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| Marikana: The man in the green blanket, later killed by police |
The treachery of Centrism
In periods of working class upheaval
(like those most starkly exhibited today in MENA, Greece, Southern
Africa, Spain, and China) the working class struggles to free itself
ideologically, politically and organizationally from the shackles
imposed by generations of reformers, class collaborationist workers’ and
bourgeois-workers parties which, when given the opportunity, willingly
administer capitalism’s austerities against the workers in the name of
labor. Alongside these reformist layers, the economist union
bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy gathers a gaggle of “socialist”
leaders, professors and academics who willingly reinforce ruling class
hegemony by mis-educating, stratifying, separating, localizing, limiting,
demobilizing, and turning our class toward individualist and national
solutions.
The labor fakers guide us to bloc with
or directly enter capitalist political formations (e.g., the ANC in
South Africa, the Democratic Party in the USA); as regards imperialism
these fakers pragmatically adopt social-chauvinist campaigns (buy
American, British jobs for British workers, often supporting
anti-immigrant laws,) ignoring our internationalist duties and shaming
our class’ credo, “An injury to one is an injury to all!” In times of
counter-revolution and imperialist war these “do-good” reformists can
quickly adapt and capitulate to the most backward and vile racist,
jingoist and nationalist ideologies, they show their true colors and
abandon any pretence to representing working class ascendancy.
Social Democrats voted for war credits
in August 1914 allowing WWI to commence rather than leading
internationalist working class strikes to stop the war. Socialists
became fascists in 1920’s Italy, the CPUSA restrained the working class
with no-strike pledges, and “third camp” state department socialists
refused to unconditionally defend North Vietnam and the National
Liberation Front during the devastating conventional and chemical
warfare which left the Democratic and Republican Parties with the blood
of three million dead Vietnamese on their hands. These reformist
individuals and parties still dominate the leadership of the working
class and the so-called ‘left’. They are a major impediment on the road
to socialism but not the only one.
Sometimes out in front, always claiming
to march alongside yet most often tailing just behind and holding back
the most militant and revolutionary workers is a layer of subjectively
revolutionary yet objectively centrist individuals and organizations who
spare no effort in telling us, “another world is possible,” that “21st
century socialism” is on the agenda. In the post-capitalist economies
many of the same centrists adapt to the pressures of bourgeois
democratic forces and shamelessly maintain that market reforms are
necessary for the growth of productive forces and thus advance the
historic interest of the working class in a period while capitalist
markets dominate the global economy.
On the plane of theory centrists gather
to themselves a layer of academics who squeeze Marxism into
underconsumptionist crisis theory and at times put forward aspects of
program they can emphatically point towards, despite ultimately balking
at class independence. If drawn as a Venn diagram, the centrist layer
would span the gamut intersecting theoretically, organizationally and
programmatically with reformism on the right, with anarchism,
situationism and councils communists in the middle, and revolutionary
Marxism on the left. Their “common sense,” pragmatic and often eclectic
method traps them in a tug of war between the revolutionary aspirations
of the most oppressed workers and adaptation to capitalist exploitation
made tolerable via material benefits doled out to ever-thinning strata
of workers. In periods of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary
uprisings the centrist layers, despite their best intentions,
objectively act to hold back the class and disarm it in the face of
counter-revolution, capitalist restoration, fascist reaction and
inter-imperialist war.
During this period, like others in the
past, this dangerous and contradictory phenomenon – centrism traps the
working class in its own conundrum – despite having its hands on the
levers of production, layers of the class most closely linked to the
labor aristocracy and small proprietors embrace the “logic” of centrism
which looks as if it intends to give capitalism its death blow but holds
back the historical and theoretical lessons which the class needs to
derive the political and organizational forms and programmatic direction
necessary for victory.
In the face of what may be the working
class’ last chance to save the planet from the environmentally
destructive anarchy of capitalist production, centrism plays possibly
the most dangerous role blocking the working class from its
self-liberation. Objective conditions force workers to fight capitalism
(the polls show a disaffection from abject support for capitalism
especially among young workers and even in the USA,) Social Democratic
treachery will drive the workers from the Reformists (Greece and Spain,)
and there with open arms stand the full spectrum of centrism awaiting
the disaffected workers looking for their road to power (instead,
Synapismos dragged SYRIZA to the right.)
Epoch of Wars and Revolutions
In our epoch-that of capitalist crisis,
of revolutions and counter-revolutions, of inter-imperialist wars and
proxy-wars which often begin as currency or trade wars, the resolution
of the contradictions driving society from one tragic episode of
imperialist war and counter-revolutionary bloodletting to the next,
while testing the life-sustaining limits of the planet lies only with
the working class leading their allies the poor peasants, the
dispossessed, the unemployed, the youth, the retirees, those dependent
on social services and oppressed peoples and nations across the planet,
to remake the world according to their own plan and in their own
interests. History reveals that class consciousness more often than not
lags behind objective necessity and that the class as a whole is only
episodically drawn into self-activity, therefore the theoretical,
organizational and programmatic preparations for the working class
coming to power can only be made by the class-conscious revolutionary
workers–the leadership of the working class organizes into its own
international combat party.
Internationally productive forces
stagnate. Finance capital trapped in the contradictions between the
need to engage labor in order to produce surplus value (and thus add to
the available reservoir of profit derived from goods production from
which the biggest capitalist overlords drink) and the negative
incentive, the tendency of the rate of profit to decline, inexorably
places limits on productive investment as opposed to speculative
investment in financial instruments (which, while they may gather profit
to their investors from the reservoir of productively produced surplus
they do not add to the volume of industrial or agriculturally produced
goods available for consumption.)
In turn internationally the workers’
share of the available produce of their own labor’s effort must be
diminished for capital to rationalize the vast reservoir of fictitious
capital accumulated in the speculative bubbles chased around the world
markets by the big capitalists looking for investment opportunity for
vast quantities of stagnating and fictitious capital. To diminish the
workers share, the austerity must be imposed for profitability to return
to productive investment. Workers conditions are attacked today by
the bosses gendarme layers of enforcers of austerity, the economic hit
men of the IMF and World bank, the politicians promoting “free trade”
nightmares like NAFTA and TPPA, the corporate media, the political
agents of the ruling class in the workers’ organizations, and when the
workers push back; by the armed body of the state, i.e. the police and
national guard, citizen-council-thugs, scab herders, and as a last
resort fascist gangs drawn from the most alienated of the criminal
element, from the lumpenproletariat and the ruined petty bourgeoisie.
In its struggle for ascendancy the task
of building an independent international revolutionary working class
party that stands above limited national programs, that unites the
workers of the world programmatically and organizationally is the
primary task facing the working class today. A revolutionary
international is required to unite workers across borders to mobilize,
educate itself and prepare the working classes of all nations for our
historic task; the formation of class-wide
shop-floor/office/factory/mine and farm organs of workers’ power,
service and domestic workers’ committees, their networking, the building
of popular assemblies (cordones industriales) and delegated
councils intent upon building socialism via the transitional tool of a
workers’ government which will take action, put capitalism out of our
misery by expropriating the big capitalist enterprises (the extraction
industries, the major manufacturing industries, the distribution,
communications, pharmaceutical, medical and financial houses including
banks, credit and investment firms) and placing them under workers
self-management and running them according to plans developed by the
workers’ representatives attuned to the environmental, and
redistributive requirements for remediating the environmental
destruction as well as the historic toll on the billions kept in
devastating poverty by capitalism.
Holding back the advance of the
working class toward the realization of its own independent and
revolutionary party, the centrists across the board unite behind the
work of various academics whose crisis theory befuddles the workers into
the mistaken idea that radical yet modest and reasonable structural
adjustments to capitalism can be accomplished transforming the workers
conditions. Underconsumptionist theory places the crisis of over-accumulation in the realm of consumption rather than production.
The under consumption
theorists make the crisis one of falling wage share of the working class
as an income class (what Marx calls ‘revenue’ classes at the end of
Capital Vol. 3,) so the state becomes the site for a distributional
struggle over income shares (i.e., minimum wage, duration and amount of
unemployment insurance, tax burden on working class, pensions, national
insurance etc.) At the level of international relations this theory
translates to supra-imperialism and in the current situation a US
super-imperialism. Income shares are represented at the subjective level
as apolitical, trade unionist economism. The centrist loudly declaims
for revolution but practices economism. Whereas, if falling profits
cause crises despite rising exploitation and independent of wage shares
then the crisis of capitalism cannot be resolved by distributional
‘structural reforms’ but only by expropriation of the 0.01% and the
reorganization of production by the workers for human need and by their
own plan. The break from economism requires the understanding of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall 1 TRPF as Marx explains it.
Marikana Solidarity: Our experience and some observations
On August 16th of this year we of the
CWG, together with our international co-thinkers in the Liaison
Committee of Communists, proposed solidarity actions with the murdered
and striking Marikana and other South African mine workers. We wrote our
first leaflet and blog statements on the subject that night and spent
the next day beating the Bay Area bushes for support for an ASAP
demonstration of this solidarity. Before another week went by there was
enough far-left agreement for a solidarity committee to “exist,” and it
exists. We could scarcely say it was formed. Not only was this not a
propaganda bloc, as some who have fetishized a ‘principle’ that only a
revolutionary party or perhaps also its union caucuses may raise
transitional demands, but the committee has so far failed to adopt a mission statement 2.
There are a number of centrists who have their own reasons for
preferring that the committee have only a logistical and no political
agreement. Each dreams of turning this movement (!!! There’s hardly a
movement) into an uncritical cheering squad for the South African
political grouping of their choice, or to position her/himself to broker
the support of major Bay Area union officials (a vain hope, as we said
and as it turns out.)
One of these is the well-known
spokesperson for the Democratic Left Front (DLF). Judging by two months
of what he has said and what he has not, including his articles in Amandla,
the public organ of the DLF, we would have to say he has a functionally
Menshevik conception of the South African revolution. This is not
merely his personal view of how matters stand, either. Was there a
Lenin? Does he matter nowadays? You’d never guess from the front page Amandla article
“Crisis and Alternatives” of Dec. 11 by Achin Vanaik. He begins by
playing up to the left and even seems to contradict the more usual
“underconsumptionist” view expressed in Amandla, saying crisis is
the natural product of capitalism. But he drops that subject almost
right away. Was there a revolution in Russia? He doesn’t mention it at
all, and it doesn’t appear in the discussion of desirable economic
organization models and examples, which is glaring given what he says
the purpose of the analysis was.
Do you see mention of taking power?
Yes, they say you can’t fool yourself about that. But there’s no
mention of a revolutionary party, scarcely any mention of the working
class, and instead we have a discussion of what “coalitions of
progressive forces” can accomplish, what reforms (yes, they said it)
would amount to alternatives to the capitalist crisis. “Progressive
alternative” is the big concept here, and it boils down to making
finance capital a utility owned by the state; the state, but not under
workers’ control, the state he finds so very useful for regulation and
conflict resolution between competing capitals and international
stability in the abstract. We were just thinking about this and how it
sounds like a Cliffite International Socialist Organization (ISO) fake
socialist “campaign” when the Zimbabwe comrades of the Revolutionary
Workers Group warned us that members of the local ISO had put out the
call to form a DLF in Zimbabwe! If none of this sounds like the
dictatorship of the proletariat to you, it doesn’t sound like one to us
either.
Now of course the DLF can say this is a
signed, guest article, and disown any part of the content if put on the
spot. But it is in the discussion of what southern hemisphere nations
(!) can do to mitigate the natural crises of capitalism and the
collisions of states in competition that the author shows his true
colors. He employs indirect but nevertheless unmistakable language to
propose that the states of the southern hemisphere would be better off
fighting American ‘hegemonism’ by allying themselves with the economic
projects of China and Russia, and he discounts as a much less likely
development the rise of Chinese Asia-Pacific ‘hegemonism’ to the point
of contesting U.S. ‘hegemonism.’ How is this Metternich-style
combination calculus calling itself a dialectic different than the
foreign policy – or is it retail advertising?- of the tri-partite
Popular Front? From the “market” or “21st Century” phony socialism it is
eager to embrace? Perhaps being “serious about power” as they say on
their masthead logo means doing what the Popular Front only proposes to
do.
And what of the South African Popular
Front? The author doesn’t mention it at all, and he is supposed to be
addressing the reasons why the Southern hemisphere has not seen the
masses on the streets fighting austerity the way the European masses
have. He puts it all down to manipulations of national and ethnic
hatreds by the hegemonic U.S.(!) and the dollar economy. Workers’
champions need to put the DLF on the spot about all of the above and
accept no baloney. How do they differ from the Kautskyians of a hundred
years ago who fudged on the question of the fate of the bourgeois state
to placate the reformists and for the same reason dodged on how the
workers were to come to power?
Amandla!, the journal of the DLF
serves up a watered down Marxism where crises have so many contingent
aspects that they can in part be managed by a broad anti-capitalist
front which does not exclude popular fronts. For example, Foster and McChesney 3, editors of the Monthly Review
in an article on the global financial crisis continue the
underconsumptionist school of Baran and Sweezy. Long term stagnation is
caused by financialization, the “stagnation-financialization trap”.
But what caused stagnation? In last paragraph before the section on ‘The
ambiguity of global competition’ we find the main point: Prices rising
ahead of labor unit costs! That is, relatively falling real wages leads
to market saturation which then becomes overproduction of commodities.
Hence the classic Monthly Review school of underconsumption.
Rémy Herrera suggests underconsumptionist theory in “Reflections on the Crisis and its Effects”4, also published in Amandla: “This
over-accumulation manifests itself through an excess of saleable
production, not because there are not enough people who need or desire
to consume, but because the concentration of wealth tends to prevent an
increasingly large proportion of the population from being able to buy
the merchandise…
…The neo-liberal regime has thus been unable to maintain growth except by doping to death the demand of private consumption while promoting lines of credit to the maximum. It is this exorbitant expansion of credit that has ended by revealing the crisis of over-accumulation in its current form. In a society where increasingly large numbers of individuals are being excluded and without rights, the expansion of outlets offered to the principal owners of capital can only delay the devaluation of the excess capital placed on the financial markets, but it can certainly not avoid it.”
…The neo-liberal regime has thus been unable to maintain growth except by doping to death the demand of private consumption while promoting lines of credit to the maximum. It is this exorbitant expansion of credit that has ended by revealing the crisis of over-accumulation in its current form. In a society where increasingly large numbers of individuals are being excluded and without rights, the expansion of outlets offered to the principal owners of capital can only delay the devaluation of the excess capital placed on the financial markets, but it can certainly not avoid it.”
For their part, Panitch and Gindin 5 ignore
the fundamental causes of crisis and focus on different forms each
time. They think that 1970s crisis was resolved by neo-liberalism and
that this “new” crisis is not caused by falling profits. They have
special emphasis on the state as site of class struggle which logically
lends itself to “structural reforms”. These guys are not Marxists but
empiricists.
The Democratic Left Front in South Africa
and the entire layer of World Social Forumites, NGO lovers, ISO/SWPers,
hand in hand with anarchists and Occupiers are drawing to themselves
layers of anti-capitalist youth whom they seek to poison with
anti-Leninism masked as anti-Stalinism. They appear to deny the
inter-imperialist struggle and recreate the Kautskyite supra-Imperialism
with the USA as the super imperial power. Thus they make little of the
inter-imperialist struggle between the US/UK bloc and the China bloc.
Meanwhile Africom is preparing for a bloodbath across Africa as wars for
resources proliferate. They embrace the theorists (Chomsky, Harris,
Harvey, Panitch, Sangar) from whose ilk we are presented
underconsumptionist crisis theory which blames the crisis on the
symptoms leading them to Keynesian solutions and limiting demands (i.e.,
calling for nationalization of the mines but not calling for workers
control and not demanding there be no compensation for the big
capitalists.)
The Democratic Socialist Movement
We haven’t encountered any Taffeites
face-to-face in the solidarity effort to date in the U.S. Nevertheless,
who and what the “Committee for a Workers International”(CWI) is and
their errors generally and those of their South African affiliate, the
“Democratic Socialist Movement” (DSM) are questions we will need answers
for as they attempt to fill the political void to the Communist Party’s
left. They have garnered some international attention from all the
blame and denunciations (and also repressions) heaped on them lately by
the Vavi leadership of COSATU, the trade union federation that is
integral to the Popular Front state. We think the DSM wants into a
Popular Front government, which certainly would have to make some
disagreeable anti-austerity and wage concessions to the masses to
accommodate them. How is that, you ask?
The CWI is another anti-Leninist
tendency originating in Britain, where it is an attempt to revive a
Labour Party that really never was, i.e., an actual 2nd International
type Socialist Party, and not the actual, and from day one,
‘bourgeois-workers party’ that is the 2nd International, pro-imperialist
outfit. An affiliate of the CWI in Eire has had some traction on a
similar, if somewhat more historical basis, only neglecting that most
Socialists who were not wiped out in 1916 went on to found the Irish
CP. The Irish Socialist Party has seats in the Dial Eirann. One almost
never hears from or about them over the din of continuous scandals
there. The DSM was at first a small socialist split from the African
National Congress, only later rallying to the CWI.
In South Africa what causes the
migraines for the Vavi COSATU leadership is the DSM’s call for a “new
mass party of labor,” i.e., an old social-democratic, Labour Party, such
as they mistakenly think the British model was. The COSATU leaders are
sharing power with the ANC and have real privileges and Mercedes to
lose! Such a new party would fill seats in Pretoria and share power in
coalitions, just as the actual Labour Party in the U.K. always did. We
are encouraged that they reject the Krugman Keynesian economic view that
the present crisis of capitalism is “superficial” and “unnecessary” and
that a macroeconomic policy of government spending in the U.S. could
cure the world economy with full employment in two years. They quote
Karl Marx from the Communist Manifesto in their most recent
webzine on the nature and cause of capitalist crises. But we don’t know
if they explicitly reject underconsumptionism, for a fact.
Knowing how to compile a list of
scandals and the right capitalists to blame is useful but the
indispensable remedy for capitalist crises, the politically organized
armed uprising of the proletariat for the smashing of the bourgeois
state and its replacement by their own self-organized power is absent
from their pages. We think the workers have to take control of their
Local Unions and break with the COSATU leaders and the Popular Front.
We are for the permanent revolution! We are for a Socialist Federation
of Southern Africa, and not in the never-never land of a second stage of
the revolution that never comes and for which the various Menshevisms
have no actual plans. We think that forming a new parliamentary party of
a type that proved everywhere to be useless and ultimately an obstacle,
just because momentarily it seems to suit a mood of the masses and is
therefore possible and can fit you out with perks is a terrible
opportunist error.
Permanent Revolution not Centrism
The Liaison Committee of Communists warns
the workers and anti-capitalist youth that the only class that can
defeat capitalism is the working class, that the popular front is the
consequence of the two stage theory and that workers must not be drawn
into a bloc with capitalist parties or enter the capitalist government.
The workers party does not enter politics to administer the capitalist
state but to bring it down and form a workers state. Any left front that
does not clearly state and stand by this understanding is not left at
all but a radical petty bourgeois movement which will prevent the
workers from finding their road to power.
Furthermore, there is an international
layer of fakers who claim not to be leaders, who claim to be listeners,
who claim they will follow the lead of the “real workers” and not show
up with any pre-conceived program. Nevertheless, these fakers are
actually leaders, no matter how much they deny it. They are leaders who
are today telling the workers, “you don’t need your own revolutionary
party, you don’t need to maintain class independence, you don’t need to
develop a transitional program to help workers advance from their
minimal day to day demands to the logic of a workers government, you
don’t need to understand the pitfalls of Stalinism.” THEY ARE LEADERS
BUT THEY ARE LEADING THE WRONG WAY!
To defeat capitalism workers need their
own revolutionary party and a revolutionary workers’ international that
unites workers of the world in the face of pending inter-imperialist
wars. The formations that oppose the building of such a party are
transmitting the ideology of the ruling class into the workers movement
trying to keep the workers from having their own independent and
revolutionary party. The DLF in SA runs from Stalinism but only
critiques its authoritarianism and the cronyism that it has degenerated
into. It does not critique Stalinism as a social phenomenon and
therefore the break of Mazibuko Jara (a DLF founder and spokesperson)
and others from the South African Communist Party (SACP) is incomplete
and either ignores or denies (but has not stated) that the pitfall of
Stalinism is its reversion to the Menshevik two stage theory, which the
SACP embraced and implemented, abandoning proletarian revolution for the
“National Democratic Revolution.”
Only the theory of permanent revolution
can explain why the African revolution stagnated and has produced a
continent of semi-colonial states which have not attained their
independence from imperialism and which today are being prepared, by
competing imperialisms, as the battle grounds over which world monopoly
of essential resources and super-exploitable labor will be fought in the
coming decades. The theory of Permanent Revolution holds that the weak
bourgeois classes of the semi-colonial and ex-colonial countries cannot
break with imperialism and therefore cannot complete the national
democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution. Only the working class
can complete these tasks through the agency of the dictatorship of the
proletariat in an uninterrupted revolution that carries bourgeois
democracy to its conclusion and carries society beyond to the socialist
reorganization of production for human need.
18 DECEMBER 2012
STATEMENT BY LIAISON COMMITTEE OF COMMUNISTS
(CWG (USA), CWG (AOTEAROA/NZ), RWG (ZIMBABWE)
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