Internationalist Notes #19
As the world bourgeoisie continues to make
agreements and cut deals behind the scenes the seeds of future conflicts in
Yugoslavia have already been sown. The very people responsible for creating this
slaughter and situation that led to it are now claiming victory with the Serb
government claiming that they have succeeded in defending Yugoslavia's
territorial integrity and the US claiming that its bombing campaign has worked
in causing the Yugoslav government to back down. In this war, as in all
imperialist conflicts, civilian deaths are the "necessary" price for
"defeating evil" as NATO spokesman Jamie Shea would say.
For the
moment Germany, as the muscle behind the European currency bloc, has interests
that coincide with those of the US for the time being. One main factor
preventing any opposition to the US "drive to the east" is that the
other imperialist blocs are so divided by inter-imperialist rivalries that they
are unable to unite against the exercise of US power. In this respect the US war
serves to prevent the EU states from acting independently from US interests.
The war
has also served to accentuate tensions between the former republics of the USSR
in Central Asia and the Caucasus. In 1997 the movement of "blue fuel"
through the Russian pipeline stopped leaving countries like Turkmenistan in the
position of having to find other outlets for their production of oil and gas.
The US based multinationals quickly moved to fill the vacuum left by the absence
of a Russian pipeline. The governments of Georgia and Azerbaijan have both asked
NATO for help in drawing up security plans for their oil installations.
Azerbaijan intends to join NATO but NATO has not yet gone so far as to patrol
Azeri oil and gas pipelines as Azeri leaders have requested, this is largely due
to opposition to NATO expansion on the part of the Russian bourgeoisie. Clearly
NATO has to expand its role as imperialist policeman of the US state - or
eventually it will disappear. To the bourgeoisie of the US the alternative cover
of the UN is clearly not enough to defend the strategic interests of
imperialism.
The de facto military force of US imperialism on
the ground today has always had the support of one imperialist power or another,
since its very inception. The KLA/UCK is largely led by two distinct factions.
One faction of its leadership being connected to Albanian Kacak rebels who rose
up against the Serbs some eighty years ago and those who fought for the Albanian
SS militias in WWII. The other faction, which makes up most of the KLA leaders
in exile, are old Stalinists who were bankrolled by the tyrant Enver Hoxha. In
1974 Yugoslavia granted the status of autonomy to Kosovo, by then most of the
leadership of the KLA was in Pristina University where they received material
assistance from the Albanian government of Enver Hoxha in the form of
nationalist oriented textbooks and similar materials.
This group which until the uprising last spring, could
boast of no more than a few hundred members has always served at the feet one
imperialist master or another. Today they are assisted by the west. The
so-called peace agreement, for which US bombs were dropped on Yugoslavia in the
first place would have essentially allowed the KLA to assume the role of police
force in most of Kosovo. 1 The mass
expulsions on the part of the Serb government served a dual purpose. The first
is to warn Serbia's neighbors that if they help the enemies of Serbia's ruling
class to divide Greater Serbia they too can be dragged down with Serbia. The
second less subtle goal is the aim of establishing as much Serb control as
possible over Kosovo before any agreement between the contesting imperialist
warlords has been reached. In 1992-94 when UN sanctions against Yugoslavia were
in place, Serb capitalists evaded the worst effects of the embargo by setting up
subsidiaries in Macedonia. Fuel and Spare parts were purchased in Greece and
brought through Macedonia providing a lifeline for Yugoslavia and helped keep
the Macedonian economy afloat.
In this
nasty game any pretence of concern for the refugees from this imperialist
conflict can be nothing more than hypocrisy. The entire economic foundation of
Yugoslavia has been destroyed. If and when NATO moves the Albanian refugee
population back into Kosovo they will find a country devastated by war and
bombing and a country under a more or less permanent occupation. Revolutionaries
cannot afford to harbor illusions about a United Nations solution to this war or
in some "right of nations (i.e. imperialist statelets) to
self-determination". There are no factions of the ruling class that have
any true interest in peace. Any victory of imperialism is a defeat for the
working class. AS 1. Hedges, Chris.
"Kosovo's Next Masters?" Foreign Affairs Vol. 78 No. 3
(May/June 1999) pg. 24-42
The current trade war between the US and the EU
has left the WTO looking very weak. With sanctions over the EU's trade in
bananas already in effect, the WTO is hobbled by disagreements over who shall
lead it and no resolution is in sight in the current trade war between EU and
the US.
Likewise, the US is stalling over the admission of
China into the world trade body in a likely attempt to keep China from having a
full role in the next round of trade talks as a WTO member. The current agenda
of trade negotiations has been expanded to include human rights, labor issues
and environmental protection in a cynical attempt to protect US industry and set
a US dominated agenda in trade. The ruling class of the US has to act while its
power is yet unchallenged to obtain the most favorable terms of trade for US
based capital. The forces of world capitalism are mired deep in a crisis of
their own creation, a crisis for which there are no bourgeois solutions.
US
attempts to limit Russian and Japanese steel imports are another example of a
defensive reaction to defend US capitalism. What one bourgeoisie calls free
trade another calls dumping. When the next economic downturn hits the US, these
defensive reactions of US capitalism will likely become more pronounced. If US
restrictions on imports cause such imports to be deflected off into European
markets, this too could trigger a defensive counter-response from the European
bourgeoisie. The US has asked the WTO to slap 200 million dollars worth of trade
sanctions against the EU over beef.
Canada too has joined in on behalf of North American
beef producers in asking the WTO place an additional 50 million dollars worth of
fines on the EU as well. The US has further responded to the EU ban on US beef
by temporarily banning all imports of chicken and pork from EU countries under
the pretext that some farms in Belgium have been using feed tainted with dioxin.
These
conflicts are yet a further confirmation that the creation of the WTO was a
symptom of the growing crisis within capitalism itself. The capitalists of the
US can only take as much advantage of US imperialist muscle as possible in order
to impose the most favorable terms of trade.
The expansion of US trade is a serious matter for the
US ruling class, particularly in light of the massive deficit in the balance of
US trade. In the much heralded economic "boom" most of the jobs
created in the US today are service sector jobs. The largest numbers of
positions created are for waiters and waitresses, Security Guards and Janitors,
with systems analysts on the higher paying end. As economic booms go it is
hardly any different from the last recession. By protecting beef, bananas and
steel the ruling class is not acting to benefit US workers, rather this can only
result in a temporary increase in the profitability for the capitalists and
intensified exploitation of workers in the US. Any increase in profitability can
only be followed by a more desperate grab for greater profits. The cracks in the
edifice of the current division of the world economy become ever more apparent.
Indeed the strength of the US economy and the expansion of US power dictate that the US has a greater obligation to defend its expanding national interests. Hence, the US has to assert its military power by using all feasible methods at its disposal. In the end it can only mean further trade wars and ultimately more bloody forms of imperialist conflict.
AS
The following article is reprinted from issue 17 of
Internationalist Communist, the theoretical review of the International Bureau
for a Revolutionary Party.
A review of Sean Matgamna's The Fate of the
Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism
1
The collapse of the Russian bloc gave a great boost to
the right wing of capitalism who had long peddled the myth that the
monstrosities of Stalinism represented the logical and inevitable outcome of the
struggle for socialism. The triumphal crowing about the final triumph of liberal
capitalism of even the "end of history" was how they responded to the
collapse of the their rivals in the fight for world domination.
The left
of capitalism's spectrum, those who had pointed to Stalinism as a model for
socialism, were left to mourn the collapse of the model which they had applauded
as being worthy of support and admiration. That party of mourners included both
the Stalinists who had talked of "real, living socialism" as well as
the myriad Trotskyist sects who had considered that the Moscow based empire was
made up of post-capitalist "degenerated" and "deformed worker's
states".
Internationalist Communists such as ourselves, on the other
hand, had or decades understood that what existed was a particularly grotesque
form of state monopoly capitalism in which all the norms of capitalism (the
alienation of labor, generalized commodity production, the extraction of surplus
value by a class who had the means of production at their own disposal etc.)
dominated social relations.
For many
Stalinists and Trotskyists the collapse of the Soviet statified economies was a
fatal blow to their perspectives and resulted in demoralization and the collapse
of organizations. In Britain, for example, the former Communist Party of Great
Britain suffered total disintegration.
The remnants of the old Workers Revolutionary Party and
the International Marxist Group disappeared as substantial substantial forces
and the former Militant group (whose theorists previously included countries
such as Burma and Syria in their list of post-capitalist countries) lost its
base in the Labour Party, expelled its former leadership and rebranded itself as
the "Socialist Party".
One
Trotskyist organization in Britain responded in a different way. In the course
of transforming from "Socialist Organizer" to the "Alliance for
Workers Liberty" (AWL), the grouping led by Sean Matgamna also experience a
Pauline conversion. After more than two decades of it and its predecessors
proclaiming the orthodox Trotskyist position that the Moscow bloc was made up of
"deformed workers' states", the AWL has adopted the
"heretical" doctrines of Max Shachtman. Shachtman broke with the
mainstream of the Trotskyist organization in 1940 and subsequently adopted new
theoretical positions around a definition of the Soviet Union and its later
satellites as a new social category, "bureaucratic collectivism". It
is against that background that the AWL, in 1998, published an edited collection
entitled The Fate of the Russian Revolution - Lost Texts of Critical Marxism
Volume 1. 2
A succinct summary of the bureaucratic
collectivist position 424 from an article written by Shachman and first
published in July, 1943,
We know that there is no capitalist
class that owns the factories in Russia. We know
that the working class doer not own them. We also know that the working
class does not have the slightest degree of control over the state that does not
own Russian property.
Who, then, does own the land and factories in Russia? What class? We say:
a new class developing out of special historical circumstances, the Stalinist
collectivist bureaucracy.
A longer
exposition is provided in an article by Joseph Carter, one of Shachtman's
co-thinkers, on pages 294-299. In that article Carter effectively demolishes
Trotsky's use of an analogy between Stalinism and Bonapartism which the latter
used during the 1930s3 as he attempted to argue that the Stalinized Soviet Union
retained an essentially proletarian economic base. Carter (page 297-8) draws a
picture of the Soviet Union much of which we could agree with,
The ruling class is the bureaucracy which through its control of the
state collectively owns, controls and administers the means of production and
exchange The economy is organized
and directed through state totalitarian planning and political terrorism. The
toilers are compelled by the state (as well as economic necessity) to labor in
the factories and fields.
Forced labor is thus an inherent feature of present-day
Russian productive relations.
Having
described features which are entirely with a view of the Soviet Union as being
an expression of state monopoly capitalism, we must part company with Carter as
he concludes that Stalinist Russia is thus a reactionary state based upon a new
system of economic exploitation, bureaucratic collectivism. The conjuring trick
which Carter uses to arrive at that statement will be returned to later.
The fact
that Shachtman adopted the "bureaucratic collectivist" definition -
one whose fundamentally anti-Marxist approach will also be commented on below -
did not prevent him from launching polemics against the official Trotskyists
which were both scathing and effective.
As
Matgamna's editorial pieces highlight, the Trotskyist movement, whose Fourth
International was shattered in the course of the war, wrote thousands of words
confusing Stalinism with progress and portraying Stalin's army as a successor to
the Red Army which had militarily defended proletarian power against the White
armies and their imperialist sponsors in the years of revolutionary struggle.
Such confusions were spread particularly by the orthodox Trotskyists after the
tide of war turned in favor of the Russian state.
In 1931,
after the Communist Left had already argued with Trotsky that there was a
pressing need to understand the nature of the counter-revolution, Trotsky wrote
that
To defend the USSR as the main fortress of the world proletariat, against
all assaults of world imperialism and of internal counter-revolution, is the
most important duty of every class-conscious worker (page 363).
Tracking
the attitude of the Militant (the paper of orthodox Trotskyists in the USA),
Matgamna notes how on December 19, 1942, this 1931 quotation, now with a
portrait of Trotsky, reappeared on the editorial page.
As the USSR's military successes continued - and right
up to March 31, 1945, The Militant continued to carry the quotation and the
policy point [defend the Soviet Union against imperialist attack] (page 364).
In
response to such poisons, Shachtman's polemics should still make uncomfortable
readings for the Trotskyists who peddled the same confusion for a further half
century. In an article published in March, 1943 (pages 414-425) Shachtman
unraveled some of the confusions spread his orthodox colleagues. Without sharing
Shachtman's analysis, including Shachtman's use of Trotsky's Bonapartist analogy
(the same analogy which was decisively rejected by Shachtman's ally Joseph
Carter), it is still informative to quote from that article.
Shachtman's
article is a direct reply to the SWP's Felix Morrow who had delivered a speech
including such classics of misinterpretation as, The Red Army [in 1942 - KT] is
fighting for a socialist Europe as well as a socialist Russia.
Shachtman replied,
In the first place there is no such thing as a Red Army. It once
existed. It was organized by Trotsky and the
Bolsheviks. It was the army of
the workers, of the people, of the socialist revolution
" But Stalinism
destroyed that army! Hasn't Morrow heard?
"
What is "Red" (that is socialist, internationalist, democratic)
in the Russian army today? It would be interesting to know the answer
the Stalinist army is the army of Bonapartist counter-revolution
It is controlled by the Bonapartist counter-revolution which is in power
in the country; it is directed by it; it has been imbued with the poison of
Stalinist chauvinism and Great-Russian nationalism; its program is the program
of the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy; its Praetorian "colonels"
and "generals" and "marshals'
differ in no important respect from their opposite numbers in the armies
of capitalism; its discipline from that of a regular imperialist army like one
egg from another
If it is "fighting for a socialist Europe as well
as a socialist Russia", that is welcome news. But that would be a miracle -
and we don't believe in miracles
To disseminate the idea that the Stalinist army is
fighting for a "socialist Europe as well as a socialist Russia" is to
disseminate the most vicious pro-Stalinist propaganda, and hereby help destroy
the prospects of a truly socialist Russia and Europe
Marxist method is based on an understanding that
class struggle is the underlying theme behind the whole of human history since
the days of primitive communism - an era predating human ability to master any
aspect of nature, where what was in common was shortage and an unmitigated
struggle for existence.
Marxism,
in contrast to other views of the world, contains within it a core explanation
of why a communist future is desirable, but certainly not inevitable. Critically
for those aspiring to Marxist praxis (revolutionary activity/experience
synthesizing theory and practice) there is a need to grasp that Marxism contains
a far more fundamental essential than the desirability of communism. At the core
of a Marxist understanding is the fact that capitalism has prepared the
productive forces that make communism possible. In the course of its development
not only has capitalism accumulated gigantic masses of productive capacity but
it has also generated the proletarian class, essential to the generation of
profit, and capable of acting as the gravedigger not only for capitalism but for
the whole history of class society.
All those
essentials can be found in the first section of the Communist Manifesto, part of
the most basic ABC for would-be Marxists. As against the development of the
bourgeoisie and proletariat: the other classes decay and finally disappear in
the face of modern industry (Section 1, The Communist Manifesto). The existence
of the two classes emerging as contending giants from a capitalism which, since
Marx's time has engulfed the world, is a part of a basic revolutionary world
view.
Marxists
have always had to defend that world view against attacks from a whole variety
of sociological explanations originating from Bernstein, Weber and their modern
counterparts, who sow confusion by pointing to changes in the appearance of wage
labor and capitalist relations to talk about the emergence of new "middle
classes", salaried or "white collar staff", technocrats, managers
and so forth. A variant on those themes in which a new managerial class is
supposed to have taken control of society can be found in The Managerial
Revolution by James Burnham, an ally of Shachtman in his split from official
Trotskyism.
More
recently the bourgeoisie has launched fresh offensives around the end of class
or more spectacularly (ludicrously) Fukuyama's mock-Hegelian proclamation of the
end of history. The efforts to destroy the Marxist concept of class and
alongside it, the ability of the working class to raise its level of class
consciousness has been a major ideological weapon of our class enemies.
Fully
developed class-consciousness goes hand in hand with revolutionary praxis.
How then
does the AWL's discovery of a new "bureaucratic collectivist" class
fit in to a Marxist theory of class, without which an understanding of class
consciousness in impossible?
The difference between the Internationalist
analysis of the Stalinist formations being an expression of state monopoly
capitalism and the Shachtmanite useof 'bureaucratic collectivism' is not merely
a question of semanti cs.
For
Internationalists, our analysis of the Russian bloc is essentially located
within a historical analysis of present-day capitalism. The great contribution
of Marxists such as Lenin, Luxemburg and Bukharin was that they laid the basis
for understanding the imperialist epoch as one in which capitalism has exhausted
its progressive capabilities. The prospect of continuous economic expansion with
social democratic structures thriving as stable institutions serving the
proletariat had come to a definitive and irreversible end. From 1914 onwards the
historic course was to be one of crises, wars and revolutions with the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the two contending forces capable of shaping
the future of humanity.
For
Shachtman and our latter-day Shactmanites that analysis, a product of a
consitent and rigorous Marxist approach to historic developments, is no longer
valid. Instead they present their own revision of Marxism, a version where new
social classes can spring into existence.
In case
there is any doubt that the Stalinists represented a new class, Matgamna
reasserts the point at several times in his editorial. On pages 33-4 he writes
that the Communist International was
captured by the new anti-capitalist bureaucratic Russian ruling class. On page
45 he writes, "the Stalinists had not gone over to the bourgeois enemy
they served the anti-capitalist Russian bureaucracy.
In the
1930s and 40s those seeking to salvage revolutionary Marxism struggled to
understand "the Soviet enigma". Tragically, the defeat of the
revolutionary wave at the end of the First World War had resulted in the first
toehold of proletarian political power being transformed into a nightmarish,
obviously anti-proletarian prison camp. When Shachtman starts groping towards
his 'bureaucratic collectivist' label less than two decades had passed since the
loss of proletarian power in Russia. Stalinism in 1940 is isolated in a
relatively backward economy surrounded by predatory competitors. The argument
for a peculiar, temporary and unstable social formation developing is certainly
stretching Marxist analysis to its limits but may be excusable in a situation
where all tendencies, including our own, were still struggling for a fully
developed understanding of what had happened to the Russian Revolution.
However,
the AWL's persistent lack of understanding is no longer acceptable at the end of
the 1990s. Today their arguments have even graver implications. They would have
us believe that their 'bureaucratic collectivist' class not only seized power in
the Soviet Union for more than 60 years but spread their system to China where
it existed for more than 50 years and presumably continuing, Cuba - for 40 years
and continuing, Vietnam for a quarter of a century and still continuing and
possibly other territories as well. For Matgamna the 'bureaucratic
collectivists' may be declaimed as a historical freak but if his logic is
correct they have also proved to be the most dynamic new class in world history.
If such a
class can appear at this point in history then there is no end to the new
classes which might yet have a role in deciding humanity's destiny.
The struggle between proletarian and bourgeois may be
replaced by struggles between weird and wonderful classes which as yet remain
unimagined.
Needless to say, the modes of production which would
provide the basis for such classes can be equally speculative.
This
approach is clearly incompatible with Marx's understanding of the dynamics of
class development or the founders of the Third International's understanding of
the imperialist epoch. In short a theory of bureaucratic collectivism is
incompatible with the basic tenets of Marxism.
One clue
to the way in which the Shachtmanites reached such conclusions is in the quote
from Joseph Carter reproduced earlier. In the middle of his list of descriptive
features is, the basic motive force of the economy is the extraction of more and
more surplus labor from the toilers so as to increase the revenue, power, and
position of the bureaucracy (page 297).
Now, for those of us who saw the degenerated Soviet
system as a form of capitalism the basic motive of the economy is the
accumulation of capital.
That process took place on a dramatic scale in the
Soviet Union from the late 1920s onwards and was obviously common knowledge to
Carter and his associates. However, the approach of developing a theoretical
analysis from an understanding of the dynamics of relations of production (from
1914 onwards necessarily on a global scale) was not Carter's (or Shachtman's or
Matgamna's) preferred method. Instead the focus is switched to Weberian
characteristics such as 'revenue, power and position' all of which certainly
appear within class society but which in no way serve to reveal its underlying
dynamics.
Of course,
the very ability to adopt an analysis involving new classes also reflects the
flaws in the overall framework. Since the 1930s Trotskyists have sought to find
common cause with 'progressive movements', such as left social democracy,
anti-imperialism, national liberation, feminism, environmentalism - the list is
inexhaustible. To justify such alliances the Trotskyists are forced to maintain
an analysis and practice which pretends that struggles short of an independent
class struggle, all act as 'transitional' processes. For revolutionists in the
present epoch nothing could be further from the truth. The first step toward a
revolutionary class struggle is the destruction of illusions in these
neo-reformist strategies.
Fools
Return unto their Folly In The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx comments on the tendency for events
and characters to recur, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Reading
the writings of dissident Trotskyists from the 1940s is indeed an instructive
exercise. Revolutionaries such as the faction around G. Munis were still capable
of emerging from the Trotskyist movement as late as the end of the 1940s. This
despite the fact that the Trotskyist movement had left the terrain of
proletarian politics during the 1930s, as evidenced by their support for the
Spanish democratic republic during the Civil War and support for
anti-imperialist wars in both China and Ethiopia. The 1938 program codified
these betrayals into a document in which reformist and state capitalist remedies
are presented as a bridge to a Marxist solution.
However,
the Shachtman experience was incapable of reaching revolutionary positions. For
instance, one time associates such as CLR James or Raya Dunayevskaya evolved
towards 'Marxist humanism' as an alternative to proletarian revolution.
Shachtman himself ended up siding with democratic imperialism from within the US
Democratic Party.
Today, despite the fact that the last pretence of Trotskyism to have a coherent Marxist frame has been shattered with the collapse of the USSR, there has been no attempt by any of the Trotskyist groups to relate to the only political current whose theoretical analysis has held up in the face of this. The AWL's rediscovery of Shachtmanism and their unwillingness to break out of the social democratic/state capitalist morass that Trotskyism inhabits is just one more example of the bankruptcy of Trotskyism.
Notes
1.
The Fate of the Russian Revolution - Lost Texts of Critical Marxism. Vol.
1, ed. By Sean Matgamna, Phoenix Press, U.K., 1998
2.
It is not just the AWL who have recently adopted the tag of
"bureaucratic collectivism" as a mystifing label for the Soviet bloc.
Ex-IS/SWPer, Bob Deacon, also uses the label in an
academic publication (Global Social Policy:International organization and the
future of welfare, Bob Deacon with Michelle Hulse and Paul Stubbs, Sage
Publications, 1997). Arguably deacon attains a higher level of confusion than
the AWL when he writes about
"the bureaucratic collectivist variant of socialist [My emphasis - KT]
development that had ossified in Russia and Eastern Europe" (page 46). To
show that academia can produce more layer of confusion than an onion has skins,
Deacon, earlier in the same paragraph, contrasts the Soviet bloc with
"socialist [My emphasis - KT] development [which] was good in the past for
meeting human needs in China (and Cuba and elsewhere)"
(page 46).
3.
Possibly the fullest exposition of Trotsky's use of the
Stalinism-Bonapartism analogy can be found in his book "Revolution
Betrayed" first published in 1936.
Internationalist Notes
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