Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International
Part Three
I. Transnational production, the nation-state and the origins of war
The Spartacists' defense of the nation-state is revealed most clearly in the concluding sections of their four-part series. Here they explicitly defend the "progressive" role of the nation-state system and absolve it of any responsibility for imperialist wars.
The Spartacists take violent exception to the following passage from the speech delivered by David North in 1992 entitled Capital, Labor and the Nation-State:
"Under the aegis of imperialism, the globalization of production collides against the nation-state form within which capitalist rule is rooted. The efforts of the imperialists to overcome the restraints placed by the nation-state system upon their global economic ambitions lead to war.
"The web of alliances being formed by various transnational corporations, such as Toshiba, IBM and Siemens, expresses the organic drive of the productive forces to organize themselves on a world scale. But the other side of this same process is the growing antagonism among nation-states and the eruption of various forms of national and communal conflict."
For reasons bound up with their defense of the nation-state system, and, as we shall see, with their efforts to deny that it leads to war, the Spartacists chose to omit the italicized passage in their citation. They comment on the passage as follows:
"Transnational corporations are here counterposed to imperialist nation-states. Moreover, the former are presented as (relatively) progressive, since they serve as agents of global economic integration, while the latter are viewed as reactionary and obsolete. North's statement is diametrically counterposed to what Lenin argues in his Imperialism."1
The class foundation of all the political positions of the Spartacists is summed up in these sentences. They denounce the International Committee for upholding and advancing the central thesis of Marxism that the nation-state system is reactionary and obsolete, because it cuts across the global development of the productive forces, and that the conflict between the global development of the productive forces and the system of national states is the source of imperialist wars.
This is no mere theoretical debating point. Since 1914 and the outbreak of World War I, the attitude to the nation-state system has formed the dividing line between the program of Marxism, which fights for the unification of the international working class in the struggle for socialism, and opportunism, which defends its "own" bourgeoisie and its national state.
In his Imperialism, Lenin demonstrated that the war signified the end of the progressive role of capitalism and its system of nation-states, and the objective necessity for the socialist transformation. Either the international working class overthrew the capitalist order, or it would be plunged into a series of wars, as the bourgeoisie sought to divide and redivide the world in an endless struggle for resources, markets and profits. This was the essential meaning of Lenin's strategical perspective to transform the imperialist war into a civil war.
This perspective was based upon a profound study of the new forms of capitalist production and finance. An examination of this is enough to demolish the claims by the Spartacists that the analysis of the International Committee is "diametrically counterposed to what Lenin argues in his Imperialism."
In the passage from North's speech cited by the Spartacists, the significance of transnational production is explained as expressing "the organic drive of the productive forces to organize themselves on a world scale" -- a tendency that comes into direct conflict with the nation-state system. It is precisely this contradiction which Lenin underscored in his analysis of the initial development, at the beginning of the century, of multinational corporations and the formation of alliances between them.
Replying to bourgeois claims that, while the capitalist system was characterized by the "interlocking" of different enterprises, the Marxist prediction of "socialization" of production had not come about, Lenin wrote:
"What then does this catchword 'interlocking' express? It merely expresses the most striking feature of the process going on before our eyes... Ownership of shares, the relations between owners of private property 'interlock in a haphazard way.' But underlying this interlocking, its very base, are the changing social relations of production.
"When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organizes according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organized manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds or thousands of miles from each other; when a single center directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (the marketing of oil in America and Germany by the American oil trust) -- then it becomes evident that we have socialization of production, and not mere 'interlocking;' that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed."2
Lenin's language in this passage is somewhat less direct than it otherwise would have been, because Imperialism was written with an eye to wartime censorship, but the political perspective he enunciates is none the less clear. The crucial task is the overthrow of the private property nation-state system, which has become a shell that no longer fits its contents (socialized production) and must be removed. The key to the accomplishment of this task, he emphasizes, is the removal of the opportunist leaderships of the working class, who rallied to the national state as they took up the call for "defense of the fatherland" with the outbreak of World War I.
The socialization of production, the beginnings of which were seen by Lenin in the oil industry, now extends to every sector of the economy. Transnational corporations, either alone or in alliances, dominate production in every sphere, organizing the manufacture and distribution of commodities world-wide. But at every point, this socialization of production conflicts with the private profit system and the division of the globe into rival national states.
What is at stake in the Spartacists' denial of the "reactionary and obsolete" character of the nation-state system is the denial of the entire socialist perspective. If the nation-state system is still progressive, as the Spartacists clearly maintain, then there is no basis for its overthrow.
The Marxist analysis of the reactionary character of the nation-state system is not a subjective denunciation, based on the ethical ideal of the unification of the working class, but rests upon objective foundations. Like the feudal state system before it, the bourgeois nation-state system has become historically obsolete, because it cuts across the development of the productive forces and the international division of labor.
II. Capitalism strains against the confines of the nation-state
The historical significance of transnational production lies in the fact that it represents the striving of the productive forces themselves to overcome the constrictions of the nation-state system. It is the further development of a process that Marx began to analyze through an examination of the significance of the rise of joint stock companies and the expansion of the credit system.
Turning to the formation of joint stock companies, he wrote: "The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labor-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital ... as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself."3
This "abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself" underlined the significance of the joint stock company as a "mere phase of transition to a new form of production."4
In the same way, transnational production represents the abolition of the nation-state system within the framework of the nation-state system itself, and, in that sense, signifies the transition to a higher social order. That is, transnational production begins to lay the objective foundations for the development of the planned world socialist economy.
But the development of transnational production within the framework of capitalism cannot eliminate the national state system. Hence, it reproduces all the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production in even more acute form. So long as the nation-state system remains, then the drive of the productive forces to overcome it leads to the intensification of inter-imperialist antagonisms and the threat of world war. In other words, so long as the nation-state system remains, the very development of the productive forces threatens to plunge mankind into new forms of barbarism.
However, according to the Spartacists, these basic foundations of the Marxist program and perspective are no longer valid.
"To be sure, North & Co do not deny a tendency toward imperialist war. But they do so by counterposing 'transnational' corporations to reactionary nation-states. Corporations like IBM are supposedly striving for a transnational capitalist order but are obstructed by the bad, old, obsolete nation-state system. On the contrary, the root cause of imperialist wars does not lie in the nation-state system as such, much less on nationalist and chauvinist ideology and demagogy."5
Spartacist's argument here is not with some theoretical innovation introduced by the International Committee, but with the long-established analysis of the Marxist movement. In his pamphlet Socialism and War, published in August 1915, Lenin wrote: "It is almost universally admitted that this war is an imperialist war. In most cases, however, this term is distorted or applied to one side, or else a loophole is left for the assertion that this war may, after all, be bourgeois-progressive, and of significance to the national-liberation movement. Imperialism is the highest stage in the development of capitalism, reached only in the twentieth century. Capitalism now finds that the old national states, without whose formation it could not have overthrown feudalism, are too cramped for it."6
In his famous pamphlet The War and the International, published in November 1914, Trotsky wrote: "What the politics of imperialism has demonstrated more than anything else is that the old national state that was created in the revolutions and the wars of 1789-1815, 1848-1859, 1864-1866, and 1870 has outlived itself, and is now an intolerable hindrance to economic development. The present war is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit."7
Countless other citations could be produced to show that the analysis of the International Committee on the origins of imperialist war are based on the theoretical foundations laid down by the Marxist movement over decades. The question that arises from the Spartacists' repudiation of this analysis is the following: if the origins of imperialist war do not lie in the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the political form of the nation-state, then wherein do they lie? The Spartacists do not care to elaborate. But the logic of their politics is clear. If the national state system is not the cause of imperialist war -- as the Marxist movement has insisted -- then it is perfectly permissible for "socialists" to support the strengthening of their own national state.
While the Spartacists do not elaborate on the origins of war, their political trajectory is nonetheless clearly discernible, and forms part of a broader movement by the entire middle class radical milieu.
One of the most politically-significant features of the civil war in the Balkans, following the break-up of Yugoslavia, has been the response of the petty-bourgeois radical tendencies. In one form or another they have demanded imperialist intervention, either directly, or in the form of the United Nations. The most egregious examples of this tendency have been the German Greens and the British Workers Revolutionary Party under the leadership of Cliff Slaughter. The Greens have been in the forefront of the campaign to demand direct intervention by the German military on the grounds of "humanitarianism," while the WRP campaigned for intervention by British imperialism, conducted discussions with representatives of the Croatian regime of Franjo Tudjman and applauded the activities of fascist militias.
In the case of the WRP, the turn directly into the camp of imperialism was accompanied by the continuous assertion that the historical analysis of the Marxist movement on this complex question was no longer applicable. More than three years ago, the International Committee explained the broader significance of the evolution of the WRP as a "harbinger of momentous shifts in class relations on a world scale", which are always preceded by rapid changes in the positions of the petty-bourgeois radical tendencies, as they prepare themselves for their new role as direct servants of imperialism.
Just as the Greens renounced their former pacifism to demand German military intervention, and the WRP applauded NATO intervention in the Balkans, so the open repudiation by the Spartacists of the reactionary character of the imperialist nation-state is the clearest sign of their preparation to directly enter into its service.
III. Karl Kautsky and "ultra-imperialism"
The central accusation of the Spartacists' four-part attack -- the subtitle of the series -- is that the International Committee's analysis of globalization constitutes an "embrace" of the theory of ultra-imperialism developed by Karl Kautsky, the theoretical leader of the German Social Democracy, at the outbreak of World War I.
Kautsky's thesis provided the main theoretical rationale for the support which the German social democratic leaders gave to their own bourgeoisie in its prosecution of the war, and for their virulent opposition to the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.
While the accusation of "Kautskyism" forms the core of the Spartacists' denunciation, nowhere do they set out Kautsky's positions, nor do they demonstrate how these positions are reproduced in the International Committee's analysis of globalization. In fact, as we will show, it is the Spartacists who follow in the footsteps of Kautsky.
Before proceeding to Spartacist, let us review Kautsky's essential propositions, and the rationale they provided for the betrayals of the leaders of the German social democracy. Just as the war was breaking out, Kautsky unveiled his theory of ultra-imperialism in an article published in Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the SPD, which he edited. The Marxist movement had continuously warned of the approach of war, arising from the increasingly tense struggle between the major capitalist powers for the control of markets and access to raw materials. At the Stuttgart Congress in 1907, and again at Basle in 1912, the Second International carried resolutions calling upon the workers of the different capitalist countries to unite in the struggle against war and warning that should war break out, the working classes and their parliamentary representatives would "utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist rule."8
The resolutions of the Second International explained that wars were inherent in the capitalist system and arose out of the struggle for markets and profits, and would only cease when capitalism was abolished. In his theory of ultra-imperialism, Kautsky advanced a new perspective -- the peaceful development of capitalism under the domination of a single world trust formed out of an agreement between the major financial powers to jointly exploit the globe.
According to Kautsky: "What Marx said of capitalism can also be applied to imperialism: monopoly creates competition and competition monopoly. The frantic competition of giant firms, giant banks and multi-millionaires obliged the great financial groups, who were absorbing the small ones, to think up the notion of the cartel. In the same way, the result of the World War between the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest who renounce the arms race.
"Hence from the purely economic standpoint it is not impossible that capitalism may still live through another phase, the translation of cartellization into foreign policy: a phase of ultra-imperialism, which of course we must struggle against as energetically as we do against imperialism, but whose perils lie in another direction, not in that of the arms race and the threat to world peace."9
In a further article published in Neue Zeit in April 1915, Kautsky set out his position as follows: "The subsiding of the Protectionist movement in Britain; the lowering of tariffs in America; the trend towards disarmament; the rapid decline in the export of capital from France and Germany in the years preceding the war; finally, the growing international interweaving between the various cliques of finance capital -- all this has caused me to consider whether the present imperialist policy cannot be supplanted by a new, ultra-imperialist policy, which will introduce the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capital. Such a new phase of capitalism is at any rate conceivable. Can it be achieved? Sufficient premises are still lacking to enable us to answer this question ..."10
As Lenin demonstrated, Kautsky's speculations on the possibility of the development of ultra-imperialism were the basis of his defense of social chauvinism and the social democratic and trade union bureaucracies who provided the central prop for the imperialist war effort. According to Kautsky, "the extreme Lefts" sought to "contrapose" socialism to inevitable imperialism, i.e., "not only the propaganda for socialism that we have been carrying out for half a century in contraposition to all forms of capitalist domination, but the immediate achievement of socialism. This seems very radical, but it can only serve to drive into the camp of imperialism anyone who does not believe in the immediate practical achievement of socialism."11
Lenin explained that the issue was never the "immediate" achievement of socialism, but the perspective on which the party had to fight -- the development of immediate propaganda against the war, to carry forward the independent struggle of the working class.
Kautsky's position was that the war did not signify a fundamental turn in the historical development of capitalism. It could have been an interlude opening up a whole new phase of capitalist development. There was no necessity for the party to actively pose the task of taking political power; it could continue as before, carrying out general propaganda in favor of socialism, combined with the struggle for immediate reforms.
The differences between Lenin and Kautsky were rooted in opposed assessments of the development of capitalism. For Lenin, the war signified a far-reaching crisis of capitalism -- the essence of which lay in the transformation of competitive capitalism into monopoly capitalism -- posing the necessity for the taking of power in the socialist revolution. For Kautsky, the war merely opened up several possibilities, including that of a further stage, ultra-imperialism. Hence the issue was not imperialism or the socialist revolution. The party, therefore, could not undertake the struggle for power, but had to continue along the lines established before the war.
Kautsky's positions on the significance of the war, and his denunciation of "the Left", were guided by one central political objective: to provide the theoretical rationale whereby the party could resume its pre-war activities once hostilities ceased. In other words, Kautsky's theories were rooted in the defense of a definite social and political practice, and the defense of a social layer -- above all, the labor and trade union bureaucracies and sections of the petty-bourgeoisie aligned with them.
IV. Spartacism and Kautskyism
The social forces motivating the politics of the Spartacists are the same. Just as Kautsky sought to deny that the outbreak of the war represented a fundamental turning point in the development of capitalism, so the Spartacists maintain that the globalization of production does not represent a qualitative change in the structure of world capitalism. Consequently, the political arrangements of the post-World War II period can continue. Those politics were based on three foundations: the central role of the national state, the domination of the labor and trade union bureaucracies over the working class, and the possibility of achieving reforms within the framework of capitalism.
All of Kautsky's theoretical positions were motivated by one over-riding concern: to deny that the struggle for socialism was now placed before the working class as a life-and-death necessity, for which it had to organize and prepare, and the assertion that pre-war forms of struggles -- the fight for reforms separated from the final goal of the conquest of power -- could continue.
The Spartacists share this platform. Kautsky asserted, against Lenin and the Left in the German Social Democracy that the alternative of imperialism or socialism would drive those who did not believe in the necessity of socialism into the camp of imperialism. In the same way, when the International Committee explained that, in the defense of even its most basic interests, the working class is confronted with the necessity of overthrowing the social relations of capitalism, the Spartacists attacked this as "a defeatist and abstentionist position toward the actual struggles of the working class."
The Spartacists employ the same subjectivist method with regard to globalization as did Kautsky in regard to the war. According to Kautsky, even before the opening of the war, the arms race and the costs of colonial expansion had reached such a level that they were threatening the very bases of capital accumulation. Consequently "economic bankruptcy would occur prematurely as a result of continuing the present policy of imperialism. This policy of imperialism therefore cannot be continued much longer."
That is, the arms race and the eruption of the war were not the outcome of objective tendencies within capitalism, but merely a question of particular policy options chosen by the bourgeoisie. Consequently, when the dangers of those policies became clear, the bourgeoisie would move to implement new ones.
In exactly the same way, the Spartacists insist that globalization is not the outcome of inherent contradictions within the capitalist mode of production, but is simply a policy pursued by the bourgeoisie. At a certain stage, the bourgeoisie will recognize the dangers of this policy to the stability of the nation-state and implement other policies. Just as Kautsky suggested that the imperialists would assess the damage to their interests by the war and come to an agreement for the joint domination of the globe, so, according to the Spartacists, the imperialist powers will recognize the dangers posed by globalization and take action to reverse it.
As for the Spartacists' accusation that the International Committee has advanced the possibility of some peaceful "ultra-imperialist" development of capitalism arising from the globalization of production, this is easily refuted by an examination of the record. In addition to the programmatic statements previously cited, one need only turn to the ICFI manifesto Oppose Imperialist War and Colonialism, published for the World Conference of Workers Against Imperialist War and Colonialism, held in Berlin on November 16 and 17, 1991.
The resolution explained that the Gulf War and the virtual destruction of the industrial infrastructure of Iraq marked the beginning of a new eruption of imperialist barbarism. It warned that capitalism, after twice this century plunging mankind into world wars, was preparing an even greater world conflagration.
In the words of the resolution: "These contradictions -- between social production and private ownership, between the world character of production and the national-state system -- are the basic source of the economic breakdowns and violent political eruptions that have repeatedly shaken the planet in the course of the 20th century. Despite all the efforts to suppress them, they are once again building toward an explosion. There is no way to prevent a Third World War except through a victorious international proletarian revolution and the overthrow of capitalism. All other proposals for preventing war -- from calls for nuclear 'nonproliferation' treaties and proposals for disarmament, to pacifist appeals to the bourgeoisie, conscientious objection and prayer vigils -- are little more than exercises in cynicism or self-deception."12
The resolution explained that, far from lessening inter-imperialist conflicts and tensions, the globalization of economic processes led to their intensification:
"The modern transnational corporation has, from an economic standpoint, completely outgrown the old puny parameters of the national state. Its directors are compelled to think and act in terms of world production, world markets, world finance and world resources. The old distinctions between the home market and world market are in the process of being entirely effaced. The modern transnational corporation, regardless of the geographical location of its home base, is involved in a life-and-death struggle for dominance in the world market. But even as the national state loses its objective economic significance, its role as the political-military instrument of the competing national cliques of capitalists, in the struggle for world domination, grows enormously. This fact finds its most powerful expression in the accelerating preparations for a new world conflagration."13
V. Fear of globalization's revolutionary implications
Spartacist expresses the fear of a layer of petty-bourgeois radicals over the revolutionary implications of globalization. They are terrified that the familiar world they have known and the political relations they have established over decades are being torn apart.
Lenin never denied the tendencies pointed to by Kautsky -- the growing internationalization of finance capital, the intertwining of different national capitals and the subordination of national states to the domination of global financial interests. Rather, he sought to uncover their historical and revolutionary significance. His disagreement with Kautsky was not over whether objective economic tendencies within world capitalism were leading to the growth of internationally integrated finance capital, which transcended nationally limited finance capital. Rather, he disputed the conclusions Kautsky drew from this economic fact.
In The Collapse of the Second International, Lenin wrote, referring to Kautsky: "'The growing international interweaving between the cliques of finance capital' is the only really general and indubitable tendency, not during the last few years and in two countries, but throughout the whole capitalist world. But why should this trend engender a striving towards disarmament, not armaments, as hitherto? ... To think that the fact of capital in individual states combining and intertwining on an international scale must of necessity produce an economic trend towards disarmament means, in effect, allowing well-meaning philistine expectations of an easing of class contradictions to take the place of the actual intensification of those contradictions."14
In another comment on the economic processes cited by Kautsky, Lenin wrote: "There is no doubt that the trend of development is towards a single world trust absorbing all enterprises without exception and all states without exception."15
But, in opposition to Kautsky, Lenin insisted that this development "proceeds in such circumstances and at such a pace, through such contradictions and conflicts and upheavals -- not only economic but political, national, etc. -- that inevitably imperialism will burst and capitalism will be transformed into its opposite long before one world trust materializes, before the 'ultra-imperialist,' world-wide amalgamation of national finance capitals takes place."16
The Spartacists maintain, however, that to point to the interweaving
of finance capital -- and the creation of new institutions to manage its common interests -- is to take the position of Kautsky. They operate according to the bourgeois logic of common sense, based on the exclusion of contradiction. According to this logic the international interweaving of capital means the lessening of inter-imperialist conflicts.
Lenin insisted that the very trend of development to which Kautsky had pointed was the driving force of the war, and also of the world socialist revolution. The integration of finance capital and the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism laid the foundation for the development of a socialist economy.
"Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialization of production: it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness into some sort of new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization."17
Lenin insisted that imperialism was not a policy of finance capital, but an objective process, operating independently of the will and the consciousness of the capitalists themselves. They were not able to reverse it, even though it threatened the basis of their rule. For Kautsky, on the other hand, imperialism was a policy, which may or may not be reversed, but not an objective tendency of capitalist development. The modern-day continuators of this tendency are the Spartacists, with their insistence that globalization is nothing more than a political campaign waged by the bourgeoisie, which can be reversed if it endangers the national states of the major imperialist powers.
Against this subjective method, the International Committee has shown that globalization is an objective tendency of world economy -- the deepening and intensification of processes first analyzed by Lenin and other Marxists at the beginning of this century -- driving towards war and socialist revolution.
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