The global death march of capital has cut a swath of human suffering across Asia and Russia. The current crisis is now causing concern over the instability in South American Markets. The Venezuelan oil business was hurt by the fall in oil prices, as well as the crisis in Asia and Russia. Brazil's stock market has suffered a 10 percent drop. As of August 28th, 1998, the International Monetary Fund has less than 10 billion dollars available for future bailouts. This has lead to the request by the White House for 18 billion dollars for further bailouts. To date none of the 22.6 billion dollar bailout for Russia has succeeded in shoring up the collapsing Russian economy, in fact such bailouts exist to save the investments of the capitalists and are not meant to benefit workers at all.
Current fallout from the world economic crisis has affected US exports to the tune of a 7.4 percent drop in exports so far this year.1 The value of the US dollar, the Canadian dollar (despite its governments actions to prop it up) and the Mexican peso have dropped sharply. Wage rises have slowed from 1.1 percent during the fourth quarter of last year to a mere 0.8 percent in 1998.
Benefits have slowed even more sharply from 0.8 percent to 0.4 percent in the same period. This underlies the myth of a "tight labor market" where in Wisconsin the Ameritech phone company in Madison and the Harnischfeger mining and paper equipment company have found it necessary to lay of over 2,000 workers a piece. The Deluxe Corp. in Shoreview Minnesota will cut 1,000 jobs from its check printing business and a total of 19,000 jobs world wide over the next 18 months.2 In fact, what marks the economic recovery of the '90's is the steady number of layoffs that demonstrates its difference from the economic recoveries of yesteryear. Case corp. which manufactures heavy construction equipment, will lay-off 1000 workers and in so doing they will maintain earnings at levels close to those of 1997. On Friday, October 2nd, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would cut up to 2,500 jobs demonstrating that even those workers skilled in high-tech industries can be laid-off just like any other workers. Defense contractors Raytheon and Boeing plan to lay-off 14,000 and 28,000 workers out of their total workforce respectively. According to a study by Kevin Hallock in the American Economic Review (Sept. 98), CEO pay raises are indeed directly proportional to the number of lay-offs in their businesses in the previous year. It will come as little surprise to see them get even richer off this latest global crisis.
Falling commodity prices are a good indicator of the serious instability of the capitalist system. The price of oil has seriously hurt oil producing nations from Venezuela to Russia.3 The US has long been dumping surplus grain into the Atlantic Ocean. Of the many long established forms of economic subsidy in the U.S., from Food Stamps (issued by the Dept. of Agriculture) to the familiar tax incentives for not growing agricultural commodities on perfectly fertile land, all were designed to prop up the prices of basic commodities. These are only some of the means with which the ruling class has propped up a failing economy. Currently falling commodity prices are creating fears among the rulers of what they term as "deflation", a code word for recession or depression.
A report from the Bank for International Settlements admitted that the global banking system is "increasingly beyond the reach" of regulators on the national level.4 To attempt to reform the international banking system at this point would be wishful thinking. Technology and globalization of finance along with the extraordinary growth in fictitious capital has made this a practical impossibility. At home the instability of capitalist markets has caused the merger of NationBank with the Bank of America after the B of A lost 330 million dollars of investments in Russia, Asia and Latin America.
According to a report titled the State of Working Wisconsin, by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy in Madison, increases in household income are due largely to an increase in the average hours worked. This leaves the average wage at $10.63 an hour 1997, down from $11.61 in 1979. Full time workers lost approximately 10% of their income between '79-'97. At the same time jobs that pay less than $8.20 (the minimum to rise above the federal poverty line) grew from 26 to 31% of workers in Wisconsin. This is in comparison to the national average where such jobs increased from 14.9 to 20.3% of the national average. It is understandable that with such profits being made, that the unemployment rate (only those who file for federal unemployment benefits) be at 3.7%. The share of poor workers increased from 4.6 to 7.9%. The poverty rate for children has increased by almost 50%, from 10.4 to 15.1% of all the children in the state. The poorest workers in the state, arbitrarily set at those who earn less than 10,000 dollars a year per person, pay 13% income tax, compared to the richest 1% of the state population who pay 6.4% in income taxes.5 The irony is that after years of Democrat and Republican tax cutting rhetoric and social belt-tightening, nothing has changed to benefit workers in the way of lower taxes.
Behind the rhetoric, that is popular in the official press, of "Crony Capitalism" lies the reality that this is how capitalism operates everywhere. Cronyism is not a problem of "emerging markets" but one born into the nature of the system itself. The real solution to the structural problems of capitalism lies with workers taking up the struggle against global capitalism. ASm
1 APnews. IMF Plots Course for Latin America. August 28, 1998.
2 APnews. Deluxe Plans to Cut 1,000 Jobs. September 1,1998.
3 APnews. Deflation Fears Back on Wall St. August 30, 1998.
4 APnews. Report: Banking Reform Needed. August 30, 1998.
5 Center on Wisconsin Strategy. The State of Working Wisconsin. UW - Madison. 1998.
6 Henwood, Doug. Wall Street - How It Works and for Whom. Verso. New York. 1997. Pg. 3-
The many organizations that today inherit the legacies of the Trotsky's Fourth International, lay claim to an alternative vision of a socialist society but the record of their actions shows that the only vision ever drawn from the umbrella of the Fourth International was one of state- capitalism. This tendency has always been one of opportunism in theory and practice. The resulting circus of cut-throat opportunist "parties" has always hampered the development of a real revolutionary alternative. The origins of the failure of the left opposition are directly traceable to its very foundations. Thus the attempt to create a Fourth International without a basis in a revolutionary situation was doomed from the start.
The Fourth International from its inception was rabidly sectarian, expelling all those that did not agree with the "great man", Leon Trotsky. In 1919, the Socialist Party USA expelled all left social-democrats. By the 1935 Trotsky had told his supporters to join the Socialist Party USA where the Trotskyist opposition in the US remained until they were expelled in 1937.1 James Cannon in his History of American Trotskyism stated that, "The entry of our group into the Socialist Party of the United States was a still more important step along the complicated, winding, long drawn- out path toward the creation of a party that will eventually lead the proletariat of America to victory in the socialist revolution."2 The precursor of the Trotskyist parties in the US was the Communist League of Struggle which defended the regime of Negus in the Italian-Abyssinian conflict and believed Stalin's Russia to be a socialist economy.3 With such mistaken beliefs a real opposition could never have come out of such an organization.
Stalin first enunciated the doctrine of socialism in one country at the close of 1924. It took Trotsky until the end of 1926 to reply to this doctrine. In the meantime many Bolshevik leaders of the right and center like Zinoviev and Kamenev had challenged this mistaken doctrine. Trotsky's late reply was partially due to his initial tendency to support Stalin against Zinoviev's opposition.4 Contrary to popular belief he also did not object to the traditional marxist tenet that socialism could only occur with the event of a world revolution.5 The writer Richard Day states that "He objected not so much to the notion of Socialism in One Country (Sotsializm v Odnoi Strane) as to Stalin's concept of socialism in a Separate Country (Sotsialism v Otdel'noi Strane)."6 In other words, he believed that Russia could integrate itself as an island of socialism into the chorus of imperialist powers.
Among the oldest of the left opposition groups that opposed the rise of Stalinism and state-capitalism was the Italian Communist Left, this group always kept open the possibility of debate and future joint work yet Trotsky's dealings with the Italian Communist Left were always somewhat two-faced. In his own writings he never ceased to slander the "Bordigists" while speaking as a friend and comrade in all his correspondence with the Prometeo group.
The first contacts he made with the communist left in Italy were very amicable, indeed he praised the Platform of the Left (1926) as being "...one of the best documents published by the international Opposition..."7 This was one of the very first documents of the opposition to the counter- revolutionary turn in the Communist International. In this same letter to the Italian Left Communists "Followers of Comrade Amadeo Bordiga" he recognizes a difference between the Prometeo group and what he termed as the "ultra- lefts".8 It is also interesting that in this same letter he criticizes the French opposition as having retreated from marxism to the politics of reformism.9 It was this same opposition that he later used to help build the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire and the Fourth International.
By 1931 the group around the journal Prometeo had become "Bordigists" and "ultra-lefts" in his eyes. In his statement on the Italian Opposition and the Spanish Revolution on June 9, 1931 he wrote, "Should communists fight against provocations by the police, directed against the freedom of the press, strike and assembly? And what does that mean if not the struggle for democracy?"10 Trotsky fatally misunderstood the position of the Communist Left to bourgeois democratic forms. First, there is nothing inherently undemocratic about political repression. The only question is of what type of bourgeois government gives permission for that sort oppression.
Obviously, the U.S. was a democracy when thousands upon thousands of workers were rounded up during the Palmer raids which began in 1919 (according to Bartolomeo Vanzetti in his famous letter there were 1200 imprisoned in the state of Massachusetts alone). Second, revolutionaries are only allowed these "rights" when they pose no threat to the ruling class. Finally, it was democracy that rolled over in Italy and Germany and passively allowed fascism to take power, democracy was in large responsible for fascism taking power. The Italian Communist Left understood this from first-hand experience.
The Trotskyists asserted that the Italian Communist Left (Bordigists) originated the theory of "social-fascism" this was an intentional misrepresentation of the position of the Italian Communist Left. Fascism (and Stalinism) was the means the bourgeoisie used to crush the working class during the counter-revolution. Social-democracy was the means the bourgeoisie used to crush the revolutionary proletariat in the German and Hungarian revolutions. Once faced with a world crisis in their economy the capitalists sought to dismantle what was left of workers' resistance by using dictatorial means.11 The state, ever the method of last resort for a failing capitalist economy found many varied forms in which it intervened in defense of the capitalist system. France and Belgium had their "national plans". The US government used the New Deal and the Tennessee Valley Authority to resurrect its failing economy. The fascist governments in Germany and Italy assumed direct control over the economy. Russia, under Stalin, had "five year plans" and Stakhanovism in order to build up the reestablished rule of capital.12 Indeed the control of political life by the state had been greatly extended during the crisis of world depression. Legislative branches of government began to loose power to the executive government. In the US, strikes were regulated by the creation of the National Labor Relations Board, in such a fashion states all over the world sought to subdue the working class. The end result was that workers were submerged into a mass of "equal citizens".13 Why was his turn of opinion so radically hostile to the Communist-Left? The answer is that as long as the press of the Communist Left was widely read both in France and Italy, Trotsky would not have dared to seriously alienate a political tendency that had real support. When Trotsky had succeeded in creating his own opposition he was then in a position to isolate the Communist Left from the whole of the opposition to the stalinist counter-revolution. Thus, the great man showed his true nature as being an opportunistic and sectarian leader who sought to subjugate the opposition to his will.14 Without a revolutionary situation Trotsky's limited revolutionary perspective disappeared. In his writings of 1932 he stated, "In the period when bureaucratic centrism began its ultra-left zigzag, the Bordigists actually proved to be far closer to the Stalinists than to us."15 This is patent nonsense, in fact the Platform of the Left was written against the opportunistic zigzag within the Communist International, the same document that Trotsky praised in 1929. If anything Trotsky and his supporters always resolutely defended the Stalinist Soviet Union and always supported state-capitalism.
The Communist League in France started to split up in 1931. They even proposed to reenter the French Communist Party (stalinist/state-capitalist) and proposed accepting that they end their press and liquidate their local organizations.16 In 1933 further splits continued to decimate the ranks of Trotsky's opposition, half the French Communist League split.17 When the final separation between the Italian Communist Left and Trotsky's left opposition occurred, Trotsky never even intended to put this separation up for debate at the official conference of the Left Opposition. In his writings from the period of 1932-33 he states that, "To wait for the official conference in order to finally separate from the Bordigists would be superfluous and harmful formalism."18 This is the essence of sectarianism, which excludes all criticism and seeks and artificial ideological hegemony on the basis of the personality of one leader where all who criticize are labeled as heretics.
In "A Letter to Prometeo" published on January 1, 1933, He wrote with a very conciliatory tone that, "Separation from an honest revolutionary group like yours need not necessarily be accompanied by animosity, personal attacks, or veiled criticism. I hope on the contrary that by eliminating organizational frictions, the inevitable result of fictitious unity, we shall be able to create favorable conditions by mutual criticism based on the lessons of events."19 By the next autumn he sharply criticized Hennaut of the left opposition section in Belgium for his willingness to debate with both the Prometeo group and Souvaraine. He then invented a new category of heresy "Hennautism".
After the death of Trotsky leaders of the this movement like Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel both believed that Stalin's death in 1953 could lead to some kind of 'self- reform" of the stalinist state that would somehow transform the USSR into a more revolutionary state. Subsequent turns among the American Trotskyists lead to greater and greater support for bourgeois nationalists like Fidel Castro. Every twist and turn of this movement has lead to its further distancing itself from any even remotely revolutionary policy and has resulted in the further disgrace of the names of Socialism and Communism.
It is not unusual that the Italian Communist Left viewed Trotsky as a "great eagle who had fallen into the mud". This view was somewhat generous in light of the nasty sectarian nature of the creation of an artificial international around the personality of this one man. Much of the press of the Trotskyist organizations reflect this worship of leadership, indeed leadership is seen by the Trotskyists as a panacea for all the ills faced by revolutionaries. Those who are seeking a revolutionary socialist alternative are immediately confronted by a morass of opportunistic organizations that serve largely to repel workers from such organizations.
There exists in this view a basic hostility to the working class in that they are seen as sheep who need Trotskyist leadership. The existence of this political tendency serves to prevent the creation of a revolutionary socialist alternative and so serves the ruling class as a way of diverting militancy into harmless entryist causes. Trotsky was an advocate of state-capitalism whose political tendencies to which he helped give birth, remain at heart advocates of state- capitalism. ASm
1 Conflict Studies. Trotskyism: Entryism and Permanent
Revolution. Shipley, Peter. No. 81 March. The Institute for
the Study of Conflict. UK. 1977. pg. 9
2 Cannon, James P. The History of American Trotskyism
Report of a Participant. Lecture XI. Pioneer Publishers. New
York. 1944. pg. 216-33
3 International Communist Current. The Italian Communist
Left 1926-1945 A contribution to the history of the
revolutionary movement. 1992. pg. 87
4 Day, Richard B. Leon Trotsky and the Politics of
Economic Isolation. Cambridge U.P. 1973. pg. 3-4
5 ibid. pg. 6
6 ibid. pg. 6
7 Trotsky, Leon. Writings of Leon Trotsky [1929].
Pathfinder Press, Inc. New York. 1975. pg. 318
8 ibid. pg. 323
9 ibid. pg. 319
10 ibid. pg. 262
11 International Communist Current. The Italian Communist
Left 1926-1945 A contribution to the history of the
revolutionary movement. 1992. pg. 64
12 ibid. pg. 73
13 ibid. pg. 73-74
14 ibid. pg. 91
15 Trotsky, Leon. Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932].
Pathfinder Press, Inc. New York. 1975. pg. 102
16 International Communist Current. The Italian Communist
Left 1926-1945. 1992. pg. 62
17 ibid. pg. 86
18 Trotsky, Leon. Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932-33].
Pathfinder Press, Inc. New York. 1975. pg. 28
19 ibid. pg. 64
For further study read:
Platform of the Committee of Intesa 1925. Communist
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Write (without mentioning the name) to: P. O. Box 338.
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History of the Italian Communist Left 1926-1945 A
contribution to the history of the revolutionary movement.
International Communist Current-Internationalism.
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