Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International
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Introduction
At the end of the 20th century, world capitalism is
undergoing structural changes as fundamental and far-reaching
as those associated with the industrial revolution at the end
of the 18th century and the rise of monopoly capital in the final
years of the 19th. The advent of transnational corporations,
which operate on a world scale and produce directly for the world
market, is the central feature of a new and higher international
division of labor, based on an unprecedented global integration
of production.
The world economy today is characterized by the daily movement of vast quantities of capital across national borders, as international financial institutions scour stock and bond markets for the highest return on their investments. These sums dwarf the capital at the disposal of any national government or central bank. Transnational corporations coordinate production, design, marketing and management facilities on many continents and exploit a labor market that is increasingly global in character.
Just as the invention of the steam engine fueled the industrial revolution, revolutionary advances in technology, associated with the microchip and the integrated circuit have facilitated the globalization of production and led to an explosive development of computers and telecommunications. Combined with a dramatic lowering of transportation costs, the new technology has enabled corporations to organize the production of commodities across national, and even continental divides. Unlike the multi-national corporation, whose foreign outposts produced almost entirely for the national markets in which they were located, the far-flung facilities of the modern transnational corporation produce for the world market.
Far from opening up new historical vistas for the profit system, these economic and technological developments have raised, to an unprecedented level, the basic contradictions that have afflicted world capitalism throughout the 20th century. They have greatly intensified the conflicts between world economy and the capitalist nation-state system, and between social production and private ownership.
During the post-war economic boom, a series of regulatory mechanisms allowed the containment of these conflicts. But the vast changes in production processes, communications and international finance over the past 20 years have rendered the nation-state increasingly obsolete, so far as the organization of production is concerned. This signifies the emergence of a new period of mass revolutionary struggles by the working class.
As Marx explained almost 150 years ago, the origin of revolutions lie not, in the first instance, in changes in consciousness, but rather in objective social processes. It is these that constitute the driving forces behind those shifts in the political orientation and consciousness of broad masses that characterize a revolutionary period:
"At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution." 1
To the short-sighted observer, who cannot see beyond the disorientation afflicting the workers' movement in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakdown of the old parties and trade union organizations, the perspective of socialist revolution appears totally unrealistic, or, at best, consigned to the indefinite future.
But, as Marx further elaborated: "Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production."2
The disintegration of the Stalinist regimes and the collapse of the traditional workers' organizations have given rise to confusion in the workers' movement. But closer examination reveals that its origins lie in the deep-going crisis of the nation-state itself, resulting from the globalization of production. In other words, the collapse of the old organizations and the perplexity this has produced in the workers' movement are, in the final analysis, the outcome of historical processes that are preparing the way for revolutionary struggles.
It is not the perspective of socialism that has collapsed, but the nationalist programs to which the working class was confined for a whole historical period. The breakdown of the Stalinist regimes has demonstrated the unviability of the program of national autarky pursued by the bureaucracy under the banner of "socialism in one country," while the reformist programs of the trade unions and labor parties, based on an expanding and protected national economy, have been shattered by the sweeping changes in the organization of capitalist production.
The International Committee of the Fourth International has, during the past decade, developed an analysis of the globalization of capitalist production and its implications for the working class and the revolutionary socialist movement. The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, the perspectives resolution adopted by the International Committee of the Fourth International in August 1988, stated:
"It has long been an elementary proposition of Marxism that the class struggle is national only as to form, but that it is, in essence, an international struggle. However, given the new features of capitalist development, even the form of the class struggle must assume an international character. Even the most elementary struggles of the working class pose the necessity for coordinating its actions on an international scale. It is a basic fact of economic life that transnational corporations exploit the labor power of workers in several countries to produce a finished commodity, and that they distribute and shift production between their plants in different countries and on different continents in search of the highest rate of profit... Thus, the unprecedented mobility of capital has rendered all nationalist programs for the labor movement of different countries obsolete and reactionary. Such national programs are invariably based on the voluntary collaboration of the labor bureaucracies with 'their' ruling classes in the systematic lowering of workers' living standards to strengthen the position of 'their' capitalist country in the world market."3
This analysis, pioneered by the ICFI, has been verified in the bitter experiences of the working class, as well as by innumerable empirical studies of the workings of global capitalism.
Even as these words are being written, the financial collapse of the East Asian "tiger" nations is sending shock waves through every part of the world economy, triggering banking and industrial failures in Japan and calling into question the stability of stock markets in Europe and the US. Western bankers and political figures are issuing dire warnings that the anarchic workings of the market, in today's globalized economy, threaten to plunge the world into a deflationary spiral similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
However, within what is generally defined as the "left" or "radical" movement specifically those organizations which originated as part of the radicalization of middle class layers in the 1960s the overwhelming consensus is that nothing fundamental has changed in the nature of capitalism and globalization is merely a myth invented by the bourgeoisie.
(Here it is necessary to insert a note on political terminology. While making use of terms such as "left" and "radical" in reference to these organizations, we do so with the understanding that there is nothing genuinely radical, let alone Marxist, in their politics. Their evolution has brought them to very right-wing political positions. Their embrace of the labor and trade union bureaucracies, and their orientation to the capitalist state itself, is an expression of the movement to the right, over an entire period, of a definite social element, perhaps more accurately described as the milieu of petty-bourgeois ex-radicals.)
The evaluation of the significance of the globalization of production, and its implications for the struggles of the working class, has become the dividing line between Marxism and all forms of middle class radicalism.
Whatever the particular differences among them, the defining feature of all the radical tendencies has been their inherent nationalism. This has received its most concrete expression in their deep-seated hostility to the development of an international strategy, based on the independent role of the working class.
Denouncing such a perspective as "unrealistic" and "sectarian," the left petty-bourgeois tendencies adapted themselves to the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies that dominated the labor movement in the advanced capitalist countries, while hailing the petty bourgeois nationalist movements in the oppressed countries as leaders of the struggle for socialism.
These groups had their heyday in the post-war boom when a nationalist perspective appeared to bring certain immediate gains. It seemed far more "realistic" than the fight for a program based on the long-term historical interests of the working class. But, once again, the contradictions of capitalism have proven more powerful than the perspectives of the opportunists. With the disintegration of the traditional parties and "left" labor and trade union leaderships, under the impact of globalization, these radical tendencies have been waging a desperate campaign in support of the viability of the national state, and their program of applying pressure to it.
They claim that globalization was conjured up to deceive workers and discourage them from pursuing a policy of trade unionist pressure on the national state, which, they insist, is the only possible strategy for the working class. A central and universal feature of their rejection of internationalism is a fetishistic attitude toward the trade unions. They demand that the working class accept the authority of the unions and denounce any struggle to break the grip of the trade union bureaucracy.
By virtue of its origins and development, the Spartacist League, headed by James Robertson, is the quintessential representative of American middle class radicalism. Writing on behalf of the left fraternity as a whole, this organization last year published a series of four articles attacking the ICFI, the Socialist Equality Party in the US and its national secretary David North.
Entitled The 'Global Economy' and Labor Reformism, How David North Embraces Karl Kautsky, these articles amount to a virtual manifesto, issued on behalf of the entire radical milieu.
The central propositions advanced by the Spartacists are as
follows:
1) Globalization does not represent a qualitative change in the
structure of world capitalism. The economic and political power
of the nation-state remains intact and globalization is a myth,
a propaganda campaign initiated by the bourgeoisie to convince
the working class that resistance to attacks on wages and conditions
is futile.
2) Consequently, the program of trade unionism aimed at securing
reforms through the application of pressure to the national state
remains viable.
3) The betrayals of the unions are not the outcome of objective
processes rooted in world economy and the nature of the unions
themselves, but are simply the product of subjective decisions
taken by the trade union leaderships.
4) The petty-bourgeois nationalist forces in the former colonial
countries are the real revolutionary forces, and the perspective
of mobilizing the working class on a program of socialist internationalism
is an abstract and unrealizable utopia.
Underpinning all of these political positions is the repudiation
of the Marxist method of historical materialism, which continually
seeks to uncover the objective processes which lie at the base
of political changes. Rather, the Spartacists proceed with a
subjectivist method in which politics is reduced to the outcome
of the motives and decisions of individual leaders.
An examination of the Spartacist articles, therefore, will make clear the class chasm between the program of Marxism and the outlook of petty-bourgeois radicalism, and in that way contribute to the education of a new generation of revolutionists.
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Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight
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168 pages, index
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