Anti-Globalisation:
The Socialism of the Imbeciles
"Communists despise hiding their ideas and aims"
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
What is the real nature of global capitalism for the hundreds of
millions of proletarians who, across the planet, from Rio de Janeiro
to Shanghai, from Seattle to Johannesburg, from Seoul to Paris, are
unemployed, working and struggling? Do they suffer from the
dictatorship of "finance", that "bad side of capital" (the money
markets, stock exchanges etc.) to which we can oppose the "good
side", industrial or possibly commercial capital which creates jobs?
Doesn't the capitalist social relation rather constitute an
indivisible and united totality? Doesn't the fact of isolating one
sector to put it at the centre of critique mean taking up an
ultra-simplistic political economy?
To these questions, the anti-globalists give mystifying answers,
concentrating the fire of critique on one particular form of capital,
finance capital, the better to blot out the critique of capital as a
whole.
Putting critique back on its feet
For revolutionary communists the critique of capital is based on
the identification of the exploitation of wage labourers by capital
as the producer of surplus value, and not on finance capital which
only valorises itself on the basis of levies (interest) raised on the
social surplus value which comes from the productive sphere.
Logically therefore, for those obsessed by the struggle against
finance, the strangling of this "diabolic" sphere must begin with the
destruction of industrial capital. But the fact is that most
"anti-globalists" defend the production of commodities (when it is
not "multi-national" and, preferably, when it is carried out in the
framework of nationalised industry and/or small units of artisanal
production, cooperatives, etc.).
The left and the fascists have always been the professionals when
it comes to unequivocally denouncing the variable geometry of
capitalism. In France during the Popular Front the left tried to
divert the anger of proletarians into denouncing the "200 families".
After 1960, the Stalinists made a speciality of defending the small
traders and bosses against "big monopoly capital". The fascists, for
their part, in the 1930s attacked "anonymous" and "vagabond" finance
and channelled popular resentment into anti-Semitism, the "socialism
of the imbeciles" of that time.
The "anti-globalisation" movement is not a break from these dire
traditions.
But who are the anti-globalists?
They are all those who for the last few years, from the big
social-democratic and Stalinist parties to various kinds of leftists,
have taken up the new battle standard: anti-globalisation. This
movement has its heroes, the clown José Bové and the
masked socialite Marcos; its press, for the francophones, Le Monde
diplomatique; its sacred places, Porto Alegre, San José in
Chiapas and Millau; its economist, Tobin; its great grandfather, J.
M. Keynes; its "glorious" military achievements, Seattle, Nice, Davos
and Naples ; its newspeak, "neoliberalism", "social forum",
"participatory budget", "citizen's economy"; its Great Satans, the
WTO, the World Bank and the IMF. Briefly, all the ideological
paraphernalia necessary to mobilise the battalions of critical false
consciousness.
The ideology of anti-globalisation sets out to denounce :
- a fraction of capital designated under the generic term
"financial markets" which is parasitic and evil ;
- the commoditisation of certain "sacred" sectors of productive
activity : "culture", agriculture, water
but avoids, in the
end, the critique of the foundation and the raison d'être of
capitalism, wage labour and the productive consumption of the
commodity labour power ;
- the relocation of production to the lower wage countries by the
famous "multinationals".
The solutions put forward by the anti-globalists are the following
:
- the introduction of the Tobin tax (at a rate of 0.1% of the
total) on financial movements, the so-called "0.1% socialism"
(although it's far less than for "share trading capital gains" which
are subject to a "tax withholding with full discharge" of 26%);
- the introduction of new customs barriers to protect national
production ;
- the participation of citizens in city affairs, for example, the
municipal self-management of Porto Alegre.
Behind this apparently innovative and trendy discourse we can find
the most hackneyed themes of reformism. What, in fact, is the sad
pantomime of Porto Alegre if not "municipal socialism" in a modern
guise? What is the march on Mexico City of the EZLN - organised
jointly by the Mexican state and Marcos - if not a "modern"
application of the old social-democratic reformism from the beginning
of the 20th Century, which explained that the objective of the
proletarian movement was no longer the violent taking of political
power but its gradual and peaceful conquest?
How is it possible to imagine fighting an adversary without
understanding its functioning and by only attacking one aspect of its
domination? Capital, confronting the proletariat, is a dynamic
interdependent totality.
Global capital against the international proletariat
Contrary to what the anti-globalists say (Cf. Le Monde
diplomatique), globalisation didn't begin with the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Since the XVIth Century, with the centralisation by finance and
commercial capital of the gigantic masses of value which allowed the
rapid development of industrial capital, the social relation based on
exploitation set out from old Europe, to the Americas, to invade the
planet.
This irresistible movement was described in 1848 by Marx and
Engels in the Communist Manifesto:
"The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world
market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption
in every country. (
) All old-established national industries
have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged
by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and
death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no
longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from
the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only
at home, but in every quarter of the globe. (
) In place of the
old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have
intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of
nations."
At that time the revolutionaries understood that, despite the
enormous suffering and atrocities that it implied, this movement
created the objective bases of a superior mode of production,
communism, carried by a working class always more numerous in every
part of the world. Marx and Engels, as well, lambasted the "despair
of the reactionaries" of all stripes who, following the example of
the anti-globalists of today, longed for the good old days -
yesterday the corporations and the immutable order of feudal society,
today the benevolent national state and the "Keynesian" capitalism of
the 1960s.
These gentlemen see in misery only misery, without discerning the
revolutionary potentialities.
Since 1848, the internationalisation of capital has never stopped
deepening. Innumerable new poles of accumulation have emerged, thus
reinforcing the world proletariat and enlarging the objective basis
of its revolutionary consciousness. The workers' movement and radical
workers' struggles are no longer the prerogative of white and
European proletarians. For the last twenty years South Korea, South
Africa, Mexico, Brazil, China and many other countries have known
class confrontations. These have involved millions of proletarians
and have enrolled themselves clearly in the historic war against
exploitation.
These struggles contribute to the recreation of the foundations of
a real proletarian internationalism, a more and more vital necessity
for the exploited, including for carrying out their defensive
struggles well.
While the trade unionists of the CGT in France and the AFL-CIO in
the US moan about relocation and the international division of labour
and defend "French" and "American" production, revolutionaries set
out the urgency of the international development of the class
struggle. This is the case right now at Danone, which delocalised
part of its biscuit making activities from Western Europe to Eastern
Europe. The same goes for immigration, used to increase the pressure
on the wages of "native" workers. Is it necessary to respond to this
by pronouncing in favour of closing the frontiers, adopting the
policy of quotas, or by defending the free circulation of the
exploited so as to work for their growing unity?
Today there are two types of response to the deepening of the
planetary domination of capital. The first response - of the
reformist type - aims at regulating the impetuous course of the
circulation of value by setting up crazy pseudo guarantees (the Tobin
tax, protectionism, more secure frontiers, local democracy etc.)
against some of its excesses. The second response - the revolutionary
communist one - far from lamenting so-called "globalisation", salutes
the potential which it unleashes for the struggle of the world
proletariat and, far from the reactionary withdrawal into the nation,
the region or Roquefort cheese, works for the international unity of
the exploited for the abolition of wage labour and the disappearance
of value.
Mouvement Communiste
20 March 2001
Contact : B.P.1666 Centre Monnaie 1000 Bruxelles 1 BELGIUM
But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative,
while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old
nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system
hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense
alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade. Karl Marx, On
the Question of Free Trade (1848)
French Version
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