Comrades Warde and Wright attempt to attribute to "Johnson-Forest" an assertion that we are "self-avowed revisionists". We deny that absolutely. The essence of revisionism is blunting the class distinction between the revolutionary vanguard and the labor traitors of all types. Let us see what Comrades Warde and Wright make of Lenin's IMPERIALISM and what "Johnson-Forest", the alleged revisionists, make of it.1
Lenin lists five essential features of imperialism. Comrades Warde and Wright re-list these as if that were the whole significance of the book. Were that the issue, Lenin's books would have to take second place to Hobson's IMPERIALISM, and Hilferding's FINANCE CAPITAL, on which works Lenin based his book.a
As five "essential features" of imperialism, the five phenomena listed were, more or less, contained in both books. What was theoretically and politically new was Lenin's singling out the quintesence of those five features to be the transformation of competition into its opposite, monopoly.
Lenin's central thesis was that the transformation of one thing into its opposite was a dialectical mode which explained the actual, the concrete problems that faced him, both economically and politically. In the economic development it meant the transformation of competition into monopoly. In the political sphere it meant the development within the labor movement of a stratum of labor into its opposite, an aristocracy of labor. Thereupon Lenin changed his entire method of approach to the Second International. He wrote his IMPERIALISM: A POPULAR OUTLINE to show the economic roots of betrayal. Although his book was a profound description of the economics of his epoch, that was not the point of the book. The point, as he had phrased it in the Preface, was to disclose that "the split in the labor movement is bound up with the objective conditions of imperialism". Lenin's method of analysis had helped him to find out the objective reasons for the collapse of the Second International and to chart its future course. He drew a sharp class distinction between the Second and Third International.
What exactly is it that Comrades Warde and Wright are trying to prove by clinging to the mere listing of the "five essential features"? How does the mere re-listing of those features of the 1914 economy help Comrades Warde and Wright to understand the economy of 1951 to the end that they find the economic basis, the class nature of Stalinism? They, we are to presume, are not revisionists because in 1951 they list the features of 1914 and add the claim that these are not only correct now, but more so. The political result however, is that until 1950 they predicted that Stalinism would follow the road of the Social Democracy. Now they continue to list these features and change their position on Stalinism for reasons which have nothing whatsoever to do with these features. For Lenin, however, there was no division between the essential features and his politics.
Comrades Warde and Wright again think they are following Lenin in stressing the need to export surplus capital as "the fundamental characteristic of capitalism". This is totally wrong. Even the American bourgeoisie is concerned with something more vital than the export of capital. The American bourgeoisie knows that there is no possibility whatever of its finding any basis for surplus profits from the export of capital in the way the British Empire did. No one in the whole wide world believes that there is, except Comrades Warde and Wright and those in the Fourth International who think like them.
As is characteristic of capitalism of our day, a far more fundamental movement than the export of capital is involved. Where five imperialism in 1914 sought to export surplus capital for surplus profit, we now have two large masses of capital each seeking to incorporate smaller national capitals into their larger one. This is a far more serious question than the mere export of capital. It is this which is at the basis of political understanding today. Whoever thinks in terms of export of capital simply does not understand, not only the economics of today, but what is far more important, its politics. In this necessity to incorporate national capitals there is no difference between the United States and Russia. There is not and there cannot be. Here I can best express it by quoting from our Resolution on the International Situation which is published in the present Bulletin:
"The bankruptcy of the capitalist production compels not the export of capital for surplus profits: it compels the dominant capitals to seek to incorporate and submit to their domination the total national capital of other nations. The smaller national capitals, such as Britain and France, continue to resist, but they are steadily being forced into a situation where their capital, manpower, scientific knowledge, etc. are being incorporated into the services of the United States. The same process is being followed by Russia. This is the process of statification of production and centralization of capital on a gigantic national and international scale. This is the economic movement that has destroyed five competing imperialisms for the redivision of the world and has substituted two gigantic masses of capital competing for total centralization.
"In this change is to be found the basic economic reason for the differences between the reformists parties of World War I and the Stalinist parties of World War II. Whereas the Social Democracies each remained attached to its own national capital, in World War II and since, the Stalinist parties attached themselves to one of the competing powers, and the Social Democrats to the other. It is the development of world economics and world politics which have caused the change in the character and politics of the labor bureaucracies".2
Lenin insisted that unless you understood the specific nature of imperialism in 1914 you could not take a single step. We assert today that every single mistake of the Fourth International stems from its refusal to understand the specific stage of imperialism today.
a Indeed, bourgeois theoreticians dismiss Lenin's IMPERIALISM precisely because the "primary sources" had already been covered in these other books.
1 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, (1917).
2 The editor has been unable to locate the Bulletin that Dunayevskaya refers to here. The SWP do not appear to have published the Johnson-Forest Tendency's "Resolution on the International Situation" or Dunayevskaya's "The Revolt of the Workers and the Plan of the Intellectuals". The Johnson-Forest Tendency left the SWP at some point in 1951, and so may have no longer been SWP members by the date the Bulletin was scheduled to be published.