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The Revolution and Beyond

We publish here a text on the period of transition; it was written for the conference held in Arezzo in June, 2024 by a member and a sympathiser of Internationalist Perspective.   The subject of the period of transition has not been given the attention it is due by the revolutionary milieu in recent years and we hope to receive further contributions.  

THE REVOLUTION AND BEYOND

1. Is the idea of a ‘period of transition’ to be jettisoned?

The great transformation of social relations all over the world during the revolutionary period will take a certain amount of time – how much time remains to be seen. But the notion of a distinct “period of transition,” characterized by a lower and higher stage of communism as Marx described in the Critique of the Gotha Program, is a concept that is now an impediment to revolutionary understanding.

According to Marx, the law of value would persist in the lower stage of communism, and only in the higher stage of communism would “society wholly cross the narrow horizon of bourgeois right and inscribe on its banner, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’” The German-Dutch left tried to theorize a way to supposedly circumvent the law of value in the lower stage by using labor-time accounting with individual labor vouchers, but without success.  

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THE TRUMP OFFENSIVE

Trump has been back in office for less than a hundred days, and while the charge he is leading is unmistakable, its destination remains uncertain. The two texts that follow are attempts to make sense of what is being set in motion, and what that reveals about the current configuration of political and economic power.

Both reject the idea that Trump marks a rupture in American priorities. Instead, they trace how long-standing tendencies in U.S. statecraft — toward authoritarianism, militarization, and social demolition — are being sharpened and accelerated. Chaos is deliberately being created for the purpose of reorganizing governance and geopolitical alignment around the shifting needs of capital.

The texts differ in how they understand the nature of the project, and disagree on the coherence, or lack thereof, of the Trump administration’s policies. The first sees the administration as a vehicle for multiple, often competing factions — held together by Trump’s personal authority but lacking a stable ideological core. The second views the administration’s actions as part of a coherent effort to prepare for inter-imperialist war.

The two texts offer views from different perspectives on the unfolding of events. Both were written and discussed before the Trump administration raised the stakes on April 2 by imposing hefty global tariffs.  

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THEATER

The scene: the Oval Office, White House, Washington DC.

Present are:

Donald J Trump, president

JD Vance, vice president

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State

Pete Hegseth , Secretary of Defense

Michael Waltz, National Security Advisor

A fly on the wall

Waltz: Our starting point is that conflict with China is inevitable at some point. There is no other country that can threaten our hegemony. We must at all costs prevent this.

Trump: Exactly. We are the top predator. The world is too small for two top predators.

Waltz: So our priority is to isolate China. Expand our military power in the Pacific theater. That’s why the war in Ukraine must end. It has driven Russia into China’s arms. The BRICS is now an insignificant talking club but it could be the beginning of an anti-American bloc. We can’t allow this.. We have to detach Russia from China and we cannot do that as long as this war continues. So we are going to impose a peace that lets Russia keep its conquests. In time, we will lift sanctions and normalize relations.

Trump: There is still a lot of money to be made in Russia. I’m thinking of a Trump Tower in Moscow, for example.  

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Where are We Now?

The following text was written by Marlowe for discussion at the internationalist meeting in Brussels 2023 where “the periodisation of capitalism’ was the theoretical subject on the agenda. It is followed by a shorter text that addresses the periodisation question specifically.

The main text has two parts. In the first, Marlowe traces out the trajectory of capitalism over the past couple of hundred years and describes how capitalism has got to where it is today, emphasizing the interaction between economic, technological, social and political developments. In the second, he sketches the history of the working class struggle in the same period. He points out that there has now been over a century of onslaught on the working class without a revolutionary response. There is no organic continuity with the past revolutionary wave, the working class has to relearn everything from scratch. On today’s social protest movements he states that they contain many workers but are not led by the working class. It is imperative that the proletariat should see itself as a class and not be drowned in the wider population.

In the discussion, some comrades criticized the text for not focusing the analysis more on the impact of the deep penetration of the value form, not only in the production process but in the whole of society, transforming the conditions of capital accumulation and eroding class consciousness.  

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Wars In the Middle East (3)

Banksy

As we write this, the guns are silent in Gaza. The rain of bombs, continuing until almost the last minute before the cease-fire came into effect, has finally stopped. But rather than an end of the war, this is most likely a pause. How long will it last ? Only 42 days, if no agreement is reached between Israel and Hamas about a second exchange of prisoners/hostages. And even if the IDF doesn’t resume its mass slaughter then, the chances that the region will remain a hotbed of small scale and large scale inter-imperialist conflict are very high. And even if against all odds a lasting “peace’ would come to Gaza, it would remain hell on earth. The death and destruction accomplished in the last 15 months guarantee that. It will be a place of pain and hunger, of disease and despair. And, even more than before, it will be a prison. With prison guards to manage it and to maintain “order”.

The prison guards are back. Who else is going to impose “order” but Hamas? They were the ruling proto-state apparatus before in the strip and there’s no other. And for Israel the come back of Hamas may be the perfect excuse to resume its genocidal campaign.  

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GOODBYE HENRI

The pro-revolutionary movement has lost its Nestor. On December 16 Henri Simon, age 102, died peacefully in his sleep. He will be missed.

It was through struggles at the work place, in which he ran counter to the trade unions and the Communist Party, that the young Henri came to politics. In 1951 he became part of Socialisme ou Barbarie (SOUB), an anti-nationalist left communist group that had split from the PCF. The evolution of SOUB is a complicated story. Henri’s focus was on the actual workers struggle. He was and always remained sharply critical of political groups who want to lead the class and take over the state. For him, they could only be obstacles to the self-organization of the working class. In 1958 he left SOUB and formed with others Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières (ICO), a group with a council-communist orientation. It lasted until 1973 and was followed by the group (a network actually) Echanges et Mouvement. Henri was the editor of its main publication, Echanges (in French and English) which has now announced that it will cease publication after the next issue, which will be devoted to remembering Henri. Echanges was an interesting journal, full of detailed information on struggles going on all over the planet, complemented with articles on the world situation from a pro-revolutionary, council-communist perspective.  

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WARS IN THE MIDDLE EAST (2)

A leaflet IP published in december 2023 on the slaughter in Gaza raised a discussion within our group. What was objected to was that the leaflet related the mass murder committed by the IDF to Israeli capitalism’s need to control and reduce a surplus population that yielded no profit for it, and that it saw in this an indication of the genocidal direction in which capitalism as a whole is going. Against this view it was argued that only the rise of interimperialist tension explains this conflict. Singh, who is not a member of IP but discussed with us, reacts to this debate in the following essay. He agrees with those who defended the leaflet that a surplus population was the target of the Israeli operation but argues that, to understand this, a distinction needs to be made between the relative surplus population which the capitalist mode of production creates everywhere and which it can contain with policing and welfarism, and consolidated surplus populationwhich is a marginalized deadweight it seeks to eliminate. The latter, so he claims, exists only in specific conditions and he goes on to show how these conditions arose in Israel/Palestine and led to the destruction of Gaza.  

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IT ALL FITS TOGETHER

WARS IN THE MIDDLE EAST (1)

After more than a decade of bloody conflict in which more than 600.000 people were killed and more than 14 million were forced to flee their homes, the Syrian ‘civil’ war seemed to have settled in a stalemate and a de facto partition of the country. And yet, only a little push was needed to topple Assad.

The government forces refused to fight. Everywhere the rebels came, there was little or no resistance, everywhere they were greeted by jubilant masses cheering the downfall of the hated regime.

But the rapid collapse of the Assad regime was not the result of a mass strike or popular revolt. The push came from outside, which underscores the interimperialist nature of the current wars in the Middle East. The conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria are all connected. While the trigger was pulled by the weaker side (as it often is), it’s now clear that the string of conflicts has considerably strengthened the grip of the US and its allies on this strategically essential region. Whether that was the US’ plan all along or whether it exploited conflicts that others set in motion, we cannot tell but in essence, it makes no difference.  

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WHY HE WON AND WHAT HE WILL DO


Anger over the increased cost of living, opposition to wars, the sense of being threatened, fear of chaos and insecurity, all contributed to the election of a (not so) new US president who will increase the cost of living, prepare for more war, accelerate the threats to life on this planet and sow plenty of chaos and insecurity.

The election of a man who can’t utter a paragraph without lying and spewing hate came as a shocking surprise to many. It shouldn’t have. In almost all elections in recent years, the opposition has won. Sometimes the left won, like in the UK, sometimes the right won, like in Argentina, sometimes both left and right won, like in France, but the ruling party or parties lost time and again. This trend reflects a general, worldwide discontent. The ruled become increasingly resentful of the rulers. With good reason. Inflation has raised the costs of living, wars multiply and are ever more destructive, climate disasters worsen, war, disasters and poverty make millions flee their homes, international tension is building, people are afraid of what’s coming…

In his “Totem and Taboo” Sigmund Freud writes that primitive kings were thought to possess powers to control the weather.  

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CAPITAL BEATS THE WAR DRUMS… PRO-REVOLUTIONARIES GATHER AGAINST IT

The worsening climate disasters and the brutal wars now raging in Europe, Africa and the Middle East show that capitalism’s tendential destruction of our future is accelerating. Furthermore, the wars are used, not just in the conflict zones themselves but all over the world, for massive propaganda for nationalism, for drumming up support for the expansion of the repressive powers of the state, for war preparation.

This acceleration of history puts the political groups and individuals who oppose supporting any side in these wars between capitalists nations in which the working class is always the victim, and who want to expose the system’s drive towards destruction and the possibility to end capitalism, before a challenge. If they really want not only to interpret the world but to change it, to paraphrase Marx, now, more than ever, they need to find ways to speak louder and with more clarity, and in order to do so, they must seek to communicate and collaborate.

So it is a positive sign that there were several pro-revolutionary encounters this year in which the question how to understand and oppose capitalism’s war drive was at the top of the agenda. The Beach Communists, who organized such a meeting, a week-long ‘summercamp’ in Poznan (Poland) published a list of them (not all on the subject of war alone).  

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