The Godfather … and the ‘Anti-Imperialism of Idiots’.
The rulers of the periphery states – whether ‘democratic’, Islamist or warlord, General or suit-and-tie – are part of the world bourgeoisie. Of course, their interests may diverge sharply from those of the world ruling class, in the same way that competing capitalists’ interests differ – this is why the state acts as the bourgeoisie’s ‘Executive Committee’ and, on a global level, the core – whether as the UN, NATO, EU or IMF, plays the same function. The Godfather settles accounts with unruly underbosses, and takes protection – in the form of super-profits. Workers lower down the international division of labour must pay off two bosses, not just one. Both are the workers’ mortal enemy. Local bosses always act to discipline labour from the world market, even when they seem in opposition to it – ie. they want a bigger slice of the action for themselves or their cronies, or to shape local capitalism along phony chauvinist lines – ‘Islamic’ or ‘African’ values, ‘Sharia Law’ or ‘Ivoirité’. There are no anti-Imperialist rulers or states, only Imperialism and its local and global rulers on the one hand, and the world proletariat on the other.
Classic ‘anti-Imperialism’ became fatally confused on this question, partly because of the problems of the Leninist ‘Highest Stage’ theory – which owed more to Hobson than Marx – which underpinned its analysis. The extraction of super-profits from the periphery bourgeois (or colonies before the 1960’s) was confused with the extraction of surplus value from the workers, in the same way that libertarians think Big Business ‘exploits’ small business (rather than doubly exploiting workers in small businesses). Hence came about the notion of ‘oppressed nations’ – which opened the door to proto-bourgeois nationalists (often allied with the USSR) to promise freedom and development and that supreme oxymoron ‘national liberation’. The USSR, itself a state capitalist system within world imperialism (ever since the Bolshevik coup snuffed out the fires of the 1917 Revolution) was happy to deal with such proto-fellow state capitalists. Communist Parties inAlgeria and elsewhere were often a step behind the Comintern, and initially ‘failed’ to support bourgeois nationalists in their own countries. For them, a World Soviet was the next stage after colonialism, with no ‘national-democratic’ stepping stone in between. At the same time, third-world communists were failed by Social-Democrats and Communists in the core, who failed to support anti-colonialism until it had become fully identified with Bourgeois ‘national-liberationism’.
Would be leftists in the core also failed their third world brothers and sisters, as they sought to protect the sectional interests of their own skilled workers, which were seen as threatened by ‘cheap’ labour in the periphery and safeguarded by imperialist underdevelopment which throttled off third world industrialisation and competition. This short sighted failure – where a relatively privileged place in capitalism comes before world revolution – gave credence to another unfortunate defect in Lenin’s theory of imperialism; the idea of ‘labour aristocracy’. If ‘Imperialist nations’ (we have shown all ‘nations’ are part and parcel of Imperialism) oppress ‘subject nations’, then the wealthier parts of the core working class share in the exploitation of the poorer working class – just as the ‘national bourgeoisie’ share in the ‘national exploitation’ of their working class. The result of Leninism’s cod anti-imperialism and the opportunistic policies of ‘Soviet’ state capitalism cannot be underestimated. The posturing of ‘communists’ in the core who support, more or less openly, ‘anti-imperialist’ peripheral bourgeoisies against their own ruling classes or who, in some cases, call for the genocide of their own working class in the name of anti-imperialism (what is more imperialist than slaughtering workers) is one by-product. Another is the retreat of many core leftists into liberal ‘human-rights’ discourse and the bourgeois ideology of ‘liberal globalisation’. In fact, of course, these clowns are the mirror image of each other. More tragically, the peripheral working class, after the failure of the world revolution have (understandably) bought the anti-imperialist posturing of their own rulers, whether ‘developmental dictators’ or ‘traditionalist warlords’.
World Capitalism and the World Proletariat
In order to understand the nature of capitalism as an imperial system, it is necessary to see it from the standpoint of capital, and of the world bourgeoisie and its local rulers. This allows us to understand that the struggles against racism, (neo) colonialism, nationalism and capitalism are the same struggle, because they have the same origin. The worker is separated from their labour, or more properly, their labour power – as subsistence production is replaced by privately owned production, as the land is enclosed (stolen) by landlords and the craft worker is ruined by the factory – a craft machine, owned by the capitalist, in which the worker is a mere ‘hand’, a mere cog.
Capitalists compete to direct this stolen human creative power and to accumulate it as capital. Weaker capitalists pay tribute to the stronger ones, in the form of super-profit. As Marx says, from the capitalists point of view ‘accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and all the Prophets’.
As capitalists (and national capitalisms with their ‘executive committee’, the state) compete to discipline and accumulate labour through this centralisation, a world market develops, as more and more labour is drawn into the system. Economic crises of over-production , (or under-accumulation) force both the speeding up of production and exchange to accumulate faster, and its extension on a world scale (to accumulate more and ensure reserves of consumers, producers, and ‘raw materials’). Hence, the capitalist crises of the 1840’s and 1890’s complete the world market, begun in ‘1492’, with colonialism.
This widening of the sphere of accumulation also involves its deepening – unpaid household (usually women’s) labour brings up the new generation of labour, and feeds and clothes existing workers. Workers are increasingly disciplined to consume (converting labour-value in commodities into money value) just as they produce – on factory lines. This may be outside of the home (the drive-in cinema, the megastore) or inside it (the home cinema, the ‘labour saving’ devices that are the-factory- in the home). Thus there is a social factory – nothing escapes capitalist accumulation or labour ‘discipline’, which is also a global factory, with the offices mostly in the rich world, and with the loading bay and dangerous machinery in less favoured places.
But everywhere there are workers, whether they enter the system as wage-labourer, as plantation slave, as housewife, as day-worker forced from the fields to work half the year in a ‘Special Economic Zone’. Up until this point, it is the bourgeoisie who appear to be the actors on the world stage, drawing labour together and accumulating it, exploiting and colonising. However, the crucial point is this – capitalism elevates workers’ accumulated labour (in all these forms) into the motive force and only raison d’être of the whole system. The individual bourgeois rises or falls by their capacity to discipline workers to produce. However, this competition is on a world scale, as , the struggle to accumulate tends inexorably, towards the creation of a world market.
Thus, even on capitalism’s own terms, workers – whether factory hands, rural wage-labourers or plantation slaves – are the only progressive, historical force. In capitalism, everything is value, and, as Marx insists, break capital back down into its components and only labour will be found. All the Bourgeoise does is separate – by force, by theft, with money (itself a product of stolen labour) – the workers from their work. But it is the workers who create, not just the products of one factory, or the crop of one field – they create the world. The workers are the historical class, the world class. But under ordinary conditions, they act unconsciously, as their own labour, sold to others, emprisons them in a prison built of their own labour – the machines, the overseers whip, the slaves chains, are all dead labour ‘weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living’.
At any moment in capitalism’s history, all that has stood between the bourgeois and the world revolution is this turning of the worker’s power against themselves. And yet, from the outset, workers brought together in haciendas, in manufactories, in mines, and everywhere else begin to struggle, to become aware – however fleetingly – that together we are everything and the boss, overseer or foreman is nothing. These small struggles – for an hour less work a day, against speeding up the machines, for more decent conditions of work – are usually quickly crushed or bought off. But the memory lingers, for the next time.
To ‘get ahead’ of these struggles, to contain them, to manage them, to isolate them, the bourgeois uses control over space – finding new markets and (more pliable labour) elsewhere to counterbalance the power of workers at home and to offset the costs of ‘buying’ off workers by ‘trickling down’ the surplus back to them – welfare states in the core countries were built up from the 1930’s to stave off world revolution. Where possible, the domestic bourgeoisie will make workers ‘at home’ allies in the struggle to exploit workers ‘overseas’- in colonies where there are less restraints, and even open slavery, unmasked of the pretence of ‘payment’. The ‘New World Order’ and formal independence has replaced open colonialism in the last fifty years, but the system is the same one – despite the efforts of renegades and ideologues who persuade us of the liberalisation ‘globalisation’ inevitably brings. In fact, this ‘extension of democracy’ can only be purely cosmetic as it concerns only those matters (formally) held by the bourgeois to be ‘outside’ the scope of the market. And the poorer the country, the greater the (IMF, WTO, Standard and Poor’s) market discipline.
Class struggle does not only threaten the grip of the bourgeois (and world bourgeois) on power in the ‘last instance’ – which is of course the world revolution. Class struggle, in its everyday, local, fragmented, form determines the terms on which this power is exercised at all. But as long as struggles stay local and purely economic – haggling over the price of one’s slavery, paid in coin one has been forced to mint oneself – the result is simply a constant restructuring of the global system of rule: from colonialism to the cold war (‘market capitalism’ versus state capitalism) to the New World Order. Each time, the aim is the same, to constrain or defeat workers’ struggle and to reconfigure the system of accumulation. It is only once the struggle transcends the ‘economic’ – the bourgeoisie’s terrain – and spills into a social struggle – against the whole system which separates labour from itself – that the workers begin to push beyond the system, and thus beyond their status as labour-value being accumulated into the system. They begin to struggle against their status as workers.
As we have seen here, capitalism is built by workers acting as a global social force, which creates everything, from the evening meal to the stealth bomber. We are the only historical, progressive force – in the words of the nineteenth century social democratic slogan ‘labour is the hope of the world’. But we create the world as part of the world social factory, as parts of capital itself, as interchangeable, but functionally distinct parts, each with its own place in the bourgeoisie’s toolbox – factory worker, ‘illegal’ migrant worker, ‘tribal’ plantation labourer, housewife and so on.
The fatal error of Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ – in both its Soviet and Social-Democratic variants – was to insist on the progressive role of the workers as workers and to focus on the purely economic struggle. Hence, theUSSR was founded, on the ruins of 1917, as a means of perfecting the social factory, with the ‘Communist’ party as single overseer and capitalist, exalting the ‘dignity of labour’ whilst filling up the labour camps. By the same token, by its very State Capitalist nature, it confused a classless society – which can only be a world society – with a ‘worker’s state’ and argued that the more efficient accumulation of capital in a ‘workers owned’ state, would eventually lead to that state’s disappearance at a ‘higher stage’ of human development. Socialism, Lenin said, was Soviets plus electricity. This simply replaced the liberal capitalist state and its colonies with a ‘Socialist’ state acting as the single capitalist, with its own internal colonies inCentral Asia. Western social democrats equally saw ‘Socialism’ as gradually evolving from their own form of capitalism once production had grown to an extent which demanded central bureaucratic management – a ‘welfare state’. Both ideologies called ‘workers’ to accept the discipline of either the ‘Communist’ parties or ‘democratic’ trades-unions and Social-Democrats to lead them to victory, and work ever harder to build up the liberating productive forces. When what they were actually doing was forging the chains that bound them.
Crucially, these ‘Marxisms’ not only took the category ‘worker’ and capitalism’s narrowly economic ‘development’ at face value (as ‘real’ development), but they accepted – if only ‘provisionally’ – the framework of nation states into which its system of imperial rule is divided. Leading, as we have seen, to chauvinistic ‘our workers first’ racism and protectionism in the core and to writing off first world workers and the fantasy of ‘progressive’ – because ‘exploited’ – national bourgeoisies in the ‘anti-imperialist’ USSR-led camp.
Workers struggles are then channelled into protecting their status as commodities and haggling over the ‘price’ – separated by colonial (then national) divisions. The class struggle is abandoned in colonial countries almost altogether as workers there are offered phony ‘national liberation’ instead. Workers in many parts of the world factory, because they are not waged, or do not appear to create value – especially women and coerced labour (including child labour and prostitution) – are not identified as ‘workers’ at all, but as ‘unproductive’ subordinate categories, who, at best, have to await their induction into proper wage slavery and capitalist ‘development’ to joint the struggle.
Marx used the terms ‘proletarian’ and ‘worker’ interchangeably, but he knew that in capitalism’s hall of mirrors, the content of words changes with the struggle. ‘Socialist’ for a time in the 1840’s had come to refer to earlier 19th century dreams of philanthropic state-capitalism – Cabet and Saint-Simon – not worker’s self-liberation. And so Marx uses ‘Communism’ (which used to mean the same thing Socialism now did at other times) instead – to refer to that future society in which we consciously work on the world together, having smashed the grip of the world bourgeois and dead labour. A world with no classes, no private property, no states and no nations. What matters are not the words but their historically concrete content. This Communist vision is one shared by all workers, at least as a hopeless, unrealiseable dream – hence the old legends of Cockaygne or Big Rock Candy Mountain – ‘where the jails is made of tin, and when they lock you up you can bust right out again’. But struggling merely as ‘workers’, or as ‘nationally-oppressed masses’, in other words within the constraints of capitalist accumulation within nation-states in the international division of labour, leaves no way of realising the dream. At best it leads to the comfortable unfreedom of skilled workers in ‘core’ countries, or to barracks socialism. Communism is the world which lies beyond the system, where those who make the world every day through their labour revolt against their status as labourers.
It is no accident that struggling factory workers sabotage the machines, that plantation workers tear down the mansion they built with their own hands. You cannot – as the saying goes – tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools, your own labour turned against you. You must destroy both the house and the tools. And it is at the point where struggle is no longer merely economic, but social, that it becomes no longer national, but global. As we realise that we are kept unfree and exploited by being turned against ourselves (dead labour dominates living) so we begin to see that our enslavement also requires us to be turned against others – the ‘blacks’ the women, the sub-proletarians, the ‘others’. And overcoming this division and seizing the world we have to win, requires proletarian internationalism.
This is why the greatest struggles always cut across different categories of workers, raise social and economic demands, and give rise to international solidarity. From the British ‘Labour Aristocrats’ refusing to load the ship the ‘Jolly Roger’ with weapons to kill Russian workers in 1919, to Egyptian workers surging forward to the border with Gazato free their Palestinian brothers and sisters in 2011. Once workers begin to realise that they can appropriate their own power for themselves, we move from economic struggles (which some confuse with the whole of the class war, rather than it’s beginning) to the social revolution. And from nationally bound ‘working classes’ (in the sense it has come to have since Marx) and all it’s excluded sub-categories, women, home workers, third world labourers – to world proletarians. The proletariat only exists in potential until workers turn against the heart of the system – but it is there, if only as a glimmer, in every small, sectional struggle. And it is the job of communists to avoid the siren calls of ‘reasonable’ struggle, or ‘making small gains’ – and to blow with all our might on the cinders.
The Conjuncture – and our Tasks
After the collapse of theUSSR(lured into ‘Imperial Overstretch’ inAfghanistan), the new uni-polar imperialist system displays its essential nature far more clearly than at any time since the 1920’s. There can no longer be any illusions in a state-capitalist ‘Socialist camp’ – the core countries are united in a single system of world rule, with it’s ‘globalisation’ and ‘humanitarian police actions’. Without claiming that theUSSRwas in any way a worker’s state – it can perhaps be thought of as a counter-revolutionary one- it also did insulate peripheral nations from the worst consequences of the unfettered world market and in fact forced the core to make concessions to workers at home. It is no co-incidence that the global neo-liberal offensive which began inChilein September 1973 came but seven years before the fatal Soviet offensive inAfghanistan.
The consequences of ‘the New World Order’ are all too clear – permanent war in the periphery, a new wave of attacks on workers and a stepping up of state repression in the core. The latter is (neatly) justified by the very ‘war on terror’ used to control the third world, which has also unleashed a wave of racism and xenophobia in the name of the ‘clash of civilisations’. Further the loss of its Soviet ‘alibi’ makes the old Leninist anti-imperialism nonsensical. This opens up a space for Marxists to rethink anti-Imperialist theory and practice from the ground up. This includes reflecting on the past defeats of the anti-imperialist struggle.
It can be argued that the critical failure of anti-imperialist solidarity came before 1960’s decolonisation, before the rise of fascism in the 1930’s – when the Spanish Republicans stupidly failed to support Moroccan independence and opened the door to Franco – and before the Bolshevik counter-revolution in October1917. Inthe wave of workers’ struggles in the ‘developed’ capitalist nations from the 1890’s onwards the watchword was to resist – by general strike- any imperialist war. Then came 1914, and the slaughter of a generation of workers as their leaders rallied behind the – French, German, British and Italian bourgeoisies. Their loyalty was delivered with an eye on the peace, when the local rulers, victorious over the dead bodies of millions of workers, would share the spoils and negotiate a more comfortable wage-slavery for those left (‘homes fit for heroes’).The workers movement has arguably not yet recovered from this defeat, never mind those that came later.
The world proletariat can only win when it realises that the one decisive weapon it has against Imperialism and the bourgeoisie is its own unity as a world class, a universal class. Or more precisely a non-class, as it does not depend on the bourgeoisie as the bourgeoisie depends on proletarians identified as ‘workers’.
This creation of a world (anti)class of toilers is the only ‘progress’ brought about by capitalism’s 500-year reign of slavery and murder. And as we have seen, it is progress brought about by the workers themselves. The workers are the world’s slaves – they depend on the Master’s grace and favour for their very survival. But this is true only so long as they fail to realise that the riches with which their labour is bought (or rather stolen) are its own riches – that the immense creative power harnessed in the machines, vast cities and digital technology of the masters is its own power. This is true only so long as they mistake the various categories into which they are divided, the various rungs on the ladder of oppression – African, Asian and European, but also housewife and homeworker (who often labour for no pay at all), lumpen and skilled – for who they really are. And only so long as anti-Imperialism is confused with national – or national-religious – chauvinism.
What follows from this is that all real struggle against capitalism is anti-imperialist, whether in the periphery or the core, and all genuine struggle against imperialism, nationalism, mysogyny and racism is a struggle against capitalism. If workers’ struggles are they are not these things – and do not take the form of proletarian internationalism – then they will only perpetuate the capitalism that would-be Communists may claim to be struggling against. Support for ‘anti-imperialist nations’ or for religious or ethnic chauvinisms which conflict with the interests of core capital, or narrow sectional racist interests of ‘white’ workers, feed the system. So does supporting the ‘B52 Liberalism’- which disciplines (and effectively re-colonises) parts of the periphery in the name of supposed universal values of ‘democracy’ and the ‘rule of law’. Law is always and everywhere the cornerstone of the state. And the first ‘human right’ is the right to private property.
Communists in the core countries – which is where those writing this text live in the here and now – have a particular concern with racism and xenophobia, as these go hand in hand with not only the New World Order’s policing of the ‘service areas’ but divide the working class at home. However, an ‘identity politics’ which encourages non-white workers to fall back on ethno-religious values is no better. This feeds off the ‘new racism’ which targets ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ rather than ‘colour’ – they are each other’s mirror image and condition of existence. Differences of religious or national origin or linguistic community are not in themselves to be opposed, they can be the basis of solidarity. Black-led workers movements where black and white workers learned each others languages are one historic example. It is rather the idea that these differences define the person who has them as a heritage and makes them unable to unite with other proletarians, which is pernicious. As is the idea that one should identify with one’s ‘work’ performed for capital – with one’s slavery. And seek to protect oneself from less well-paid wage-slaves further down the ladder.
All ‘economic’ struggles, no matter how local, have a global dimension, in which ‘race’, ‘class’ anti-Imperialism and anti-Capitalism intersect. Whilst Communists in the core must always offer practical support and principled solidarity to our brothers and sisters in the periphery (and not confuse this with support for their rulers) we can best support them by building revolutionary solidarity at home, and combining anti-capitalist struggle with a consistent opposition to racism and xenophobia and ethno-religious chauvinism. As Ho Chi Minh is famously supposed to have said to leaders of the Italian Communist Party who asked how they could support the struggle of the Vietnamese people – ‘make the revolution inItaly’. Until these lessons are learned by Communists, we are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.
