We live in a world of enormous economic and social contrasts. The combined wealth of the top 300 people now exceeds the total annual income of the world’s one billion poorest. The richest one-fifth own 85% of the world’s wealth, while the poorest one-fifth control less than 2%.
The scale and nature of economic activities at the dawn of the 21st century create wealth unimagined by previous generations. Developments in telecommunications and digital technology mean that information and money can cross the globe with ease. However, half the world’s population have never used a telephone, and 840 million are illiterate—two thirds of them women.
Although the potential exists to create riches and distribute them around the world, chronic mass unemployment affects more than 820 million workers. Production and trade is dominated by giant transnational corporations like Exxon, Unilever, Shell and Microsoft. Assisted by their ‘home’ governments and states, and by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, they strive to impose their monopoly across the world in the name of ‘free trade’ and globalisation. Billions of dollars are spent on armaments each year, but resources cannot be found to eradicate poverty and diseases such as malaria. Throughout the developing countries one and a half billion people have no safe water supply, two and a half billion lack sanitation and hundreds of millions suffer from chronic malnutrition, while their governments are up to their necks in debt to Western banks.
In the United States, resources can be found to explore space and even to militarise it. Yet at the same time, the stability of the life support system of our planet is under threat due to ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, deforestation, toxic wastes and the extinction of species.
After a century of unprecedented social, national and international conflict, war still blights one part of the world after another. Aided by Britain and other NATO powers, the United States acts as policeman, judge, jury and executioner on behalf of the ‘international community’. Countries that depart from the American line like Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq and Sudan are invaded or bombed with no regard for human rights or international law. The division of the world by the major imperialist trading blocs of North America, the European Union and Japan is increasing the danger of military conflict. The Cold War may be over, but the risk of nuclear annihilation still exists.
This crisis which grips the world is endemic to capitalism in its highest and most moribund stage, imperialism. Britain however, as a wealthy imperialist state, is not immune. Here too, the richest tenth of the population own half of Britain’s wealth, while the poorest 50% own just 6% of it. Governments come and go, but the major economic decisions continue to be made in the boardrooms of the big financial institutions and monopoly corporations. At the stroke of a computer key, huge sums of money are moved out of Britain and around the world. Factories are shut down while investment is directed overseas, where wages are often lower and conditions worse. The Welfare State is put in jeopardy and hard-won gains are sacrificed, so that companies can remain profitable ‘in the global market place’.
Does the world—or indeed Britain—have to be like this? For much of the 20th century, Communists could answer with a categorical ‘No’ as the world appeared to be undergoing an irreversible transition to the higher system of socialism. Such arguments became much more difficult after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist states. Various ‘Third Way’, ‘New Age’ and anarchistic ideas have stepped into the ideological vacuum.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism was a severe setback from which Communists have had to draw many lessons. Those societies certainly had many faults—not least their restriction of democracy—which contributed to their downfall. Nevertheless, developments since then confirm our basic analysis. Socialism, as it existed there, may have been overthrown, but capitalism fails billions of people the world over every day.
Capitalism is unable to tackle the problems of Britain and the world because it is a system based on private ownership and individual greed. Socialism, reborn and reinvigorated by mass participation, remains the only alternative. This conclusion is not a case of wishful thinking. It arises from our scientific, Marxist analysis of society and the class struggle within it.
In Britain, as in all capitalist societies, a continual struggle takes place between workers trying to preserve or advance their pay and conditions, and capitalists attempting to cut costs and boost profits.
The capitalist class is dominated by big shareholders who own most of industry, land, commerce, the banks and the mass media. The overwhelming majority of people can live only by selling their labour power to a capitalist employer, or to the state sector which maintains capitalist society. Most retired and unemployed workers are receiving a portion of the wealth produced by their past or future labour power. Parents receiving child-related benefits and allowances are rearing future providers of labour power for capitalism. That makes most of the population of Britain objectively working class, whatever their own individual perspective.
Under capitalism, the price of commodities that workers produce reflects the average labour time taken to produce them, including their inputs (raw materials, power, wear and tear of machinery etc.) But the revenue that capitalists receive from the sale of those commodities is more than enough to pay the wages bill, other production costs, taxes and renewed investment. The balance—capitalist profit—goes mostly in dividends to shareholder capitalists, in rent to landowning capitalists and in interest payments to money-lending capitalists.
Where does this capitalist profit come from? It is the value created by the company workforce, over and above the value of their wages. Workers in Britain’s manufacturing industry, for example, create almost twice the value of their wages. The portion they do not receive back in wages or social benefits is the ‘surplus value’ kept by their employers. Here is the source of capitalist profit, and in this way workers are exploited under capitalism.
As employers seek to minimise costs and to squeeze more surplus value out of their workforce, they will try to hold down wages while also investing in machinery and equipment that saves labour costs and enables them to produce commodities more cheaply than their competitors. As the price of a commodity is determined largely by the average labour time taken to produce it, companies producing it at below average cost and value will make extra profits at the expense of the high-cost ones.
In the state sector, workers in local government and the civil and public services are also engaged in a struggle with employers. Lower costs and higher productivity of labour will keep public expenditure down—which means lower taxes, less pressure to increase wages and therefore bigger net profits in the private sector.
Whether in the private or public sector, it is in the interests of the capitalist class to reduce labour costs by employing workers who can be discriminated against on the basis of their race, gender, or age. Divisions within the working class on these and other grounds assist the capitalists to force down the general level of wages and other labour-related costs. That is why it is in the interests of all workers to unite against discrimination and inequality.
Across the economy as a whole, the drive of capitalists to maximise productivity and profit has a contradictory effect. As the work process is increasingly mechanised in the drive for higher productivity, for lower labour costs and greater market share, so the proportion of the economy’s capital invested in the workforce which creates new value—and therefore surplus value—diminishes. Employers are compelled to combat this tendency of the overall rate of profit to fall by reducing the real value of wages, intensifying the work rate, reorganising the work process, introducing continuous working, etc.
Thus the capitalists are impelled to increase production while at the same time restricting the purchasing power of the vast majority of consumers, namely the working class.
As a consequence, the point is reached periodically when not all the commodities produced can be sold at a profit. Orders for new machinery to increase output are cut back; workers in those sectors are laid off and their spending power diminishes; more commodities are unsold and, in turn, the workers who produce them are sacked. Soon the whole economy goes into a downward spiral of wage cuts, redundancy, closure and mass unemployment. As workers resist, the capitalist class exploits all the divisions that exist within the working class, deploying the forces of the capitalist state against the labour movement and any scapegoats’ who can also be blamed for the crisis.
In these crises of ‘over-production’ which are increasingly frequent and widespread, smaller and weaker companies go the wall as plant and machinery is scrapped. Bigger capitalist firms weather the storm until it becomes profitable to produce once more, utilising cheap labour provided by mass unemployment, cheap credit and cheap means of production.
Thus the relations of production under capitalism—based on private ownership and profit—increasingly squander and periodically destroy society’s productive forces. Yet these productive forces, if planned and owned and nurtured by society as a whole, could already more than satisfy the material needs of all the world’s people.
During the 19th century, periodic crises speeded up the process—through bankruptcy and merger—of reducing a large number of small firms to a small number of large ones. In each sector of industry and commerce in the main imperialist countries, no more than ten or 12 large companies came to monopolise the market, often forming cartels to restrict competition. Where they could, these capitalist monopolies restricted output relative to capacity in order to obtain monopoly prices and profits.
This compelled them to find greater investment outlets abroad for their growing capital, aiming to repeat on a world scale the monopoly control they had established at home. In particular, they sought to monopolise sources of raw materials and cheap labour, thereby pre-empting imperialist rivals. More and more of these companies thereby established themselves as transnational corporations (TNCs or ‘multinationals’), locating at least some of their production operations abroad.
The monopolies also sought to protect their foreign investments through political and often military control of the countries in which they operated, using this to maintain privileged markets for their own manufactures. Hundreds of millions of people—the majority of the world’s population—were drawn as workers and through trade, usury and taxation into the sphere of imperialist exploitation, and into the political and cultural oppression that sustained it.
In the early 20th century, once the world was completely divided up into colonies and other spheres of influence, the expansion of any one imperialism could only be achieved at the expense of another. No stable redivision or carve-up was possible, because capitalist countries develop unevenly. The faster-growing industrial power of Germany came to challenge the status quo dominated by the older, less dynamic power of Britain.
A struggle between imperialisms became inevitable. To prepare their economies for war, and to condition or bludgeon their peoples into accepting it, the monopolists began to fuse their economic and political power into a unity: state monopoly capitalism. This is characterised by the closest collaboration and joint involvement of the capitalist monopolies and the state apparatus in economic, political and military affairs.
The conflict between imperialisms culminated in the bloodbath of the 1914-18 First World War. But as they saw through the nationalistic and bellicose slogans of their own ruling class, working people everywhere began to struggle against war and the system which had caused it.
In the Russian empire—itself a target for imperialist investment—the corruption and military incompetence of a landlord police-state helped forge an alliance between the peasants’ struggle against landlordism and the workers’ struggle against capitalism. Out of this came the October Revolution of 1917, when Lenin, the Bolsheviks and their allies seized political power.
From then on, imperialism was faced for the first time in its history with a system which was ending exploitation. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) became a new and special focus for capitalist hatred.
Within the imperialist system all the old contradictions continued to develop. The First World War had stimulated important shifts in the productive forces and production relations. Methods of mass production raised the productivity of labour very sharply, while the war economy had accelerated the growth of monopoly. As capitalism was re-stabilised in the mid-1920s, partly by the the increased intervention of the monopoly capitalist state to defeat trade union militancy and attempts at revolution, workers’ consuming power grew more slowly than productive capacity. This contradiction laid the basis for capitalism’s most profound periodic economic crisis, the Great Depression of the 1930s.
This crisis was uneven between imperialist countries, being deepest where the cushion of super-exploited colonies did not exist on a significant scale, but where the productive forces had grown most rapidly. In Germany, such deep crisis coincided with an organisationally strong but politically divided working class. The German ruling class turned to fascism to destroy the Communist and working class movement, in part as preparation for a new imperialist war to redivide the world in its favour.
Initially, Nazi Germany was able to use the anti-Sovietism of powerful sections of the ruling classes of other imperialist countries to strengthen its own economic and military position. The working class, on the other hand, led the struggle to build a popular front against fascism, the principal force for war. In the struggle against fascist aggression, the Soviet state and the international Communist and working class movement were able to use the divisions within imperialism—between bourgeois democracy and fascism—to prevent a united front of imperialism against the USSR. Thus the basis was created for the defeat of fascism in the Second World War. That war also marked the emergence of the United States as the world’s leading imperialist power, having already established its own colonies and semi-colonies in Central and South America.
Since then, capitalism’s productive forces have grown at an unprecedented rate, largely due to the scientific and technological revolution. Widely based, this has been epitomised by the computer and micro-electronics revolution, through which complex mental processes could for the first time be carried out by machines.
But for the fruits of scientific advance to be realised, an ever more complex division and unity of labour was required, with huge resources devoted to research and development. In some sectors (eg. aircraft, informatics, chemicals and robotics), giant enterprises constituted the minimum scale of operation required to achieve this, but even they needed to collaborate with other giants. The research and education needed to underpin the scientific and technological revolution could only be organised and financed through massive state involvement, and in spheres such as nuclear fusion only through collaboration between states. Few countries were large enough to sustain the scientific and technological revolution in every sector. A new division of labour between countries—with a new geographical distribution of productive forces—was necessary.
This process has been led by the transnational corporations. Their policies are tempered only by state pressure and popular struggle. The transnationals are now the decisive monopolies of imperialism, exporting capital from the home country where their headquarters and most of their biggest shareholders are based. They organise their activities between different countries in order to maximise their global profits. Their decisions—which sectors to expand, which to contract, which type of productive forces to develop, which to make redundant—determine the fate of whole regions, nations and groups of workers. Today, transnational corporations based in the USA, Japan, Britain and the other leading imperialist states account for one-third of the world’s production, two-thirds of world trade and three-quarters of international investment.
For the working class and oppressed peoples of every nation, the Russian revolution was proof of the practicality of their hopes and beliefs. Working people could achieve political power and use it to build a social system free from exploitation, unemployment and war. Workers and oppressed peoples everywhere gained enormously in confidence. In particular, they saw how in the Soviet Union a communist party based on the theory of scientific socialism had been the vehicle for this breakthrough.
The achievements of the Soviet state and people were enormous. All remnants of feudalism were abolished. Large-scale industry was developed. The achievements of Soviet science in so many spheres were outstanding. In health, housing and social services big steps forward were recorded. There were massive advances in education, and a cultural revolution which changed the face of what had been a very backward society. Women threw off many of the shackles forged by feudal and religious customs and beliefs, achieving equality in law if not always in practice. Whole peoples acquired a written culture and a measure of national self-government as the Tsarist ‘prison house of nations’ was demolished.
The Soviet Union also made a tremendous impact on the struggle for freedom against imperialism across the world, rendering invaluable aid to the national liberation and anti-apartheid movements. Nor should it be forgotten that Soviet industrialisation, on the basis of state ownership and planning, made possible the defeat of fascism in the Second World War—thereby saving the whole of humanity from unprecedented tyranny.
The Soviet Union struggled to build its socialist system in a backward country, surrounded by hostile imperialist forces. The Soviet people were plunged into two devastating wars—the war of intervention immediately following the revolution, and the Second World War which was followed by the defence burden of the Cold War.
The effects of encirclement and invasion by hostile imperialist forces should not be underestimated. Immense problems were caused for the Soviet Union politically, culturally and economically. The ‘siege mentality’ provoked by imperialist aggression was a powerful factor giving rise to wrong policies. From the late 1920s onwards, decisions were made which led to serious violations of socialist and democratic principles. More specifically, there developed an excessive centralisation of political power. State repression was used against people who failed to conform. Bureaucratic commands replaced economic levers as an instrument of planning. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the trades unions became integrated into the apparatus of the state, eroding working class and popular democracy. Marxism-Leninism was used dogmatically to justify the status quo.
Theoretically, the working people of the Soviet Union owned everything. But in fact they were masters of very little. Society was actually run by the party leadership, issuing orders from the top down.
After 1945, the centralised planning of nationalised economies had enabled the Soviet Union and its socialist allies to rebuild their war-torn countries and, for 20 years, to outstrip the capitalist world in economic and social development. The Soviet Union developed its own nuclear capability and assisted by the world peace movement—secured a policy of peaceful co-existence, competition and co-operation between the two systems as a particular form of the international class struggle. But from the mid-1970s, the USSR and Eastern Europe began to fall behind capitalism—especially in Japan and Germany—in the quality and rate of growth of its productive forces. The bureaucratic command system of ‘actually existing socialism’ proved unable to utilise the post-war scientific and technological revolution and develop society’s forces of production more effectively than capitalism. The contradiction in Soviet society between its authoritarian form and its socialist content—which could only be resolved by the widest expansion of democracy into all spheres of life—became intractable. Failure to reap the full benefits of the scientific and technological revolution, in conditions of competition with imperialism, laid the basis for the collapse of the socialist system in the USSR, and in those countries modelled upon it in central and eastern Europe.
In particular, the arms race led by the United States had compelled the Soviet Union to channel massive resources into military production, diverting them from civilian needs including consumer goods. The unfavourable comparisons with the West which this created—and which took no account of the way imperialism exploited the Third World—contributed to undermining confidence in socialism among sections of the population in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The scale of the Soviet military programme also created a powerful network of bureaucratic interest groups within the command system, straddling industry, the scientific community and the military establishment.
Attempts to renovate socialist production relations and bring democratic control into political and social life, attempted in the 1960s but stifled, were renewed in the mid-1980s. But perestroika (‘reconstruction’) in the economic sphere failed to win the fullest co-operation of bureaucratic cadres in the Party, economy and state. Established links were disrupted but not replaced by new ones based on a more flexible planning system and the use of market mechanisms.
The policy of glasnost (‘openness’) exposed long-standing distortions of socialism, thereby weakening the confidence of many who had from ignorance or loyalty denied their existence. The old Party-state structures were broken down—but there were no properly functioning political organisations, including the Party itself, to replace them. And because the dogmatisation of Marxism-Leninism had stunted political understanding and creative socialist thought at all levels, the door was opened to illusions about private ownership and the so-called ‘free’ market.
In these conditions, the capitalist option came to be embraced by key elements of the bureaucratic establishment who saw it as protecting their privileged position. Without a mass political movement based on the working people and led by a Communist Party armed with a clear perspective for socialist reform, the pressure for capitalist development—notably privatisation—became irresistible. The descent into chaos was accelerated by the failure to work out a new Soviet state structure acceptable to the republics and capable of defusing the ethnic conflicts which had begun to break out as a result of economic disruption and bureaucratic sabotage.
The collapse of socialism and the restoration of capitalism has since been a disaster for masses of people in the former Soviet Union and central and eastern Europe. Economic output, wages, social benefits and life expectancy fell dramatically in Russia as speculators, asset-strippers and gangster capitalists siphoned huge amounts of wealth out of the country. The new capitalist class in these countries is often weak and unstable. Economic relations with capitalist countries—formerly confined to trade—are deepening through transnational involvement and financial links with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Imperialism’s main economic interest is to exploit the huge natural resources of the former Soviet Union not to encourage the development of a modern, rival capitalist Russia.
As a result of the regression to capitalism, civil war and ethnic conflicts have erupted in the Balkans, the Caucasus and in Central Asia. These have in many cases been encouraged by outside imperialist interference. The major imperialist powers are pushing eastwards towards Russia, economically and militarily. The continuing expansion of the European Union and NATO into eastern Europe threatens peace in a way that the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact never did.
Since the 1990s, the collapse of the socialist system has objectively strengthened the hand of capital while weakening that of the working class. The glue of anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism which held competing imperialist interests together has melted away, freeing imperialism to intensify its rivalries and its domination of the Third World. Far from creating a single economic ‘global village’ in the wake of the collapse, competing transnational corporations have intensified their struggle for new markets and larger shares of existing markets, so intensifying the exploitation of the working people of all countries.
So long as the capitalist world economy was expanding rapidly, rival transnational corporations could share in swallowing up their smaller competitors. But when the rate of world expansion slowed down from the early 1970s, German and Japanese companies -built up with substantial state aid and protection—mounted a challenge to their mainly US and British competitors. The economic and political outcome has been the polarisation of the world’s monopolists into three groups. The capitalist monopolies have pressed their own national governments to construct rival trading blocs based on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), where the USA is dominant; the European Union, where Germany, France and Britain are dominant; and the countries of the Pacific Rim, where Japan is dominant.
It should not be imagined that TNCs ‘have no country’. They constantly exert pressure to ensure that national state power is deployed to create a favourable class and financial climate at home, and to support their struggle against rival monopolies and troublesome governments abroad.
In western Europe, though, the use of national state power to help establish monopolies which dominate in a single country or even on an all-European scale is no longer enough. Because the struggle for domination takes place today in a global arena, transnationals in Europe are disadvantaged without an all-European state apparatus. The most powerful monopoly capitalism, Germany, organises others under its own hegemony in accordance with an absolute law of monopoly capitalism: the domination of the stronger over the weaker. Hence it strives for European economic unity backed by a European state apparatus, one which is capable of taking on the USA and Japan in a global struggle.
The European Union (EU) was established as the European ‘Common Market’ (later the EEC) in 1957 precisely in order to increase the power and the profits of the capitalist monopolies through greater exploitation of the working peoples of Europe and the Third World. Its bureaucratic, anti-democratic structures reflect this purpose. The political representatives of monopoly capital use the EU to co-ordinate their attacks in each member state on social and welfare programmes, nationalised industries, job security, migrant workers and refugees. The single European currency (the ‘euro’) is a central element in the strategy to impose pro-monopoly and anti-working class monetarist policies in every member state of the European Union.
At the same time, the transnational corporations see in the EU the opportunity to weaken the power of individual member states to regulate the economic activities of monopoly capital. So big business and finance work to undermine national economic sovereignty and so remove themselves from any possibility of democratic control by—and accountability to—national governments. Thus in the EU, economic and financial powers are transferred from democratically elected national governments to the European Commission, the European Central Bank and other supra-national agencies that are beyond direct democratic control and accountability.
Lenin warned in the midst of the First World War that the formation of a capitalist ‘United States of Europe’ would either be impossible or reactionary: impossible, because the monopoly capitalists of different European imperialist powers were fundamentally the deadliest of rivals; or—to the extent that they could bury their differences temporarily—reactionary because their unity could only be ‘for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America’.
Capitalism portrays deregulation, privatisation, cuts in the welfare state and mass long-term unemployment as necessary medicine to be swallowed by workers in the ‘era of globalisation’. A handful of imperialist powers are the main driving force within the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation in efforts to create a ‘globalised’ market, one in which their transnationals can operate without restrictions. This is reflected in the formulation of one-sided definitions of ‘free trade’ and ‘fair competition’, whereby power blocs such as NAFTA and the European Union are exempt from many of the measures imposed on other states. IMF and World Bank programmes are designed to create the most favourable conditions for the penetration of Third World and former socialist economies by Western monopoly capital, usually involving privatisation and cuts in social spending.
Changes stemming from the scientific and technological revolution and operating mainly through the transnational corporations have had a devastating impact upon the poorest and least developed countries.
Firstly, imports of the most industrialised countries are increasingly of sophisticated manufactured goods, whose raw material content is decreasing or is composed of artificial substitutes. By the late 1990s, the developed capitalist countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) drew less than 20% of their imports of food, beverages, tobacco and raw materials (other than petroleum) from former colonies, compared with two-thirds from each other. Lower tax rates on company profits in the imperialist centres have made it more attractive for transnationals to impose artificially low prices on imports from their subsidiaries in the Third World. In this and other ways, the underdeveloped countries are robbed of much of the value that their working people produce, and which could otherwise be used to develop their economies and societies. But this trade is also of less significance to the imperialist countries than it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
Secondly, the relative reduction in demand for raw materials from underdeveloped countries has shifted foreign investment away from them and towards the developed countries and their sophisticated industrial products. By the late 1990s, the six leading imperialist economies (the USA, Japan, Britain, Germany, France and Italy) received less than one-fifth of their foreign investment income from the developing countries. Four-fifths of their assets abroad are now located within north America, western Europe and Australasia. The flow of rent, interest and profit from foreign investments is predominantly between the developed industrial countries themselves.
Operations in the Third World currently provide less than 3% of the total profits of the home-based capitalist class in most imperialist countries, although this figure takes no account of the cheap prices imposed on imports from the Third World by monopoly pressure. Significantly, the chief exception is Britain, whose capitalists draw nearly one-tenth of their total investment income from the developing countries. These global interests impel sections of the British ruling class towards a close alliance with US imperialism.
The export of profits and interest payments from the Third World to the West makes a significant contribution to the balance of payments of a number of imperialist countries, especially Britain, while plunging Third World countries themselves into utter destitution. Their balance of payments is kept permanently in deficit, forcing many of them to subordinate their economies to cash-crop production for export. Deeply in debt and short of foreign currency, they turn to the IMF and the World Bank for assistance that comes with strings attached—they must slash social and welfare spending, and sell off state industries to Western transnationals.
This analysis of world economic relations and the latest developments in the productive forces shows that, for imperialism as a whole since the 1980s, the most important source of profit is the working class of the highly developed capitalist countries. So long as that situation holds, it follows that the sharpening struggle will be primarily within the ‘First World’ itself, between the three main imperialist blocs for a redivision of markets and spheres of investment and influence. Control over oil resources, supply lines and key minerals, many of which are located in the Third World and the former socialist countries, will remain a vital strategic objective of the imperialist powers—one for which they will threaten and use force. In a world dominated by imperialism, without the Soviet Union as a powerful force for peace, there is greater scope for a reversion to the open military methods of colonialism and the final arbiter of inter-imperialist conflict has always been war.
How can the world’s left, democratic and progressive forces find a way forward from this dangerous juncture in world development?
Intensified competition between rival transnationals and their states invariably means a deepening trend towards reaction in every sphere of society. Economically, this coincides with severe cyclical crises, exerting greater pressure on wages and the social wage, reinforced by political and ideological offensives. The response to this must be practical struggles for the first stages of alternative economic and democratic strategies—consistent with the historical position and traditions of each country—that would shift the balance of wealth and power towards working people. Such strategies would prioritise the need to defend jobs, trade union rights and the welfare state, and to build solidarity against the transnational corporations.
Politically and ideologically, pressure for reactionary unity within Europe will coincide with pressure for growing hostility towards the USA and Japan. All moves towards the creation of a European capitalist super-state must be resolutely opposed on democratic and anti-monopoly grounds. The militarisation of the EU, with its common foreign and security policy, military-industrial complex and European Army (or ‘rapid reaction force’), threatens not only the neutral status of some member states, but also the national self-determination of peoples beyond western Europe. Communists see national and multinational states with their popularly-based democratic institutions—the only democracy we have—as essential vehicles for the establishment of socialism.
The EU’s ‘Fortress Europe’ policy is imposing further racist legislation in the field of immigration and asylum rights. The resurgence of neo-fascist parties and movements within the European Union and in non-EU states in Europe is of enormous concern. Whether arising from counter-revolution in eastern Europe after 1989, or from xenophobic and racist policies pursued by the EU under the Schengen Agreement, neo-fascism needs to be confronted and isolated. The ruling class everywhere will seek to make scapegoats of national and ethnic minorities. All manifestations of racism have to be actively countered by the Communist and working class movement.
In the former socialist states, the best condition for slowing down and even reversing the restoration of capitalism is that the people’s democratic and socialist organisations have the greatest freedom to operate. Their battle to keep their countries’ development free from external capitalist intervention is a vital part of the working class struggle for national self-determination everywhere.
The collapse of socialism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has led to increasing external pressure on the remaining socialist countries. Thus there is need for growing solidarity with, for instance, Cuba against US imperialism. The campaign to impose capitalism upon China and People’s Korea has begun, with Tibet and Taiwan providing pretexts for imperialist interference. To safeguard and develop the socialist countries and those of a socialist orientation, their right to self-determination must be defended by the world’s working class movements.
The oppression and indebtedness of much of the Third World will continue to give rise to revolutionary struggles and attempts to break from the yoke of imperialism. Control of strategic oil supplies and other key natural resources will continue to be a source of conflict in the Third World and in parts of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Growing divisions within imperialism preclude a US monopoly, and provide openings for smaller and Third World states where popular struggle can reinforce a neutral or anti-imperialist stance. This underlines the importance of a reinvigorated Non-Aligned Movement. All of these possibilities will demand greater solidarity from the labour and progressive movements in the imperialist countries, in defence of national self-determination and against imperialist interference including military intervention dressed up as ‘humanitarianism’.
The future role of the United Nations depends upon the balance of forces and interests between member states, and between peoples and governments. The collapse of the USSR removed a powerful progressive force from the UN Security Council and agencies such as the International Labour Organisation, UNESCO and the World Health Organisation. The changed international balance of forces has allowed the imperialist countries to sideline the UN when necessary, as in the war against Yugoslavia and the prolonged bombing of Iraq.
The United Nations is in urgent need of democratic reform, but this will not be easy. Many smaller states are subject to the economic power of the imperialist countries. For the present, therefore, the Security Council veto exercised by China and Russia alongside the imperialist powers remains an important check. Democratisation will depend on the strengthening of anti-imperialist and working class forces at national level. Immediately, it is necessary to put forward initiatives on basic economic and social issues which can expose and isolate imperialist programmes at world level, to demand the scrapping of debt repayment and begin developing the UN as a forum for promoting a democratic New International Economic Order.
Faced with imperialism’s renewed and militarised drive for new markets and for the redivision of old ones, the campaigning for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation needs to be stepped up. The peace movement nationally and internationally has to be strengthened in the struggle against great power interference in countries’ internal affairs, for the right of nations to self-determination, for the peaceful resolution of international disputes and against the political and economic doctrines of imperialism. In this context, the role of China as a socialist power committed to peaceful relations between states becomes increasingly important.
Success in the campaign for peace and disarmament would release enormous resources for the conquest of poverty, hunger and disease, and for protecting the world’s ecological balance. By opening up a new system of international relations, it would make possible co-operation between all states irrespective of their social system—to deal with the problems of global environmental protection.
In its world-wide rush for profit and power, imperialism has ravaged the resources and environment of the earth for more than a century. Widespread pollution of the air, soil, rivers, lakes and seas is but one of the consequences. Global warming and its ‘greenhouse effect’ threaten a greater incidence of climatic instability, crop failure and flooding. Destruction of the rainforests is driving plant and animal species to extinction. Ozone depletion, acid rain, deforestation and desertification present the world’s peoples with new and additional dangers.
The transnationals, aided by imperialist governments and some international agencies, have exported ecologically dangerous processes to the developing countries where safety laws and their enforcement are inadequate. This adds to the total pollution of the environment and must be stopped. Pressure on the environment is exacerbated by the continued growth in world population. World resources are finite and the planet clearly cannot sustain an infinite number of people. While moves to contain population growth must be welcomed, it is essential that population policies are seen as just one element in a programme of sustainable development. Family planning policies should be combined with far-reaching programmes of education and—above all—poverty alleviation. In poor countries, poverty leads to a desire for large families both as a form of insurance in old age and as a source of labour for subsistence agriculture. This desire persists even in the early stages of development and, combined with improvements in medical services, leads for a period to accelerated population growth. But experience also shows that once development has become established and poverty decreases, family size tends to diminish.
Population growth is not sufficient to explain the degradation of the environment. A major factor is capitalism’s drive for profits, its unplanned exploitation of the earth’s resources and the consumerist psychology which it engenders. The average inhabitant in Britain or the USA consumes 25 times the resources of someone in India or China.
New bio-technologies which use as their raw material species of plants and animals found in the Third World—particularly the rainforests—should not be in the hands of the TNCs, which have a record of ruthless exploitation and destruction of other natural resources.
An environmentally safe system of energy production does not yet exist. Greater emphasis will have to be placed on energy conservation and on the development of renewable sources, with less reliance on fossil fuels. Cheap public transport would cut down the use of cars and the production of carbon dioxide from petrol combustion. The burning of coal will remain a major source of energy for the foreseeable future—but in Britain this should be British rather than imported coal. Fluidised-bed combustion and adequate scrubbing of waste gases must be introduced to cut down the emissions which produce acid rain. Because of the environmental hazards from nuclear power based on fission, particularly from the disposal of nuclear waste and the problems of decommissioning, existing nuclear power plants should be phased out.
We must move towards an overall system of production in which waste products are either eliminated or reduced to an absolute minimum. The atmosphere, the oceans and the land can no longer be treated as a dustbin. Waste must either be recycled or used as a starting point for other processes. Where this is not possible in a particular process of production, that process may have to be abandoned or replaced by an alternative one. At all times, the effects of human activity on the environment will have to be carefully monitored, and research carried out to deal with problems as they arise. This applies to agriculture as much as to industry.
The change to a closed system of waste-free production is incompatible with the existence of an unplanned capitalist economy dominated by the monopolies. Their drive for maximum and short-term profit takes precedence over the long-term consequences for the environment.
The drive for private capitalist profit is an in-built obstacle to greater environmental protection. It regards ‘green’ policies as a drain on potential profits and dividends. It leads to the wasteful levels of consumption of raw materials seen today in the highly industrialised world. It follows that measures to protect the environment must feature prominently in any programme for advance to socialism. But even under socialism, as experience in the former socialist countries indicates, environmental protection will require constant vigilance, public awareness, democratic involvement, openness and accountability.
Not only is capitalism a system built on exploitation and oppression in its imperialist stage, it is becoming increasingly parasitic and obsolete. Its intrinsic profit motive produces militarism and war. Compared with what is possible, capitalist production relations are today a barrier to the development of society’s productive forces and their use by human beings for the full, free and beneficial development of all.
Replacing private ownership of the means of production (land, workplaces, power, machinery, raw materials, et.c) with common ownership will not only put an end to exploitation. It will also ensure that production takes place in order to meet society’s needs, not in order to maximise private profit. The democratic planning of production would enable the full use of scientific and technological advances to eradicate poverty, raise living standards and put an end to the massive inequalities of wealth and power. The guiding principle of socialism would be: ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their work’.
Socialism would make possible the creation of genuine democracy and participation in all areas of society, allowing people to fulfil their potential free not only from economic and social pressures, but from all forms of prejudice and discrimination. It also provides the only hope of saving our planet’s ecological balance from irreparable damage.
How can socialism be achieved? Communists strive to formulate the road to socialism in the concrete conditions of each country, taking as their starting point the real-life developments and forces in society.
Next: II. The Crisis in Britain