Against Capital: Experiences of Class Struggle and Rethinking Revolutionary Agency
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Against Capital: Experiences of Class Struggle and Rethinking Revolutionary Agency
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781785350955 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hunt, John Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/25/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Against Capital
Experiences of Class Struggle and Rethinking Revolutionary Agency
By Cliff Slaughter
John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Cliff SlaughterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78535-095-5
CHAPTER 1
PART I
Introduction: What We Confront
by Cliff Slaughter
In every continent, countless thousands of men and women look for ways to organise and demonstrate for an escape from the oppression and exploitation inflicted upon them. Many of them find themselves victims of murderous wars between conflicting powers, with thousands dying or reduced to homelessness and hopeless poverty. Even in what used to be called the 'advanced capitalist countries' of Western Europe and North America, mass unemployment and attacks on basic standards of living in the name of 'austerity' to solve problems of 'sovereign debt' are more and more the order of the day. Everywhere in the struggles against these conditions youth have been to the fore, more and more of them insisting that the future of humanity is threatened and that a new social order must be founded. We shall argue in this short book that what is at stake everywhere is the necessity to end the rule of capital, and that it is possible to learn from past movements and mistakes in order to move towards that end.
For many years, it was only on very rare occasions that the word 'capitalism' and the name of Karl Marx could be found in our newspapers. Today, in 2015, hardly a day goes by without our seeing them in the European and North American press. We are told that there is too much polarisation of wealth, too much debt, that bankers are paid too much, that there is too much or too little credit or 'quantitative easing', and so on ad nauseam. Some of the commentators report all this as simply matter-of-fact news. Others appear radical, telling us that capitalism 'isn't working' and something should be done about it. But what? With very few exceptions, they offer only suggestions about how to manage the system better and more fairly. On 27 May 2014, TV news programmes informed us that an international conference on 'Inclusive Capitalism' was about to begin proceedings, its intention to deal with 'bad capitalism'! No doubt the initiators of this conference had in mind a 'good capitalism', to be rescued and properly organised. (Has anything been heard of this conference since? Let alone any news of its successes?) In this book we see the problem very differently. The problem is not how to manage the capital system, but how to get rid of it.
Along with the jeremiads about the faults and virtues of capitalism we find reports and commentaries on the state of the working class: has it disappeared? Do people still feel working-class? What happened to the 'old' working class and its culture and consciousness? And so on. Again, our approach here is very different. We do not mean by working-class consciousness the feeling of individual working people about whether or not they are working class. The workers are a class of wage-earners, the indispensable opposite of capital, its structural antagonist. And so, as for class-consciousness, we focus on the possibilities of a working-class movement aimed at overcoming wage-slavery, with the recognition in theory and in practice that capital has inescapably created, in that movement, what Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, referred to as 'its own gravediggers'.
The rule of capital now has global reach. In the nineteenth century, when modern socialist ideas and the socialist movement were born, the working class existed in England, soon in Western Europe and the United States, and then, in the last decades of the century, in Russia. Today the working class exists everywhere. In and alongside the working class in many countries there are millions of oppressed and exploited people struggling to find subsistence on the very minimum of resources, and falling victim in massive numbers to famine and disease, as well as the dispersal and destruction of thousands of communities in wars, which have become a savage method of social control. In the older, 'advanced' capitalist countries of Europe and North America, living standards, basic rights and any promise of a future are daily under attack, giving rise to movements of protest, especially of young people. In the countries where ex-Stalinist bureaucrats have become a new capitalist class (particularly China and Russia) a large and growing working class confronts employers who are inextricably integrated with the state machine, together with the transnational corporations who invest there because of the inhumanly low wages and the denial of political and organisational rights imposed by the state. In ex-colonial countries such as those in Africa and the Middle East, millions are awakening (as in the 'Arab Spring') to the necessity of getting rid of the nationalist leaders who abandoned their left-wing, even 'communist' rhetoric as soon as they were in power, turning on the working people, and keeping order on behalf of imperialist powers like the US and Britain.
Egypt provides a compelling recent example. When the workers and youth in Cairo massed in Tahrir Square demanding the ousting of President Mubarak, for decades the head of a government repressing all opposition and protecting US business and strategic interests, newspapers in Britain and the US carried the headline 'Obama: Mubarak Must Stay!' Only days later, as Mubarak's fate was sealed, Obama and the State Department presented the US as the guarantor of a new democracy and the rule of law. In fact the US and its allies have since then, as always, supported and armed the Egyptian military in the imprisonment of tens of thousands of protestors and the murder of some 2,000. US arms sales to Egypt had increased by over 80 per cent by 2014. In Cairo dozens of trade commissioners from the US, Canada and Britain are safely ensconced. Typically, the heroic youth and workers of Egypt are going through bitter experiences in order to absorb the lesson that it is the real source of their plight, the rule of capital, that they must find ways to confront and remove.
The Egyptian experience conforms to a pattern. The US has supported and armed the repressive regime of Saudi Arabia, ignoring its brutal suppression of any demand for human rights and its notorious oppression of women. After encouraging and arming the regime of Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Kuwait, the US claimed to discover 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq and, with the support of New Labour's Blair government in Britain, launched the invasion of that country in the name of the 'war on terror'. Since then two million Iraqis have lost their lives. Then came the war in Afghanistan and the barbaric 'drone' bombings. Gaddafi was for some 30 years acceptable as protector of US interests in Libya until the uprising against him, at which point the State Department concentrated only on finding satisfactory successors among his opponents, settling for the highly reactionary assortment of armed militias. Earlier, as the US greatly increased its business relations with Russia, Putin's invasion of Chechnya and South Ossetia was virtually ignored. In China, US business interests grow apace, facilitated by the US administration, while the Chinese state's incarceration of fighters for human rights and freedom of expression is criticised in words but accepted in reality.
In 2014, the Ukraine government led by Yanukovich, seen to be acting in the interests of Putin's Moscow regime, was ousted by popular protests. It was soon replaced by a junta of nationalist and right-wing parties, to which the US and its allies rendered immediate support, knowing that the junta is unable to maintain control without making use of ultra-right and even fascist armed organisations. Meanwhile Russian President Putin took advantage of the crisis and proceeded to the annexation of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in pursuit of his 'Greater Russia' project, confident in the support of many of the Russian-speaking majority in that region, who mobilised against the junta in Kiev.
In every case of this kind of political and military rule on behalf of capital, we have seen protests and demonstrations, and important signs of consciousness of the need not only for defensive struggles but also for an alternative socialist way of life. Socialists have understood that as well as convictions and aspirations there must be an objective, material basis for the possibility of a socialist future. That basis is the great advance in the forces of production which came with the capitalist system. At a certain point these forces come into contradiction with the social relations based on the capitalist system of exploitation, and the capitalist order must be challenged by its own creation, its structural antagonist, the working class. This was the basis of Marx's anticipation of a social revolution and a socialist future. Is it still justified?
The fantastic growth in productivity, the application of science and technique, the development of what Marx called 'the social brain', has gone far beyond the machine production that Marx analyses in his Capital. The contradiction between these means of production and the existing social metabolism, based as it is on capital accumulation derived from 'the theft of alien labour time', is more and more glaring (there are many manifestations, especially in the dominance of finance capital). The 'objective conditions', 'necessary conditions' for a truly human social order are there, increasingly so. But we have reached a stage where the uncontrollable imperative of capital accumulation is using the means of production in such a way as to destroy, and threaten the very existence of, the elementary natural and human conditions of such a future social order. And is it not a fact that in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries the development of the means of production (large-scale factory production) inevitably brought together many millions of wage-workers in workplaces and towns where they could organise, becoming indeed capital's potential 'gravediggers', the organised movement that could become the agency of social revolution?
Such is the nature of the scientific and technical changes in production in the older, so-called 'advanced' capitalist countries that it is no longer a matter of creating mass production plants in which thousands, millions of workers can organise themselves. On the contrary, we more and more see that the working environment and the nature of work have radically changed: now we have casualisation, the predominance of 'service industries', de-skilling and 'precarisation'. The self-organisation of large numbers of workers becomes more and more difficult. And to this must be added the persistence of long-term, 'structural' unemployment, particularly for young people, the decline and bureaucratisation of trade unions, the imposition of anti-union laws, and the virtual disenfranchisement of the working class as the so-called socialist and labour parties have become openly pro-capitalist and the betrayals of the old 'communist' parties have given place to their collapse. These agencies have in fact become settled components of capital's system of social control.
At the same time, the 'workshop of the world' (as Britain once was known), where masses of workers are employed in great industrial plants and have the potential to organise, has shifted to China, the Indian sub-continent and parts of Africa and Latin America. Perhaps we should turn on its head Lenin's insistence that after the October 1917 Revolution, socialism in backward Russia could come about only if the Russian workers could 'hold on until the workers of the advanced countries come to our aid'! In Europe and North America must we learn to fight to 'hold on' until the workers of Asia, Africa and Latin America come to our aid? We are saying this not out of pessimism or disillusionment (or, God forbid, 'revisionism', as incurable sectarians are certain to say), but because we need urgently to look afresh at the ways in which the exploited and oppressed are beginning to organise and assert themselves.
The twentieth century, however, saw the onset of a new and ever-increasing danger, immeasurably intensifying the urgency of a social revolution; namely, the predominance of the destructive side of capital's self-reproduction. The imperatives of capital's system of production have become destructive of the elementary foundations of any future truly human society – on the one hand, through devastating the natural environment and its resources, and on the other, through ruining the potential of human beings, and in millions of cases their very existence. Countless numbers die of starvation in areas of the world now incorporated into capital's 'globalisation', while a few thousand are kept alive by 'charity'. In the old 'advanced capitalist countries', 'austerity' and unemployment, in the name of resolving problems of 'debt' arising from the rule of finance-capital, bring an insoluble crisis in 'welfare' provision. Already in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had seen the writing on the wall when they wrote that:
The bourgeoisie is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to ensure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.
In Britain, for example, the ruling class was compelled to concede the benefits of the welfare state at the end of World War Two, but now the depth of the structural crisis is such that this can no longer be 'afforded'. There is no solution for the consequent problems, so that millions will be plunged into a situation of desperate need – the condition for renewed working-class and popular struggle. As Stendhal, writing his long-unpublished autobiographical book, Vie de Henri Brulard, in the mid-1830s, put it: 'I have always, as it were by some instinct, despised the bourgeois ... So then according to me, energy was only to be found ... in that class which has to struggle with real needs.'
Marx saw this force of people with 'real needs' in the proletariat of his time: in the ringing closing words of the Communist Manifesto, 'Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!' Today's proletariat is thousands of times more numerous than in Marx's day; the world ruled by capital in which the proletariat exists is far larger. In terms of living standards, 'nothing to lose' is by no means as true for many of the workers of North America and Western Europe as for those of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but it is highly significant that, as we have noted, in Britain and other countries the 'welfare state' is being systematically destroyed, and in countries like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy national indebtedness has brought unemployment and poverty to millions. As we shall try to show, this means that the problems faced by the working class in achieving the consciousness and organisation needed in challenging the rule of capital will differ in important respects in different countries. It also means that the making of a working-class internationalism, a vital component of that consciousness and organisation, involves problems and tasks more complex and demanding than ever before.
We have referred to the 'internal differentiation' of the working class. The class is not only differentiated, it is divided. This is more than a matter of differences between skilled and unskilled, white-collar and blue-collar, low-paid and better-paid workers, etc. Long ago, Lenin identified as one of the sources of opportunism and social-chauvinism in the working-class movement in Britain the existence of a 'labour aristocracy' of relatively well-paid workers, made possible by the fruits of empire and the City of London's international financial dominance. Reformism proved to be of great benefit to the British working class particularly after World War Two. (It was Trotsky who defined the Labour Party – which was to enact the 'welfare state' – as 'a bourgeois workers' party'.) The reforms of the 1945 Labour Government of Clement Attlee were a response to the strong feeling among workers that there must be 'no return to the hungry thirties'. Whatever possibility there was of any sort of revolutionary socialist development in the working class was dispelled by the effect of the concessions won based on the Beveridge Report, and William Beveridge's 1944 book, Full Employment in a Free Society, which included the National Health Service, nationalisation of some industries, and more.
As noted, however, the onset of capital's structural crisis in the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the beginning of a ruling-class offensive against the welfare state, a series of anti-trade-union laws and large-scale privatisations. Margaret Thatcher's governments in the 1980s carried through a campaign to destroy militant trade unionism, culminating in the brutal suppression of the 1984–85 miners' strike and virtual closing-down of the coalmining industry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Against Capital by Cliff Slaughter. Copyright © 2015 Cliff Slaughter. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Contributing Authors,
First ... A Last Word,
Preface,
Part I: Introduction: What We Confront,
Part II: Rebuilding: Some Experiences and Lessons,
Southern Africa, by Robert Myers,
Britain: A State of Disorder and a Disunited Kingdom, by Tom Owen and Terry Brotherstone,
Spain: A Personal View, by Jonas Nilsson; and Theses on Podemos and the 'Democratic Revolution', by Raul Zelik,
Bosnia-Herzegovina: Report of a Workers' Aid Delegation, by Robert Myers,
Ukraine: War as a Means of Social Control, by Gabriel Levy,
Mexico: Mexican Workers in the Continental Crucible, by Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui,
Part III: The History and Politics of the Crises in the Middle East, by Yassamine Mather,
Part IV: A Critique of Some Past Guidelines (Including 'On the Partiinost of Yesterday and of Today', by Janos Borovi),
Part V: The Theoretical Foundations,
Part VI: Some Conclusions,