Living Marxism

Chapter 9 of “On the Marxist Program” ILTT Draft Program (last revised July 2022)

Starting with Marx, crisis is a crisis of reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production. Capitalism can survive so long as it has not exhausted its capacity to impose and restore those conditions. It can do so unless the proletariat intervenes and takes power. Thus, the crucial factor in resolving capitalist crises is: which class has power. The current crisis marks terminal decline of
capitalism, as the looming environmental catastrophe means capital can no longer reproduce its
conditions for existence.

As we have seen capitalism for the whole imperialist epoch has been over-ripe for its replacement by
critical factor for the ability of the proletariat to take power is the existence of an internationalist
revolutionary party. Without that party, capitalist crises become more and more destructive of the
conditions for capitalism’s reproduction, including the destruction of accumulated wealth (dead labor)
and the labor power or living labour. The future of humanity therefore is a race between living labor
(the proletariat) and dead labor (accumulated capital). Either capitalism dies or humanity dies.

(a) Marx, Lenin and Trotsky on Crises

The experience of the economic crises of the 20th and 21st centuries vindicate Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin developed Marx’s theory of the anarchic self-expansion of capital to explain the rise of imperialism and the inevitability of the First Inter-Imperialist War. That war failed to solve the problems of restoring profits as the Bolshevik Revolution opened a new period in which the world’s workers threatened to take power. Imperialism used social democracy and its state forces to suppress the revolution, ultimately resorting to fascist movements to suppress the still-powerful proletariat. Trotsky as the main surviving Bolshevik leader saw the rise of fascism as the mortal enemy of the working class and its program of Permanent Revolution, and expected that if global revolution did not result from the 2nd inter-Imperialist War, then Marxism itself as a revolutionary theory/program would be found wanting.

Had Trotsky survived the war he would have quickly drawn up a balance sheet. He would have recognised that the 4th International in the Second inter-Imperialist war betrayed the international working class by adapting to the Stalinist 3rd International with terrible consequences as in Vietnam. The Stalinists succeeded in destroying the best Trotskyist cadres during and after the war, sucking workers in the “democratic” imperialist countries into popular fronts with their own capitalist ruling classes against the fascist powers. This divided the international working class and led, as we have seen above, to the abandonment of the Bolsheviks’ program on imperialist war in the majority of the Fourth International (FI).

Trotsky would have concluded that while imperialism survived the war, this was only a temporary respite. The crisis of Marxism was not the same as its bankruptcy. The crisis of Marxism was now the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the Fourth International. The Post-war boom was the result of unprecedented destruction of the forces of production in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Yet it did not resolve capitalism’s tendency to crises. Despite Stalinism’s betrayals, workers’ property survived the war in Russia, and in the semi-colonies, imperialism was forced to go through a formal ‘de-colonisation’. In some countries this struggle for independence would lead to the formation of bureaucratic workers states. The FI, reneging on the most important part of the program on war, would have to be rebuilt to prepare for the inevitable onset of a new, bigger crisis. The 1946 and 1948 international meetings would have drawn up honest balance sheets and repudiated the social imperialist deviation of the European and US sections. This correction did not take place.

The first major test of a rebuilt international would have been drawing these lessons to vindicate the
Transitional Program for the post-war boom. Like the end of the First inter-imperialist war, workers, despite their historic defeat, were after the Second inter-Imperialist war, able to organise and demand
some concessions in a period of new capital accumulation and prepare for the inevitable new, bigger
crisis. The new crisis came in the ‘60s with the end of the ‘post-war boom’. In the absence of Trotsky
and a healthy International, the response to the crisis revealed the bankruptcy of theory and program
of the official Fourth International. We can see this clearly in the debate between Ernest Mandel and
David Yaffe over the onset of a new crisis of falling profits.

(b) Debates over the post-war ‘structural’ crisis from 1970s to today

Mandel, the chief theoretician of the Pabloist USEC had an empiricist multi-cause theory of crisis,
(contingency was all the rage) which when boiled down was left with underconsumption, i.e., a distributional theory of crisis not unlike David Harvey’s theory today. Yaffe accused Mandel of capitulating to a state-centred Keynesian economics consistent with the FI’s capitulation to Stalinism. In fact, the post-war boom had disoriented most Marxists, worsening the crisis of Marxism. The defence of ‘democracy’ against fascism and the defence of the Soviet Union got conflated into the defence of Stalinism as a petty bourgeois fraction of the working class embedded in the capitalist state alongside classical Social Democracy (as for example ‘Eurocommunism’). The ‘boom’ was explained as the result of ‘democratic’ capitalism managed by Social Democracy, and its end resulted from, not from inflation as a symptom of the LTRPF, but the revival of neo-classical economics and neo-liberal regimes.

Hence Marxism was increasingly diluted, the left moved right across the world tailing democratic mperialism. In the UK it tailed the retreat of the imperialist Labour Party from Harold Wilson to the Blairite “third way”, and the US Democratic Party from the ‘Great Society’ to Bill Clinton. The Pabloists or all colors who followed Mandel called Yaffe and Co ‘fundamentalists’ when they claimed the ‘neoliberal’ upturns of the ‘80s and ‘90s were largely speculative. Neo-liberal ‘reforms’ destroyed constant and variable capital to raise the rate of profit but this was not sufficient to restore pre-crisis levels of profitability in production. Over-accumulated capital was diverted from production to speculating in existing values. Neither did capitalist restoration in Russia, China in the early 1990s help solve capitalism’s crisis. Russia and China were not super-exploited neo-colonies of the US bloc but became new imperialist powers to rival the declining US. Cuba and Vietnam restored capitalism and became capitalist semi-colonies under the influence of the imperialist Russia/China bloc.

Debates among Marxists about the nature and causes of crisis, continue to reflect the need to attack
Marxism to undermine its revolutionary theory and practice by refuting its ‘laws of motion’ – the laws that explain the drive for capital accumulation. We can see this in the positions taken on the Law of Value (LOV) and the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF). Those who defend both laws (fundamentalists) see the current crisis as demanding a socialist revolution while those who reject both laws (empiricists) explain the current crisis as resulting from wrong policies that can be corrected with democratic socialist reforms.

The debate between Michael Roberts and David Harvey is instructive. Roberts argues that Harvey rejects the LOV and therefore the LTRPF. Capitalist crises are therefore not necessary but contingent on powerful elites controlling the distribution of income. This is shared with the radical neo-Ricardian school that says that exploitation occurs at the level of distribution. And therefore, we need a politics of re-distribution! Roberts explains that the capitalists’ power is to make profits, but when the laws of motion necessarily destroy the conditions for this, they are powerless to stop their money losing value without a massive attack on workers to restore those conditions. We argue that the structural crisis of the 1970’s to today demonstrates that capitalism can no longer accumulate sufficient value as capital, so that the crisis is not contingent but necessary; and further, we would argue, terminal.

The “Global Financial Crisis” of 2007/8 proves that the structural crisis that ended the post-war boo is worsening. Since the 1960s the capitalist world economy has failed to destroy sufficient surplus capital to restore the conditions for a new period of capitalist accumulation. Nor can Russia and China as new imperialist powers evade the decline of the capitalist world economy as they are necessarily subject to its laws of motion. This means that in the epoch of imperialism, spanning the period from the turn of the 20th century until today, capitalism has been in inexorable decline. Despite its attempts to restructure and re-divide the global economy and resolve depressions with world wars, each crisis gets deeper and longer. Each world war merely postpones the day of reckoning. The build-up of the explosive contradictions that are just beneath the surface of the neo-liberal veneer, will burst forth to bring its life to an end. The owners of the big chunks of capital are desperately trying to suppress those contradictions by state-backed financial speculation in existing values. But this is now expressed as multi-trillions of ‘fictitious’ capitals resulting in impossibly high levels of debt that can never be exchanged for actual new value expropriated from labor power as profit. We can see this explosion in the making as capitalism’s ability to restore profits now drives it towards the final destruction of the forces of production and with it, nature.

(c) Marx on Ecological Crisis

Once we factor in the many positive feedbacks driving global warming it is obvious that we face the prospect of human extinction. Once the ecosystem which capitalism takes for granted begins to collapse, capitalism itself will collapse. Capitalism only exists as a mode of production by a constant process of exploiting nature to the point of destruction. Marx recognised this early on. There was a limit to the ability of capital to replenish or restore nature when it could deplete and destroy nature for profit. Marx concept of metabolic rift is based on the best science of his day already revealing the depredations of capitalist agriculture. It is a model for understanding the ecological rift between capital and nature.

Contrary to popular wisdom, Marx was not a fan for environmental destruction. Rather he based his whole theory on the contradiction between nature and society, expressed as between use-value and
exchange-value. Use-value being the natural process of producing for use (though this ‘nature’ is
conditioned by the requirements of capital); exchange value as being the requirement that use-values were commodified as exchange value. Commodities would only be used if they were bought and sold on the market. This contradiction is the seed of capitalist development which accumulates riches at the top and accumulates impoverishment at the bottom. Inevitably capital would destroy nature and itself unless labour as part of nature fought back and restored a harmonious relation between nature and society. (Climate Crisis: From Capital to Commune).

The only unanswered question is how soon this will happen and in what form. Global warming is already destroying the conditions for production as the ‘external’ costs of pollution, degradation, and exhaustion of raw materials impact back on declining profits. The costs of wars to control this declining resource base on human life as part of nature is producing a rise in resistance to this inevitable social collapse. There is no prospect of the capitalist ruling class taking any responsibility for preventing this collapse. It is necessary for the proletariat to take the lead in this task. Marxism holds that under capitalism the class relation between capital and labor generates the motive force for class struggle between the proletariat and capitalist class that, through workers strikes, occupations and insurrections, will end in socialist revolution. As capital exhausts its historic capacity to develop the forces of production, it inevitably destroys nature including the ecological conditions for human existence. The proletariat in fighting to overthrow capital, must take the lead in drawing all other oppressed people into the struggle for survival. These include all forms of labour, producing value or not, unemployed, undocumented, self-employed, skilled or unskilled, white or blue collar etc., plus all those who are outside the formal capital-labour relation but whose labour is appropriated by capital. Its Transitional Program must address itself to bringing all oppressed peoples, and groups behind the banner of socialist revolution, because without them there can be no revolution.

Women as the majority of workers, as members of an historic sex-class, still perform domestic labour for no payment as domestic slaves, and continue to face ongoing gender oppression. As domestic slaves, they do not directly create value but contribute their unpaid labour in reproducing the value of labour power. Contrary to Marx and Engels, who expected the inclusion of women as wage workers alongside men to make them more equal, they remain doubly exploited as domestic slaves and a floating section of the reserve army of wage labour, where their working conditions lag well behind those of men. Colonial and semi-colonial workers, (including self-employed, unemployed and migrant workers) peasants and poor farmers are the big majority of the world’s workers and doubly oppressed as unpaid slaves and wage workers. They are the largest section of the global reserve army, super-exploited since their labour can earn no more than a poverty income. Indigenous peoples who remain colonized in some form, partially embedded in their pre-capitalist social relations, are oppressed by capital, and have their labour and land exploited by capital. There will be no socialist revolution that does not include the representatives of working women, semi-colonial and indigenous workers in the vanguard of the proletariat, and which does not make the liberation of all oppressed from the threat of extinction, and the realization of communism, its goal.

Since Marx, Marxists have maintained that capitalism is a living contradiction between labor and capital, which can be suppressed indefinitely unless transcended by socialist revolution. Today, however, we do not see any prospect of capitalism ‘stabilising’ as it did briefly after the First Imperialist and Second Imperialist wars. Today, the decomposition of capitalism is so advanced that we are justified in using the term “terminal” crisis to mean that capitalism cannot restore profitability because it is destroying its own conditions of existence. Whether this takes the form of fascist attacks on workers and oppressed to resolve the crisis of falling profits, failure of production as the ecosystem collapses, or expansion of many local and regional wars into a Third Imperialist World War, the outcome is the same. The proletariat and other oppressed people facing death and destruction have nothing to lose but their chains. Led by a revolutionary international communist party, they have everything to win; the survival of the human, and other threatened species, in a global socialist, and ultimately, communist world.