LCFI Statement: Marxism and the Post-Counterrevolution Cold War
The Diminution of Imperialism and the
Rise of Non-Imperialist Capitalism, Deformed by Decades of Non-Capitalist
Development, in Russia and China
The series of nationalist military coups in
former French colonies, now neo colonies, in North and West Africa, Niger and
now Gabon, and the expansion of the BRICS Economic bloc (Brazil, Russia, India,
China and South Africa), to include 6 new members (Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia,
Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) from 1st January
2024, are both products of a new situation brought into being by the West’s
long, brutal and clearly losing proxy war against Russia in
Ukraine. The Ukraine war was prepared by
imperialist provocations, ‘colour revolutions‘ (coups), Western-backed far
right terror against Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and threatened NATO expansion
into Ukraine, was supposed to weaken Russia and cause collapse.
But it has backfired. The sanctions regime
has strengthened, not weakened Russia relatively to its imperialist
antagonists, who have suffered a greater decline in their economies than Russia
itself because of the economic ill-effects. In fact, Russia is rapidly
regaining the economic ground lost since the massive intensification of
sanctions from the beginning of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in
February 2022. It is within a whisker of regaining its GDP position prior to
that point and no doubt will do so pretty soon. And in Ukraine itself, the Nazi
regime has sent 400,000 of its own troops to their deaths in ‘meat grinders’
trying to destroy the population of the Donbass. It is now clear that Ukraine
is not capable of defeating that population and the Russian troops defending
them, and the imperialist propaganda façade is showing signs of cracking.
The arrogance with which the collective
West (i.e. the imperialists) have demanded that the semi-colonial countries of
the Global South ‘sacrifice’ their economies and the livelihoods of its people
for their sanctions on Russian oil, gas, and other commodities and exports, has
caused a popular backlash against imperialism generally, and antagonised many
semi-colonial bourgeois governing layers, who have suddenly seen the
possibility of throwing off the shackles of the ‘unipolar world’ and Western
economic blackmail and differential trade (exploitation). The growth of BRICS
from 5 to 11 members next Jan 1st will mean that around 47% of the
world’s energy resources originate in BRICS nations. Next year it is
confidently predicted 10 more countries are likely to join, including Algeria
and Venezuela, which will take BRICS’ share of the world’s energy resources to
around 70%.
The queue to join BRICS is one
manifestation of this revolt of countries of the Global South. The coups in
North and Central Africa, which overthrew classic French pseudo-democratic
puppet regimes, are another manifestation of the same revolt. The increase in
the price of Uranium by the new Niger government, from €0.01 to €200 per kg, is a
classic example. France was getting its hands on Nigerien Uranium for the
former price, whereas the latter (€200) is the
normal price charged by imperialist countries that export Uranium, such as
Canada. (https://spectacle.com.ng/2023/09/03/niger-increases-price-of-uranium-from-e0-8-kg-to-e200-kg/)
No wonder France has been threatening military action itself and trying to
incite the neocolonial client umbrella organisation ECOWAS into doing its work
for it.
But this was made enormously more difficult
by the pledges of solidarity from governments such as Mali, Bukina Faso, and
Chad, already seriously at odds with France, who basically have said that they
will treat an attack on Niger as an attack on themselves. And it was made even
more difficult by the coup that followed in Gabon, which expelled from power
another notorious French client regime. France in this situation is acting as
the standard-bearer of the imperialist West. So, the consequences of this are
giving birth to a major crisis of imperialism and US hegemony. The fact that
BRICS is looking for alternative means of trade to the previously almighty
dollar is another major problem for US hegemony.
The US is trying to hit back against this
challenge to their hegemony in South America in particular, with their obvious
support for far-right candidates in the forthcoming Argentine elections. These
are in the Bolsonaro mould and far from de-dollarisation, they are
looking to massively re-dollarise Argentina, which would mean a massive
attack on the living standards of its working class and poor. Struggles are
breaking out against that, and the elections in October will be a massive
confrontation over this. If they manage this, another coup against Lula in
Brazil is the logical next step.
The impending defeat is polarising the US
bourgeoisie itself, exacerbating the original clique warfare between Trumpians
and Neocons in the Republican Party, and has given rise to the candidacy of
Robert F Kennedy Jr in the Democrats. It is highly likely that there could be
one or two ‘third party’ candidates in the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election,
with both party machines trying to marginalise both far right and ‘liberal’
critics of the Ukraine fiasco. This fragmentation of US politics could quite
conceivably result in next year’s elections collapsing into chaos, which would
certainly be a symbol of imperial decline.
Counterrevolution
and the New Cold War
The Ukraine war has its origins in the problematic
sustainability of the counterrevolution that took hold in the USSR, and most
centrally Russia, in August 1991. Though it tore apart the USSR and fractured
the apparatus whose main function for decades had been to maintain state
ownership of the main means of production, it did not result in the
dismemberment and destruction of the Russian Federation, the central component
of the USSR. Fracturing the state is not the same as obliterating its
administrative and especially productive components. Many important elements survived,
albeit in some cases under different titles. But in many cases, they preserved
attitudes to property and the various components and classes of Russian society
that that were simply customary and had been for many decades, almost as an
automatic reflex.
This is the context for the paradox of today’s
new Cold War. The driving force of the original Cold War was class antagonism
and class struggle: in 1917, driven beyond endurance by the first imperialist
World War, the working class of the Russian Empire, supported by the poor
peasantry in and out of army uniform, took power as a class and began the task
of abolishing capitalism. The revolutionary wave that this was part of, despite
convulsing much of Europe, was only victorious in Russia. And that was after
fighting off invasion by 13 foreign, mainly imperialist armies - attempted
counterrevolution from without in league with the executed Tsar’s ‘White Guard’
general staff. They fought right across the length and breadth of Russia from
Europe to the Far East.
Nowhere else did the young Communist
Parties manage to take power. This isolation of the revolution created a new
situation previously unknown in history and not fully foreseen by the earlier
classical Marxists. The proletariat was
in power in a materially backward country, surrounded by more advanced, more
productive and ultimately more powerful capitalist-imperialist states. This
situation meant that the proletariat, in power but isolated, was subjected to a
new form of oppression by its state power, simply by virtue of the oppressive
material circumstances of material deprivation, blockade and encirclement. Over
a period of several years, this oppression led to the atrophying of the direct
organs of working-class rule, the soviets, and the crystallisation of a
privileged labour bureaucracy in the workers’ state. This degeneration caused
the proletariat to lose any real control of the state created by the
revolution, and consolidated a privileged layer of labour bureaucrats over the
working class in power.
Economic and military siege is a crucial
weapon of imperialism against a workers’ state in such circumstances. If the
world revolution is too long delayed, capitalist restoration begins, in a
molecular manner. First with the crystallisation of privileged layers that
begin to advocate conciliation with the class enemy, rationalising national
isolation into a ‘theory’ that socialism can be built within national borders,
abandoning the world revolution as an aim. It continues with the formal
dissolution of international organisations, and the gradual, further crystallisation
out of the original labour bureaucracy of more overtly bourgeois layers. These
agitate politically for ‘market socialism’ and the like, and gradually eat away
at the economic planning that the revolution created, seeking a greater
economic ‘freedom’, in reality to make money, while exploiting the
often-repressive nature of the original labour bureaucracy to demand greater
political freedom for bourgeois currents particularly. Then in turn this gives rise, in the next
generations as it turned out, to an aspiring capitalist class that inevitably
would come to overthrow the workers state if the workers failed to stop it.
This kind of molecular preparation for
capitalist restoration took several decades in the USSR. Because of the deep
social roots among the masses that the revolution dug, it could only
crystallise very slowly. While this was crystallising the USSR, under
bureaucratic leadership of this type, fought off the gargantuan imperialist
attack of 1941 from Nazi Germany, and then endured the decades-long military
and economic blockade of US imperialism, expressed through NATO since 1949. But
the health of the world revolution depends on the working class organised
politically on an international, i.e., global scale, led by its most
class-conscious and clear-thinking political vanguard. Once that is lost, if it
is not regained by the conscious action of the masses, capitalist restoration
at the hands of the various privileged layers analysed above becomes virtually
inevitable.
Thus, there were no politically
authoritative forces able to stand up for the USSR in August 1991: only a
decrepit remnant of the earlier bureaucratic regime attempted to preserve it
against the rampant privateers lined up behind Gorbachev and especially
Yeltsin. They were a feeble bunch indeed and when their three-day coup effort
failed, the USSR was seemingly rapidly swept away as Yeltsin, the former head
of the Moscow Communist Party, took control of Russia and rapidly dissolved the
central state, embarking on a massive privatisation exercise and an economic
‘shock treatment’ that forced millions of people into starvation, despair and
death as their living standards were rapidly destroyed. Life expectancy fell by
around 5 years under Gorbachev and Yeltsin in the early 1990s, something that
was only matched in peacetime during the 20th Century by Stalin’s
panicked forcible collectivisation of agriculture in the aftermath of the 1929
Kulak revolt (after the bureaucracy, in its own earlier marketising phase, had
encouraged the wealthier Soviet peasant layers to “enrich yourselves”). Both
events killed several millions. But only the Stalinist famine is exploited by
imperialism and its agents to blame ‘communism’; the economic massacre under
Yeltsin had the wholehearted approval of the Western bourgeoisies and indeed,
Putin is loathed by them precisely for his efforts to reverse a number of
Yeltsin’s crimes against the peoples of the former USSR.
The
New Cold War: After the Counterrevolution
There is a huge problem with capitalist restoration
in countries where for several decades capitalism did not exist, and (sometimes
crude) economic planning took its place. This is clear now, as a new Cold War
has begun. In the earlier Cold War, the ideology of ‘Socialism in one country’
led to the perverse situation that giant deformed workers’ states such as the
USSR and China were on opposite sides of the geopolitical conflict. From the
early 1970s until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, ‘Communist’ China was an
ally of US imperialism against the USSR. It fought overtly and covertly
against the USSR and its allies in several wars: it invaded Vietnam in 1979 as
‘punishment’ for Vietnam’s 1978 armed overthrow of the most brutally irrational
of all the Stalinist regimes – Pol Pot’s ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ (Cambodia). It
armed and funded, in alliance with the US and Britain, the Khmer Rouge when
they effectively became counterrevolutionary warriors against the
pro-Vietnamese Hun Sen government in Cambodia through the 1980s. China funded
the counterrevolutionary Islamist mujahedin in Afghanistan though the 1980s in
their US-backed war against the USSR and its left nationalist allies of the
Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDPA), whose defeat played an important role in the
destruction of the USSR. China funded anti-Soviet, anti-Cuban allies of the
apartheid regime in South Africa such as Renamo in Mozambique and UNITA in
Angola, against Soviet and Cuban allied post-colonial left populist governments
such as FRELIMO (Mozambique) and the MPLA (Angola). This is when the state
ideology of China was much more overtly ‘communist’ in colouration, as opposed
to today when the whole world knows of the powerful capitalist sector that
plays a major role in China.
A form of capitalist restoration took place
in China in the early 1990s, from above through a large bourgeois layer, the
product of prolonged bureaucratic marketisation beginning around 1979, and
proceeding for several decades, gaining sufficient power in the state to absorb
key elements of the ruling Communist Party itself. Even Xi Jinping, the current
Supreme Leader of the Chinese Communist Party, is part of this billionaire
capitalist class which had its genesis within the Stalinist regime and has some
markedly different features to the capitalist norm, particularly as seen in the
imperialist countries where state power is clearly a tool of corporate power.
In China, to a degree, state power overlaps with corporate power in a novel
manner that is somewhat unprecedented.
Both Russia and China are thus novel forms
of capitalism, where new bourgeois classes are very powerful and yet the state
power contains much that is left over from the decades when the dominant form
of property was state ownership and economic planning. Not socialism, but
societies where the forms of property were those corresponding to the rule of
the working class and can be said to be part of what should be the transition
to socialism. Socialism, or the lower phase of communism, being defined as a
society where class-based social antagonisms no longer exist, though the
horizon of what Marx called ‘bourgeois right’ has not yet been crossed. Social
and economic inequality persists under socialism not between classes as such,
but between different sections of the associated producers themselves, simply
because social production has not reached the level of abundance for all as to
make formal inequality irrelevant. There will be some functions until that
point that will require greater material renumeration simply because without
that they will not get done. As work becomes more social and rewarding in its
own terms it is likely that these will be the most unpleasant and/or dangerous
tasks. At a greater level of material-productive and social wealth such
considerations will become increasingly irrelevant, and society will cross the
horizon of ‘bourgeois right’ to actual communism, the ‘higher stage’. That
however is a process that takes time. And neither the USSR nor ‘Red’ China ever
achieved even the lower stage of communism (‘socialism’) as defined by Marx,
let alone the higher stage.
Limits
to Counterrevolution; Further Revolutionary Possibilities
When history rolls backwards though
counterrevolution, it rarely manages to do completely. The French revolution
that began in 1789 was the greatest of the social revolutions that brought the
bourgeoisie to power and overthrew the feudal system of property and production
that preceded capitalism in Europe. In terms of its impact in providing the
impetus to the overthrow of local forms of feudalism and initially at least, to
democracy through Europe, it was one of the greatest events in history. The
radical-democratic phase of the revolution under the historic leaders of the
Jacobin party, Robespierre, Danton and Saint-Just, where the French aristocracy
was basically wiped out by the stern measure of the guillotine, was succeeded
by Thermidor, the seizure of power by a more conservative faction, and then the
bourgeois Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte. But Napoleon, though his rule
decisively ended the radical phase of the revolution at home, nevertheless
exported the bourgeois anti-feudal revolution throughout much of Europe, almost
all the way to Moscow. After the final defeat of Napoleon, the feudal order in
Europe was damaged beyond repair. In the succeeding century, all the feudal
absolutisms, including Prussia and Tsarist Russia, were forced to introduce
capitalist social-revolutionary measures from above to try to prevent them
being forced on them from below, as in revolutionary France.
The final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 led to
an attempt to restore the old French Bourbon monarchy. Louis XVIII and his
successor Charles X were unable to simply restore feudalism and absolutism. The
old regime in France was irreparable, and as the history of the 19th
Century proved, so was the feudal order in the whole of Europe, which was
convulsed by revolution after revolution, from above and below, right through
the 19th Century. Out of such bourgeois-revolutionary events the working-class
movement itself took shape and began to act as an independent class force in
its own right, with bourgeois revolutions interlacing with proletarian class
struggles to an increasing extent throughout the 19th Century,
reaching an initial high point with the Paris Commune: the first short-lived
attempt to create a workers’ state in history. This occurred at the end of the
1870-71 Franco-Prussian war, which was in effect the culmination of the
bourgeois revolution (from above) that unified Germany and created it as a
capitalist great power. After which we saw the transformation of European
capitalism where such national struggles were still possible into imperialism,
where rival European monopoly capitalist powers fought to divide the world
between them for plunder.
The
culmination of this process took place in Russia in 1917, in circumstances of
imperialist world war, where the bourgeois revolution, centring on the agrarian
question and the emancipation of the overwhelmingly peasant population of the
pre-capitalist Russian Empire, was carried out by the proletariat in power. That
proletariat that had been created by the transplantation of capitalist
technique by the Tsarist state in a desperate struggle to compete with the
European capitalist-imperialist powers culminating in the First World War.
Does
capitalist restoration happen ‘automatically’?
All this raises some difficult questions
about Russia today. About the nature of capitalist restoration, and the
prospects for both the anti-imperialist struggle and the world revolution
itself. Since capitalism was restored in Russia in the 1990s, was apparently
consolidated, and yet imperialism has resumed its war drive against ex-Soviet
Russia with a vengeance that resembles the Cold War against the USSR when it
was a workers’ state. Why should this be if capitalist restoration has happened
in Russia? What is the meaning of the current geopolitical conflict between
Russia, China and the West? And what is the likely outcome, in the event of a
defeat of the NATO powers?
The essay by Leon Trotsky titled Not a Workers
and Not a Bourgeois State, is an important supplement to Trotsky’s major
work on the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed (1936),
which defined the USSR under Stalinist rule as a bureaucratically degenerated
workers’ state. It was a preliminary response mainly to Max Shachtman, who had
begun to question the proletarian nature of the USSR and later would lead a
struggle that would split the US Trotskyist movement and cause major divisions
in the movement elsewhere.
Not a Workers and Not a Bourgeois State was written in 1937 and began to at least hint at addressing
some questions of future development that were slightly beyond the scope of the
Revolution Betrayed. It made some important points about the similarity
of the relationship of an economically backward and isolated workers state with
imperialism, and those of semi-colonial, formally independent, capitalist
countries, with the same imperialism. It is worth quoting from Trotsky’s essay
because it does cast some light both on the likely path of capitalist
restoration in such a situation, and implicitly the likely aftermath:
“The proletariat
of the USSR is the ruling class in a backward country where there is still a
lack of the most vital necessities of life. The proletariat of the USSR rules
in a land consisting of only one-twelfth part of humanity; imperialism rules
over the remaining eleven-twelfths. The rule of the proletariat, already maimed
by the backwardness and poverty of the country, is doubly and triply deformed
under the pressure of world imperialism. The organ of the rule of the
proletariat – the state – becomes an organ for pressure from imperialism
(diplomacy, army, foreign trade, ideas, and customs). The struggle for
domination, considered on a historical scale, is not between the proletariat
and the bureaucracy, but between the proletariat and the world bourgeoisie… For
the bourgeoisie – fascist as well as democratic – isolated
counter-revolutionary exploits … do not suffice; it needs a complete
counter-revolution in the relations of property and the opening of the Russian
market. So long as this is not the case, the bourgeoisie considers the Soviet
state hostile to it. And it is right.
“The internal
regime in the colonial and semicolonial countries has a predominantly bourgeois
character. But the pressure of foreign imperialism so alters and distorts the
economic and political structure of these countries that the national
bourgeoisie (even in the politically independent countries of South America)
only partly reaches the height of a ruling class. The pressure of imperialism
on backward countries does not, it is true, change their basic social character
since the oppressor and oppressed represent only different levels of
development in one and the same bourgeois society. Nevertheless the difference
between England and India, Japan and China, the United States and Mexico is so
big that we strictly differentiate between oppressor and oppressed bourgeois
countries and we consider it our duty to support the latter against the former.
The bourgeoisie of colonial and semi-colonial countries is a semi-ruling,
semi-oppressed class.
“The pressure of
imperialism on the Soviet Union has as its aim the alteration of the very
nature of Soviet society… By this token the rule of the proletariat assumes an
abridged, curbed, distorted character. One can with full justification say that
the proletariat, ruling in one backward and isolated country, still remains an
oppressed class. The source of oppression is world imperialism; the mechanism
of transmission of the oppression – the bureaucracy. If in the words ‘a ruling
and at the same time an oppressed class’ there is a contradiction, then it
flows not from the mistakes of thought but from the contradiction in the very
situation in the USSR. It is precisely because of this that we reject the
theory of socialism in one country.” (25 Nov 1937, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/11/wstate.htm)
This juxtaposition of the situation of the
semi-colonial capitalist ruling classes, with that of the proletariat in
power in a backward and isolated workers state, is highly suggestive of what
Trotsky considered likely to happen if the proletariat were to lose power as a
class. In a situation where the proletariat even in power was oppressed by
imperialist encirclement and backwardness, it is obvious that any bourgeois
regime that were to replace it would face the same material conditions, and
would likewise be a “semi-ruling, semi-oppressed class”, subject to
imperialism. That basic Marxist supposition, implicit in the above passage
though not explicitly spelled out is of enormous importance today in
understanding not only Russia but also China, and likely other former workers
states such as Vietnam which have (so far) not played a major role in the
current developing new Cold War between imperialism and the giant former
bureaucratically ruled workers states.
What we are actually faced with is the
aftermath of the counterrevolution in the USSR. Trotsky also had some useful
observations about the course of counterrevolution, actual and likely, in the
context of both the French (bourgeois) and Russian (proletarian) revolutions in
an earlier (1935) piece, The Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism.
Talking directly about the French revolution, he wrote:
“After the
profound democratic revolution, which liberates the peasants from serfdom and
gives them land, the feudal counterrevolution is generally impossible. The
overthrown monarchy may reestablish itself in power and surround itself with
medieval phantoms. But it is already powerless to reestablish the economy of
feudalism. Once liberated from the fetters of feudalism, bourgeois relations
develop automatically. They can be checked by no external force; they must
themselves dig their own grave, having previously created their own
gravedigger. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/02/ws-therm-bon.htm)
He contrasts that with what would be likely
in the event of the collapse of the Stalinist regime and the Russian revolution
with it:
“It is
altogether otherwise with the development of socialist relations. The
proletarian revolution not only frees the productive forces from the fetters of
private ownership but also transfers them to the direct disposal of the state
that it itself creates. While the bourgeois state, after the revolution,
confines itself to a police role, leaving the market to its own laws, the
workers’ state assumes the direct role of economist and organizer. The
replacement of one political regime by another exerts only an indirect and
superficial influence upon market economy. On the contrary, the replacement of
a workers’ government by a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government would inevitably
lead to the liquidation of the planned beginnings and, subsequently, to the
restoration of private property. In contradistinction to capitalism,
socialism is built not automatically but consciously…”
“October 1917
completed the democratic revolution and initiated the socialist revolution. No force in the world can turn back the
agrarian-democratic overturn in Russia; in this we have a complete analogy
with the Jacobin revolution. But a kolkhoz overturn is a
threat that retains its full force, and with it is threatened the
nationalization of the means of production. Political counterrevolution, even
were it to recede back to the Romanov dynasty, could not reestablish feudal
ownership of land. But the restoration to power of a Menshevik and Social Revolutionary
bloc would suffice to obliterate the socialist construction.”
But what has actually happened is more
complex. We have had something roughly akin to “the replacement of a workers’
government by a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government … ” and “….the restoration
of private property” in Russia since the 1991 collapse of the USSR. In China,
we have had policies carried out for decades – abolition of Kolkhoz
(collective farming) and the naked encouragement of capitalist enrichment both
rural and urban -- under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party – that Trotsky
considered would lead to the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union into a
kulak-led counterrevolution in the late 1920s. By the standards of the struggle
of the Left Opposition against the Stalin-Bukharin bloc and its Neo-NEP – it is
inconceivable that the regime of the Chinese Communist Party, with its numerous
billionaire capitalists whose influence penetrates to the very top of the CCP
regime, could be described today as a workers’ state. It is evident that China
today is something fundamentally different from the old CCP regime under Mao,
and that state power today is used to defend and promote the capitalist
development of China, not to suppress it.
And
yet far from stabilising world capitalism under the rule of the imperialist
bourgeoisie, we now have a considerable level of unity in defensive struggle of
the two giant former workers states of Russia and China, against US/led NATO
imperialism, which grows more and more hysterical every day. It is worth
recalling Trotsky’s remarks above that:
For the
bourgeoisie … isolated counter-revolutionary exploits … do not suffice; it
needs a complete counter-revolution in the relations of property and the
opening of the Russian market. So long as this is not the case, the bourgeoisie
considers the Soviet state hostile to it ….”
This appears to have been only part of the
story. Just as with anticipations and theorisations by Marxists of what might
happen if a workers revolution triumphed in a backward country, the
theorisations of what would happen if such revolutions were subsequently
defeated, by even the best Marxist theoreticians, including most notably
Trotsky himself, have proven inadequate for the task. “Theory is grey, but
green is the tree of life” is an old saying, but that does not mean that anyone
should dismiss Marxist theory in some cavalier and philistine fashion. Theory
is a guide to action. But such is the profundity and complexity of
world-historic events, when they emerge, that they invariably cause a crisis in
existing theories, a need to re-examine, correct and deepen existing theory to
provide an updated guide to action for a new period.
It does appear that Trotsky was correct to
say, of the bourgeois revolution, that “once liberated from the fetters of
feudalism, bourgeois relations develop automatically” (see earlier). However, that
automaticity does not transfer mechanically to a situation where it is not
feudalism that is overthrown by capitalism, but a workers’ state, however degenerated,
based on socialised property.
The restoration “to power” of something
rather similar to “a Menshevik and Social Revolutionary bloc” took place in the
1990s in a number of bureaucratically ruled workers states, but it does not
seem to have been simply able to completely “obliterate the socialist
construction”. When degenerated and deformed workers states have been
overthrown by pro-capitalist forces, it has not been the case, unlike with
feudalism, that “bourgeois relations develop automatically”. What we have in
fact seen is that the kind of “bourgeois relations” that have developed have
been highly problematic and have in fact given rise to forms of society that
the imperialist bourgeoisie does not have confidence in at all. States have
emerged that still contain enough modifications of those features of capitalism
as a system that the imperialists consider vital and non-negotiable, that the
same imperialists fear that capitalism has not been sustainably restored at
all, and these societies could flip back to some sort of socialist construction
as easily as 19th Century France did to bourgeois-revolutionary
upheavals after the defeat of Napoleon, with its supplementary revolutions in
1830, 1848 - which convulsed the whole of Europe - and 1871 - which gave rise
to the Paris Commune, the first attempt in history to create a workers state.
‘Deviant’
Counterrevolutions and Imperialist Hysteria
What seems to have come into existence in
those workers states where indigenous social revolutions were once victorious
and defeated many decades later, are capitalist states, but ones where
capitalist relations are modified and ‘deformed’ in significant ways, and those
states do not function either as copies of the imperialist states, or as
semi-colonial vassal states. Neither Russia nor China fit into either category.
Nor do they occupy any intermediate category between the two – they are
qualitatively different from both. This is very different to passively produced
‘satellite states’ like most in East Europe, which have generally become
satellites/vassals of Western imperialism.
The deadly imperialist shock treatment in
Russia under Yeltsin in the 1990s produced such a huge popular backlash that
within the state machine itself, a nemesis was generated, personified by Putin,
that rolled back many of the attacks, and though it did not restore the status quo ante, produced a variant of a social-democratic ‘mixed economy’ with
considerable concessions to the welfare of the masses, whose genesis is
arguably pretty unique. In a ‘pure’ capitalist state, it would take the threat
of revolution itself to produce such concessions which would always be under
threat. In post-Soviet Russia, the state apparatus itself, heavily marked by
its origin in a workers’ state, responded to mass popular sentiment without such upheavals.
Something
analogous seems to have happened in China, but with some important differences
also. One key difference being that in China initially the capitalist-restorationist
programme was carried out from above, without the kind of all-out economic war on, and carnage of, the working-class
population that happened in the former USSR. However, there were lesser
attacks, from which flowed a similar outcome to that in Russia. As one
left-wing source described:
“… the negative consequences of allowing
privatization and looting public assets had to be borne by the working people.
Mass layoffs continued in the name of ‘management rationalization.’ Social
welfare benefits provided by hired state-owned companies have also disappeared.
Naturally, the workers were indignant and resisted. Labor disputes have soared…
the number of labor disputes has soared since the mid-1990s when
"privatization" was realized extensively. The number of participants
in labor disputes in 2003 was nearly five times higher than in 1996.”
“This surge in labor disputes has raised the
level of social unrest. Like teeth with broken gums, the foundation of
Communist rule shook from its roots. Then there was a slight change of
direction. In 2005, the Fifth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
announced that it had abolished the theory of rich-first that ‘anyone should be
rich first’ and adopted the theory of ‘Let's all live well together’ .. From
the existing ‘private sector advances while State sector retreats’ of
encouraging private ownership rather than state ownership, it has shifted to
‘the State advances while the Private sector retreats’ to ‘restore the part of
state ownership.’” (China: Social Character and Working Class, Bolshevik Group of Korea).
As a
result of this policy shift, the result was “the number of disputes and the
number of participants decreased significantly over the next few years” (ibid).
These
events show clearly that in both Russia and China the state responded similarly
by adapting to mass pressure from the working class and adopting what can best
be described as a social-democratic recipe of mixed economy. This was possible
because of the post-capitalist deformation within these bourgeois states, which
act as a transmission belt for pressure from the masses and modifies the
operation of the bourgeois state itself. In some ways this shift, somewhat
later than in Russia, arguably put China on course for the bloc with Putin’s
Russia that exists today, which is a net gain for the working class. In both
cases this was brought about by the pressure of the masses on these highly
deformed bourgeois states, forcing them to behave in similar ways.
Another important
difference is that China actually benefitted from Western neoliberalism in that it became a key repository of ‘outsourcing’
– job migration -- from Western imperialist countries, whose capitalist rulers
saw China’s cheap but highly-educated working class in the context of apparent
capitalist restoration as an opportunity for a massively enhanced rate of
profit relative to what was possible in the imperialist countries themselves.
China was not the only country that acted as the recipient of such outsourcing,
but its state apparatus, which also had its origin in an era of state economic
planning, was able to make use of it to embark on its own massive
industrialisation. As a result, China has become today’s “workshop of the
world” in a manner reminiscent of Britain during the 19th Century Industrial Revolution, but on far vaster scale.
The real
driving force of Western Russophobia is not the supposed ‘authoritarianism’ of Russia’s
political regime, but anger at the political clout that the Russian masses
still hold within what used to be their state. Hatred of the Russian people
themselves is a key element of today’s Western Russophobia, which resembles
Nazi hatred of the Jews for their supposedly inherent ‘Bolshevism’. Likewise, today’s Sinophobia reflects similar
hatred for the Chinese masses, as well as the rage of imperialism at the
seemingly unexpected industrial development of China. This was not supposed to
happen – China was supposed to be a mere source of profit, not a major
industrial adversary able to threaten US hegemony. And Russia and China
together are an even more potent countervailing force to the hegemony of the
imperialist powers which has persisted since the late 19th Century
at least.
So, what
is at the root of this paradox? One hint of an answer can be found a
formulation in Engels’ 1880 work Socialism Utopian and Scientific, where he makes the following point about
the tendency of capitalism towards the generation of trusts and monopolies:
“In the trusts, freedom of competition
changes into its very opposite — into monopoly; and the production without any
definite plan of capitalistic society capitulates to the production upon a
definite plan of the invading socialistic society. Certainly, this is so far still to the
benefit and advantage of the capitalists. But, in this case, the exploitation
is so palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put up with production
conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a
small band of dividend-mongers. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm, emphasis added)
This
formulation, about the ‘invading socialistic society”, stems from the basic
idea of Marxism, held in common by Marx and Engels, that “socialism” or
“communism” which they considered as two manifestations of the same thing
(‘lower’ and ‘higher’) represented a superior mode of production to capitalism:
“Development of the productive forces of
social labour is the historic task and justification of capital. This is just
the way in which it unconsciously creates the material requirements of a higher
mode of production.” (Capital, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1966, Chap. 15, p. 259)
Much of
Trotsky’s polemic against the Stalinists in the 20s and 30s was against the
theory of socialism in one country, the notion that it was possible to build a
complete socialist mode of production in a society qualitatively more backward
than the far stronger capitalist-imperialist powers that encircled it. That
critique retains its full relevance and potency. But then again, Trotsky also
noted that despite this, the reactionary course of the Stalinist regime “… has
not yet touched the economic foundations of the state created by the revolution
which, despite all the deformation and distortion, assure an unprecedented
development of the productive forces.” (Once Again: The USSR and Its Defence, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/11/ussr.htm)
Engels
considered that the socialist mode of production, which was completely in the
future in 1880 when he wrote Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, had the ability to ‘invade’ contemporary
capitalism, and as a kind of unconscious expression of the historical process,
affect the development of the same capitalism to (in some ways) anticipate
future developments that would come to fruition under a higher mode of
production. This is only an expression of the basic Marxist concept that Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific
expresses -- the objective tendency of social development toward socialism:
“The new productive forces have already
outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between
productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the
mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in
fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of
the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in
thought, of this conflict in fact…” (Engels op-cit)
The
point being that the process of capitalist restoration, the destruction of a
long-established workers state, cannot be ‘automatic’ in the manner in which
capitalism is able to do away with feudalism. The existence of a workers’
state, however deformed or degenerated, means that that state has already begun
the transition to a higher mode of production, communism. Even if the
transition is blocked by social backwardness, imperialist encirclement and the
monopoly of power of a bureaucracy that opposes and attempts to sabotage the
world revolution and thereby the completion of the transition, the transition
has begun. The train has left the station, even if it is stalled only a few
hundred yards down a track that is many miles long. It is extremely heavy, and
still very difficult to simply drag back to its starting point and beyond.
So, what
we have in both Russia and China are forms of society where capitalism appears
to have been restored, and yet the “invading socialist society”, has modified
and blocked the transition backwards. The previous regimes began some kind of
transition to the communist mode of production, even though it was sabotaged
and blocked by those same regimes, and the existence of those partial gains
have proven much more difficult to destroy than previously anticipated,
including by the Trotskyist movement in their fragmentary attempts to address
what would happen if capitalism were to be
restored. This substantially modifies the capitalism of Russia and China and has
produced new types of what we could call ‘deformed capitalist states’, which
are evidently not
imperialist. The
capitalism that was restored is weak, not so much vis-à-vis their imperialist
tormentors and enemies, but vis-à-vis the massive post-capitalist ‘deformation’
in their ‘capitalist’ economies. Finance capital and the systematic transfer of
wealth from less developed economies played no role in their post-capitalist
development, and there is no material reason for it to happen that way now.
There is
a classic, dialectical quality in the reality that the outcome of the
counterrevolution that destroyed deformed workers’ states that existed for
several decades, should be a form of capitalist state that itself embodies
major deformations and modifications that stem from those decades without
capitalism, to the extent that imperialism still perceives them as a major
threat to their rule and their hegemony.
Such deformed
capitalist states can be of heterogenous types, depending on the specifics of
their history and origins, and there is no pre-ordained ideological banner
which is imperative for their ruling political trends to necessarily uphold.
Though China is ruled by the Communist Party, whose ideology is a capitalist
bastardisation of what was Stalinist ‘Communism’ but really isn’t anymore, Russia
is ruled by the centre-right bourgeois (sui-generis) Orthodox Christian President Vladimir
Putin, leader of the hegemonic and highly popular ‘United Russia’ party whose
authority stems largely from economic programme and practice, which have
tangibly and arguably hugely benefited most Russians since the end of Yeltsin’s
carnage.
Putin is
a kind of a mild Bonapartist who balances between forces to his left and to his
right. To his left is the main opposition, the Communist Party of the Russian
Federation (KPRF), the former Stalinist Party which has many subjective
communists among its base but has not determined as yet what it really stands
for. To his right is the broadly ‘Eurasian’ trend most prominently led by the
philosopher Alexander Dugin, who many in the West dub as a fascist, a Russian
nationalist, a great Russian imperialist, etc.
A close
examination of Dugin’s politics reveals that he is opposed to ethnic
nationalism, rejects the whole concept of the nation-state explicitly in
theory, and actually looking back at history has managed to construct an
‘Orthodox Christian’ rationale for critical support for Lenin and Trotsky’s
Bolshevik Party forces in the 1918-21 Civil War against the mainly Christian
Orthodox White Guard forces, whom he very perceptively dismisses as tools of
Anglo-American imperialism and therefore enslavers of the Russian people (as
elaborated in his 1997 work Foundations of Geopolitics). Thus Dugin, the ‘right-wing’ pressure on
Putin, is revealed as a still having an affinity with Bolshevism, the
originator of the workers state, and a perfect illustrator of the peculiar
deforming influence of the past workers state and its legacy on the present-day
capitalist state. A supposed ‘fascist’ who argues for critical support for
Bolshevism, whereas actual fascists, like Hitler and Mussolini, were driven by
the most virulent hatred for Bolshevism.
These deformed
post-Stalinist bourgeois states have proven capable, because of the enormous
productive gains (and military developments) that were made without capitalism,
of defying imperialist capitalism far more effectively than any rebellious
semi-colonies. They are far stronger than any semi-colony because of the
independent development of the productive forces they possess. In combination,
Russia and China may well be stronger than the US militarily and economically.
Russia’s military-nuclear arsenal does appear stronger than that of the US.
Instead, as the imperialists have declared a cautious but accelerating new Cold
War against them (with ‘hot’ elements, like Ukraine) they have proven capable
of leading semi-colonial, capitalist countries, long forced into dependence and
vassalage to the imperialists, in revolt against imperialist hegemony.
Revolt of the Victims of Today’s Imperialism
We have effectively a revolt by numerous semi-colonies
against US imperialist hegemony of an economic and political nature, under the
banner of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and also the Shanghai
Cooperation Organisation (SCO). These bodies overlap, though the SCO is specifically
Eurasian, whereas BRICS is worldwide. Despite the imperialist war drive and
economic sanctions against Russia, and the threat of ‘sanctions’ against any
country outside the imperialist ‘club’ who does not join in the sanctions. 20
countries have applied to join BRICS, including Argentina, Algeria, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Indonesia, and many more. 6 are now joining in the first
phase – with likely 10 more to follow by next year’s BRICS 11 summit in Kazan. BRICS
before their joining encompassed 40% of humanity … the accession of the hopeful
newcomers would undoubtedly encompass a majority.
BRICS has something of the flavour of the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) led by Nkrumah, Nasser, Nehru, Sukharno, etc. along
with the dissident liberal-Stalinist Tito in the early post-war period.
Although it still formally exists, its influence is very diminished. The NAM
aimed to manoeuvre between the US and the Soviet bloc in the Cold War,
understanding that most semi-colonial countries and their bourgeoisies had major
divergences of interest with both. But now there is much more commonality
between such countries and Russia and China, most semi-colonial bourgeois
states see them as kindred spirits, but more powerful, and having shifted the
relationship of forces against imperialist domination in a way that is fairly
unproblematic for such bourgeois regimes. Few take China’s verbal ‘communism’
seriously at all and Russia has no such ideological obstacle even formally. So,
the main agency of challenge to US hegemony in favour of the multipolar world
is BRICS.
There have been some startling indications
of changes in the world to the detriment of US imperialist hegemony that have
been brought to a head by the Ukraine war. De-dollarisation, the jettisoning of
the US Dollar as the habitual currency of which international transactions are
made – previously almost irrespective of who is trading with who – has become a
major movement. This is a threat to US financial stability and military power,
as the US has been for many decades been able to write virtually a blank check
for its military based on the earnings received from the dollar being pretty
much the dominant currency for international trade. Its worldwide network of
military bases is financed through this mechanism. The rise of the Russia-China
bloc threatens all that, as BRICS has already created its own development bank
and is also discussing the creation of a new agreed currency for international
transactions.
One startling index of how things are
changing is in the Middle East. In deals brokered by Chinese diplomacy, Saudi
Arabia and Iran, who have been in a state of bitter antagonism for many years,
as most sharply expressed in the war in Yemen, have restored full diplomatic
relations, and the Yemen war is apparently winding down. Both Saudi Arabia and
Iran will join BRICS on 1st January, with the UAE. Syria, whose
Assad government the US and its allies tried to overthrow in a similar manner
to Libya and were stopped from doing so by Syria being given armed backing by
Russia, has now been restored to membership of the Arab League after former US
clients dropped their antagonism. The US is on the defensive in the Middle East
and China has also made demands for a settlement of the Israel-Palestine
question, which is certain to prove much more difficult because of the problem
of the overlap of Israel’s ruling class with that of Western countries – the
material basis of the very powerful Israel lobby.
But the broader question is whether this
concept of a multipolar world is somehow an antidote to imperialist capitalism.
And the answer has to be one of deep scepticism towards that. Capitalist
development has created an exclusive club of monopoly capitalist powers that
basically have enriched themselves massively at the expense of the bulk of the
world’s population for a century and a half, with a couple of centuries of
preparation before that through mercantilism and primitive accumulation of
wealth through such means as a revived chattel slavery on an industrial scale,
which was only done away with when it became an obstacle to capitalist
development. The problem is that a multi-polar world does not do away with
those powers, who will inevitably fight back in some way, either jointly or
separately. US hegemony is not the only possible form, and the NATO that is the
current expression of imperialist domination. It is worth recalling that
between the two world wars there was no undisputed imperialist hegemon – that
role was contested between Germany, Britain and the United States and the
resulting armed dispute plunged the whole world into war. Such a development in
the future could destroy humanity itself.
Imperialism is coherent in its
socio-economic objectives, even though it can be thrown into disarray by
unexpected challenges from other forces. It will not just disappear into a
peaceful ‘multipolar world’. The lion will not lie down meekly with its victims
for the greater good – for imperialism the majority of humanity are just fodder
for exploitation. The problem that they face is a historical crisis – the
capitalist system itself declined through the decline in profit rates in the
advanced countries to the point that only outsourcing, overseas cheap labour
schemes and industrial-scale financial frauds such as Credit Default Swaps etc.
could keep up the rate of profit. That is an inherent contradiction in
capitalism itself, as Marx pointed out, and affects all capitalism.
The creation of deformed post-Stalinist
capitalist states like Russia and China, a new form of anomalous
non-imperialist capitalism that uses state power to offset the most irrational
drives of capital, cannot simply be reproduced. Because it takes the creation
of a fundamentally flawed workers state, and then its ruin, to bring such a
state into being. And another paradox is that it was the overall strength of
the existing imperialist states throughout nearly a century and a half that
allowed those same imperialisms to act as an exclusive club and block the
development of other capitalist powers into imperialist competitors. So, the
only new imperialism that was created in the late 20th Century,
which did not emerge organically, but was transplanted, was Israel.
There is a possibility that a strategic
defeat for existing imperialisms by these deformed bourgeois states could have
the effect of creating the political and economic space for new imperialist
states to crystallise. The most developed semi-colonial states that are jumping
on the bandwagon of BRICS may well be provided with the means of economic development
to the point that they are able to exploit less powerful semi-colonial
countries, and thus begin to behave as new imperialisms themselves. That seems
a possibility for instance with India or Indonesia, whose rapid economic
development is not restricted by any kind of deformity inherited from a
previous social revolution.
And overarching this is the question of the
palpable destruction of the world’s climate by capitalism with its fossil fuel
industry, a problem that can only be resolved by an end to the profit motive as
the force driving economic development, and its replacement with economic
planning on a global level to make it possible to transform the world’s energy
generation to use means that do not destroy the environment for human
habitation. Which is currently happening, and not slowly.
Even if the wildest dreams of the theorists
of the ‘multipolar world’ are realised, and a new world mechanism of voluntary
collaboration between discrete chunks of the planet is able to bring a
sustained new rationality to international relations, that will not solve the
fundamental problem: humanity will still be afflicted with the contradictions
of capitalism.
This contradictory moment in the history of
capitalism would never have been possible without the 1917 workers’ and
peasants’ socialist revolution in Russia, and then the secondary, derivative
but enormous revolution of Mao’s peasant armies in China leading to 1949. It
will prove to be fleeting unless the problem pointed out earlier, of the
domination of the workers movement particularly in the advanced countries by
social-imperialists, at war with those who stand on the revolutionary outlook
of the Bolsheviks, is resolved. To resolve it a new Communist International has
to be created, with deep roots in the imperialist countries themselves, able to
stand up to imperialist pressure and prevail. A successor to the previous
attempts of the Third and Fourth Internationals that for diverse reasons have
fallen by the wayside. A new regroupment of communists is therefore necessary
to create such a movement, otherwise the historic opportunity of this major
crisis of imperialism could be lost.
