Category: class struggle

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. Marlowe replied that there is a danger in fixating on the value-form almost to the exclusion of all else. Production does not exist in isolation, he argued, social and political developments, their interactions and effect on the production process, must be taken into account, which IP has not done enough.

It is true that there is not one correct analysis of history that invalidates all others. Our understanding of the trajectory of capital and the conditions for revolution today can only benefit from looking at it from different angles.

In the second text Marlowe criticizes the use of concepts like ‘progress’ and ‘capitalism’s obsolesence’. He writes: “The question of periodisation should not be reduced to a search for the right numerical measures to date an exact turning point in capitalism’s historic trajectory. Capitalism’s historic trajectory is economic, social and political in character – with its competitive nature punctuating that trajectory with warfare. Its economic activity has never existed in isolation.”

Both these texts feed into ongoing discussions in our group about capitalism’s history and in particular about the evolving role of the state and the obstacles to the development of revolutionary consciousness.

IP

Where are We Now? Capitalism and the Revolutionary Subject

Over the past century world capitalism has expanded enormously, and become more and more deadly – through exploitation, mass murder, pandemics, mass psychoses, and the ongoing destruction of the biosphere. And yet there has been no revolutionary wave to follow that of 1917-23. We have to ask – why not? There isn’t a simple answer to that; indeed, we might not be able today to do much more than suggest contributary factors. But it is essential that revolutionary Marxists preoccupy themselves with the question.

Capitalism’s Trajectory – A Potted History

Capitalism is based on specific relations of production but it is so much more than that; it has become an entire social system, now global – with classes, power relations, social institutions, state organisations, beliefs and ideologies. Furthermore, this phenomenon – capitalism – has a history, an especially turbulent and dynamic one.

By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, industrial capitalism had made its mark on Europe, not least because of its contribution to military production. In different countries, the initial industrialisation varied according to circumstances. In England, for example, the initial focus was in textiles where profits were most attractive and which were linked to the global network set up by centuries of mercantile capitalist development. The technologies of production were spread to other countries by sales of the material means or by knowledge transfer. The amassing of the necessary appropriate workforce came substantially from the proletarianization of erstwhile agricultural workers and from the displacement of artisanal manufacture. At the point of production, Marx analysed the determination of value by labour time and highlighted the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital over labour as capitalism developed. His analysis of this move to the extraction of relative surplus value developed into what he termed the coercive law of competition. But production does not exist in isolation; it is intertwined with all parts of society and the coercive law of competition permeates all institutions of capitalist society – local, national and international – and manifests itself as greater or lesser antagonisms between them – as well as generating brutal social consequences for the proletariat and the rest of society. So the analysis of the historical trajectory of capitalism must involve – along with the development of productive forces – the ramifications for the economic, social and political aspects of life, their interactions and their effect on those productive forces.

Capitalism did not begin in a vacuum, but in a European world of largely monarchical states and statelets, and including several large empires. These entities had histories of rivalries over land, raw materials and other sources of wealth – all of which contributed to their power. What capitalism brought into play was a new source of wealth based on the production of value. The growth of this industrial bourgeoisie generated a political struggle as a class with the established classes, particularly with the owners of land – landlords and, ultimately, with aristocracies and monarchs. The 19^th Century was witness to the development of the bourgeoisie and its institutions sloughing off the integuments inherited from the anciens regimes. It was a bloody process. And along with the development of capitalist production came the formation of nation states, the framework for the structure of bourgeois political power and its management of populations. Within the nations, the bourgeoisie reconstructed the state apparatuses and between the nation states permanent lines of contact were set up (a feature of international relations following the Congress of Vienna). The development of capitalist economies within nation-states was closely related to the mercantile trade networks set up over the previous centuries. The example for other nations to follow was that of England/UK (which had become the master of the seas with colonies across the world; this led to a dash by European powers for colonies through the Century, leading to conflicts between them. A first attempt at mitigating general antagonisms through agreements took place at the Conference of Berlin (1874).

The capitalist states – in the course of establishing ascendance and displacement over previous state manifestations – demonstrated several noteworthy characteristics. Among them, the assertion of state authority over narrower private interests. Two examples were: the takeover of the East India Company by the UK state (1874) and the establishment of the British Raj; the takeover by the Belgian state of Leopold II’s personal union Congo Free State in 1908. Another aspect of the states’ growth and penetration into civil society was the (often covert) assimilation of workers’ organisations (trade unions) into its structures – and interests; the extent of the states’ success was shown in the mobilisations for war in 1914. From then on the role of the state in every nation grew to the point where we can talk of state capitalism as a universal tendency – although with different component functional and ideological structures as, for example, we see in the 20^th Century histories of the US and China.

Often neglected in descriptions of capitalism’s trajectory is the role of fuel availability in the development of industrial production. Wind and water power quickly became insufficient and coal became the source of energy to drive industrialisation and had a direct impact on where the industrialisation took place. However, during the latter half of the 19^th Century oil technology and production strove to replace coal – and became an important factor in determining military capabilities. Also important was the role it was to take as an axis in 20^th Century geopolitics.

The outbreak of World War in 1914 was a culmination of several linked processes in what was by then a global capitalism including: the competitive law of coercion and the consequent antagonisms it generated, the strengthening of states’ roles in national economies and in social life, and all within the constant threat of crises of overproduction. This threat – which had actually been experienced in local contexts many times – had become a permanent threat at a global level to what was now a world economic system. This culmination brought the economic and military rivalries into the First World War; dozens of countries entered the fray and its conclusion brought the world into a period of disarray.

* * *

The 20^th Century brought profound reconfigurations in capitalism. The period between 1914 and 1945 included two global conflagrations, and profound economic and social crises; again the threat of global overproduction was addressed through a Second World War – this time the prime antagonist concerned with overproduction was the US and its target was Germany. Other participants in the war , with substantial rivalries and antagonisms included the UK, Russia, Japan and China. The post-1945 period brought the US-Russia military antagonism to centre-stage. Subsequently, the post-war economic developments were steered by the military-economic needs of the two blocs (such as the American Marshall Plan), lasting until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Bretton Woods Agreement brought key financial aspects of the world economy into a web of international institutions and arrangements under American domination. It included an arrangement for currency convertibility and the determination of the value of the US dollar against gold. The US held about 70% of the world’s gold reserves in 1947 yet, after years of post-1945 warfare, it became the world’s largest debtor; in 1971 the US came off the gold standard and converted the dollar into a fiat currency. Although this was a landmark in the decline of key elements of Bretton Woods, the international financial and trade management institutions have remained; they continued to be useful tools for international capitalism – and in large measure by the US to inflict its interests on much of the world.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 triggered a whole new global restructuring of many economic, military and political aspects of capitalism. It heightened the hubris of the American state which then set about pushing NATO’s European borders eastwards and striving for greater control over the oil supplies from the Middle East. Western businesses went on an asset-stripping trip in Russia, one which also generated a new crop of especially wealthy home-grown capitalists there and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The collapse also helped stimulate the weakening of autarkic policies in India – to abandon the Licence Raj – and in China – to follow ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.

The global financial system also underwent massive changes. The abandonment of capital movement restrictions, the maturation of the offshore financial jurisdictions, and the immense technological development of global electronic communications systems ramped up the ability of capitalism to grow – and to mitigate tendencies to overproduction. Furthermore, the opening up of Chinese and Indian (and many other) manufactures offered western industry an outsourcing of production to lower-cost regions of the world. The decade was a turning point for many aspects of capitalism. There was also ongoing developments in the role of money through the new technologies: it could now be used to project soft power internationally by countries which either did not have the means to transmit hard power or to assist the build-up of the economic and military power of those with the resources to do it. Saudi Arabia was in the first category and China in the second. All countries are tied together through the global financial system which is still largely American-dominated. Since 1945 it has held up, though it has had many national and some international crises, the most substantial being that of 2008.

It was not long before reactions to ‘the end of history’ worked their ways through. The 2000s revealed several turning points. The 9/11 attacks from Saudi jihadists provided an opportunity for the US and other western powers under the cover of the ‘War against Terror’ to launch invasions and build up their military presence in the Middle East and North Africa. As Greenspan said, it was about the oil. The 20-year war against terror inflicted $7 trillion dollars-worth of murderous onslaught on the world. Political and economic conditions in Russia enabled the reinforcement of authoritarianism under Putin who has promoted Russian military reaction to the West in Georgia, Syria and, especially, Ukraine. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China is building a global network of economic clients (including in the Middle East, Africa and South America) and military bases in strategically important areas (as round the Horn of Africa); it threatens penetration of Western electronic infrastructures and is overtly posing a challenge to American and other capabilities in the Indo-Pacific areas. The recent rapprochement between China and Russia is a direct challenge to Western military-economic interests.

Allies and adversaries are not mutually exclusive in the bourgeois world. While being solid members of NATO, the UK financial industry continues to welcome Russian money and German manufacture its oil and gas. Turkey and Greece have gone to war while both were members of NATO. Today, Turkey and Hungary play both European and Russian sides. Sometime allies become adversaries – such as Japan in WW1 and WW2; sometimes adversaries become allies – as with Russia and China today. Middle East oil producers were securely in the Western orbit; now they are not. Binding countries together through trade does not stop them going to war; it wasn’t true in 1914 and it’s not true today. At present, many regimes are playing the field so we can’t predict what, if any, new configurations will emerge outside of the very long term alliances – or what fractures will happen.

* * *

The worlds of the 19^th Century and the 20^th (and the 21^st) were very different. Capitalism has always been brutal and war has been endemic to its development from its beginnings. However, since 1914 the anti-social nature of the system has reached scales that would have been inconceivable to revolutionaries in the 19^th Century: two world wars, and incessant warfare outside them have murdered hundreds of millions; exploitation, whether in times of economic expansion or economic crisis has immiserated hundreds of millions more; the ejection into destitution of people who cannot be absorbed into the production process; and the mass production of waves of migration as people try to get away from the epidemic of violence, often falling victim to people and sex traffickers. And all the while destroying the environment in which all living creatures must survive. This is truly the drive to a death world. Barbarism.

* * *

The Revolutionary Subject

We have traced out, in a very rough way, the trajectory of capitalism over the past couple of hundred years and described how capitalism has got to where it is today. Along that trajectory, the revolutionary subject, the proletariat, has expressed itself episodically. Early in the industrial revolution, the Radical War in Scotland (1820), the Merthyr Rising (1831), the Silesian weavers (1844) all showed the combativity of workers – not only at their places of work but also on broader political terrain such as to repeal the corn laws and to support Chartism. The working class struggle they witnessed had a profound effect on both Marx and Engels. Their spectre haunting Europe, the movement towards communism, described in the Manifesto published early in 1848 was given bodily form later that year in the class struggles in France.

All through the 19^th Century, workers struggled not only to improve their lot at the point of production but also for improvement politically, in the national societies to which they belonged. But herein alongside advancement lay a trap: the institutions where they saw the bourgeoisie’s political power lie – in parliaments – were being undermined by capitalism’s development and the strengthening of the state. The political lesson following the Paris Commune showed that the state cannot be taken over by the working class. The mass strikes in Russia in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 showed how practically the class could respond, and in 1917 the workers’ councils put organisational structure onto the revolutionary process. Nonetheless, the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 was defeated not only by attacks from the world bourgeoisie but also by a disintegration from within due to the pernicious effects of statification: the latter was strikingly evident in Russia where the Bolshevik Party was integrated into the state apparatus and the independent workers’ councils destroyed. These were all signs of the strengthening tendency towards state capitalism. There has been no revolutionary resurgence since then, and the increasing political power of the ruling class showed itself in the social mobilisation for the Second World War.

In its aftermath there were many popular revolts such as in Germany and Hungary in the 1950s. Then after 1968 there were many strike waves with popular support in Western Europe – especially in France, Italy and the UK, waves which went on into the 1970s and ‘80s. Although there were signs of limited self-organisation none developed revolutionary structures; of course, revolutionary structures can only exist in struggle outside of which the vampire state sucks the life out of any residue.

It’s as if capitalism’s growth, its scale and its overt power have been too daunting. Which has allowed the ruling class to continue its onslaughts on the populations of all countries – whether through the War on Terror or the Great Recession, the commodification of more and more aspects of social and personal life (as with the opioid epidemic). Plain, old-fashioned brutality is widespread – such as against the Rohingya or the Uighurs, or in Congo – with the violence now having displaced over 100 million people.

Nonetheless, there have been many popular movements against oppression in the last decade: the Arab Spring, Indignados, Occupy Movement, Gilets Jaunes, Hong Kong resistance; demonstrations in Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey, or Zimbabwe or South Africa over corruption and the poverty and destitution it brings; in Iran over the attacks of the state on women. Scarcely any part of the world has been unaffected by struggle against governments. There has also been a remarkable simultaneity in this resistance, partly due to the speed of modern communications including the near-universally available social media. These movements have included widespread gestures of solidarity – such as over racist murders in the US, with the demonstrations over George Floyd’s murder going global.

What do we make of all this?

* * *

The source of the capitalist system’s economic problems – the threat of overproduction that results from the manner in which surplus value is extracted from the proletariat – remains. Indeed, much of recent technological developments has been used to mitigate or delay destructiveness of that threat, but mitigation may be ineffective and, anyway, is not elimination.

Marx’s coercive law has worked into all areas of bourgeois society and cannot but generate antagonisms between its factions. From this comes the drive to disrupt and corrode all aspects of social life, not least of which are the destruction of the environment and mobilisations for war.

For more than 150 years, the state apparatuses of capital have stood against the interests of the working class. No matter, whether democratic or totalitarian, the state cannot be used by the proletariat.

The challenges the proletariat faces today are in some respects the same as they always were. But, although ruling class ideology has always been full of half-truths and lies, the ideological barrage today is unremitting and its effects have been made worse by the universal availability – mainly through television and social media – of nationalist, democratic, authoritarian, xenophobic, religious – often contradictory – messages generated by state and market needs. The result is disorientation and confusion among populations in general and the working class specifically. The identity of the proletariat is a primary target; and hence the widespread campaigns on identity today focus on individuality so as to undermine sociality.

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 as there are no participants alive today meaning that the working class has to relearn everything from scratch – and in circumstances very different from the past. What is missing are workers’ own organisations – yet in a world in which they cannot have permanent organisations, this can only be in struggle. They can’t develop by accretion, gradually. Not only must they arise out of the struggle, they will disappear incipiently, unfinished.

In recent months there have been massive demonstrations in France; the largest popular demonstration ever has taken place in India. In China there was an explosive reaction to the Covid lockdown. There have been huge protests at the treatment of women in Iran, at the banks and government in Lebanon, and widespread demonstrations over the destruction of the environment. These popular movements contain many workers, but they 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 this regard, the massive strike wave in the UK that has gone on for nearly a year is certainly composed of workers, but has been corralled ideologically by unionism – despite union membership having fallen substantially over past decades. This struggle in the UK has not had major confrontations with the forces of the state – as, say with the massive combative struggles in the 1980s – and highlights how powerful are the ideological forces standing in the way of the proletariat.

It has long been said that the working class has only two things going for it: its consciousness and its capacity for self-organisation. Today’s situation only emphasises the fundamental need for both.We have to ask: how is this to be done?

Marlowe

16 May 2023

Remarks for the Periodisation Discussion at the Brussels Meeting

Note: the text contains references to texts of other participants in the Brussels meeting, Link and Mcl.

Commonly, some well-known quotes from Marx are used to open up statements on the periodisation of capitalism such as: “From forms of development of the productive forces these relations [of production] turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. … No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed …” As Link points out, from this the conclusion is drawn that “… capitalist decadence consists in the productive forces being fettered…” We need to be blunt. The eloquent summary Marx gives of his guiding principle in the Preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy is wrong and has been clearly invalidated by the actual economic experience of the 20^th Century. Furthermore, Marx never gave any concrete evidence for his claim concerning the ‘sufficiency’ (to use Marx’s term) of a social order to develop productive forces in pre-capitalist societies.

One of the concepts which was common in Marx’s day and which has been absorbed into the contemporary periodisation discussion is the notion of progress. This concept (of relatively recent historical origin) became associated strongly in the 19^th Century with the development of capitalism’s productive forces whose growth was unparalleled. Tying this association to Marx’s ideas has generated a fog around historical developments and their interpretations; the use of the term ‘historic mission’ is a source of theoretical ambiguity as it flirts with determinism and teleology. Within a discussion of progress today it is almost inevitable that obsolescence should also be introduced; But what does this mean? Capitalism is not obsolescent in the eyes of the bourgeoisie who strive to maintain it tooth and nail. Neither is it obsolescent to the proletariat – on the contrary, capital is its active, deadly enemy despite being its creator. The fate of humanity is in the hands of the proletariat – as the only actor potentially capable of releasing it from capital’s relentless pursuit of value.

Where does the real domination of capital lie in this? Marx describes the taking-over by capitalist production of industry after industry where only formal subsumption prevailed until – through technological developments – the production is done for production’s sake, on a social scale shedding its individual character. This ongoing process resulted in the real domination of capital in those industries. Historically, this process reached a stage where we can say that capitalism as a whole had taken on the social and global character of real domination – even if there were swathes of small-scale producers who were not individually participating in that characteristic. Such producers, such as millions of peasant producers in India or Africa or China, were nonetheless constrained by the world market of capitalist production and economically imprisoned by its characteristic of real domination. This gave the lie to the Third Worldists who argued for alternative routes to development. And because of real domination, capitalism has created a death world. Barbarism indeed.

Marx’s analysis of capitalism – not completed – was contained in a very large body of work, and not just on the pages of Capital. His writings on the actual conflicts between ruling classes and the struggle of the proletariat all have to be taken on board without fixating on the value-form almost to the exclusion of all else. Only five years after the publication of Capital, Marx analysed the Civil War in France and the Paris Commune for the General Council of the International without reference to the value-form.. Was this a mistake? I don’t think so; capitalism operates at many interacting levels.

It seems that for some Marxists today questions concerning the development of capitalism can and should be reduced to quantitative measurements only – as Mcl does in his text. I therefore go along with Link, who says: “I do not see that numerical or economistic measurements of accumulation, rate of profit or exploitation are sufficient to define the periods of ascendant capitalism nor its decline.” Furthermore, the actual choice of measures – with little from the 19^th Century – also need justification. The expansion of the capitalist economy in the 19^th Century makes it difficult to measure the actual state of the global capitalist system at any given point. If anyone using national measures as proxy for the whole system then this substitution requires justification.

In IP’s reference text, point 24 says: “But to explain why World War I happened when it did, as well as how it developed, a great number of factors have to be taken into account, including the weight of the past on the capitalist class, of an entire history in which economic gains and territorial conquest went hand in hand, of the successes of protectionism which reinforced the idea that state power was the key to market expansion. Other contingent factors played a role. However, instead of seeing those as competing explanations, we should look at how these factors interacted within the context of a slowly building need to devalorize, caused by the maturation of the contradictions of the value- form.” The “great number of factors” must be considered in depth to get an overall picture.

(How has this trend to drop historical and political dimensions to periodisation come about? It may be because of an over-influence of academic Marxism in which the revolutionary subject has no real role – which leaves discussion on an abstract terrain. But that’s only a speculation.)

The question of periodisation should not be reduced to a search for the right numerical measures to date an exact turning point in capitalism’s historic trajectory. Capitalism’s historic trajectory is economic, social and political in character – with its competitive nature punctuating that trajectory with warfare. Its economic activity has never existed in isolation. And Marx never thought so.

Marlowe

16 May 2023

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. The results are the same.

The war in Ukraine was also a factor. Assad’s ally Russia could have launched an air campaign against the Syrian rebels but that would have diverted military resources from the war in Ukraine at a crucial moment – now that “peace’negociations seem to be approaching – and the results would have been uncertain at best. Putin might have seen it as a trap of the West to weaken the Russian position in Ukraine and choose not to fall in it. He had, in chess terms, to give up a bishop to protect his queen.

Hezbollah, a crucial mainstay of the regime, had to withdrew its troops in Syria to deploy them against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, while its bases in Syria were bombed to smithereens. Iran also had little choice but to withdraw its troops from Syria, once it was clear that Russia wasn’t going to try to save the regime.

So, while the turn of events was surprising, perhaps we should have seen it coming. Every step led to the next one. The brutal destruction of Gaza, the crushing of Hamas, the missile attacks and assassinations in Lebanon and Iran, showing that Israel can strike anyone and anything anywhere in the Middle East while the US and UK assure that any attempt at retaliation remains futile, the invasion and terrorizing of Lebanon, the defeat of Hezbollah and now the toppling of Iran’s ally Assad: it all fits together.

The “axis of resistance” is gone. Iran, the main challenger to American domination of the Middle East, is forced into a defensive position and can do little more than accelerate its nuclear program (even though the chances are high that its installations would be bombed once it would start – or even be able to start- to produce nuclear weapons). For now, it seems unlikely that the other challengers to American hegemony, Russia and China, can do anything about it. US imperialism scored a big win.

The whole set of conflicts was a demonstration of its overwhelming military power and willingness to use it. Israel had its own imperialist interests but it also acted as an agent of the US and its European allies, who kept the flow of arms going which enabled the IDF’s massacres and who protected Israel from retaliatory attacks. Meanwhile, in the diplomatic theater, Israel and the US played the usual good cop – bad cop routine.

The reason why it’s such a big win is fossil fuel. If capitalism would be moving to a clean energy economy, the vast oil and gas reserves of the Middle East would be of diminishing importance but the opposite is true. The world economy needs ever more energy to grow and because it is capitalist, it needs to grow in order not to collapse. In 2004, the world consumed 12.5 billion tons of oil equivalent (TOE), in 2014 13.6 billion TOE and in 2024, global energy consumption is projected to reach 15.3 billion TOE. And of that growing total, the part of fossil fuel keeps rising: In 2014, the world consumed 80.91% of its total energy from fossil fuels and by 2024 this figure has risen to 82.5%. This shows not only that the greening of capitalism is a myth but also that the importance of the Middle East is greater than ever on the inter-imperialist chessboard. Not only the economies but also the war machines consume ever more fossil fuel. If the present tendency towards mounting inter-imperialist confrontation would lead to a global war between opposing blocs, whoever would control the Middle East would have a clear advantage.

The demonstration of US/Israeli military dominance comes right on time for the new (old) US president. It fits his agenda and style, which both on the international and domestic front is based on the projection of power and intimidation.

Of course, the domestic situation played a decisive role in the demise of Assad as well. The vast majority of the population hated his government. But that was nothing new. What was new was a major shift in the balance of forces in the region. Yet the fact that Assad was so easily toppled shows, once again, the vulnerability of governments that rely solely on state violence to cling to power. Assad had no ideological grip on the population and was incapable to halt or even slow the deterioration of its conditions of survival. The Syrian economy was in the doldrums and the part controlled by the government was worst off, in part because of the sanctions imposed by the West. Inflation and unemployment grew rapidly. The regime’s purpose of the murder of the thousands of civilians whose mass graves are now discovered was to sow fear, to cower the population into submission, but it was made possible by the great number of people for whom there was no room in the shrinking economy. They could be killed because they were not needed. Like Gazans and many millions more who have no value for capital.

And now, many Syrians who have fled are returning. They find their land devastated, their cities in ruins, scarce resources and conflicts over them. The country remains a vipers nest. The state is weak and disorganized which leaves room for big and small players to conquer and rule. Israel, which kept bombing Syria even after Assad was gone, has added a swath of land to the part of Syria it annexed in 1967. Turkey also occupies a part of Syria and wants to attack the part controlled by the Kurdish YPG (“Rojava”) but the Kurdish army is an ally of the US which has a military base in the area. Russia still has its naval and air force bases on the Syrian north coast and will not give those up easily. Then there are the remnants of the toppled regime, the remnants of Isis, and all the militias, armies and factions that were formed during the ‘civil’ war, some loosely allied with the new government, some against it, some allied with outside powers like Turkey and Qatar, all using the existing religious differences to stoke division and carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. Ahmed al-Sharaa (Muhammad Al-Jawlani), the leader of the new government (ex-Al Qaeda, ex-Isis) received a media make-over from dangerous terrorist with a price on his head to heroic liberator and is now supposed to lead Syria on a path to reconciliation and reconstruction. It doesn’t look good.

Of course we’re glad that the Assad regime has fallen but the joy may not last very long. Peace and prosperity will not return to the region any time soon. For the working class in Syria, the bulk of the population, it is now essential not to be divided by the religious and other sectarian fault lines used to bind them to various factions of capital, and instead to fight autonomously for their class interests, against war and exploitation, for a better life. And why not believe that there may come a day when proletarians in other countries do the same, in the Middle East, in all parts of the world: fight against war and exploitation, for a better life, and refuse to be divided by national, religious, racial and other imposed fault lines. It seems utopian, especially in the Middle East. Yet the need becomes clearer by the day. Capitalism drags the world towards an environmental holocaust, towards impoverishment and global war. But what is missing is confidence in the possibility of a different world, a human community. We feel powerless. By “we” we mean the ordinary people whose labor reproduces society, who make the world go round and who want nothing more than an end to war and exploitation, a better life for all, yes but… we don’t believe yet that it is possible. It is a matter of consciousness: potentially we are so much more powerful than we realize.

December 31

INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE

* * * *

Like probably most of those who read this, we in IP have followed these events closely, trying to understand what is happening. We realize it is complicated, many factors intermingle. We have our differences on how to interpret the events and have debated those openly. We want to continue this discussion with a series of articles on the wars in the Middle East, of which the text above is the first installment. The debate we had earlier centered on the question whether capitalism’s need to manage, including liquidate, surplus proletarians, which it increasingly produces as more labor power is being banned from the ever more technological global production process and cannot be profitably exploited, was a driving force of the war. However, both sides agreed that the systemic crisis of capitalism intensifies inter-imperialist conflicts and that this explains the broader “logic” of the war escalation. The next two texts are written by comrades who are not part of the IP group but who share many if not most of its positions. We do however disagree with some of their views, as we will make clear in the introductions, but they both add interesting elements to our understanding of the period. So let the debate continue.

IP

We recently published a leaflet denouncing the war in Gaza. The intention was to distribute it at demonstrations as a means of engaging participants in discussion. After it was published on our website, it was criticized by some of our members and by others in the milieu for not being clear enough about the fact that the inter-imperialist nature of the war in Gaza is paramount, and that only proletarian class struggle can impede and break the inter-imperialist conflicts and wars endemic to capitalism.

Whereas we agree on these last points, a revision of our leaflet has led to a disagreement centered on the role played by the increasing number of proletariats who have become superfluous to capital, in the unfolding of capitalist crisis and war; and this war in particular.

We believe that it is important to have political debates in the open and the reader may expect more articles on these subjects forthcoming.

In the meantime we publish a string of texts that were produced in the immediate wake of the leaflet. Our hope is that by making available our discussion and openly showing the nature of our debate, others will be encouraged to contribute.

IP

The Gazan Inferno

For revolutionaries, the two most important statements to be made about this butchery are: that this is but the latest murderous eruption of global inter-imperialist antagonisms, and that the only solution for the proletariat is through class struggle. Against these perspectives the recent leaflet, No War in Gaza, published on the Internationalist Perspective website in December is not only sadly wanting but flirts with opportunism by diluting what we have to say to the working class to make it amenable to people we are likely to meet on demonstrations.

* * *

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union 35 years ago, the physiognomy of global imperialism changed considerably. With no substantial rivals, the US – with support from its many acolytes – was able to inflict its so-called ‘War Against Terror’ on the world for 20 years. But rivalries to the US did build – though with novel (and not so novel) dispositions. Russia redeveloped its forces against NATO’s eastern extension, against which it has been militarily active for a decade. China became an economic giant and embarked on a programme to rival American military capability and reach. Several Middle Eastern states have used their massive financial wealth first to globalise their influence and then to become active players in expanded military rivalries (such as in Yemen). The inter-imperialist antagonisms endemic to capitalism in this period operate and intersect at global, regional and local levels; rivalries and alliances are forever shifting as economic and military interests change in the resulting chaos. (That Russian oil has now entered the Pentagon’s supply chain is only one recent example of this.)

While the Israeli state might have its local agenda, the current war with Hamas is in the context of a galaxy of conflicts – along with the bloody wars in Yemen, Sudan, Congo and elsewhere. What is not imperialist about it? That the most recent Gaza conflict was set off just as overt rapprochement between several of the most powerful Arab governments and Israel was imminent is a clue as to the role of regional rivalries centring on Iran; the presence of two American carrier groups and the escalation of hostilities in the Red Sea and the Gulf involving more military forces is another. To reduce this dimension is to veil the global context for the whole proletariat and hides the existential threat it faces.

To argue that this horror show is primarily a manoeuvre by the Israeli government to deal with its uniquely substantial “surplus population” (whatever that is) is vacuous. To highlight the conflict as an “asymmetric war” is to focus on the difference between military capabilities which leftists use to justify support for the ‘lesser evil’. Suppose the asymmetry were to switch – would that make the mass murder any better?

* * *

The leaflet says: “We call for an immediate end to the war, the release of hostages and prisoners, an end to the blockade. We call to build international solidarity against warmongers and nation-builders.”

Who is this leaflet calling on? Capitalist nations and governments? Are they supposed to abandon their interests at our request? To promote the idea that the various factions of capital listen to ‘calls’ is to reinforce illusions promulgated by liberals and leftists. ‘Peace’ demonstrations are inadequate. The Vietnam War did not end because of the demonstrations by millions of people in the US and elsewhere; the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not stopped by the participation of one million people in London in the biggest anti-war demonstration in the UK ever. And the only way that international solidarity can be built is through class struggle; is there any other kind?

The hard reality is that there is no solution for one issue until there is a solution for all – through class struggle. The fact is that imperialists will continue their manoeuvres and continue to murder millions until stopped by a self-conscious proletariat in its class struggle against the capitalist states. That perspective is the only one we can hold out for the working class. In World War II and in World War I, revolutionaries did not call for immediate ends or hostage release or humanitarian aid; they called for the proletariat to turn the imperialist war into a class war. Class struggle against capitalism is the only answer. And there is no short cut.

As revolutionaries we speak to the proletariat of the world – in Gaza and in Israel and everywhere else. We must have at all times clarity about the class terrain.

Marlowe

January 2, 2024

The Role of the “Surplus Population” in Our Analysis

Recently Internationalist Perspective drafted a leaflet on Gaza. The purpose of the leaflet is its distribution in rallies, but after its publication on our website it drew criticism from some voices in our milieu. Some of the critiques have found resonance with a few members of IP. In particular, the question of a “surplus population” has become an important source of contention in our discussions. One member, for instance, has said that in the context of the war in Gaza the “surplus population is irrelevant.” Without wishing to detract from the emphasis on the inter-imperialist nature of the war, it is on the issue of “surplus population” that I would like to make a first contribution to this debate.

***

To begin with, it is impossible to reduce war to one cause. So the existence of a “surplus population” cannot be the cause, let alone the only cause, of war. However, I do not agree that it is an irrelevant factor.

To give a causal explanation of war in capitalism IP has often relied on the idea that a crisis of valorization of value compels capitalism to unleash its destructive forces in order to continue the process of valorization. This explanation has been met with criticism, most recently from one of the participants of the Brussels conference last May. Indeed it seems a bit mechanistic, if not with a touch of fantasy, to suggest that Capitalism somehow sets out to consciously destroy itself so it can continue to produce.

It is true that the methods of making war are intrinsic to capitalism; its tactics and strategies are reflected in economic phenomenon. But war is nonetheless irrational and contradictory, it destroys economy and cannibalizes itself. We must, therefore, interrogate how this irrational and contradictory dimension is harnessed by the state which employs it against the working class in the form of imperialism. It is here, where, in my opinion, an analysis of a “surplus population” can contribute to our overall understanding of the connection between wars and the capitalist mode of production.

As Marx explains, to keep profits growing capitalists are forced to find ways to cut labor costs. In the post-war period this took place through the introduction of new industrial methods which gave rise to Fordism. The draining of the world’s countryside from the 1950s all the way through to the ‘70s provided capitalism with the labor necessary for new waves of industrialization. This industrial expansion meant both the integration of larger numbers of people into the proletariat as well as a growing consumer power of the working class amidst cheap products and rising inflation. But the consumer-footprint which capital’s high productivity output implied, and which increasingly became a structural necessity, was eventually undermined by a tendentially declining rate of profit.

By the ‘80s Fordism was already unable to increase productivity. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, capitalism’s now permanent crisis was met with waves of “globalization.” This was a period of “social contraction”, which saw, among other things, a shift of capital into de-regulated financial sectors (creating the first global banking crisis), the integration of China into the WTO, and, importantly, the accelerated implementation of new digital technologies into industrial processes. This latter tendency, still underway, provoked an even sharper rise in the organic composition of capital. It is therefore that the new global industrial landscape has taken shape alongside the expulsion of masses of living labor from capital’s automated processes. Those workers who are excluded from capital with no possibility of their re-integration, are forming a greater and greater portion of the collective-worker who can neither be considered a lumpenproletariat nor a reserve-army of labor in the way that Marx had described. This, loosely termed, “surplus population,” is manifested in different ways, such as in the creation of what Mike Davis has described as a “planet of slums” or what the capitalist state calls “an immigration problem.”

Now, to be clear, I would not argue that capitalists have found the “solution” to their “surplus population problem” in war. This would be a misplacement of the role of “surplus population” in analysis. However, I will argue that the presence of a “surplus population” represents a unique condition which acts as an expedient for the way in which the capitalist state steps in to interpret social crises and thus assert its logic amidst the insecurity (and despair) that capitalism creates.

When the state, or a proto-state, acts belligerently, the significant presence of a population which is overwhelmingly excluded from industrial labor (like in Gaza) can become a basis for integrating the collective-worker into forms of nationalism on racial, xenophobic and ethnic grounds. In the absence of proletarian identity such a “surplus population” becomes ideologically susceptible to ethno-nationalist forms of “solidarity”. This is not to say that employed workers are not susceptible; the state also imposes a national identity onto that capital which represent worker’s “security.” However, when people are excluded from capital’s cash-nexus, even the promise of future material security disappears, and with it any possibility of maintaining their identity on a consumer basis. Thus, in the absence of the possibility to form their identity through capital-labor bonds, a “surplus population” turns to the only things that it “owns,” its body, its children, and its past.

I believe that in the context in which a material crisis is also expressed in a crisis of identity, the focus on the body exacerbates the possibility of using biological and semi-biological markers to ideologically divide the working class¹. The isolation and desperation that capitalist crisis creates, engenders a longing for community, a pretext in which historical memory can become equated with an irrational and mythologized past. The inclusion of people’s identity in such an imagined communal-past is portrayed, by the state, on the very basis of the exclusion of, and most often an induced hatred for, “the other.” It is in this way that a reactionary understanding of the past becomes the ideological justification for the slaughter of the working class.

With the increasing emergence of a “surplus population,” the formation of ethno-nationalist identities by the racial subjectivation of “the other” has become a central part of capitalist warfare. Moreover, this ideological trait of imperialism (a tactic taken from colonialism), when coupled with new military technology, acts as further grounds for the disappearance of any distinction between soldier and civilian, adult or child, since entire populations can be portrayed as “the enemy” and ultimately treated as such by capital’s destructive forces.

In my opinion, to ignore the role of a “surplus population” in the context of capitalist war is, a. to have an incomplete picture of the causal-conditions in which capitalist war unfolds; and b. to fail to understand war as the most radical form of state-oppression and therefore to interrogate the tactics with which the ruling class subjects the collective-worker to “imperialism” thereby forming significant obstacles to proletarian self-awareness.

Although inter-imperialism represents the framework within which every war should be understood, each conflict is unique in the way in which it engages the working class. And the working class, although it shares a common historical interest, is far from being a monolithic entity. The transmutations in its composition over the last hundred years need to be understood. A key factor in this understanding is the emergence of a “surplus population”. This factor should be integrated into our milieu’s analysis and not dismissed as “vacuous”.

SY

January 5

IN DEFENSE OF THE IP-LEAFLET

After reading Marlowe’s text, I had to reread the leaflet. Does it really deserve this harsh critique? In my opinion, while it is not perfect, it doesn’t.

The leaflet was made for distribution in the large demonstrations against the slaughter going on in Gaza, not for a (non-existent) class-based struggle. The aim was to show that this war is a product of capitalism, to show how its systemic crisis intensifies its inter-imperialist conflicts and makes an ever growing part of humanity superfluous – an unprofitable burden – for capital. Israel is dealing with its surplus-population in ways that show the future capitalism has in store for humanity. The leaflet makes clear that capitalism has only more war and misery to offer and that nationalism always serves its cause. It calls for an end to this war, for an end to capitalism, for international solidarity and the self-organization of the working class. I stand behind that.

As I said, it’s not perfect. Leaflets rarely are. The inter-imperialist context could have been more developed. And in the sentence “We call to build international solidarity against warmongers and nation-builders”, the insertion of ‘working class’ after ‘international’ would have been appropriate. There may be other possibilities to improve the text that we can decide on. It’s a tool that can be sharpened.

But the charge that the leaflet treats the inter-imperialist context as an after-thought is incorrect. Here is what it says on this:

“Everywhere military spending is rising. We are told this is needed as more war may be coming. This is all against the background of a world economy sinking steadily deeper into crisis, from which its managers know no way out — no way out but war. The destabilizing effect of this crisis melts frozen fronts across the world. Opportunities and necessities arise as existing balances of power shift. And like the weapons which must be produced for war, minds must be molded for the same purpose. Our rulers want us to admire soldiers, glorify battlefield victories, wave national flags and be convinced that fighting for justice means supporting one side against the other in inter-imperialist conflicts, which all wars are today. Siding with the nation always means siding with the ruling class of the nation, the managers or would-be managers of its capital.”

There are other passages highlighting the inter-imperialist driving force. What is striking in this one is that it connects the rise of inter-imperialist conflict with the systemic crisis of the capitalist world economy and shows how nationalism of all kinds serves capitalism’s destructive tendency. Marlowe writes, in his first sentence, “that this is but the latest murderous eruption of global inter-imperialist antagonisms”. That is true and yet it’s also more than just the latest eruption: what we witness is an acceleration of capitalism’s death drive in direct relation to the impasse of the global capitalist economy. That is a connection the leaflet makes and Marlowe does not. In his second paragraph he gives a short overview of global imperialism since the end of the USSR without any mention of the building impasse. He gives no reason why, if this is but the latest eruption of what’s been going on for a long time, it is now an existential threat for the whole proletariat which the leaflet supposedly hides.

Marlowe goes out of his way to misinterpret the leaflet. He writes:

“To highlight the conflict as an “asymmetric war” is to focus on the difference between military capabilities which leftists use to justify support for the ‘lesser evil’. Suppose the asymmetry were to switch – would that make the mass murder any better?”

If you read the passage to which he refers², you see that it states that the two sides are not different, that the difference comes only from the different means at their disposal, none is any better than the other. Exactly the opposite of what Marlowe infers, support for one side.

The leaflet calls for an end to the slaughter and a lot more:

“We call for an immediate end to the war, the release of hostages and prisoners, an end to the blockade. We call to build international solidarity against warmongers and nation-builders. (…) We call for an end to this war, these borders, and all divisions which pit the working class against itself. We call for international solidarity and the self-organization of the working class. We call for real communism: a human community without exploitation, with freedom and dignity for all.”

Admitted, it’s a tall order. But still, that is what we’re calling for. Arguably it could have been formulated better, but in essence, that’s what we’re advocating. Maybe it should have called for more, especially concrete steps, like calling on soldiers on both side to desert, fraternize, attack those who give the orders to kill and destroy. Not with the illusion of having any impact on events in Gaza but to indicate, through the mist of nationalist propaganda, the road forward.

Marlowe objects:

“Who is this leaflet calling on? Capitalist nations and governments? Are they supposed to abandon their interests at our request? To promote the idea that the various factions of capital listen to ‘calls’ is to reinforce illusions promulgated by liberals and leftists.‘Peace’ demonstrations are inadequate. The Vietnam War did not end because of the demonstrations by millions of people in the US and elsewhere”.

It seems clear to me that most of these calls are directed to the working class. When the leaflet calls for “international solidarity against warmongers and nation-builders” and for “the self-organization of the working class”, evidently it is not calling on capitalist nations to realize that. When it calls for an end the war, we join our voices to the millions who are outraged about the mass killing and try to convince some of them what the root of the problem is. Yes, this is a demand on the governments. “Are they supposed to abandon their interests at our request?” Yes, every struggle for demands contains the aim to make capitalists concede, to force it to abandon, to some degree, their interests. True, peace demonstrations are inadequate. Does that mean we have to stay away from them? While they are not class based, there are plenty of proletarians participating in them, some of them eager to hear what we have to say. Why should we not join their demand for an end to the war? It is because we share this demand that we can explain that ending these wars requires ending capitalism, against the nationalists and other reformists that dominate the conversations. The same goes for climate demonstrations and others. Marlowe writes, “The Vietnam War did not end because of the demonstrations by millions of people in the US and elsewhere”. That is a half-truth. They were certainly not the sole cause but they were part of the mix. The US did not lose the war militarily, it withdrew under pressure, in large part domestic pressure in which the demonstrations by millions played a role. It was not just the anti-war demonstrations, it was also the waves of wildcat strikes, the riots in the inner cities, May ‘68 and other revolts in Europe and more. All these occurences influenced each other, stimulated each other which made Washington decide, among other things, to get out of Vietnam. I’m not denying that there were other, geostrategic reasons as well, nor that the US later turned its defeat into a victory, making Vietnam into a useful client. This does not undercut the argument that domestic pressure weighed heavily in its decision to withdraw its troops, effectively ceding South Vietnam to the enemy, losing the war.

Many of the pro-revolutionaries of my generation marched in these demonstrations, joining the call to end the war while at the same time attacking the nationalist and reformist ideologies that permeated them. Like the leaflet does. They denounced the calls to support Ho Chi Min and the Vietcong just like the leaflet denounces support for Hamas. For some of us, these demonstrations were the first step to revolutionary positions.

Marlowe emphasizes “The hard reality is that there is no solution for one issue until there is a solution for all – through class struggle.” He’s right. ³And although the leaflet makes that point at the end, it should have been made stronger, more explicitly. But we should not limit our understanding of class struggle to what happens in the factories. The Russian revolution started with a peace demonstration (for immediate demands).We should not shy away from movements which are interclassist at first but can contain germs of revolutionary potential. They can be places where a questioning begins, where we can intervene, while there may be few others. Unfortunately, the global working class, while not defeated, is neither seizing the initiative; the capitalist class is dictating the events. Otherwise, our call for class struggle to end capitalism would sound less abstract.

Surplus-population

As mentioned before, the global crisis of capitalism, the impasse of its economy, is the context in which to comprehend the present acceleration of interimperialist conflict. What is striking about this crisis is that the attempts to overcome it, while beneficial to some, actually make the impasse deeper. Automation, the concentration of capital, monopolism, the chase for technological rent (surplus profit) all lead to a decline of the general rate of profit, meaning that a growing portion of existing capital assets, constant capital as well as variable capital, becomes unprofitable, and hence superfluous for value accumulation. That means that a lot of companies around the world cannot survive, or survive as ‘zombie companies”, living from loans on borrowed time, or hanging on by a thread by intensifying the exploitation of their workers. It also means that a growing portion of the variable capital, the working class becomes superfluous for capital. That is what we mean by “surplus population”. It exists in every country but especially in the global south, hence the massive attempts to escape from there, despite the huge obstacles. This surplus population cannot be equated with a lumpenproletariat surviving at the margins of society, but neither is it an ‘industrial reserve army’ since there is no perspective of them being integrated in the global capitalist chain of production in a new phase of expansion, which will not come. It represents a problem for capital, a financial burden as well as a political danger, since the survival conditions of the surplus population engender unrest and turmoil and the ideological framework of democratic citizenship based on common consumerism no longer can work to subjectify them. The latter point is not in the leaflet but in a text of SY who also theorizes how capitalism fills this ideological vacuum to fit its war drive. This we can discuss later on.

The crisis widens the gap between highly developed, surplus profit yielding capitals and all the rest, as well as between the parts of the world where the former are concentrated (roughly, western Europe, north America and southeast Asia) and the rest. In the former, the surplus population is still relatively small, in the latter it is enormous and growing fast. It is a peculiarity of Israel that it is a part of the former, the high tech capitalist nations, while at the same time it has to manage a large surplus population. This position is the result of its specific role as bridgehead of American imperialism in the Middle East as well as of the general tendency of capitalism to expel living labor which accelerates in periods of crisis. As MacIntosh put it in “Marxism and the Holocaust” (IP # 49, 2008):

”Capitalism, as Marx shows, `calls to life all the powers of science and nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it.’46 The result is the tendential ejection of ever-larger masses of labour from the productive process; the creation of a population that from the point of view of capital is superfluous, no longer even potentially necessary to the creation of value, and indeed having become an insuperable burden for capital, a dead weight that it must bear, even at the expense of its profitability. The existence of such a surplus population — at the level of the total capital of a national entity – can create the conditions for mass murder, inserting the extermination of whole groups of people into the very `logic’ of capital, and through the complex interaction of multiple causal chains emerge as the policy of a capitalist state.”

This is not to say that Israel is trying to exterminate the population of Gaza. But with the ongoing killing of tens of thousands, the destruction of now already more than 70% of the habitations, the certaintly that many more Gazans will die from disease-festering conditions, it is a step in that direction.

A comrade asked: If a big surplus population is a problem for Israel, why does it import workers from Russia, Thailand, Philippines, etc.?

These workers come themselves from countries with a growing surplus population for capital. They are there temporarily (most have a 5 year-contract). If they would be replaced with Palestinians, the majority in Gaza and the West Bank would still be living in the shadow economy or surviving by the handouts channeled through the local prison gangs, Hamas and Fatah. Still, it would be cheaper for Israeli capital to hire local Arab workers instead of importing them from afar, despite their low wages. There was a time when many more Palestinians were employed in the Israeli economy. But the policy of the Israeli state, which accelerated in this century, has been to impose separation in order to strengthen the national identity, the Zionist ideology of a pure Jewish community, the acceptance of an extreme militarization of society, the endurance of wars. As Macintosh writes:

“…the identity upon which the pure community is established, necessarily entails the exclusion of those who do not share the common historico-cultural bases of the mass. Those excluded, the Other, racial, ethnic, or religious minorities for example, though they inhabit the same territorial space, become alien elements within the putatively `homogeneous’ world of the pure community.” And: “… that rage against alterity can become one of the bases for a genocidal project directed at the Other, whose very existence is seen and felt to be a mortal danger to the pure community.”

On the other side, that rage against alterity is stoked by Hamas and consorts for the same purpose. Both sides need the separation.

The growth of nationalism, not only in Israel-Palestina but around the world, the sharply increasing hate-mongering against the Others, mostly immigrants, are ominous signs. National identities are forged in these battles. We can see how they serve capitalist interests, the various imperialist designs, the need to curtail the surplus-population (“mowing the grass”, the IDF calls it) but also how on a deeper level, “the imperative of the destruction of both variable capital (living labour) and constant capital (factories, machines, etc.) shapes the very course of decadent capitalism”, as MacIntosh writes. “The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also drive it towards mass murder and genocide.” I agree. There is a perverse harmony between the incentives the systemic crisis creates for conquest and conflict and the system’s need for destruction of existing, unprofitable capital to restore the conditions for capital accumulation.

Sanderr

January 8

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON “SURPLUS-POPULATION”

In my earlier contribution to the debate, I emphasized the link between capitalism’s systemic crisis and the current increase in militarisation and war. SY, in his latest paper on this subject, writes: “To give a causal explanation of war in capitalism IP has often relied on the idea that a crisis of valorization of value compels capitalism to unleash its destructive forces in order to continue the process of valorization. (…) it seems a bit mechanistic, if not with a touch of fantasy, to suggest that Capitalism somehow sets out to consciously destroy itself so it can continue to produce.” This seems to suggest that we claim that capitalists wage wars with the conscious aim of destroying value. Generally speaking this is not true, their aim is usualy the opposite, to conquer value (or defend it). We have to make a clear distinction between intent and result.

The fact that the global capitalist system is in crisis ⁴ means that there is too much existing value in proportion to the creation of new value. Excess of existing value in all its forms: constant capital (excess production capacity), variable capital (excess workers) and financial capital (financial bubbles, growing debt overhang). All these forms of capital can only remain value if they remain engaged in the creation of new value. When that doesn’t happen a devalorisation of existing cap will result. The fact that the cap class has developed state-capitalist means to temper that, or rather to postpone that, or the fact that the most developed capitals can still rake in megaprofits thanks to their competitive advantage, doesn’t change the underlying dynamic, which the capitalist class cannot stop because “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth […] On the one side […] it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature […] to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it […] On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created.” (Marx, Grundrisse)

Left by itself, this dynamic leads to a great unravelling, a deep depression, a sharp conflict between the needs of capitalism and the reproduction of society, a breakdown and, in the worst case for our rulers: proletarian revolution.

It is the fear of that global unravelling, I suspect, that is one of the roots of the current trend in the capitalist class to focus on self-protection from the storm. What that entails in policies is something different for an hegemonic power than for a contender state, but everywhere it goes hand in hand with an ideological effort to intensify community bonds based on a common, idealized past, on common “values”, common language, religion, race etc. Whatever combination is used, and it differs of course from place to place, it’s always that what the exploited have in common with their exploiters and what convinces the former that the interests of the latter are theirs as well. This trend in the ideology of the ruling class, this populist nationalism, responds to the widely felt longing for community in this time of great uncertainty and atomisation, and since this community is as much defined by exclusion as by inclusion, as B.York wrote, it also responds to the need of the ruling class to separate the community from the undesirables, from the surplus-population, and to prepare the working class for conflict with outsiders, to adapt its subjectivity for war.

The crisis intensifies the economic competition, which was never purely economic but which shifts more to military competition when opportunities for valorization dwindle. It therefore intensifies inter-imperialist conflict which has its own rules of escalation that can overpower economic rationality and yet serve the perpetuation of the capitalist system, without that being the conscious purpose.

The war over Ukraine did not flare up because the nations engaged in it wanted to destroy excess capital, unless you count the desire to destroy each other’s armies, which certainly are commodities that are excess capital since they cannot be used to create new value. But the aim was to conquer capital, not to destroy it. However, that’s what the war has done and continues to do.

But because of the difference between constant and variable capital, between dead labor and living human beings, the elimination of the latter can become a conscious purpose of military destruction.

An unused worker isn’t the same as unused machinery. A machine that can’t be used anymore doesn’t need to be kept alive, doesn’t have a family that has needs too, doesn’t cause havoc, doesn’t revolt, can’t be used by imperialist rivals. It ceases to exist, contrary to human beings. When we see ethnic cleansing in Karabakh, Nigeria, Sudan and many other places, mass expulsions in Pakistan, attacks on homeless in America and on dalits in India, the flattening of entire cities in Gaza and a rising tide of hostility all over the world against undocumented immigrants, the official purpose of course never is to get rid of excess variable capital, of surplus-population. But that seems indeed to be the underlying goal, even when it can, for now, only partially be realized. As the IP-leaflet states, it makes you shudder to think what will happen when the crisis deepens, which it will.

So I don’t think the IP-leaflet was wrong in claiming that dealing with the problem of the surplus-population is one of the underlying causal factors of what is happening in Gaza.

SY, in his text, makes another claim: that the surplus-population is important for capitalist war because it can be used for it, because it is supposedly more easily seduced by ethno-nationalist forms of “solidarity” than any other part of the proletariat. His argument, that the surplus-proletariat lacks a proletarian identity because it is excluded from industrial labor, and that, by having no hope of future material security, it also lacks a consumerist identity, and that therefore it is susceptible to embrace a ‘body-based’ xenophobic nationalist identity, seems speculative to me. One could just as well speculate that the surplus-population, because it is in no position to have consumerist illusions, is the part of the proletariat that is best placed to understand that capitalism has nothing to offer and needs to be abolished. Is either speculation something we see confirmed by what is happening? Do populist xenophobic leaders like Trump, Orban and Le Pen get more support from the surplus-population than from other sectors of society? I don’t think so. The entire class is vulnerable to nationalist ideology. The surplus-proletarians are a part of the class, not standing outside of it. It is true that the conditions in the working class, their conditions of survival and of struggle, differ very much. So much that, according to Kurz and other Wert Kritikers, the idea of a unified global struggle on a working class base has become a pipedream. We don’t agree with that and so we emphasize what all these different parts of the collective worker have in common, and the potential of that. To look at the specific conditions of different parts of the proletariat and try to understand how they may aid or hinder capitalist plans, how they may aid or hinder the development of revolutionary consciousness, is absolutely worthwhile, but we need to be careful not to draw hasty conclusions that underestimate the complexity of the questions.

Sanderr 1/16

Class Struggle – The Only Way Forward

The Gaza leaflet lacks class clarity. We have to recognise this and decide what to do about it. So far as I am aware, it has not been distributed as a leaflet and it should not be. ⁵ Since it has been published on our website I propose that IP also admit that it was politically erroneous and publish a critique and correction. This should be done not only for ourselves but for others in the working class movement who may be grappling with the same issues; we should lead by example.

* * *

In his January 8 text, Sander spends several pages suggesting what the leaflet might have said; I’m not going through it all here, it’s plain to see, but it must be stressed that the problems with the leaflet are not solved by editorial tweaking. To give one example: Sander says that inserting “working class” between ‘international’ and ‘solidarity’ “would have been appropriate.” Appropriate? Not “essential”, or “the heart of the matter”?

Sander also says: “Maybe it should have called for more, especially concrete steps, like calling on soldiers on both side to desert, fraternize, attack those who give the orders to kill and destroy. Not with the illusion of having any impact on events in Gaza but to indicate, through the mist of nationalist propaganda, the road forward.” The problem here is the word, “maybe.” Delete that and we have a real criticism; retain it and it just looks like the writer wants to cover our backsides. It won’t work.

The crux of Sander’s political defence of the leaflet is in his second sentence: “The leaflet was made for distribution in the large demonstrations against the slaughter going on in Gaza, not for a (non-existent) class-based struggle.” This is an appalling argument. Instead of going to demonstrations to argue from our, IP’s, left communist perspectives, the implication is that we should just soft-pedal and capitulate to the surrounding leftist, liberal and other mystifications on ‘peace’ and ‘ceasefire’. And the “(non-existent) class-based struggle”? Instead of pointing to its necessity for the working class to move forward, the class lines of the left communist movement are greyed-out.

* * *

Where did the obsession about ‘surplus population’ come from? An interview with Emilio Minassian apparently. Now, Minassian denies that this is an inter-imperialist war, and asserts that it is an “internal affair” centred round “surplus proletarians.” This interview was taken up in a personal blog, then incorporated into a signed article, ‘Warmongers Left and Right’, from where surplus population has morphed into a position of IP in the Gaza leaflet. Our focus on the situation in Gaza must return to inter-imperialist antagonisms. IP’s focus in general must return to class struggle as the only way forward for the proletariat.

* * *

This leaflet must be corrected publicly

Marlowe

January 19

On Surplus-populations, Subjectivation and the State

In his latest response, Sanderr has challenged my claim that a surplus population is more susceptible to ideology. He says this is speculative. He makes a good point. But I want to clarify that whether the surplus population is more or less “susceptible” to ideology or is more or less “useful” to the capitalist class is not the point I wish to make; the point is that it constitutes an important vector by which the State distributes social subjectivity.

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Class consciousness only emerges when the working class acts as a class and in the interests of the class. When the state relates to the class through its administrative networks, legal institutions, market identities and even cultural forms such as the family, it divides the class and atomizes it, thereby breaking it up and weakening its possibility to act as a class. Thus the state becomes one of the most formidable obstacles to class action and class consciousness.

Subjectivity relates to individuals but cannot be understood by recourse to individuals. Individuals are ‘caught’ in one ideology or another, one identity or another, but the origin of this identity will always be in social divisions.

Of course immigrants, for instance, are not themselves individually susceptible to ideology in the classic nationalist sense- how could they be?! But they are constituted in the socio-political imaginary as the ‘outsiders’ necessary for the formation of those other nationalist and xenophobic identities. Both identities are mutually constituted; they represent an ideological division of the working class. In this sense, high numbers of excess labor become grounds for a split in social identity.

From the point of view of capital, the working class represents abstract labor. A mass of undifferentiated potential value. In capitalist crisis, a quantitative portion of this abstract labor represents a burden because it cannot valorize itself.

The state does not only perform the function of postponing and tempering de-valorization, as Sanderr says, but performs the active function of differentiating abstract labor into its concrete configurations. The state disciplines, administers, sorts out and socializes labor along productive and re-productive lines. That is, it subjectivates it.

In a moment of crisis, when there is a breakdown between the needs of capital and the reproduction of society, the state finds its highest raison d’être, it steps in to insure a distribution of social functions that will not represent an attack on the system. The state thus intervenes along re-productive lines by bringing the working class into conformity with its hierarchy. It decides who lives, who dies, who lives where, what kinds of resources are available to who, who is allowed to wield violence, who has re-productive capacities over themselves and others, etc.

A key way in which the state performs this social/class division is by subjectivation, by transforming crisis into ideology; interpreting experience by recourse to irrational narratives. In doing so its fabricates ideological justifications for the murder of the working class. The surplus population, as indicator of capital’s crisis, becomes subjectivated by the state which interprets it [as crisis] and gives it an identity within the hierarchical state structures of capitalism. No social identity group (no matter how oppressed) will ever be able to attack the system as a whole; so far as the working class is thus divided so far capital will continue to reign.

An increase in surplus population, in fact, is not unconnected from the rise of populism. As such populism is an indicator of a political instability of the ruling class. But populism cannot overcome the crisis to which it is a response. Yet populist movements represent an opportunity for the state to intervene and reassert itself as a necessary solution. One indicator of the state asserting itself amidst growing crisis is the increasing presence of proto-states which use terror and war as their primary weapon.

War is the truest expression of the State, and its most powerful reinforcement. Just as Capitalism must create Artificial Needs for its increasing Superfluous Commodities, the State must also do the same and continually create Artificial Conflicts of interest requiring its Violent Intervention. –Bureau of Public secrets 1991

SY

January 21

On the Writing of the Gaza Leaflet

I wrote most of the leaflet. I did think the question of surplus population was underdeveloped in the text, and I have not been surprised by the debate that has followed. However, I was surprised by the claims, both internally and externally, of the text’s leftism or insufficient communism. There are a few points that I feel I should clarify.

First of all, I want to contextualize the effort of the leaflet. My active “political life” is relatively short for this milieu, basically beginning with recently joining IP. Previously in my development, I was drawn to the works of Monsieur Dupont, Letters Journal, etc., with their critiques of activism, organization, and the leftism of the ultraleft. This ‘salon’ once claimed something like that proselytizing pro-revolutionaries must either sound like used-car salesmen or millenarians, and I think in some ways this is true. However, I am optimistic enough to think this work is worthwhile. I think revolution is possible, and I think intervention can make a difference. I thought this leaflet would be a good opportunity for me to crystallize this shift — from a basically schizoid line of “communists should only talk to communists” to believing in the importance of clear communication of communist politics. However, I had difficulty writing the pamphlet because I couldn’t figure out the intended audience. Given the context of demonstrations where I live, I tried to think about who would be at such a demonstration and how I would speak to such people. Where I live, it is given that demonstrations about the war, if not immediately nationalistic, would all be heavily leftist. It is also safe to assume that such demos would not have “working class character”. My goals in writing the leaflet to distribute at such a demo were to practice expressing myself — perhaps to an audience too-familiar with leftist sloganeering — and for an internationalist perspective to be heard.

I can understand concerns that the text was not as class-forward as other polemics. I didn’t write the text to be in conversation with leftism, but to an audience who may have been exposed to leftism before. I think it is important to meet people in their rage and grief, and to validate their anguish before pointing to the larger picture. Telling people that their (popular / democratic / etc.) solutions to such horrors won’t work because the world is much worse than they realize is painful and difficult. The narrative arc I decided on was (1) to underscore how awful things are (2) highlight that this is a part of a concerted pattern (3) identify the actors at play (4) show the system which leases them power, and (5) point to an agency which can change the world. I think this was an appropriate choice for an anti-war protest.

Marlowe claims that the leaflet “flirts with opportunism by diluting what we have to say to the working class to make it amenable to people we are likely to meet on demonstrations.” I think the text does change the presentation and style of what IP has to say to the working class, and does so to make it more amenable to people at protests, but I also think the stakes of leafleting are low. What we do is important but I think it’s important to be realistic about the impact of our actions.

I think Marlowe’s objections to “calling” are misplaced, or are already anticipated. This is not a Trotskyist transitional program with a list of reform demands that can never be satisfied. “We call for” means “we want” or “we stand for.” I think an argument can be made that these lines are bad since they anticipate the questions of a skeptical buyer on the ideological marketplace: “but what would you do if you were in power?”. I’m happy to drop such phrases for formulations like “there can be no xyz without proletarian revolution.”

I think the theoretical concerns about the causes of this war are valid. I think this is another place where it is essential that we know our audience — meditations on the ‘aims’ of capital vs. those of its personifications can weigh down a polemic, especially when the right balance of simplicity and accuracy is delicate.

With all that said, the text does not permit a leftist or non-communist reading. It is an explicitly communist text which identifies the working class as the only subject with the power to radically transform the world.

HK

2/7

Endnotes:

1 Among other things, the pandemic, became an opportunity for the State to treat it as an “exercise” in isolating and dividing the working-class through the imposition of a “biological image” on the population; thus reinforcing its role as provider of “solutions” for social grievances.

2 “it is an asymmetric war, which in this case means that one side’s troops first enter a home to kill an entire family, while the other can rain down bombs to the same end. Asymmetry means that many more Gazans have been murdered than Israelis, as they are the collateral damage whose lives each army has written off as an acceptable cost.”

3 But his claim that there were no struggles for immediate demands which pro-revolutionaries supported during the world wars is not correct. There was, to be true, very little class struggle except at the end of ww1, but when it occurred there were immediate demands, like in the Amsterdam general strike (1941) which demanded ending the Jewish deportations. Spoiler: the strikers lost.

4 And not a “permanent crisis”, a crisis may be prolongated as it is today but by definition it cannot be permanent; this concept flattens the cyclical course of the accumulation process.

5 It was, but only at one demo.

No War in Gaza! Fight the Nightmare Which Haunts Us All!

War is the climax of the nightmare in Gaza. We hear the numbers rise every day, but the losses are immeasurable. Like many of the past 50 years, it is an asymmetric war, which in this case means that one side’s troops first enter a home to kill an entire family, while the other can rain down bombs to the same end. Asymmetry means that many more Gazans have been murdered than Israelis, as they are the collateral damage whose lives each army has written off as an acceptable cost. We call for an immediate end to the war, the release of hostages and prisoners, an end to the blockade. We call to build international solidarity against warmongers and nation-builders.

We refuse the language of right to the land, of border legitimacy, and of national security. The rallying cries and waving flags hide the truth: we are being tricked, bribed, or forced into the wars of our masters. We refuse to excuse mass murder in the name of “justice”, “resistance”, or “defense”. War can never bring peace or freedom beyond the peace of a graveyard and the freedom to pillage the dead.

We are not pacifists, either. A truce won’t free Gaza from the nightmare. The IDF will resume its peacetime role as prison guard, and its junior partner Hamas (or its heirs) as a prison gang. In Gaza, Israel imposes misery by limiting the flow of capital and supplies across the border, and Hamas manages this misery by taxing goods and crushing protests. For most of humanity, the end of war is at best a return to business as usual: to work their lives away to buy survival, rely on aid if there is no work, scrounge for food if there is no aid, or starve if there is no food. In Gaza, wages, aid, and food are limited. Can fighting every day to scrape by — just enough to survive — really be called “peace”?

Each side fights to change the division of power between them. As always, each side uses the other’s brutality to justify its own. As always, whoever wins, humanity loses. In Israel-Palestine, the unspoken truce was suddenly broken, as it was broken in recent years in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, and in Sudan. Frozen fronts have melted, and others seem on the verge of doing so. Everywhere military spending is rising. We are told this is needed as more war may be coming. This is all against the background of a world economy sinking steadily deeper into crisis, from which its managers know no way out — no way out but war. The destabilizing effect of this crisis melts frozen fronts across the world. Opportunities and necessities arise as existing balances of power shift. And like the weapons which must be produced for war, minds must be molded for the same purpose. Our rulers want us to admire soldiers, glorify battlefield victories, wave national flags and be convinced that fighting for justice means supporting one side against the other in inter-imperialist conflicts, which all wars are today. Siding with the nation always means siding with the ruling class of the nation, the managers or would-be managers of its capital.

Israel is not waging a colonial war in Gaza. It is collectively punishing the Gazan population for the actions of Hamas and seeks to discipline it with total warlike methods. On the West Bank it continues to eject Palestinians to provide a lebensraum for Israeli settlers. But this is also an interimperialist war, in which the US and Iran and its allies confront each other through their Israeli and Palestinian proxies. However, among the highly developed economies, Israel is unique in the proportion of surplus population under its management. The growth of a surplus population that cannot be profitably exploited by capital is a global trend. Deportations, mass incarceration, and forced displacement are common peacetime solutions, but war is capitalism’s gold standard to clear the way for growth. Israel’s combined solution of bombing concentration camps gives us a chilling view into the future of capitalism’s death world.

Freedom for Gazans can never be found in a “Free Palestine”. Even if Palestinian nationalism could wrest territory from Israel and form a state, would Palestinians get “their” land back? Nowhere in the world is there a country that belongs to “the people”. Everywhere the land and everything on it belongs to the owners. There is not a single national “liberation” struggle that freed the bulk of the population from hunger and powerlessness.

The nightmare of Gaza is a nightmare that dominates the world. In Yemen it is famine, in the Amazon it is deforestation, and everywhere it is poverty and war. The nightmare is capitalism, a social structure which begins with dispossessing most of humanity from what we need to survive. We are forced to work, animating this machine that turns life into money, whose power grows as ours is stolen. More and more the machine’s intake gets clogged, and the feed of people must be thinned out before profit extraction can resume.

When the nightmare fills our minds, it makes this world’s everyday insanity seem as normal and natural as gravity. When one forgets that another world is possible, oxymorons like “fair borders” and “humane wars” seem like sensible demands. The only way out of capitalism’s nightmare of war and work is to collectively wake up: to see the machine for what it is, to overthrow its deputies, and to reclaim our power as makers of this world. We must remake the world for all of humanity, rather than for money and its power. Until then, the monsters of class, state, and nation will haunt the earth.

We call for an end to this war, these borders, and all divisions which pit the working class against itself. We call for international solidarity and the self-organization of the working class. We call for real communism: a human community without exploitation, with freedom and dignity for all.

“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win.”

Internationalist Perspective, December 2023

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