that the historically contingent, but specific, forms of technological development have themselves been impregnated by the capitalist law of value; that they are not neutral tools, but rather historically conditioned by the capitalist integument within which they have been generated, and from which they cannot simply be separated. It was just such a separation that Lenin sought to make concerning the Taylor system, which he believed could be appropriated for socialism, but through which the very dynamic of capital asserted itself.
Not only has the prodigious technological development
which has transformed the human landscape over the past century been indissociably
linked to the spread of the real domination of capital, as the CDP asserts, but
that very development has not simply favored the advent of communism, as the
CDP also claims. Rather, that same technological development has also
constituted the unleashing of barbarism on an unparalleled scale; it has let
loose the destructive forces that have turned the twentieth century into a vast
slaughterhouse, and that threaten to make the new century a graveyard for the
human species. It is this side of the enormous technological development that
capital has wrought which the pamphlet of the CDP ignores -- a development
which has been nefaste for the human species. It is this very destructiveness
of capital -- which since 1914 has afflicted the capitalist metropoles and not
just the peripheries -- which led Rosa Luxemburg to insist that World War One
placed humanity before the choice of socialism or barbarism. The epoch that
opened in 1914 has been one in which the continued development of capitalism
threatens the very existence of the human species. It has been characterized by
a destructiveness and barbarism not despite its continued technological
progress, but precisely because of it! There is a straight line from Sarajevo
1914 to Sarajevo 1994. There is a firm link between the development of
capitalist technology and the smokestacks of Auschwitz. It is decadent
capitalism which is responsible for the shape and content of technological
development in the 20th century and the orgies of destruction it
unleashed. Their root-causes are not to be found in the weight of “superstructures arrierees” but in the
fundamental change in the conditions for capitalist accumulation in the 20th
century, which the CDP never analyses from the point of view of Marxist value
theory.
As we explained before in our series on “the roots of
capitalist crisis”, before the 20th century, there was a fundamental
harmony between capitalist society and the productive forces, between the mode
of production and its basic rule, the law of value. That doesn’t imply that
capitalism did not experience crises. At the contrary, they were more numerous
then, but they were mostly caused by a lack of development (bad years in
agriculture, shortages of raw materials) or the still limited containment of
capitalism’s intrinsic chaotic tendencies (speculation driven financial
shocks). In sofar as they were caused directly by capitalism’s most fundamental
contradictions, they remained limited in scope and impact. The overall
conditions of scarcity of output in relation to productive demand and
capitalism’s reliance on increasing absolute surplus value (appropriating more
unpaid labor time) assured that, generally speaking, economic growth,
employment and profit developed hand in hand. This slow, yet fairly harmonious
growth, was buttressed by a balance between the creation of exchange value and
of use value.
Only in the 20th century, when the real
domination of capital, the specifically capitalist industrial mass production
with its reliance on labor power replacing technology, became the prevailing method of production, the
creation of exchange value end of use value began to follow widely diverging
paths. The capacity to create use values -material wealth- grew vertigonously
but the capacity to create exchange value could no longer keep pace. The
condition of scarcity in relation to productive demand was fraying and with it,
the conditions for capital’s valorisation.
The value of existing capital is conditioned by its capacity to generate and realise new value. The disbalance between the enormous mass of existing, accumulated capital and the value it generates and productively realizes cannot keep widening without making the valorisation of total capital, not just part if its surplus value, impossible. There is but one ‘solution’ to this: the balance between the value of existing capital and the value of newly created capital (which is also the balance between purchase and sale) must be restored through a massive devalorisation of existing capital. This explains why decadent capitalism is so extraordinary destructive: only through the violence of deep depression and cataclysmic wars can this devalorisation be accomplished.
The shortness of this description inevitably makes it
somewhat schematic and we refer the reader to the crisis series and other texts
in IP. Also, we want to emphasize that this analysis explains in our view the
general context of capitalist development in the 20th century but by
no means all the particular and complex ways in which history unfolded. For
instance, it does not adequately explain why world war one broke out in 1914,
at a time of no open economic crisis, nor why the crisis took the specific
forms it did in the ‘20’s. But that doesn’t mean that either event can be
understood outside of this context.
How does our analysis square with the quote from Marx which the CDP emphasizes, the one in which he stated that “never has a society expired before it has developed all the productive forces which it is large enough to contain” (Preface to The Critique of the Political Economy)? Note that Marx says “expire”, not “become decadent”. But even so, if taken literally, this statement cannot be correct. It is demonstrably untrue for feodalism, which continued to develop agricultural productivity long after it expired as a political system and is even less conceivable concerning capitalism. It would mean that capitalism will continue to exist until it has exhausted every potential to accumulate at which point it would expire suddenly and spontaneously, without needing any help from the working class struggle. The capitalist mode of production is not conceivable without accumulation, without growth; it is synonomous to it. Furthermore, the exacerbation of its contradictions acts as a powerful impetus to raise productivity through technological development, since that is the way through which capitalists must try to escape from the declining rate of profit of total capital.
Marx sometimes painted with a very broad brush a picture which required some distance to be seen properly, for in the larger context of his theory it acquires a meaning that seems absent when seen up close in isolation.What the comrades of the CDP do not seem to grasp is that the tension between the capitalist mode of production and economic development cannot be understood as a lineairly growing condition that results into static, irreversible immobility. It is dynamic and must be analysed as a dialectical movement of development and destruction which condition each other.
From the above, it may be clear that we think that both the real domination of capital and the general context of decadence should be taken into account to explain the validity of the revolutionary class positions. On the trade union-question for instance, it is the real domination of capital which explains why there does no longer remain any space unconquered by the law of value in which large, permanent organisations can operate autonomously. It is decadence which explains why these organisations, having become part and parcel of the fabric of capitalist society, are compelled to act against the interests of the working class, against the future of humankind.
If we have taken so much space to critcize the
positions developed in the pamphlet of the CDP, it is because we think the
debate is worth it. The comrades of the CDP have demolished the theory of
decadence upon which the coherence of the ICC was based, revealing its
theoretical vacuity. They have raised serious questions regarding the role of
imperialism and the prospects for the overcoming of the nation-state. They have
demonstrated in practice that there can be no "invariance du
marxisme," that constant theoretical innovation, and, yes, revision, is
inseparable from the development of Marxist theory. Perhaps most important of
all, they have demonstrated an openness to discussion and debate, without which
that development of Marxist theory will be impossible. Que ne pas Faire?
should be read by all those who wish to participate in the renaissance of
Marxism; they will not be disappointed.
Mac Intosh and
Sander
June 2001
[from Internationalist
Perspective #38]