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Capitalism, Stalinism & War
(1) Under the impact of the First World War, Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of social-democratic reformism, elaborated his theory of “ultra-imperialism,” according to which the organic growth and internationalization of capitalist monopoly would lead to a single world-wide trust and international peace.
We have seen, in fact, that a kind of “super-imperialism” has indeed emerged from the advance of monopoly – two super-imperialist powers, each imposing its own imperialist sway over other modern and equally imperialist states.
But far from making for a more peaceful cohabitation of national states, the world-racking imperialist rivalry and the increased shift of all national economies for war and destruction has been brought to a pitch never before seen. For the first time, the life of every important country in the world, including the United States, is being organized more and more on the basis of a. permanent war economy and a permanent militarization of society.
(2) In economic terms, this means the rapid growth in the economic structure of capitalism of a third great department of production alongside the production of the means of production and the production of the means of consumption. This newly significant sector of the economy is the production of the means of destruction – production of goods which do not re-enter either into the process of reproduction or into (what is at bottom part of the same process) the production of labor power.
While the production of war goods and the devotion of means of consumption to the production of “soldier power” has always been a part of capitalist economy (where its economic effects have been similar to those of luxury goods consumed by the capitalist class), the rise of this production to the immense role it now plays has been accompanied by far-reaching changes.
(3) The link between the economic and political changes thus produced is the fact that the market for this third department of capitalist production is the state. The rise to dominance in the economy of this type of production effects, therefore, the partial negation of the blindly-operating market as the regulator of capitalist economy and its replacement by the partial planning of the state bureaucracy.
In proportion as production for war purposes becomes the accepted and determining end of economic activity, the role of the bureaucracy ceases to be limited to that of a political superstructure and tends to become an integral part of the economy itself. This bureaucratization of economy in the capitalist countries leads to the growth of the state bureaucracy in size, in the importance of its role for the regulation of the economy, and in its relative independence from the direct control of the capitalist class.
(4) In this stage of the dominance of war economy and the bureaucratization of capitalism, the role played by state intervention (“statification of the economy”) changes accordingly. From its role in the early period of capitalism of forcing development (especially in the case of latercomers like German or Japanese capitalism), and from its role in the middle period of capitalism of “socializing the losses” of particularly sick or weak individual industries, its dominant role today is that of building or maintaining the war potential of the economy in anticipation of future conflict or planning war production in actual conflict.
This new character or statification is founded upon the new dominance of war economy and the new role of the state bureaucracy, tending to substitute state-organized planning for the blind operation of the market, largely at the expense of petty capitalism but also partly at the expense of limiting or infringing upon the political and even social power of the bourgeoisie (as in the case of the fascist war economies).
(5) This development has not advanced equally in all capitalist countries or all spheres of capitalist economy, being especially marked in those capitalisms devastated or bled white in the war (like England and France) and less marked in proportion to the wealth of the country (as in the United States).
Nationalization in England has already gone beyond the limits expected by Marxists (including Lenin) in the days when British capitalism still appeared as a going concern, albeit in a state of historical decline, in particular still able to feed on the wealth produced by its colonial slaves. If nationalization in England does not go further (say, to steel) in the next period, this will not be because such a step is excluded by the nature of forces operating in the degeneration of British capitalism. While a nominally socialist government staffed by the Labor Party is the vehicle through which these changes are taking place, the bourgeoisie has so far put up a comparatively weak resistance and the Conservative opposition has been compelled to promise that its resumption of power might slow up or temporarily halt the trend but would not turn it all the way backward.
Likewise in France, since the end of the Second World War, nationalization has played a role which, before the war, would have been scouted as impossible of realization under capitalism by all Marxists.
(6) The all-pervading degeneration of capitalism marked by the new phenomena outlined above is superimposed upon its decades-long decline, just as the new stage of the bureaucratic militarization of capitalism does not negate but is superimposed upon its stage of imperialism.
It must be emphasized that while, both in economic structure and in political consequence, a new stage is marked, it is yet a new stage of capitalism, indeed of capitalist imperialism. The fundamental social reason for the emergence of this new stage is the delay of the socialist revolution and working-class intervention in cutting short the agony of capitalist decline in favor of a new social order based on workers’ power.
(7) Out of this partial self-negation of the capitalist world, however, the new traits rising to prominence have more and more in common with the rival social order whose power has mounted parallel with the degeneration of capitalism: Russian bureaucratic collectivism. Thus already in 1939, discussing the bracketing of the New Deal, German fascism and Russian Stalinism under one head, Trotsky commented that “all these regimes undoubtedly possess common traits, which in the last analysis are determined by the collectivist tendencies of modern economy,” and that “the tendencies of collectivization assume, as the result of the political prostration of the working class, the form of ‘bureaucratic collectivization.’ The phenomenon itself is incontestable. But where are the limits, and what is its historical weight?”
While in 1939 Trotsky expected this inner tendency of capitalism toward “bureaucratic collectivization” to be aborted by post-war revolution and to be therefore only of academic interest, the prolongation of capitalist degeneration and the continued “political prostration of the working class” more and more brings it to the fore and lends it increasing historic weight. The limits of this tendency are set by the struggle of the working class for power and, even aside from this, by the fact that the complete negation of capitalism short of working-class revolution requires the intervention of some other revolutionary social force which is visible in the Western capitalist countries only in broad outline.
(8) This capitalist tendency toward “bureaucratic collectivization,” therefore, by no means erases the distinction and antagonism between the rival social systems of capitalist America and bureaucratic-collectivist Russia, but bears on the direction of capitalist degeneration – given working-class failure to fight the trends created.
Capitalism itself is doomed. In the looming war between Western imperialism and Stalinist imperialism, the victory of the former can be achieved by it only by intensifying precisely those tendencies which push it in the direction of its enemy. War economy – bureaucratization – bureaucratic planning – controls – regimentation – declining standard of living in the midst of “full employment” for war production – these are the social prerequisites for gearing capitalism toward victory in the threatened war. It is irresponsible and utopian to believe that the victory of American imperialism in this war can be ensured at any cost lower than the acceleration of its own descent into that modern-type barbarism upon which it wars.
The fight against the inevitable assault of today’s capitalism on the most firmly entrenched economic gains and democratic rights of the people is part and parcel of the socialist struggle against the war itself and its preparation. This is the most fundamental historical basis for our slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow!” and the refusal of the Marxists to make the slightest compromise with social-patriotic notions of supporting the capitalist side of a war in order to gain a “breathing spell” from the threat of Stalinist totalitarianism.
(9) The degeneration of today’s capitalism is most noticeable at its peripheries, in the relations between it and the colonial world. The end of the First World War brought the strengthening of the colonial empires at least of the victorious powers. The Second World War has brought a thoroughgoing disintegration into all of world imperialism where it counts most, among their colonial slaves.
For the first time since the early progressive days of capitalism, peoples in revolt have won their national independence from big powers. The British and French empires, greatest in the world, are breaking up. India, classic example of colonial subjection, is now politically independent. Egypt and most of the Arab world are no longer under direct British mastery. This change is not due to any change of heart by a reformed British imperialism under Labor Party control. On the contrary, British imperialism has not given the slightest sign of having changed its spots – in Africa, for example, where it still maintains a firm hand. Nor is it true, on the other hand, that “nothing new has really happened,” that India’s independence is a “fake,” etc. India’s political independence is as real as the political independence of any state today other than the Big Two themselves.
(10) What is noteworthy, from the point of view of the Marxist prognosis, is that this change has been accomplished without a socialist revolution and not under the leadership of the working class in these colonies. If this stands in contradiction with the prognoses based on the theory of permanent revolution, it is so not because the theory misread the character of the colonial bourgeoisie, but because it did not envisage the transformation which has actually taken place: the accelerated degeneration of capitalism and therefore the disintegration of capitalist imperialism.
Capitalism, falling apart and held together at home through bureaucratic militarization, loosens its grip first at its outer fringes. The sweeping and worldwide changes in the colonial world testify to the entrance of capitalist imperialism onto a new stage of its degeneration.
(11) But at the same time – and equally characteristic of the new stage of capitalism – national political independence has come to mean less and less in today’s world. It no longer opens the doors it used to, in the earlier day when it meant (for the native bourgeoisie) the opportunity to itself center upon the road of economic expansion and development among the powers of the world.
For the old relationship of colonial slave and colonial master, a new relationship is being established not only for the former colonial dependencies but also for countries which have enjoyed national independence for a century and more. This is a hierarchical relationship of economic subordination under the overall hegemony of American super-imperialism.
(12) This relationship, under which the situation of the ex-colonies is being subsumed, is that which American imperialism is on the way to establishing between itself and the advanced countries of Western Europe. As noted in previous resolutions: since the Second World War, for the first time in modern days, the spirit of national resistance has found a social basis in these lands – not merely, as during the war, directed against actual military occupation, but directed against the usurpation of their national sovereignty by the United States through the economic levers of the Marshall Plan.
The relationship which is being established between American imperialism and (for example) Italy is not the same as the pre-war relationship between England and India. It is no longer that of master and colonial slave, but of overlord and vassal. The capitalist-imperialist world is no longer divided into two more or less distinct spheres consisting of a number of exploiting states and a larger number of bondsmen-nations without rights; it is a hierarchy under the overlordship of Washington, in an imperialist system of mutual but unequal obligations with the dominant imperialism of the United States skimming the cream. The newly independent colonies are fitted into this framework.
(13) The American overlordship in Western Europe does not take the form of political suppression of national sovereignty, just as it did not in its conquest of Latin America; the vassal continues under the form of a “sovereign” independent state, subordinating itself to Washington of its own “free will” – that is, under the compulsion of economic necessity to knuckle under lest its own capitalist economy collapse.
In addition, the counter-threat from the East, from Moscow, drives it into the arms of that imperialism which at least seeks to prop up its existing ruling class. Thus the threat of Russian expansion becomes, in addition to their own economic weakness and need, the cement which binds together the new American hegemony being established on the Continent and over the rest by the capitalist world.
Only by convincing the peoples of Europe that it is the lesser evil can the United States mitigate the outbursts of national resistance which would otherwise greet its encroachment on their sovereignty. This has its counterpart in the propaganda appeal of Russia to the peoples under its own heel.
The two super-imperialisms feed on each other. In the European working class, the politics of the reformists who. paint the victory of American imperialism as the lesser evil and as the prerequisite for a “breathing spell” is precisely the line of propaganda and conviction which permits Washington to realize its world ambitions.
(14) American overlordship in Western Europe is indeed a necessity if capitalism is to withstand Stalinist Russia’s assaults on its bastions. It is irresponsible – or at least inconsistent – to greet the Marshall Plan as a necessary bulwark against Stalinism arid at the same time object to America’s utilization of the Marshall Plan for the purpose of dictating what its recipients shall or shall not do economically or politically. Capitalist Europe cannot defend itself while maintaining a real independence, in its present stage of degeneration. Economically and politically, it cannot organize itself into a unity, as against the Russian empire’s integrated totalitarianism, except under outside tutelage.
As a social force, European capitalism has little or no appeal for the masses, either in its own countries or in Eastern Europe. The European reformists, who have never entertained the thought of socialist revolution as a bulwark against Stalinism, conclude that the only “practical” alternative is reconciliation to American imperialism or dependence upon it. In every part of the world – outside Europe too, where Stalinism’s threat is far-flung – the politics of supporting America in its cold war now, or in the shooting war tomorrow, makes impossible any struggle for national independence beyond grumbling or pleading. Here too the shadow of the Third World War determines all politics.
(15) If world capitalism, in its senility, is entering upon a new stage in our epoch of war and revolution, accompanying this development are retrogressive symptoms in all fields – social, political, ideological, cultural. The old system awakens barbaric echoes of its past, as civilized values in the broadest sense crumble with the economic structure.
The appearance of these symptoms, however, does not mean that two centuries of capitalist development and social change have simply been put in reverse and wound back on the film of history. Thus the reappearance of national-liberation movements and strivings in modern Europe represents, on one side, a hurling back of working-class consciousness, but it does not and cannot mean a throwback to the social conditions that prevailed in the early days of capitalism. Thus the hurling back of culture in so many of its aspects (most evident in German fascism and totalitarian Stalinism but visible also even in the United States) is a retrogressive movement, but it does not simply take society back to the problems and solutions of a previous epoch. These symptoms are superimposed on an entirely new constellation of social forces.
(16) The political dangers latent in an erroneous theory on this question are most evident in, but not confined to, the formulation of the theory of retrogressionism put forward by the IKD group.
According to it, the process of retrogression “harks back in reverse order to the end of the Middle Ages, the epoch of ‘primitive accumulation,’ the Thirty Years War, the bourgeois revolutions, etc.” and is “shoving society back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages,” bringing about “a reversal ... of all relations, foundations and conditions valid for the ascending development of capitalism” and producing “the exact counterpart” in reverse of this ascending development, creating “conditions in economics, politics, social relations, etc., which are like the conditions of the epoch of the origins of capitalism,” etc.
In the political conclusion drawn from this theory, the IKD group, in emphasizing the “democratic revolution” against the despotic regime of capitalist barbarism minimizes the specific and leading role of the proletariat as a class and even slurs over the decisive question of class distinctions in the broad popular and democratic movements against capitalism into which all oppressed classes and strata are driven by its decay. At the same time, by failing to emphasize the fact that for Marxists the conscious and consistent struggle for democracy can be conceived of in no other way than as the struggle for workers’ power and socialism, the position of the IKD, which is at best ambiguous on this score, leaves open a return to the political program of the immature proletariat in the days of immature capitalism.
(17) On the theoretical side, its theory ignores precisely the new driving force of capitalist degeneration in favor of a sterile schematism. Far from lessening the leading role of the working class in the struggle for both socialism and democracy, the degeneration of capitalism and of its “democratic” sections in par ticular more than ever leaves the proletariat as the only social force which can lead all the oppressed in combating the descent to a new barbarism.
At the top of the agenda today for the socialist movement is the fight for every democratic demand, including national independence of subject peoples and nations, but this struggle has progressive significance only insofar as it leads to or creates more favorable conditions for the achievement of the proletarian socialist revolution by the overthrow of capitalism.
(18) The degeneration of capitalism exercises a penetrating effect on all aspects of its society and on all its wings, from its reactionaries to its liberals. Not least of all does it affect social-democratic reformism, in the latter’s capacity as the bearer of capitalist ideology in the ranks of the working class. Where the social-democracy has seemed to take a new lease on life in the countries of Western Europe, it has been in part at the expense of a change in its role corresponding to the changes working within capitalism itself.
(19) Social-democratic reformism is today increasingly one of the political channels through which the “bureaucratic collectivization” of capitalism expresses itself. The “collectivist tendencies” within capitalism press forward, and in many cases – as has happened often before – the old capitalist representatives are unwilling or unable to become their vehicles, hidebound by tradition and personnel. The social-democracy is in many respects peculiarly fitted to do so.
After the First World War, discredited capitalism required a “democratic” face-lifting, sops and stopgaps; and it permitted the social-democracy to take the lead in this direction until it was no longer useful. Today the needful for capitalism is not democratization; it is bureaucratization, a measure of bureaucratic state planning accompanied by increasing Bonapartism. Just as two decades ago the social-democracy “democratized” under the impression that it was thereby fulfilling an installment of its own program, so today it plays a role in the bureaucratic militarization of economy under the impression that it is achieving a slice of “socialism.”
(20) This is possible for the social-democracy because – precisely in that basic respect which distinguishes revolutionary Marxism from all petty-bourgeois ideologies in the working-class movement – there is an underlying ideological kinship between social-reformism and Stalinism: the aim of a rationalized society plus a fear of the masses in movement and a rejection of the working class’s claim to social leadership; its ideology of collectivism without trust in workers’ democracy and initiative.
This is also why the soul of social- democracy is split throughout Europe between capitulation to American domination and capitulation to Stalinism, depending upon their relative power. Where Stalinism has not yet taken power, social-democracy mainly gravitates toward the former; in Italy, lapped by the wave of Russian power, it split between the two until the Stalinist debacle in the last election; but it then becomes anti-Stalinist in order to play its role as part of the vanguard of the native, capitalist tendencies toward bureaucratization.
(21) In the United States, where the reformist social-democracy is organizationally insignificant and capitalist degeneration least advanced, this ideological role is adopted by elements outside the miniscular Socialist Party or Social Democratic Federation – the neo-liberals who have abandoned the traditional liberal fetish of freedom from state power in favor of another fetish, “planned capitalism,” i.e., bureaucratized capitalism, denominated in liberal jargon as “progressive capitalism.” In the case of American liberalism, as in the case of the European social-democracy, the same split is seen, however: into the pro-American liberals and the pro-Stalinist liberals (Wallaceites, neo-Stalinists), while in both camps the well-known phenomenon of “totalitarian liberalism” grows apace.
(22) This development – a modification of the long-standing political role of reformism – by no means erases what we have emphasized as being the fundamental social distinction between reformism and Stalinism, a distinction which also determines a basic difference in attitude toward the two on the part of the Marxists. The reformist parties are based on the existence of a more or less free labor movement in a more or less bourgeois-democratic state structure. Where this has cea§ed to be true, as in the totalitarianized satellites of Russia, the basis for the social-democracy has ceased to exist, and consequently the social-democracy itself has ceased to exist, being absorbed by the Stalinists or converted into new underground revolutionary movements.
(23) It is likewise the social basis of the social-democracy, as it is today – its working-class base – which also limits its role as a political channel for bureaucratic tendencies under capitalism, Just as it was this same basic characteristic which limited its ability to act as an instrument for defending the capitalist state in the past. It can go along with these capitalist tendencies only up to a point; as ever, its working-class base pulls it in a different direction. It is this divided soul of the social-democracy which creates the opportunity for a left wing – a Marxist tendency – to attempt to drive a wedge between the proletarian masses who follow the social-democratic leaders and the policy and program of the leadership itself.
(24) In those countries, therefore, where the social-democracy is still a mass organization, then – in the absence of sizable revolutionary parties, which is the situation in Europe today – the possibility exists of setting up within its leftwing ranks a pole of attraction for those independent workers who wish to orient away from both Washington and Moscow, an incubation center of the revolutionary third camp. This possibility does not and cannot exist within the Stalinist movements because of their totalitarian character.
Reformism still acts as a tail to capitalism and, at the same time; incubates elements of revolutionary-socialist struggle against capitalism – which means, by the same token, against reformism itself.
(25) Above all, it is not reformism which is today in most of the world the main enemy of revolutionary Marxism within the working-class movement. That is Stalinism.
In the period leading up to the First World War, the effect of the development of imperialism on the working class was to distort its ideology in the direction of reformist. Today the effect of the bureaucratic degeneration of capitalism on the working-class movement is to distort its ideology in the direction of Stalinism. The dominance of social reformism was the result of the imperialist development of the system; the Stalinization of the working class is the result of the new stage of capitalism. In this sense Stalinism is the contemporary analogue of pre-war reformism, although not merely a variety of reformism.
(26) The attitude of revolutionary socialists toward democratic demands and slogans has undergone substantial modification in the last period, especially during and since the Second World War, under the impact of the changes in capitalism itself. One of the first and biggest manifestations of this change was the position on the national-resistance movements in Europe adopted by the Workers Party in 1944. At the same time, the recognition of the world Stalinist parties as an anti-capitalist but reactionary movement highlights the crucial role of democracy today in the proletarian struggle against capitalism, in contradistinction from Stalinism.
(27) The fundamental difference between the reformist and the revolutionary view of the struggle for democracy dates back in modern times to the contrast between the politics of the pre-1914 social-democracy and of its revolutionary Marxist wing of the same period, when both operated on the common Marxist belief that the road to socialism lay through the unceasing struggle for the broadening of democracy. But the social-democrats based their fight on the view that there was an unlimited perspective of democratization before capitalism, which need only he driven to its ultimate conclusion in line with the natural tendency of a peacefully developing capitalism; among other revolutionary Marxists, the Bolsheviks viewed their struggle for democracy in Russia as inevitably bringing the masses in conflict not only with the autocratic regime of the czar but also with the capitalist class.
Where, therefore, the former view led the social-democrats to adaptation to and support of capitalism, and finally even support of its wars, the Marxist view led to the carrying of the democratic struggle over to the socialist revolution, without which it could not achieve fruition.
(28) The Russian October and the period of the first world revolution of 1917–23, which saw a proletarian revolutionary wave sweep over all of Europe and shake up the whole world, with soviet power and the overthrow of capitalism immediately on the order of the day, also saw the formation of the Communist International and the crystallization and codification of Marxist doctrine as developed by Lenin taking place under these conditions.
The fundamental difference between social-democracy and revolutionary Marxism took another specific form: the reformists undertook the task of defending and preserving capitalism against the assaults of the revolutionary proletariat, calling this betrayal “the defense of bourgeois democracy.” To this bourgeois democracy, under which guise the capitalist system was making its last stand, the Marxists counterposed workers’ power and socialist democracy. Under the cover of the bourgeois-democratic regimes, temporarily staffed by the reformists, the continued dictatorship and oppression of the capitalist rulers restabilized itself – until the temporary burgeoning of democratic and republican forms in Europe gave way, once the revolutionary tide had receded, to fascism and the drive to a Second World War.
(29) This last struggle against the bourgeois-democratic form of capitalism, however, left its lasting impress on the Marxist movement and on its attitude toward the struggle for democracy under capitalism. While it is certainly not excluded that, with the rise of a second wave of world revolution, bourgeois democracy (or what is left of it) will again be able to be counterposed to workers’ power, in a last attempt to head off the final overthrow of capitalism, the present trends and relations of forces in the world call imperatively for the revival of the revolutionary Marxist struggle for democracy, exemplified by the Bolsheviks, which led up to the first world revolution, and not the mechanical repetition of the slogans and attitudes which were characteristic while the direct struggle for socialist power was on the order of the day.
The fact that this revival has been delayed in the Marxist movement can be ascribed to two factors besides political inertia in general: the effect of the Stalinization of the Communist International even upon those who broke with Stalinism (like the Trotskyists); and the universal expectation of the Marxists that the outbreak of the Second World War would be the prelude to a second world-wide upsurge of proletarian revolution which would bring back the conditions of 1917–23 on an even higher plane. The actual aftermath of the war makes the readaptation of the Marxist-Leninist struggle for democracy an imperative necessity.
(30) The trend of capitalism today is not toward democratization but its reverse: militarization and authoritarianism, “bureaucratic collectivization” and Bonapartism. The “defense of bourgeois democracy” conducted by the reformist social-democracy today, this time as a “lesser evil” in comparison with Stalinism, is such as to drive them and their similars to whitewash and condone – i.e., not struggle against but support – an unending series of inroads upon democracy necessitated by capitalism’s degeneration.
In the United States, as has been noted, even “old-fashioned” liberalism is giving way to emphasis upon statism instead of democratic controls as the cure to the evils of capitalism. Only the revolutionary socialists today can inherit and prosecute militantly and consistently the fight for the defense of every democratic right under capitalism, and for the extension of democracy, as part of its struggle to mobilize the masses for the abolition of capitalism.
(31) The key to the struggle for socialism today is the struggle for democracy – the fight to awaken a mass movement behind the most thoroughgoing democratic demands as an indispensable means of leading this fight on to socialism. The Independent Socialist League therefore seeks to be the champion of every popular democratic struggle against the manifestations of degenerate capitalism; is implacably opposed to every plea that any such struggle should be subordinated, soft-pedaled or sidetracked because of its effect on United States power in its struggle for the world against Stalinist Russia; and determined to push such a fight for thoroughgoing democracy consistently and unwaveringly to its final conclusion, a socialist democracy.
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Last updated on 29 September 2018