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 19th 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 20th 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 19th 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 20th 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.
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The 20th 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.
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The worlds of the 19th Century and the 20th (and the 21st) 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 19th 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.
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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 19th 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?
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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 20th 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 19th 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 19th Century – also need justification. The expansion of the capitalist economy in the 19th 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