Presentations by the Communist Century Editorial Group and
Discussion of the Zyuganov paper on Globalization
Oakland, October/December 2001
Scientfic and Technological Revolution
Sharon: What is the scientific and technological revolution (scientific and technological revolution)? There have been more than one in history, but the latest one, which probably began after the Second World War (or maybe it had its impetus during the war) has now, in the last decade made a qualitative change in the way production is organized and accomplished and the manner in which profits are realized.
I want to talk about three aspects of the scientific and technological revolution. In all of these three aspects the main characteristic that is brought by technology is that human beings use computers to control every aspect of production. When we talk about how computers are used to control things you really have to tell yourself that it’s a different way of controlling things than has ever been known in human history.
The first aspect is production itself. The actual making of things in factories. A good example is the making of machine tools. In the past machinists were trained to create with their own hands metal objects which are standardized and which are put together into tools which make other machines. The skilled machinist’s job was, obviously, very crucial to the whole production process. Today machinists sit at a computer terminal, using a keyboard and a mouse, and control a machine that shapes and assembles the metal into complete machine tools. And that’s all they do. Actually, they don’t do it all the time on their shift, according to one person who does this who is a friend of mine. What she does is she sets it up at the beginning of her shift by logging onto the computer and doing something. And then she reads the newspaper for four hours. And maybe the machine beeps at her occasionally and tells her that something is completed. And she checks it and types something else and reads her novel for the rest of the shift. And this is the way production is controlled now in almost all of its aspects. ( In 2004 in the most advanced industries the process has gone much further than this. Products are designed and tested on computers and from those designs software generates more software that controls the entire production process, including the supply chain.) I suppose you can point to some factories that are the old fashioned kind and clearly there are some industries, like clothing manufacturing where there are seamstresses. There are still people who sit and feed the material into a machine. But even those factories are not the old fashioned Triangle Shirtwaist type factory. They are heavily computerized in a lot of their aspects.
I want to emphasize that this whole production process, where factory workers are sitting at computer terminals and controlling the production process that’s done essentially by robots, is not the same thing as the computer you use at your desk which is essentially an automatic typewriter – maybe a little more sophisticated, but essentially doing word processing and simple calculations and throwing up fancy pictures on the screen. Production uses much more sophisticated a hardware and software.
The second aspect of production that is computere controlled is transportation and distribution. We now are at a point where most factories are controlled by something they call “just in time inventory.” Instead of stockpiling all the materials, ordering and collecting lots of supplies of materials that are needed for production of whatever the factory is producing, they calculate with the help of computers, exactly what they need for any given planned production, and then they control the process of getting that stuff to the factory just in time for producing whatever it is. This is taking the planning process to a completely different level. It means that the contradiction between production and consumption is to some degree mitigated. In the past consumption was driven by production. What you were going to consume was sitting there already and then when you were producing something you consumed whatever it was you needed. But now it’s the other way around. You have much less waste in the system.
An illustration of this, or a confirmation that this is really happening is that the duration of recessions (or any kind of dip in the economy) has become shorter, so they can recover faster from a recession. There may be more of them – the frequency of recessions is not what I am talking about. I am referring to the duration of any single dip in production. And it is less because they have less of a crisis of overproduction. They still have overproduction, but it’s less because they can cut it off faster if they see the demand slowing down on the other end. And we are not just talking about consumer goods. Obviously, we’re talking also about all the intermediary goods that are produced in the course of production. For example, an auto factory that needs to get all the pieces of the car from all the other manufacturers. Because most automobiles have parts produced by many different manufacturers – they are contracted out to various places. Or even if it is within the same auto maker (like Ford, for example) they still have plants all over the world where the different pieces of the car are made. And so they can cut it off faster. They say, “Okay, we know that there’s going to be a slowdown in demand for cars, so stop making the windshields over here, and you stop making the whatever over there …..” So just in time inventory is pretty much the norm now in production. And they can achieve this because of computers. Because computers are used to keep track of all production everywhere and can be used to control when things are put on boats or trucks or planes and shipped where they are needed.
The final aspect of the use of computers to control all of production is the financial aspect. This is the most evident to ordinary people. All financial transactions are done on computers now. And they are instantaneous, around the world, and money moves across the world in seconds. Actually, almost no physical money ever moves anywhere. It’s all electrons in computers and computer records. This facilitates all kinds of transactions across borders that never happened before. The stock market, the banking industry, and all of the transactions that happen among and between capitalists, internationally speaking. And what it’s done is it’s made possible and also it requires a transparency, an openness of transactions that never existed before. This is international in scope and is reflected in the economic integration of Europe that we all know about. The ability to go from many currencies to one currency. And the whole Asian crisis that we learned about in the last few years was essentially the capitalists requiring the various governments to let go of their holds on their economies – Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, to various degrees. It was made possible by and reflects this aspect of the control of financial transactions by computers. And Jon is going to get back around to that and speak about it more later on. So, I hope by these few illustrations I’ve convinced you that people use computers to control all aspects of production all over the world.
Scientific and Technological Revolution and Globalization
Now I want to get to briefly the relationship between the technological revolution and globalization. On page ten of the Zyugonov article he says, (and I think this is so good – it’s one of the best things he says – it’s a very clear little statement): “Globalization is the capitalist form of the socialization of labor which has reached worldwide scale.” Now it’s clear that it is socialized labor – that all things are intertwined. All workers are one way or another using a computer to do their work. And the computers are interconnected, so the people are interconnected thereby. The worker on the assembly line in Detroit (which may or may not be an assembly line, actually – it’s more like a bunch of people guiding robots around a car, putting it together) are not only socialized in the same building or on the same plant, but they are dependent on and working within a socialized relationship to workers all over the world who are supplying all those parts for that car. And also the people who are figuring out who gets what money to pay for all those parts.
I want to share an interesting bit of research I did on the internet. A search on “scientific and technological revolution” and “Communist” turned up statements from many Communist parties over the last five years (some went back as far as 1985). These were statements from the Chilean, Vietnamese, the Italian, various Russian parties, the Chinese. They all said the same thing - “ the scientific and technological revolution has reached global scale and our party has to deal with this. And our country has to deal with the way in which production has changed and the way it affects our country.” In the case of the people who were addressing this from the point of view of underdeveloped countries, or developing countries – they were saying, “We have to grab on to this and figure out how this revolution can be used for the benefit of our people and production in our country because if we don’t we will remain simply the suppliers of cheap labor and raw materials for the industrialized capitalist developed world.” And the people who are in state power – the communist parties of China and Vietnam (and actually, the Cubans had something to say about this too) they were saying “We are going to figure out how we can relate to this revolution and globalization and we’re going to make sure that we take advantage of this for our people.” Everybody is recognizing that this is a global phenomenon that has to be dealt with. In a nutshell, globalization is made possible by, and is a consequence of the technological revolution, because capital uses whatever is at its disposal to develop new ways to reap more profits. And so given that this technological revolution has developed – of course it’s a product of capitalism – it didn’t come from the sky or out of the brains of goodhearted scientists, it’s part and parcel of capitalist development – but it results in globalization because it makes it possible and capital must use it to its advantage. And the communists in state power are saying “We’ve got to use it for our advantage.” That is not necessarily the same thing exactly as the capitalists are doing, but it is acknowledging that this phenomenon exists, this is the reality of the 21st century in the world. So that’s what I think is the relationship – globalization and the scientific and technological revolution are part and parcel of the same thing.
Contradictions of the scientific and technological revolution and Globalization
Export of Capital
What are the contradictions that arise from the scientific and technological revolution and globalization? I thought of a few, which I’d like to bring up for discussion. The first one is the so-called “runaway” shop. I call it 'so-called' for two reasons. First, I do not think that the same shops are being picked up – that is, closed down in one place and opened up somewhere else. There’s a phenomenon where some shops are closing down and people are losing jobs. And many new shops are opening in underdeveloped countries like Mexico, for example. But it’s not the same shop. It’s completely different shops actually. Because what was shut down was old fashioned production. And what was opened up was new kinds of production based on technology. And if it hadn’t been that those old shops were old fashioned they might not have moved. You could still argue that the cheap labor in Mexico would have made them move. But in any case, the fact is that most of the shops that were shut down were very old. And what was opened up was very new technology.
Secondly, and more to the point, there was no net loss of jobs in the last two decades. Although many individuals lost their jobs and had their lives turned upside down, in this country there was no net loss of jobs due to “runaway” shops. These “phenomena” of the so-called “runaway “shops lead to the contradiction between a narrowly conceived or perceived short-term, self interest of the workers of the developed world (namely, those of the US and Europe) versus international working class solidarity. To me it’s a contradiction because what is really needed is international working class solidarity, and I don’t think I need to convince you of that. And what we mainly have is protectionism based on this view that our self interest as workers of the developed world is to not lose any of those” runaway “shops. I think that we could talk about that more. It gets to the question of the vanguard – what is the vanguard class, or strata of the class.
Hyperconsumption
Another contradiction is raised by the technological revolution is one that Zygunov dwells on – a glut of consumer buying is needed for profit realization. It is a contradiction between true human relationships on the one hand and the relationship between people and things on the other. Which is what we’re often reduced to by the capitalists. Zygunov makes a big point of this and I think a lot of us might feel it in our own lives. I mean being bombarded by advertising, and now, to keep on buying if we’re really patriotic. And not let the terrorists dissuade us from being good consumers in the eyes of the capitalists, which is to spend as much as we can. There are arguments on the other side of this, which Jon might touch on. Some people don’t think that this is a major phenomenon or a requirement of profit realization.
Jon: Or that it’s a negative. Some people don’t think that it’s a bad thing.
Education
Sharon: Another thing is the need for an educated work force. So this has probably been true since the early decades of the 20th century, but it’s certainly taken on a qualitative aspect in the last few decades. With all of this s&t development, you need a lot more very highly trained workers to run all this stuff and to develop it further, to invent new things with computers. And that kind of thing is exponential. And we see it in our own lives. It wasn’t very long ago that only a very small portion of the working class went to college. And now a large percentage of working people have education beyond high school and a large percentage of those are college educated. And that’s needed for almost all production. Of course, when you educate people, you raise the possibility that they might start thinking for themselves about their own conditions of life. And that’s why I say it’s a contradiction from the capitalist point of view.
Economic Interest of Capital versus the Interests of the State
Finally, there is the contradiction between the economic interests of capitalists and the interests of the state. Because of the qualitative leap of the interests of the world economy as a whole– the capitalist class as a whole which has nothing to do with the borders of countries – it’s a worldwide interest – on the one hand. And the nation state on the other which can’t protect the interests of capitalists across the whole wide world. Now, of course, the nation state is the product of capitalism. Its existence is to protect the interests of capital. But because the interests of capital now range far beyond any borders any one nation state is hard pressed to protect the interests of world capital. And there are all kinds of contradictions that arise because of that. Contradictions among nation states – an obvious one is the integration of Europe, the European Union which is trying to deal with this contradiction, and it’s relationship to the US as the only superpower. And there’s very little capital that is only US capital – it’s insignificant these days compared to the transnationals. And so many different questions arise from that contradiction, it’s going to be a whole long discussion in itself. And it’s probably the most important of all the contradictions that I mentioned and Jon will talk about that as well.
Jon: Questions, answers, statements?
S: I think that the contradiction between the national governments, particularly the US and international capitalism will become more acute in the period we’re heading into. One of the CEOs of a major oil company recently described in a speech the negotiations with the various countries surrounding the Caspian Sea. http://www.chevrontexaco.com/news/archive/chevron_speech/2000/2000-09-19.asp He was arguing that the US government should not play the great game in the Caspian. He said that oil companies are perfectly capable of negotiating their own deals in central Asia and that the presence and assistance of the US government would only screw things up. And he gave the example of their plan to run the pipeline through Russia, and the US for national interest doesn’t want the pipeline to go through Russia. He said that we can run the pipelines through any number of countries. They’ll all compete with each other. The price of oil will come down and we don’t need the US government to help us or to intervene in central Asia. So I think that there are a lot of interests that capitalism has that are opposed to the national interests of the powerful countries. They have interests in world peace for one thing so that they can make profits, whereas national governments have interests in keeping any other national governments from being powerful. They have other interests that will conflict with the international capitalists’ needs. During the Cold War a lot of the alliances were made based on the choice of US or USSR. I mean, for an international corporation, if their option is the USSR or the US, they’ll pick the US. Once the Soviet Union doesn’t exist, if the option is the US in a world war or a decrease in the importance and interventionism of the national government may well chose the latter, especially if the price of nationalism, or the dominance of powerful countries rises which it seems like will happen. I mean the balance of power theory that once one national government becomes inordinately powerful the other national governments organize against it. And I think that that seems to be happening now against the US, the “hyperpower”, as the French call it. And so the price of supporting the US government will be rising for these international capitalists. And I think that we’re going to see a division.
What’s going on in central Asia now makes sense from the point of view of the US government. The US government has to show that it can’t be attacked, that it has the power to respond, that it can punish other countries. But it doesn’t make sense from the point of view of oil companies for instance.
The State
R: Globalization raised the question of the state. There was a good deal of talk during the intervention in Yugoslavia. The state itself was dismissed by a whole range of nations in order to achieve “regional stability.” The integrity of Yugoslavia was secondary. But I think from a Marxist point of view it is premature to come to the conclusion that transnational capital and globalized capital and its continually globalized working class are somehow mitigating against the function of the state. I would argue that capital is transforming the function of the state. One of the better Communist theoreticians from the Greek party, Nicos Poulansis who died tragically young, devoted most of his career to examining the state. One of his driving concepts is that there are multiple functions. So, for example, the coercive apparatus of the state, as we see now particularly, is not going to go away immediately and has not necessarily changed within the nation state or outside of the nation state. That’s still important. It’s important from just a classical Leninist point of view that armed men and prisons are necessary to maintain the state because of the divisions of classes that has to be mediated – it doesn’t mediate itself.
Another element that I think is not going to go away is civil society which Poulansis and I and maybe some others also believe is an element of the state. Except in extraordinary moments the raw essence of state power is not manifest. Civil society is probably that which determines the hegenomic structures to which people respond in their daily lives more than the most obvious evident manifestations of state power.
And another element of state power that is frequently overlooked is the ideological state apparatuses which generally are used to condition and maintain a certain normative quality within the vast polity of workers and even the ruling class. There’s a certain structure by which the assumptions and the animating values and sometimes simply the ideological delusions of capital are visited and made into reality by the people. So I think if we are going to examine this we have to examine it in terms of a transformation of functions rather then an elimination or a kind of vaporizing of various traditional functions of the state. And the reason I say this is, particularly during Yugoslavia there was a lot of writing on the left, a lot of information on the left, that was not well-thought-out, not a particularly well-articulated view on state power in this period.
Persistence of old industries and limitations of scientific and technological revolution
G: I was just thinking of what you said about control and the use of computers. I was thinking of the huge agricultural industry which still gets many of the workers from Latin America. Then we have our tourist industry – we have hundreds of thousands if not millions of workers. If they can get a computer to swab out a toilet that would be fantastic. But that’s not about to happen. The other thing, too, is all these other huge industries that are peripheral to production. Another thing – this just in time inventory – the way you described it reminded me of a high wire circus act, you know, with the trapeze up there and the guy swinging on his bar, and the other guy comes and he turns around just in time to grab him. Okay, this high wire act – I was very appreciative of it because I was back in Detroit a couple of years ago, where the talk is always about the godhead of General Motors, and the GM executive priests are always stroking it. I was asking about the robotics, you know, you have these machines that stamp this stuff out and put it together. And my brother-in-law was cursing the day that they brought robotics in. He’s totally non-religious and he thought it was the work of the devil, you know? The thing is that what happens with robotics is this: when things are coming down the assembly line and a glitch happens. It’s like anything else, it just multiplies. It’s like thing backing up and you can’t stop them. Have you ever seen that I Love Lucy thing where she’s working in the bakery? Or Charlie Chaplin …. Whatever. It’s the same thing. And he said it takes anywhere from hours to days to weeks to make corrections. He said I’d rather have people working out there than that cursed machine. I’m sure they’re making technological corrections all the time, but as far as that being a done deal, the technology doesn’t always advance – the tide doesn’t always lift all boats. It lifts it over here, and then maybe over there, and then it has to be connected. So there’s a lot in that aspect that will change. Especially now that we’re engaged in Asia and we’re trying to fit the Cinderella glass slipper on Pakistan’s foot. So all these things make this technological intellegencia class sometimes very comical and farcical but at the same time they are trying to go ahead and modernize. But other things really seem to be emerging. And the dust has not settled on a lot of this.
Sharon: What you say is very true. When a glitch happens bad things can be multiplied when you have this kind of control by computer. An enormous amount of effort (and a hundred times more right now) goes into building in redundancy and building in backup and ways to restore computers that go down and have other computers take over. Enormous amounts are invested in all of that just because one little glitch has the potential of causing enormous problems. But Marx taught us to always try to find the key trend, the vanguard, if you will, the cutting edge - what’s coming up and what’s going down. What’s on the ascendancy is what I described. With all of its glitches, with all of its missteps. With all of its mistakes. It’s still on the ascendancy. And that’s the key here.
Non-capitalist Development
D: A couple of things: one, in regard to the role of the nation state: I think that capitalists work as individuals – individual companies. They do what they think is proper. So that Chevron wants one kind of oil pipeline. The French oil company wants a different kind of pipeline. And the two governments don’t necessarily coincide. And at some point the US finds it useful to put troops into Uzbekestan. To protect Chevron, or whoever. So that the nation state still has a role and in a sense its role is determined by the unplanned activities of individual transnational corporations which go out and do their thing because they see a piece of profit over there. So that in order to defend this particular development, whatever it might be, the nation has to use its military force or diplomatic …. Or whatever. Secondly, in terms of the technological changes – I think the world has obviously moved in a certain direction. But that direction has been determined by the fact that we are living in a capitalist world. And you are assuming, and Zygunov assumes, that this is positive. That this business of socialization on a world scale is a good thing. Well, maybe it is. On the other hand, maybe it isn’t. Maybe there are other ways to develop the world economy. In other words, if you look at the large peasant populations which still exist in South America, in Africa, and you take a look at Samir Amin’s contention that development has to be a different type that what is occurring under capitalism, so that, it seems to me we are swallowing this bait as if it’s a wonderful thing and as if that’s the only way the world could develop. Well, maybe it could develop in other ways. And the importance of individual countries pursuing what you are calling protectionism – there may be something to that. It may be important in the terms of the culture of South Africa or Venezuela, or wherever that they develop industry of their own, which in a sense you may consider redundant because you can do it on some other scale. But on a different level it might be important. I’m just raising this as a question to be looked at.
Sharon: I’m trying not to say whether something’s good or bad. I think that we need to get away from that and instead say what’s objectively the case. So personally I don’t think that we will have what’s best for all the people of the world until we have socialism everywhere. I don’t have any problem with your pointing out all those problems. I don’t know exactly what Zygunov is saying, but I don’t think we’re necessarily saying things are good if we’re pointing out what’s happening. And I don’t think that the Chinese and the Vietnamese and other socialist countries that are accepting large input in various ways from world capital into their economies are necessarily going down the 'capitalist road' to use an overworked phrase. The capitalists point to all this stuff in China and say, “See, they’ve accepted the market economy. They’ve accepted capitalism. They’re going to be capitalist. All we have to do is make sure they have opposition parties.” I don’t believe that. I think that the communists who are in state power there are trying to figure out how to deal with this objectively changing world. And objectively speaking, globalization and the technological revolution has happened. But they are trying to deal with it in the interests of the people of their country.
World Culture and Communism
Jon: I think that I would come down on the side of world culture and the development of world culture. And the development of a greater integration of the economy of the world leading to world culture. I also think that’s consistent with Marx’s view. But whether it is or not, that is my view. So while it certainly may be possible that Andean peasants could live for another thousand years the way they’ve lived for the previous thousand years, that doesn’t get the rest of the world closer to communism. And I’m interested in getting the world closer to communism as a political and social and economic objective. And while I appreciate Sharon’s effort at laying out the objective process and I think that we need to be objective about it, I also have a point of view.
For me, I try to deal with these questions from the point of view of getting to communism. And I think that what’s important about this stuff is that we are getting toward communism. Things are unfolding in a way that are moving us towards communism despite the fact that the capitalists want to utilize globalization and the scientific and technological revolution to preserve and extend capitalism, to maximize profit. They are implementing things now that in the short term may maximize profit, but actually are breaking down the way that capitalism has functioned in the previous period. And breaking down the way capitalism has functioned – actually, breaking down the power of capitalism in the way that it’s functioned in the previous period – it creates opportunity for revolution. So on the one hand we have economic development that, let’s say, creates the possibility for communism. And we can get more into the specifics of how the economics create possibility for communism.
Subjective Backwardness and the Capitalist State
We don’t have the subjective factor, if you want to call it that. There are real obstacles to communism at the level of what human beings are willing to do politically at this stage. Well, part of that limitation on the subjective factor are objective limitations: first of all, underdevelopment of human consciousness.
But also, the continual existence of the capitalist state. It is curious that the economic developments in the world economy actually necessitate the breaking down of the capitalist state. The needs of capitalism require a breaking from the way that they have utilized the capitalist state, say in the last half century, or the last century. That doesn’t mean that the state no longer exists. The state certainly exists. It demonstrates its existence every day. And it also doesn’t mean that the state no longer has an interest or power. The state certainly has quite a bit of power. And it has an interest in preserving and extending its influence which may not coincide with the interests of capitalism and the capitalist system. And I think going back to one of the points that Sharon made when she talked about the contradictions – there is a contradiction now between the interests of the capitalist system as a whole, which is a world system that exists increasingly on a world scale, that is, because of the qualitative leap in global integration of the world economy. There’s a contradiction between the interests of the capitalist system and the interests of the national state. Up until recently, the national state was able to guarantee the interests of capitalism – guarantee the interests of the capitalist system and to a very large degree the role of the capitalist state in all of its manifestations, in all of its aspects, including the ones that B mentioned. The role of the capitalist state was to preserve and extend the capitalist system and to guarantee the capitalist system. Increasingly the capitalist state – the way that it exists – is not in a position to guarantee and extend the interests of the capitalist system as a whole because the capitalist system as a whole now exists in a way that goes beyond the scope of the capitalist state. So that means that there is less interest on the part of those that own capital to want to fund the state or at least those aspects of the state that no longer serve their interests. Increasingly, there are elements of owners of capital that view most of what the state is as an unnecessary economic burden that actually cuts into their profit margins. And because of the falling rate of profit that issue becomes more pronounced. The question of having to allocate so much resource to a state that no longer actually serves your interests, that’s cutting into your bottom line becomes more of an issue. What’s an example of that? If you’re a company that headquartered in Delaware and you operate on a world scale and most of your production and consumption is not taking place in the US, but the history of your company is as a US corporation and you pay taxes in the US, you’re increasingly supporting a state apparatus that has nothing to do with protecting your interests in the world except possibly in the form of a military intervention, and maybe the diplomatic corps. Increasingly, that doesn’t work either because, as M pointed out, it’s easier for the oil company itself to negotiate the arrangements with the five countries of the Caspian than it is to have the oil company executives go to the State Dept., find the right guys there who actually see the possibility and don’t have a vested interest in building up the interests of one of those countries in the Caspian or a couple of them or some group of Mullahs who are in opposition to some country in the Caspian or a group of some other kind of terrorists that is in opposition to some old style communist who’s still running one of the countries in the Caspian or any of those other possible perversions of the interests of the oil company executive. The oil company executive is interested in getting the oil out, getting it processed, and getting it to the market and realizing profit. And increasingly the state stands in the way of that. And that obstacle that the state poses to the realization of value, realization of profit, is becoming more pronounced not less pronounced. And as time goes forward it will become even more pronounced. And it will become so pronounced that we end up with some sort of collision. A collision between the economic interests of the capitalist system and the political interests of the old style capitalist state.
Repression
R: I think I kind of agree with what you say about the international projection of capital. My interest, or another focus I think, is the domestic situations within the nation states. The nation states are very much with us. And they continue to have localized as well as global elements to the economy. Let me digress to try to illustrate what I’m trying to say. One of things that’s become axiomatic among some people on our side of the political line is this idea that capitalists want repression, they really want fascism – no doubt so they can order us to go to the mall rather that encourage us to go. My own response to that is the Marxist gangster formulation, which I’ve always called the Soladso principle. In the Godfather, after Soladso tries to assassinate the Godfather he’s letting Tom Hagon go, and he says, “You know Tom I didn’t want to do this. Blood is a big expense.” And I think the capitalists basically view things along the lines of the Soladso principle. The point I’m trying to make is that domestic tranquility and domestic calm is very important for the functioning of certainly the cosmopolitan capitalist economies. I would suggest that the role of the state, at least in its domestic functions, is fairly unchanged. So I guess what I’m asking you is, how would the contradictions you see emerging internationally be reflected domestically?
G: I want to reiterate what D mentioned. When you have these huge populations who are doing a lot of the work, but are not into the technological aspects so much, you have a large political and social and economic situation to deal with. You have to have some kind of organization for that. You have to have some kind of leadership for that and you’ve got to handle political situations. At the same time that I agree with you about technology and with Jon about the nation state, we still have to take into account the class divisions that are widening. It may emerge as a new large social force in the future. The idea of being educated – when you say “educated working class” are you talking about somebody who is computer literate? That’s a technological thing, like being a mechanic or knowing about typewriters. People who sit in front of terminal or are computer programmers, I can talk to a baseball fan and get the same kind of response to world affairs. So the kind of education that you speak of is a technical education. When I think of education I think of a broad thing. They may be able to speak the language of technology (Jon: of COBOL) and talk with authority about programming and things like that, but it does very little else. There’s no broadening of understanding of humanity, or the desire to want to develop oneself – except to go out and buy.
Jon: Perhaps Richard can talk to that question of the quality of the education of the working class and what that means and if that exists.
Uneven Technological Inovation
D: Regarding a couple of other questions that Sharon raised. That business of the plants that are moving to other countries being new plants. I don’t whether that’s true. I don’t know if you’ve looked into it, but my impression is that certainly the textile plants, the shoe factories, and so forth are not changing their technology. They’re simply moving into big warehouses with hundreds of workers using the same old system. The technology in those industries is changing. It could change. As a matter of fact, B once sent me a very interesting little article from Business Week about a shoe manufacturer in the US who really changed the technology of shoe manufacturing, which Nike has not. And he was competing in the US with US labor because of his technological innovations. But historically, and I don’t know whether that’s true now or not, the auto plants that they used to set up in Mexico were inferior to the auto plants in the US. And this was deliberate. Now whether they are still following that pattern or not I don’t know and I don’t know whether you have looked into that. But I think that’s an important question.
And there are other industries – you’re talking about technological change. You look at the construction industry. Outside of design, where CAD has becoming widespread – you know, you can design with computers. But you still build them in the same old way. You don’t build them any differently. And I worked for years. And I recently worked in the construction industry again. And it’s the same old carpenter out there. Now he’s got an automatic nailer. But beyond that, you look at the buildings going up in California – same system that’s been going on for the last fifty years. Whether that’s because technology simply hasn’t penetrated to that or whether technology can’t as a matter of fact revolutionize building construction, but in any event this major industry has not been revolutionized.
The other thing is you say that the size of the working class has not decreased. But the nature of the working class has certainly changed in so far as workers have been displaced in industries where computers have taken over. So they’re moving into service industries. And of course that one of the phenomena that as capitalism becomes more productive and able to produce its automobiles and refrigerators and so forth automatically now the possibility for increasing service industries obviously grows and the need to doing that. But they’re also industries that don’t pay much, where the workers are getting low wages and where the necessity for this high skilled education is not so evident. So I think there are a whole lot of things that have to be looked at in terms of where are we going, or where should we be going. Because I think that’s also a question that we have to ask. As Marxists and communists we need a plan for the future. And maybe Kautsky’s plan is a good one, but maybe it’s not.
Sharon: Well, I just want to answer the direct question you asked me. I have not made a thorough study of those questions. So you’re right.
Jon: Right about what?
D: As Marxists we have to do that.
Sharon: I agree. It’s a task to be done. And I can’t point to a lot of data. I looked at a couple of industries briefly.
Del: I am happy to be here. This is a whole part of the question I had no idea of. And I’d like to see you write that up concisely. And published it in Political Affairs. Or as a pamphlet. Because I tell you coming from the boondocks, there’s nobody that knows that. Some places have an idea. The overwhelming majority of the working class has no idea of what you described. And its so important for us to be clear on the way in which the capitalists function. I’d like to see that so everyone in our party could get an idea.
M: I think that computers have penetrated every area of working life. If you look just at manual labor you can see it. If you wanted to find proletarians, people to have to sell their labor to live, you have to look at the whole body of people working in all fields. And it’s obvious that computers have radically changed every aspect of majority proletarians’ lives. I’ve worked all kinds of service jobs and they all involve computers. I’ve worked at a ferry company. I’ve worked at a record store. Computers everywhere. And the less efficiently used computer, the worse your business is. So at the record store I worked at we used the computer basically like a cash register. And we were driven out of business by a chain store that every time they scanned a CD it went to their warehouse automatically and was replaced. So we were doing all this inefficient stuff. We had more people working than they do. We didn’t have the latest things because we don’t have the information. We didn’t know that we sold the thing until a week later. Their stuff is back on the shelves immediately. I’ve seen construction sites. I remember once I was in downtown San Francisco and the entire street was blocked off as this giant truck was wheeling in this enormous preprocessed something. It was some monstrously huge piece if something. So it seems like there is some kind of innovation going on there as well. Also you look at the world trade center, and that’s thirty years old, but they couldn’t have built that prior to then. So at least over decades there’s massive improvements in construction going on. I also have a bunch of anecdotes I want to throw out.
Communication Revolution
As far as the communication revolution, I’ve been reading about Al Jazera, the Arabic satellite network. They’re broadcasting images of children dying in Iraq all over the Arab world and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop that. It’s satellite, so anybody in any Arab country can pick it up. The individual Arab nations don't like it. The people are getting too much information. The US sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t like it. Israel doesn’t like it. It doesn’t matter – anyone can pick it up. It’s also broadcast on the internet. You can access all the information from the Middle East if you speak Arabic anywhere in the world. Except I think there are some Arab nations where they are having some success blocking some of it. So, the communication revolution, which includes computers, has a lot to do with the crisis we’re in now. The fact that they can recruit from all over the Arab world because people all over the Arab world now know not just what’s going on in their individual country with their leader, but they know the US is behind it. They know the proxies of the US in other countries are also active.
Capitalist Penetration on a World Scale
Another thing – I think we need to look at where we are as far as capitalism taking over world. My understanding of Marx is that you have capitalism and from capitalism people learn about interacting and then they create socialism, or socialism develops from the technology. But according to what I’ve read, it was only up to about five years ago that the majority of people lived in even small cities. So before five years ago the majority of people in the world lived in things that would be called villages. Or maybe about ten years ago now. But until very recently the majority of people lived in very backward situations. And even now it’s at least a billion people who are not part of the economy. They’re making what we would call a dollar a day. Whatever they’re doing – they’re bartering – trading their labor for barter. But a billion or two billion people are not in the economy. So that means that sometimes it will be more efficient to have those people work in the most primitive ways possible and ship the product somewhere than it would be to have somebody who has a labor union and who lives in modern society to do something. It’s not smooth that automatically that something new happens that it’s all the latest technology there.
JP Morgan and Inverventionism
Also, again about the state and international capitalism. I just read a biography of JP Morgan. He was against US interventionism. He opposed the Spanish-American war. At that time Roosevelt explicitly attacked capitalists for being unpatriotic. He said “They’re only interested in money, blah, blah, blah.” And we’re seeing that again with this thing in China. There were a number of editorials I read where they said that US companies are too interested in trade with China, they’re overlooking China’s abysmal human rights record, or they’re making friends with communists because of this. So you see this attacking of capitalism. With Morgan, after Theodore Roosevelt went after his trusts, Roosevelt then asked him to invest in China. And Morgan didn’t want to invest in China at that point. He felt he didn’t have the infrastructure there and couldn’t oversee the investment. But he did because of wanting to cooperate with the US government at that point. He lost all the money he invested there and then he was attacked by what would now be called the leftist press for intervening in China. And I think we’re seeing that again.
Nader, hero of the left, asked the heads of international corporations to salute the flag. And they all refused. They said they are international companies and they don’t salute the flag of any nation – companies based in the US. The AFL-CIO is now splitting with the anti-globalists because they are militantly in favor of the bombing attacks on Afghanistan now. Some of the other anti-globalists are opposing the attacks. So the anti-globalist movement is now splitting because of nationalism. I’m definitely not saying the state is withering away and I’m not saying the US government is becoming less and less interventionist. I’m saying that there’s going to be more and more conflict between the business elite in the various countries and the US government.
AFL-CIO and the anti-globalist movement
Jon: Just to add something to the very last point M made. I read an article about this split between the AFL-CIO and the anti-globalist movement over the issue of the war. It quoted the assistant to the president of the United Steel Workers saying, “We are still united against free trade and for protectionism, but we are split over the question of war.” So you should understand this – it’s clear that the AFL-CIO leadership is for US wars of intervention (that is, US imperialist war) and for protectionism. So on the two pillars of the question of international relations of the proletariat, or proletarian internationalism, the AFL-CIO leadership is specifically on the side of reaction – politically, socially, and historically on the side of reaction. Marx was for free trade and against protection. If you read Marx’s speech on free trade from 1847 you can see that. And in that speech he criticizes the capitalists for being johnney come latelies to free trade. He says that the proletariat had always been for free trade and would always be for free trade. The capitalists only come to free trade when it serves their interests. Anyway, I didn’t want to leave aside your question of the domestic impact. That question seems to be related to your having raised the question of civil society. Right?
R: Yes, absolutely.
Jon: I think that what’s happening with the state – the breaking down of the state is taking place necessarily based on the needs of capital to transcend the boundaries of the state. That is to say, there’s been a qualitative leap in the world economy necessitated by the technological revolution and the needs of capital. The needs of capital brought about the technological revolution – the need to maximize profit and so on. So the needs of capital are breaking down the state by transcending the state. And why is that happening? Well you know that even with the scientific and technological revolution the same basic things in capitalism still exist – there’s competition among capitalists, there’s competition for labor, there’s competition to try to get the cheapest labor possible. It has to be qualified labor, but also the cheapest labor possible. There’s competition for raw materials. There’s competition amongst the capitalists for realization of value and for those kinds of things. So none of that has changed. There’s still the competition. The difference is that the competition for labor is taking place in a broader field.
That very fact alone brings into existence new businesses and new needs. And those new needs call into existence new businesses. That’s why we can say that there’s been no net loss of jobs because the changes that have taken place have brought into existence new businesses which have absorbed that labor. And in fact not only absorbed the labor, but increased the demand for labor. The demand for labor is greater now than it was ten or twenty years ago. It has not lessened.
Expansion of the Proletariat as Part of the Revolutionary Process
So, yes, while there may be a billion people in the world overall on the fringes or outside of the general trend of world economy, at the pace that economic development had been taking place in the last decade or more, they won’t be outside the world economy for much longer. Nor should we want them to be outside the world economy. It’s not in their interests to be outside the world economy. And it’s certainly not in our interests for them to be outside the world economy. You could say, “well, it’s in the interests of the capitalists to exploit them.” That may be true, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not in the interests of the revolutionary proletariat to have the rest of humanity drawn into the process of the revolutionary struggle, because they are going to be drawn into the world economy as proletarians. They will increase our number. And some number of them will become revolutionary proletarians. So from that point of view it draws a greater number of forces into our movement, which brings the possibility of revolution closer to the fore. It also minimizes the reserves of capitalism and reaction.
Resistance to Capitalist Globalization
As long as the billion people stay outside of the world economy they can be a reserve for capitalism and reaction. You can see that there are elements in countries that are resisting being drawn into world culture and world capitalism, this resistance is not revolutionary.
Then there is resistance like, for instance, Cuba. It resists some of the encroachments of capital while it attracts others . But Cuba’s stance, even if it makes errors in relationship to some of its resistance and even if the resistance may not be in its best interests, at least it is doing it from the point of view of the proletarian revolution, of advancing the development of socialism at least within Cuba, and the Cuban’s point of view is they would like to see socialism on a world scale. The Chinese, Vietnamese, Korea, similarly. That’s different from people in Saudi Arabia who are resistant to the encroachments of US capitalism, and turn to Islamic fundamentalism as the organized expression of resisting the encroachments of US imperialism. It’s also different than people in Latin America turning to Christian fundamentalism or the Catholic church to resist the encroachments of US imperialism. You can look around the world and see that, there is a resistance to the encroachments of capitalism that is actually a reactionary resistance. Those elements create a reserve for imperialist reaction. It’s the job of communists either to neutralize those elements politically or to win over those people socially to communism and to world culture.
Specifically, in relationship to the way our society functions, long ago US capitalism was able to figure out that you get more bees with honey, so to speak. That bribery is more effective than terror in maintaining social order and US capitalism has been in a position to really extend bribery, if you want to call it that, to the broad masses of the American people of all colors, of all ethnicities, of all language groups, of all religious groups, and so on and so forth. Of all ages, sexes, and so on. Now, that’s one side. I’m not saying that American workers have not struggled for the social gains and the social guarantees and so on. Certainly that has happened. The US capitalists have been in a position to do it, although, there’s actually somewhat of a shift now. Having had that sort of unhealthy relationship over these decades, you know, ninety percent of the people of this country are supporting the war against the people of Afghanistan. So there still is a certain unhealthy aspect to it.
Abundance and the Transition to Communism
There is also is a qualitative change that’s taken place that has to do with the technological revolution. It has to do with the extension of credit, the utilization of electronic transactions, the whole way that commodities circulate in the US is really radically advanced. I mean it’s way beyond the old capitalist social relations. In some way, it actually is a negation of capitalist social relations. And if we look at what Marx said about abundance being the basis of communism, the technological revolution has created the condition for abundance in the world. It may have already created abundance. But if there isn’t absolute abundance, in the world as a whole, there certainly is now the practical immediate possibility of abundance on the day that humanity decides that we are going to have abundance. I mean that’s where we are in terms of our productive capabilities. So that goes back to: can we get there? Can humanity come to that decision? That’s a political question that communists really have to address. And it’s really up to the communists to get the rest of humanity to that decision. And in a way, today that’s the main task of communists. And if you talk about the technological revolution as a knowledge revolution then the main task of communists is in the knowledge arena. That is, it’s a theoretical, political task to get the rest of humanity to come to the decision that we should have abundance now and abundance now means communism essentially. Or shortly thereafter.
Well, where are we right now in relationship to abundance? We certainly have abundance in the US. You know, US has four percent of the world population and we consume forty percent of the world GDP. Now, we also produce 25 percent of the world GDP. So just because we’re four percent of the population and consuming forty percent, it’s not as if we’re only producing four percent and consuming forty percent. We’re still consuming more than we’re producing, but that also may be relative because some of the GDP measurements are price measurements rather then actually quantity of production measurements. Anyway, it would be hard to argue that there is not abundance in the US. Right? There’s abundance – that doesn’t mean it’s being distributed equally. And it doesn’t mean it’s being consumed equally. Then the question is ….
(?) How do you get your share?
Jon: Yes. Well, that is a question. I mean, because we have abundance in the US doesn’t mean we have communism in the US. But it does mean we could have communism if we could decide to have it. And part of why we don’t have it has to do with what Zyuganov talked about as superconsumption. I disagree with Zyugunov on this question. I don’t think that superconsumption is simply a manipulation of the masses by the bourgeoisie for the realization of value. Certainly the capitalist class wants the realization of value and has a direct interest in consumption – in the broad mass consumption – because of realization of value and therefore realization of profit. And there’s no question that there have been a large number of businesses created – there’s whole industries that have been created to help facilitate consumption. (Encourage consumption, create demand where demand didn’t exist and so on.)
In my view this process that is underway is really a situation in which we’ve created abundance that is the basis for communism in a condition where the human beings – us – and all the rest of our fellow citizens and other people living in the country – are unprepared for communism. We have the material condition for communism but the human being that have created the material condition for communism are not themselves prepared for communism. So again this goes to the task of communists. It’s up to the communists in the society to get the rest of the human beings in the society to recognize that the basis for communism is here and we have to make a decision to have communism. And we actually all do have an interest in that. Because communism will eliminate all the social problems in the society. That isn’t to say that there won’t be some other kind of social problem, but all the social problems that currently exist in this society will be eliminated by communism.
D: I would like us to get down to the main point – who is the revolutionary class?
(?) You said that we are able to settle all the social problems. Did you forget about the nuclear weapons that are expanding into countries that are developing nuclear weapons?
Jon: No. If we have communism I don’t think nuclear weapons are an issue. Even President Bush has proposals on the table to the main leaders of the world that have nuclear weapons for disarmament. He had proposals for unilateral US nuclear disarmament.
Sharon: He was just making a general generic statement about the nature of communism as allowing us to solve all of our social problems. But you’re right, I think, it’s a long discussion about what we mean by that. But it’s not really directly germane to this discussion.
Revolutionary Class – Advanced Sector
Richard: The question that D raised – is the working class the revolutionary class? I can’t think of any other one right now. I don’t think that’s really the issue that Zyuganov raised. He raised the issue of whether the scientific, medical, technical, and I would add, managerial sector – the sector of the working class that is creating the scientific and technological revolution and globalization – is it somehow the revolutionary sector. To put it another way, is it possible to speak of this sector as a revolutionary sector just because of its central role in revolutionizing production? D’s position, as I understand it, is that this sector is really a middle stratum between the working class and the bourgeoisie. And in the development of the revolutionary struggle, basically, this group will be absorbed into the mass of the working class which will make the revolution.
Zyuganov’s argument is that this sector – well, he doesn’t make the argument explicitly but you can surmise or infer it – that this sector is now going to play the same role in a revolutionary struggle as the progressive bourgeois intellectuals played in the 19th century, up to the Bolshevik revolution. The progressive intellectuals from the capitalist class brought communism and socialism to the working class. Now, Zygunov is saying, a section of the working class – this advanced technological scientific sector – brings communism to the mass of the working class and leads the working class. In other words, the the working class develops its own leadership from this sector. It makes sense, but how it works in practice is another matter. However, it is also important to recognize the fundamental difference between the old bourgeois intellectuals and the new advanced sector of the proletariat. The revolutionary bourgeois intellectuals never 'met a payroll' until, in a few cases, they came to power. The new sector, which includes managers, is actually already running the key sectors of society, not, to be sure, on its own behalf or on behalf of the whole class or the whole of society, but running it nevertheless.
On the question of superconsumption that Zyuganov raised, we still have a working class, certainly on the international level, to which the problems of over-consumption haven’t reached . For large numbers of people super consumption looks like a pretty good thing to aspire to. Even medium consumption is a preoccupation. Whereas the advanced sector of the working class has, in a way, gone past superconsumption. They see its limitations. They have now more spiritual aspirations. In a way it reminds me of a comment that Engels makes about vegetarianism. He said somewhere, “ In all due respect to vegetarians, we couldn’t have gotten to the place where we could consider vegetarianism if we hadn’t have gone through meat eating because that was a much more efficient way to develop human intellect than eating grains and plants.” Well, in a way we couldn’t get to a system of production that saves resources and uses them rationally without going through the stage of waste. So there’s a big problem there between this new sector and the old much larger sector. Not to mention the sectors that are not yet incorporated into modern technology and science.
One way to look at this issue of how the advanced sector can lead the working class to lead the world to communism is to look at the characteristics of this new, advanced sector of the working class that might make it a revolutionary sector. There are two types of characteristics that would fit the sector for leadership – ability and motivation. Let me just list them and maybe we can discuss them next time: one is the international orientation of this sector. This sector tends to work in an international environment. I know that in places I’ve worked in, the technical staff is drawn from all over the world and also works cooperatively globally. Increasingly, we see complex scientific, engineering or business projects being executed by global teams, both in terms of the ethnic and cultural diversity and the geographic dispersion. Also, the advanced technical and scientific intelligencia tends to work at the controlling node of a global productive process. Secondly, this sector has had to develop the ability to work within complex organizational structures. It also tends to work most effectively in organizational structures that combine collegiality (equality) with heirarchy(inequality) in some optimum balance. There is a whole theory of organization that has been developed to address these issues. It is difficult to achieve an optimum organization, even if you know what it is, because of the exploitative essence of capitalism. It is a contradiction that becomes more acute as the scientific and technological revolution advances.
Maybe this is repetitive, but there’s also a system orientation. This kind of worker has a greater necessity and ability to assimilate and generate more complex ideas at a higher level of abstraction. And that also creates a tendency to reject one dimensional goals, means, and objectives. That is a contradiction in capitalism which has a single objective, which is profit, or production. Also, this sector for some reason, develops more complex social demands beyond material demands, and more spiritual – we don’t like that word because it implies religion, but in fact non-material requirements – cultural requirements, so on and so forth that cannot easily or completely be satified by capitalism. The kind of work that these people do creates a greater capacity and need for self-discipline and self-motivation. And finally, because of the advanced, dynamic character of their work there is a greater individual self confidence than among other workers. So those are some of the characteristics of this sector, the advanced technological sector.
Marx and Engels as Revolutionary Intellectuals
D: I think the main thing is the transition to social ownership with the working class in control and private ownership of the capitalists ended. And I don’t think we’ve got to that exactly. And that’s all I’m going to say til next time.
Jon: Do we have some other questions or brief comments about Richard just raised?
M: Why were Marx and Lenin and their followers – why were they Marxists? I mean, what class did they represent? And if they didn’t represent the working class, then why were they the leaders? I’m wondering if we look at the past, why were there intellectuals and people from bourgeois backgrounds and educations in the Marxist movement? If we answer that, maybe that will help us understand what is likely to happen in the future and the motivations of people in the future, or in the present, who would be leaders or involved in one way or another.
Del: That’s a whole new question.
Jon: No, it isn’t. It’s actually an excellent approach, I think. And on that question, we should realize when we think about that question, that when Marx and Engels were developing as young men the proletarian movement was relatively new. The proletariat as a class was barely formed. In most places it hadn’t formed yet as a class. In Germany it was not yet really formed as a class, which is where they grew up. The bourgeoisie was quite widespread, particularly if you include all of the bourgeoisie at the time, that is, the industrial bourgeoisie, the commercial bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and the peasantry as a whole, all the strata of the peasantry, which essentially was bourgeois, a form of the bourgeoisie. The vast majority of people in society were bourgeois. There were various strata of the bourgeoisie. So just randomly if you were going to take the set of human beings in any given society, if the majority of those human beings were bourgeois, a certain number of those human beings were going to become revolutionary, then there was a good chance that a certain number of those revolutionaries would have come from some strata of the bourgeoisie. That doesn’t mean that the bourgeoisie was the main revolutionary force. Certainly by the time Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto the proletariat had become clearly at least a revolutionary force in society. Today in our society, the vast majority of people, without any remote competition, are sellers of labor power. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the country – to it stands to reason that those elements interested in revolution would come from the proletariat.
Del: I dealt with that question very thoroughly in my article on Slovoism. And I’ll duplicate it and send it to everybody if you want it. The point is about the development of revolutionary theory and why the working class did not originate it. The intellectuals like Marx did. I’ll duplicate it and send it.
(11-4-01)
Development of Communism
Jon: The aim of my presentation is to delve further into the subject that Zyuganov actually only hints at, but that must be considered if we are interested in the development of communism. From a Marxist point of view, advances in the development of productive forces have consequences in production relations, social relations, ideas and politics. The mental/manual labor contradiction has become inverted or reversed in this period, and the technological revolution that brought it about - the application of knowledge directly to production - has necessitated a new qualitative leap in the global integration of capital. That’s been driven by the need to try to maximize profits. Capital has no choice but to utilize anything it believes will do so. This increases competition and reduces the required productive capacity while expanding market reach. It also creates abundance, or at least the immediate practical possibility of abundance, which, of course, is the material basis of communism. So to the extent that the state is an obstacle to this process it must be done away with. And the contradiction between the economic interests of capitalists and the political interests of the national state becomes more pronounced. With the qualitative leap in the global economic integration, the ability of the national state to deal with, insure, or protect the interests of capitalism and of the world economic system has been severely curtailed. And this is not a question of democracy or sovereignty. In the period following WW II, in many countries the state was the only force capable of acting as an agent of capital formation. At present capital markets are increasingly displacing the state in this area. The state is no longer necessary for capital formation, in the third world or the developing world, nor is it capable of insuring the interests of capital either in the advanced capitalist countries (or the imperialist countries), or in the developing countries.
The possibility of communism has been given rise to by the creation of abundance, or at least the immediate possibility of abundance. And it has already manifested itself in some countries. Where Zyuganov talks about superconsumption, or hyperconsumption, really where that exists – where the hyperconsumption exists – is in places where the abundance already exists, or the immediate possibility of continuous abundance. There may be moments in those places that abundance doesn’t exist, but it’s only for very brief moments of time. Essentially, abundance exists continuously in those places. And so we have a sort of superconsumption, or hyperconsumption, and really what that is is abundance at a moment where people, the human beings, are not prepared for communism. We have the condition for communism, but the human material are not ready for communism. And so what we have instead is sort of a neurotic acting out of the ability to consume at will. You know, communism is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” That implies the ability to consume at will. So we have the ability to consume at will with people not prepared for communism. And so it manifests itself as this sort of gluttonous consumption. So that’s where we have the contradiction between true human relations versus the relationship between people and things.
Going back to the contradiction between the interests of capital and the interests of the state, as I said earlierthe September 11th issue has focused or heightened the contradiction within the United States between the interests of capital and the interests of the national state. The national state interest is to preserve and expand itself. And part of preserving and expanding itself is, at least periodically, to utilize its most violent expressions. So it needs periodic war. It needs building up of its resources of intelligence and repression and its military capabilities, and so on.
The interests of finance capital, however, is to break down borders, and to make the movement of goods and services and actually, even people, more efficient and smoother. And the reason that I say 'even people' is that for capital more efficiently to exploit labor, it really requires a world market in labor and an efficient world market in labor, which implies the breaking down of borders so that labor can actually move efficiently to where capital needs it, just as capital can move efficiently to where labor is available. In other words, both sides of that have to be just as flexible in order for capitalism to work most efficiently. And therefore at this stage, with the qualitative leap in global economic integration, capitalism really requires an elimination of the borders that inhibit the movement of goods, services, and people. The state, on the other hand, requires and is attempting to erect greater barriers between the movement of people, certainly. And there were various elements within the state, and actually even retrograde economic elements, within each state that require erecting barriers even to the movement of goods and services, as well as the movement of people. So these things stand in contradiction to each other and are more important contradictions today.
The elected government (the Bush administration) came into office as a representative of those elements within finance capital that wanted to further break down barriers to the movement of goods, services, and people, the movement of capital and free trade, and those elements in capital that are not interested in having to allocate so much of their capital to supporting the state, to supporting military, to supporting intelligence, to supporting the unnecessary elements of weapons manufacturing, weapons systems, intelligence systems, and so on, and for bringing about a more efficient and streamlined and radically reduced state. They have been hampered by, and in fact because of the September 11 attack, it’s strengthened those elements within the state apparatus and those retrograde elements in economic life of the country who have a lot of representatives in Congress. It’s strengthened those elements to completely reverse the policy of the Bush administration, which was, as I said earlier, to reduce the number of weapons systems, to reduce military production, to close military bases, reduce the number of military personnel, to reduce the number of security agencies in the US, to completely eliminate many of them, to completely eliminate many of their functions, to consolidate many of them, and to reduce the amount of tax dollars allocated to the military and to reduce the number of tax dollars allocated to intelligence – all of that has been reversed.
Congress, immediately upon the attack, the next day, reversed all of it. They immediately put back every weapons systems that was eliminated. They immediately put back every intelligence system that was eliminated. And so we see played out in life a manifestation of this contradiction in which the state still has ways of preserving and expanding itself even to the detriment of the finance capital that had originally brought that state into existence.
Sharon: clarification questions first.
N: Why did Bush want to do all those things you just listed?
Jon: Because having a bloated military budget and a bloated intelligence budget and huge amounts of people and resources allocated to the military and allocated to intelligence is economically inefficient. It doesn’t serve the current interests of finance capital, which is to break down the barriers to trade, to break down the barriers to the movement of goods, services and people. The intelligence apparatus is unnecessary for that – at least the degree to which the intelligence apparatus has existed hitherto. And this huge military apparatus is also an obstacle to that. It’s economically inefficient and it stands in contradiction to the requirements of finance capital, which is really to move away from the role of the military in guaranteeing the interests of finance capital.
?:That confuses me too. I mean, the goal of finance capital is to make money. What do they care if they get it on making a bomb, or a nuclear weapon, or whether they get it from selling something required?
M: Well, that’s true. An individual capitalist would be just as happy to sell nothing and make money on it. They’d be happy to sell bombs, be happy to sell lettuce, whatever. But the thing is, if you sell a boat, say, that transports things. You sell that to a European company that then uses that boat to ship goods over. Then commerce increases, there’s more wealth created for society, more wealth for the capitalists. If you make a nuclear bomb that bomb sits in a silo, hopefully, and doesn’t create any further wealth, which decreases the amount of wealth in the entire society including for the capitalists.
?: But that’s why we’re going to now build the anti-ballistic missile. Because they don’t want the stuff used, they just want the money for making it.
Sharon: That’s true, for the individual capitalist. But we’re trying to look at the interests of capital as a whole. But in order to do that you have to see the contradictions within capital. So some capitalists want to make nuclear bombs. But a lot more capitalists want to have production in this country that gets sold everywhere all around the world and where they can exploit the labor – I misspoke – I didn’t mean just production in this country – they want to have production wherever it’s cheapest to have production and they want those goods to be sold all around the world.
? Remember surplus value. To realize the profits they have to have somebody buy it. But if they can shoot it off into space then they don’t have to worry about it.
Sharon: But that’s only a limited part of capital. Only a small number of capitalists are in the shooting off to space production business. And most capitalists are not.
Jon: Not only that, but the realization of surplus value takes place when a weapon system is sold to the government …
? That’s taxes
Jon: Yes, but the capitalists are also paying taxes and …
? They do?
Jon: In fact they pay the largest portion of the taxes, far and away the largest portion. It means that the capitalist class as a whole are subsidizing individual capitalists. And what’s happened now is that the capitalist class as a whole is rejecting – and this has been going on for some time – the demand that they subsidize individual capitalists.
R: I thought that you were specifically identifying finance capital as the agent. Finance capital being essentially dynamic. It goes across borders and increases forces in relation to production. For example, they build railroads and create infrastructure because they have to because they need infrastructure to exploit workers. Now if I understood your argument correctly the dynamic nature of finance capital crossing borders and going out into the world was kind of creating the platform on which an international proletariat will emerge. Is that correct?
Jon: Yes, essentially.
R: So, their interest in not having a bloated security apparatus, not having big militaries is because, first of all, they don’t want to pay for that. And second, at least prior to September 11, they didn’t perceive that the world worked that way. It was just an expense.
Jon: Right.
R: They don’t like welfare because it’s an expense. They don’t like weapons systems because they’re an expense too. All they care about is accumulation of capital. That’s where they are.
Sharon: And they don’t really want to blow up all those people all over the world because they want to exploit them and if they’re dead they can’t exploit them.
R: And if they’re blowing them up they can’t get them to the factories.
Jon: Exactly. And they also can’t buy the products.
?: Someone has got to buy.
Sharon: Right. They want to raise up a certain level of working people to have enough money to buy stuff.
Afghanistan
Jon: Which is why, as M said earlier, the bombing of Afghanistan is actually not in the interests of capitalism.
R: I absolutely agree with you.
Sharon: So what does capital want with Afghanistan? Aside from the small military-industrialists who want to sell bombs. Those that come immediately to mind are those who want to build an oil pipeline somewhere there. And one of the plans that they’ve had on paper is to build it through Afghanistan. And its not helping them to bomb the place back to the stone age. Except if they think that politically they have to get rid of the Taliban and put in somebody who’s going to help them build their pipeline.
Jon: But part of the reason they wanted the Taliban was they thought the Taliban was going to guarantee them the opportunity to build the pipeline. And part of the reason they don’t like the Taliban now is that that didn’t happen. But the other thing that actually has happened is that the US has basically surrendered the issue of Caspian oil to the Russians and the Turkmen and the Uzbeks, maybe, and whoever else is over there. The US has just recently has basically said, “It’s yours. You’re going to sell it to us, that’s all we really want.”
Sharon: You gotta figure out how to ship it or pipe it to the port. And that’s what Turkey’s role is going to be.
Jon: Well, they’re not going to go through Turkey or Afghanistan.
Sharon: Where are they going to put it on the boats?
Jon: They’re going to go through Greece or first through Romania …
R: We have a globe ….
(A lot of discussion of geography. The consensus seemed to be that the oil would go to the Crimea and they across the Caspian through the Bosporus…..)
N: I’m still a little confused. You’re saying that the Bush administration and all its entourage doing this bombing they’re not doing it in their usual position as servants of the capitalist class?
Jon: We’re saying that it actually goes against the interest of the capitalist class as a whole. It may represent the interests of a narrow section of capital. I would say to the extent that it represents the interests of a narrow section of capital it’s a retrograde section of capital. That is, today, it’s a backward section, it’s a section that’s resistant to this qualitative leap in the international economic integration. Except for the military industrial complex and the intelligence industrial complex which do benefit to some degree. Well, actually they really benefited from the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The bombing of Afghanistan doesn’t really benefit them particularly. To some extent the bombing of Afghanistan is an appeasement of the backwardness of the American people. That has to be said.
R: Remember the Solatso principle?
Jon: From the Godfather.
R: Yes. When he let’s Tom go…. The first thing Solatso says to him is, “You know, Tom, I didn’t want it to be this say. Blood is a big expense.”
Jon: Exactly.
R: And that’s the way capital thinks. Blood is a big expense. What we want to do is have people producing in a factory.
Jon: Right. You know, this is not the middle of the eighteen hundreds. In the middle of the 1800’s imperialist capitalism or capitalist colonialism still had the task of quote civilizing the world. That is, bringing the world into capitalism. Well, now the world is in capitalism. To the extent that capitalism hasn’t penetrated every village, the way that that penetration takes place is not through armed force, it’s through the power of finance capital. And we have the unchallenged intense hegemony of finance capital in the world. There’s really no getting around it.
Sharon: But instead of saying that the 19th century was the demarcation, didn’t it have something to do with the end of the cold war, too? Before the end of the cold war, it might have been an expense, but it was a necessary expense.
Jon: Right.
R: One of the things I’ve found is that particularly in this period, there is an intuitive series of assumptions in the progressive left, even among communists – if there is an event taking place you have to connect it to an economic rational. It has to be some kind of economic benefit. Oil is kind of the all purpose one.
Jon: Right.
R: And in advancing the very idea that Jon has over the last several weeks that this is not in the interests of capitalism, it’s not really in the interests of imperialism, advancing essentially the arguments that you did, people look at me like I’ve got two heads. This is counter-intuitive. My point is that in order to begin to develop the theoretical sophistication to begin to change this society, we’re going to have to start breaking down some of these knee jerk reactions. Like Sam Webb’s idea that this represents an arc of military power, like all of a sudden on the 12th they decided they needed this arc of military power. I’m not sure that I entirely agree with everything that Jon had put forward, but I think it’s unarguable that there’s a contradiction at this point between capital in general, finance capital in particular, and the state. And what you have now is a militarized bourgeoisie.
Jon: What do you mean?
R: I think the bourgeoisie is actually sold on the idea that something has to be done because we don’t want buildings being blown up, we want everything to get quiet.
Jon: Oh, you mean the Afghanistan thing.
R: Right. And I think they may be looking to find that spending money on blood may be desirable. Kind of the way Sharon was saying about the cold war.
Sharon: They’re having a united front. If we agree that there’s this split in capital now, they have to temporarily patch it up.
Modernism versus Reaction
Jon: I’m not sure that that’s really what’s going on, as much as there are elements within finance capital – interestingly, the Bush administration and most of the people around Bush represent this anti-state, pro-finance capital side. That’s really the interesting dynamic right now, despite the fact that they’re conducting a war. What’s interesting about this situation is that Colin Powell has said that (and he really tried to define the political context) that this was an attack on civilization, which I think do some degree we have to say is true. And he actually said it was an attack on world civilization. Well, compare that to what the CIA guy I talked about earlier, and the guy who wrote the book on Afghanistan said when he talked about how the communists had hijacked modernism, hijacked civilization. And that it was necessary for the imperialists to support the anti-civilization elements, the anti-modernist elements. Powell is attempting to shift the position of the United States in the world from one that was supporting historical reaction (backwardness, tribalism, religious fundamentalism, all the retrograde trends in the world) to one in which the US is now on the side of world civilization. That’s really an important development. Whether it actually takes place or not, whether it actually can take place (I don’t think it had taken place) is a separate question from the fact that Powell is attempting to lead it in that way. Next is the conduct of this war itself. I’ve heard military analysts compare this war to the gulf war and to the US war in Kosovo based on the number of sorties that are being flown every day. And the number of sorties that are being flown are like forty to fifty a day. On a big day it’s eighty. The number of sorties that were being flown in the Gulf war were twelve hundred, fifteen hundred, two thousand a day.
Sharon: It was pretty much around the clock nonstop.
Jon: Yeah. And the same with Yugoslavia – the 72 days of bombing it was essentially in that number of sorties – there were a thousand, twelve hundred a day. So that this is war at a very different scale. It’s this aggressive imperialist type war on a very different scale. In some way it almost appears to be for show. But the other thing about it is that the US in this process has formed this world coalition and who are they coalescing with? They’re actually attempting to move themselves into an alliance with modernism. Right? They’re coalescing with Russia, India, China. They’ve even tried to redefine their relationships with Libya, Syria, Iran, Cuba. This is a moment in which, if I’m correct about these elements that are in the Bush administration, that they are for shifting the relationship of the US to the world along the lines of this finance capital – state contraction to the benefit of finance capital and the diminution of the power of the state – they certainly appear to have taken advantage of the attack on the WTC and Pentagon to try to bring that about. In other words, again counterintuitively to what the left and the communist movement says that they are doing, they actually are forming alliances with people that previously – I mean they have actually formed a coalition and it’s they who are saying it’s a coalition – with countries and forces in the world that previously it was unthinkable that the US could form the alliance with, even if it was desirable, it was unthinkable.
Sharon: You know what’s going to be the proof? – what they do about Iraq. Because Iraq was the most modern of all the Arab countries up until 1990. If they decide to really reverse the policy of sanctions and bombing and do something to normalize relations with Iraq, then you’ll know that that line has won. But there are forces trying to drum up that it was Sadam Hussein that bombed the TC or sending the anthrax over here and if that line wins, if they decide to overthrow him after they take care of the Taliban, then you know that real reactionaries are still in control.
R: What you would see is almost the US adopting Soviet mid-eastern foreign policy, because it was Soviet policy by-in-large to support secular nationalist elements against the reactionaries. Of course, they were much more enlightened about than the US.
Jon: Let me say two things: one is the Bush administration, from the time it came into office until the 9/11 bombings had pretty consciously already started to pursue that policy on Iraq. Don’t forget, the Bush administration had proposed withdrawing the sanctions, or modifying them, and actually Iraq didn’t trust it.
Sharon: The so-called smart sanctions.
Jon: Yeah. Which Iraq didn’t trust and Russia and China ended up blocking it. And so the old sanction regime was still in place, but the US really wasn’t carrying out the old sanctions anyway. It was essentially that the sanctions had not completely gone away, but had mostly gone away.
Sharon: But they were still bombing.
Jon: But they bombed very little. Until July, the Bush administration had bombed Iraq two days in six months. They were trying to change the policy, there’s no question about it. They were also trying to deal with Syria. What was Blair doing in Syria the other day? That wasn’t an accident. They’re trying to change that relationship. But here’s where the other side of the thing with Iraq: if the US is trying to actually shift its position – is this contradiction between the US and Saudi, which is really being intensified now and also is being talked about much more, which has never been talked about.
Sharon, R: right. All of a sudden it’s in the NYT.
Jon: In the last two weeks its being talked about everywhere all the time. And so that stands in contrast to the US contradiction with Iraq. And if you notice, it’s different elements within the ruling class that talking about it. So what we have is a contradiction in the US in the political class, really, in the people that occupy the apparatus, a contradiction between two wings of the apparatus, one of which wants to essentially create world war – the Wolferwitz crowd, the neo-cons, you know, William Kristol, Podoretz, and also religious fundamentalists like Bill Bennet.
R: The Christian right is real big on this front, they like it.
Jon: Certain elements of the Christian right. The ones who signed the letter trying to force Bush to go to war, essentially. So those elements – and they’re represented in this current apparatus by Wolfowitz, more that anyone. They’re the ones that are trying to instigate a war with Iraq. And acutally certain elements from the Clinton administration have been really big in that. I mean, they’re still active. Not when they were in the Clinton administration, but now they are part of that “Let’s go to war with Iraq, let’s expand the war, essentially, let’s create world war.” Acutally, “let’s break the coalition”, actually is their position. And the other elements, the anti-Saudi elements are opposed to expanding the war to any place outside of Afghanistan. They want to confine the war. They follow the so-called Powell doctrine to have a very narrow definition of what your goal is and use overwhelming force to be able to carry out that definition, and have an exit strategy. Well, the ironic thing is that they are not even using overwhelming force. Because the truth is that bombing Afghanistan isn’t going to – if the job is to eliminate terrorism, or eliminate Al Quieda or its leadership, bombing Afghanistan is not gonna do that.
Jon: One other thing I wanted to mention related to this idea of finance capital breaking down the state is: my analysis of the so-called Asia crisis of several years ago was really about the state apparatus in those countries previously had been – since WWII the state had been utilized as the agent of capital formation in most of the developing countries. Well, we got to a point where that was no longer necessary and actually it was in the interests of finance capital to break that down and establish the hegemony of capital markets and utilization of capital markets for capital formation everywhere that they could. It was in the interest not only of international finance capital, US finance capital, but even the domestic finance capital in Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Korea, and so on. And so that’s what happened in the so-called Asia crisis. They manipulated the currency to break the power of the state. And actually since that time we’ve seen the power of the state diminish, the evolution of so-called transparency in economic activity, which is necessary in order for finance capital to function effectively. And the ascendancy of the utilization of capital markets all throughout Asia for capital formation.