Since
the mid-'70s there has been a worldwide offensive of capital
against labour and the toiling masses of the third world. This
offensive expresses the sharp deterioration of the relationship
of forces at the expense of the workers. It has objective and
subjective roots.
The
objective roots are essentially the sharp rise of unemployment
in the imperialist countries from 10 million to at least 50
million, if not more. The official statistics are all government
statistics, and they're all fake. In the third world countries,
at least 500 million are unemployed. For the first time since
the end of World War II, unemployment is rising in the
bureaucratised post-capitalist societies too.
The
subjective roots lie essentially in the total failure of
organised labour and mass movements to resist the capitalist
offensive. In many countries these organisations have even
spearheaded it: France, Italy, Spain and Venezuela, just to name
a few. This has undoubtedly made resistance to the capitalist
offensive more difficult.
But
all this being said, one should not underestimate the concrete
impact of pseudo-liberal - in reality neo-conservative -
economic policies on world developments. These policies,
codified by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank,
and symbolised by the governments of Thatcher and Reagan and
their many imitators in the third world, have been an
unmitigated disaster.
Under
the pretext of giving priority to monetary stability, the fight
against inflation, and balanced budgets, social expenditure and
the expenditure for infrastructure have been ruthlessly cut.
This has resulted in a worldwide rise in social inequality,
poverty, disease and threats to the environment. From a
macro-economic point of view it is increasingly
counterproductive and irrational. From a macro-social point of
view it is indefensible and odious. It has increasingly inhuman
results which threaten the survival of the human race.
I
should point out the basic cynicism of the neo- conservative
ideological offensive which accompanies the conservative
economic policies. The neo- conservatives say that they want to
reduce state expenditure drastically. In reality, state
expenditure has never been as high as in the 1980s and early
1990s under the neo-conservatives. What really happened was a
shift away from social and infrastructure expenditure to
military expenditure, which for that period can be estimated at
$3 trillion, and to subsidies to business. The bailing out of
bankrupt and near bankrupt financial institutions like the
savings and loans associations in the United States, as well as
the huge interest payments on the steeply rising debt, belongs
in that category.
The
neo-conservatives say that they stand for universal human
rights, but in reality, given the unavoidable mass reactions
against these antisocial policies, neo-conservative governments
increasingly undermine and attack democratic liberties: trade
union freedom, the right to abortion, freedom of the press,
freedom to travel. They create the appropriate climate in which
extreme right-wing tendencies - racism, xenophobia, outright
neo- fascism - can arise.
Third
world poverty
The
worldwide growth of poverty is disastrous. In the third world it
has become a historical catastrophe. According to official
United Nations statistics, more than 60 countries with a total
of more than 800 million inhabitants have suffered an absolute
decline of per capita domestic product between 1980 and 1990. In
the poorest of these countries this decline is in the order of
30-50%. For the poorest layers of these countries' populations
the figure oscillates around 50%. Per capita domestic product in
Latin America in 1950 was 45% of the imperialist countries. In
1988, it fell to 29.7%.
Decades
of modest rise in public welfare were wiped out in a few years.
What this means concretely can be illustrated by the example of
Peru. According to the New York Times, More than 60% of the
population of Peru is undernourished, 79% live below the poverty
level, which is quite arbitrarily fixed at $40 a month. Even
college- educated civil servants earn only $85 a month. This is
not enough to pay for a month's car parking in that country.
If
one takes into consideration the social differentiation inside
the third world countries, the situation is even more
disastrous. The poorest inhabitants of the poorest country have
today a daily food intake which equals that of a Nazi
concentration camp of the 1940s. A report of the United Nations
World Health Organisation prepared for a December 1992
conference estimated that half a billion people suffer from
chronic hunger in addition to several hundreds of millions of
people who suffer from seasonal malnutrition. Nearly 800 million
people in the third world suffer from hunger. If you add to that
figure the number of hungry in the post- capitalist and
imperialist countries, you arrive at nearly one billion people
today suffering from hunger. And this is when there exists an
overall situation of overproduction of food.
In
the north of Brazil, there is a new race of pygmies which has
arisen, with an average height 35 centimetres less than the
average inhabitant of Brazil. The way the bourgeois ruling class
and its ideologues characterise these people is to call them rat
people. This characterisation is completely dehumanising,
reminiscent of the Nazis, and has very sinister implications.
You know what is done to rats.
There
is widespread malnutrition involving insufficient consumption of
vitamins, minerals and animal proteins. Women and children
especially have these deficiencies. As a result, children in the
third world run a risk of dying or catching grave diseases 20
times greater than that of children in the imperialist
countries.
The
fate of children symbolises the rise of barbarism in the third
world. This is not a question of the future; there barbarism has
already started on a huge scale. According to the statistics of
UNICEF, every year 16 million children die from hunger or
curable diseases in the third world. This means that every four
years there is an equal number of deaths of children as all the
deaths of World War II, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Bengal
famine combined. Every four years a world war against children.
There you have the world reality of imperialism and capitalism
in a nutshell. In addition, in south Asia, 20% of baby girls die
before the age of five; 25% die before the age of 15. Baby girl
infanticide is growing from year to year, combined with massive
use of child labour under conditions of semi-slavery.
Growing
inequality
The
disastrous effects of neo-conservative economic policies are no
way limited to third world countries or to the living conditions
of the mass of the inhabitants of post-capitalist societies.
They have started to extend more slowly, but in a real way, to
the imperialist countries too. In these countries, depending on
what source you use, between 55 and 70 million people live below
the poverty level. A dual society is developing, with a growing
number of social groups less or not at all protected by the
social security net: the unemployed, casual labourers, people
living on welfare, mothers having to care for many children
alone, demoralised petty criminals: these are some of the
constituent elements of that underclass.
Here
is but one example which is very telling, very sad and very
revolting. In the heart of what has been historically
revolutionary Paris, where five major revolutions have started,
every day thousands of migrants, workers and casual labourers,
stand around waiting to be employed. Sometimes they are,
sometimes they aren't. They are without any kind of social
protection, without residence permit. They are competing among
themselves to work for a pittance, because a pittance is still
higher than what they can get in their own countries.
The
situation in the United States ghettos is typical of that trend.
Youth unemployment in the ghettos reaches 40% and most of these
youths have no hope whatsoever of finding any job in the future.
The same phenomenon has spread in a more limited way to several
southern European countries and Great Britain. Privatisation
accentuates these trends.
While
real wages actually declined in the USA, the number of people
having gross annual incomes of one million stable dollars has
risen 60-fold. That of people getting between $ 60,000 and $1
million has risen from 78,000 to 2 million, but there's
literally not a single worker among this new rich.
The
rich get richer
The
perverse effects of neo-conservative policies on the world
economy are likewise evident. Both the growing poverty of the
third world and the third worldisation of sectors of the
population in the imperialist countries constitute one of the
major brakes on any significant expansion of the world economy.
Third
world debt has led to that perverse and scandalous development
of a net flow of capital from the south to the north, with the
poorest parts of the poor countries subsidising the richest part
of the rich countries. One could say in a cynical way that
that's what capitalism is all about. Nevertheless, in this
dimension and amplitude it's at least a new phenomenon in the
20th century.
The
same is true for the adverse development of the terms of trade
and the role of intermediaries on world price structure. It is
very little known that the second largest contingent of third
world exports after oil is coffee, which we all drink. At this
time, for western consumers, coffee is relatively cheap. A pound
of coffee cost around $5 in the western countries. The workers
who produce that coffee get 30-50 cents a day. The rest is taken
in by middle men.
The
greatest danger of the third worldisation in the south, the
east, and the west is the spread of typical poverty-related
epidemics like cholera and tuberculosis which were assumed to
have been wiped out. The ominous threat of AIDS is likewise
poverty related. The former director of the World Health
Organisation's anti-AIDS program predicts that at the end of
this century, 100 million people will be HIV infected, of whom
25% will fall ill and die; 85% of these deaths will occur in the
third world.
This
is not a result of some cultural or ethnic specificity, but of
deficiencies in education, prevention, health care and
sanitation. At the same time, $7 billion have been spent in the
struggle against AIDS since the beginning of the epidemic. Only
3% of this sum has been spent in the third world, where 85% of
HIV-infected people live. It is obviously suicidal to believe,
even for the capitalist class, that the epidemic will not reach
the imperialist countries too.
Under
these circumstances, the pope's call to limit the struggle
against AIDS to self-restraint and the chastity of individuals
and to oppose the use of condoms and the contraceptive pill is
totally irresponsible. The neo-conservative policies of cutting
health and education budgets everywhere likewise appear
irresponsible and suicidal. The overall effects are as
economically obnoxious as they are socially obnoxious.
'Market
economy'
In
all the university departments dealing with development
policies, in all the countries of the world, it is considered to
be a truism that the most productive investments are those for
education, health care and infrastructure. But if you cross the
corridor into the sub-department of economics called public
finance, then you suddenly hear that a balanced budget is more
important than investment in education, health care and
infrastructure, and that there have to be ruthless cuts in these
budgets in order to stop inflation.
It
should be stressed that pseudo-liberal, neo- conservative
policies are being applied within the framework of a
capitalist-dominated world economy. Two important conclusions
can be drawn from that basic fact of life.
First,
much of the ranting about the alleged superiority of the
so-called market economy is just eyewash. Market economy in the
pure or near pure form does not exist and has never existed
anywhere.
Second,
any alternative economic policy applied within that same
framework, like the neo-Keynesian policies now proposed by a
growing number of international institutions and leading
capitalists, will not result in any basic change in all these
horrible realities. To give you just one example: the tremendous
technological backwardness imposed upon the third world by
imperialism means that while that part of the world consumes
only 15% of the world's total energy expenditure, it has to
spend five to six times more energy per dollar's worth of
domestic product than the richest countries.
Hence
the question arises, don't we need a basic alternative not only
to pseudo-liberal policies, but to the whole capitalist system
in all its variants in order to get to a qualitatively better
world than the present one? My answer is obviously yes. That's
why we need socialism, and that's why I am and will remain a
socialist.
Humankind
is facing frightful threats to its physical survival: nuclear,
chemical, and biological warfare, traditional massive wars which
could become nuclear wars by the bombing of nuclear power
stations with conventional weapons, growing risks of destruction
of the environment typified by the greenhouse effect and the
ozone hole, destruction of the tropical forests, desertification
of large parts of Africa and Asia and the cumulative effects of
epidemic catastrophes.
Many
people have raised the question, "Isn't it already too
late? Isn't doomsday unavoidable? Will humankind be able to
survive the coming 50 years?" We believe that humankind is
not doomed. This is not wishful thinking or pure intuition. It
is a belief based upon solid scientific data and the ongoing
dynamic of scientific research.
Just
one example: there exists a concrete, serious approach to
completely reverse the desertification of Africa; to irrigate
the desert in order to make it again into a rich food-producing
region like it had been up until 1500 years ago; to inspire its
inhabitants to apply nature-conserving agricultural techniques
to switch bach from commercial crops to crops which enable them
to feed Africans in a healthy manner. The effect of a green,
wooded Sahara on the world climate would be really stunning.
The
problem to be solved in this case is not a technical, natural or
cultural one. It is a social one. In order for this solution to
be applied, you need a social order in which greed, the desire
to accumulate personal wealth regardless of overall social and
economic costs, and short-term pseudo- rationality substituting
for long-term rationality do not determine social and economic
behaviour. We need power in the hands of social forces which can
prevent individuals, classes and major class fractions from
imposing their will on society. Power needs to be in the hands
of the toilers willing to let solidarity, cooperation and
generosity prevail by democratic means over short-sighted egoism
and irresponsibility.
It
is not a question of awareness. The rich, the capitalists, the
powers that be are not stupid. Many of them are perfectly aware
of, for instance, the ecological dangers. They try to take them
into consideration, include them in their economic planning and
projection, but under the pressure of competition, they are
forced to act in such a way that the overall threat remains.
Some
say that science and technology have developed an irresistible
logic of their own, and that uncontrolled development of science
and technology is bringing humankind to the brink of extinction,
but this is not the correct way of seeing things. This is what
you could call, in terms of Marxist philosophy, reified
thinking. Science and technology are presented as forces
divorced from the human beings who control them. But this is
incorrect.
Workers'
democracy
Science
and technology have no power independent of the social groups
who invented them, apply them, and bend them to their interests
as they see them. The key problem is to subject science and
technology to conscious social control in the democratically
established interests of the great majority of human beings. To
free them from submission to special interests, which abuse them
regardless of the long-term interests of the human race. For
that purpose the organisation and structure of society itself
must be subjected to democratically determined, conscious
control.
What
socialism is all about in the last analysis is the conquest of
human freedom for the greatest possible number to decide their
own fate in all key sectors of life. This is, in the first
place, true for all wage earners, who are under the economic
compulsion to sell their labour power and who represent today a
mass of people bigger than they ever were in the past. There are
now more than 1 billion wage earners.
Those
who plead for minority rule over and above that freedom - the
freedom of these wage earners to decide in a democratic way
which priorities to apply to production and how to produce and
distribute - those who state that this freedom should be
subordinated to the rule of market laws, rule by the rich, or
rule by the experts, rule by the churches, rule by the state or
by the party, arrogantly assume the perfectness of their
knowledge and their wisdom and underestimate the capacity of the
masses to equal or overtake them. We reject these claims as
empirically unfounded and morally repulsive, leading to
increasingly inhuman consequences.
We
share Marx's warning that the educators in turn have to be
educated. Only the democratically organised self-activity of the
masses can achieve that. Socialism is a social order in which
these masses decide their own fate in a free way.
In
order to look at the world as it is today, we have to look at it
in a way that is different from what you generally read in the
newspapers or see on television. People are starting to fight
back.
In
Uruguay, the people have just rejected, in a referendum by 74%
of the vote, privatisation of the telephone company. British
miners, and especially Italian workers, have reacted to the
austerity policies which their governments tried to put down
their throats in a very big way. Both groups have been on strike
against these austerity policies. In Germany we have witnessed,
and this is most heart-warming, a radical reaction of the youth,
against the rise on xenophobia, racism and neo-fascism.
This
is completely different from what happened at the end of the
1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. At that time the Nazis
conquered the high schools, the universities - the youth - much
before they conquered political power. Today, the mass of the
youth is moving against xenophobia, racism and neo- fascism
while political parties are going to the right.
The
most gratifying example is that of Brazil, where there is a
fight back of the working class against a corrupt reactionary
government. I'm rather pessimistic, I don't think they will win,
but a challenge to bourgeois power in this seventh largest
country in the world, where there are now more industrial
workers than in Germany in 1918, has at least been made
possible.
There
is, however, a sober side to the world picture, and that is that
many of these movements are generally single-issue movements and
are discontinuous because of the lack of an alternative social
order.
Socialism
Over
this whole world development hovers what we call in my movement
the worldwide crisis of credibility of socialism. Workers have
no confidence whatsoever in Stalinism, post-Stalinism, Maoism,
Eurocommunism, or social democracy.
Under
these circumstances, neither of the two basic social classes,
capital and labour, is capable in the short or medium term of
imposing its historical solution to the world crisis. The
capitalists can't for objective reasons, because the working
class is much too strong. It is much stronger than it was in the
1930s. But the working class cannot solve this world crisis
either because it has no belief in an alternative social order.
So
we are in for a protracted crisis, the outcome of which is at
this stage unpredictable. We have to fight for an outcome in
favour of the working class, in favour of socialism, in favour
of the physical survival of humankind. Because that's the real
choice today. Not socialism or barbarism, but socialism or the
physical extinction of the human race.
I
see the key task of all of us socialists as threefold.
In
the first place to defend unconditionally all the demands of the
masses everywhere in the world which correspond to their real
needs as they see them, without subordinating this support to
any priorities of a political nature or of any specific power
scheme. We have to go back to the example of what the labour
movement did in its inception and during the period of its
greatest growth from the end of the 188os up until the eve of
World War I.
Socialists
had two key goals at that time: the eight-hour day and universal
suffrage, and they didn't start from the question: How are we
going to realise that, in what form of power, what form of
government? No, they said these are objective needs of human
emancipation, and we will fight for them by all means possible
and necessary and we will see what will come out.
In
some countries the eight-hour day was conquered by general
strikes. In other countries it was realised through governments
which one could consider workers' governments. In others it was
given by the bourgeoisie as a concession to a powerful workers
movement, thereby trying to prevent it from making a revolution.
But that's neither here nor there. The real fact was that the
eight-hour day was, as Marx and Engels pointed out, in the
objective interest of the working class, and that is the reason
why you shouldn't subordinate the fight for such demands to any
pre- established power scheme.
I
have many times reminded the comrades of the famous formula of
that great tactician Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Lenin quoted very
approvingly, " First start the struggle, and then we'll
see". The important thing is to start the struggle; what
comes afterwards depends on the relationship of forces, but the
struggle itself changes the relationship of forces.
The
second task of socialists and communists today is basic
socialist education and propaganda. Humankind cannot be saved
without substituting for this present society a fundamentally
different society. You can call it anything you want to, the
label makes no difference, but its contents have to be
specified, the contents of socialism as it will be accepted by
the masses. After the disastrous experiences of social
democracy, Stalinism and post- Stalinism, the image of socialism
can only be one of radical emancipation, having a dimension of
radical feminism, radical defence of the environment, radical
antiwar pacifist consciousness, political pluralism and total
identification with human rights without exception. Socialism
will be accepted only if it is considered radically emancipatory
on a world scale without exception.
The
third condition for solving the terrible crisis of credibility
of socialism is the reunification of socialism and freedom. The
bourgeoisie has made a terrible strategic mistake in raising the
human rights issue against socialists the world over. This will
become a boomerang hitting it again and again. But in order for
that to happen, the reunification of socialism and human freedom
has to be complete.
In
the mid-'20s, the traditional song of the Italian labour
movement, " Bandiera Rossa", contained these wonderful
words, "Long live communism and freedom!"
One
of the gravest crimes of Stalinism, post-Stalinism and social
democracy has been to provoke the historical divorce between
these two values. We have to come back to that.
In
the United States in the mid-'20s two anarchists, anticommunists
- they had absolutely no sympathy for communism - Sacco and
Vanzetti, were condemned to death by the reactionary bourgeois
government. Their cause was taken up by the Communist Party of
the United States and by the Communist International. The fact
that they were anarchists, anticommunists, didn't make any
difference whatsoever. I say with pride that our comrade James
P. Cannon played a significant role in organising that worldwide
campaign for these two anarchists. That's the tradition we have
to go back to without any restrictions.
Whoever
commits crimes against human rights under whatever pretext in
whatever country should be condemned by the
socialists-communists of this world. That's the precondition to
restore confidence among the masses in our movement. Once that
confidence is restored we get a moral power, a moral credit, a
moral strength which has 10 times more punch than all the
weaponry which the capitalists control.
In
defence of Marxism
I
want to tell my friends at the Marxist School that they are
absolutely right to stand for Marxism and not to give in in the
slightest way to the anti-Marxist pressures which are all around
us. Some are open, some more diffuse, but they are all around
us.
Marxism
is the best thing that has happened to social thought and action
in the last 150 years. Those who deny that, those who make
Marxism responsible for Stalinist counter-revolution, for social
democratic support for colonial wars, are either ignorant or
deliberate liars. Marxism has given humankind two basic
conquests which we have to defend, but with the assurance, the
self-confidence that we are defending a good cause.
Marxism
is the science of society. It is the understanding in a coherent
way of what has been going on for the last 200 years, if not
much more than that, on the basis of a tremendous wealth of
empirical information and without any valuable, even partially
valuable, alternative among the social sciences.
We
make no predictions about the future. The only scientific form
of Marxism is open Marxism. Marxism which, like Marx himself
said, integrates constructive doubt. Everything remains open to
reconsideration, but only on the basis of fact. Those who do
this in an irresponsible way without taking facts into
consideration, those who throw away this tremendous tool of
understanding world reality in exchange for nothing but
scepticism, irrationality, mystification, or mythology serve no
positive purpose.
As
important as Marxism is as a science, its second basic component
is just as important, and that is its moral component. Marx
himself formulated this in a very radical way. From his youth
through to the end of his life he didn't waver for one minute
from the definition of what he called the categorical
imperative.
That
is to fight against any condition in which human beings are
despised, alienated, exploited, oppressed or denied basic human
dignity. Whatever the pretexts are for the justification of such
denials, we have to oppose them unconditionally. Understand that
you cannot be happier than if you have dedicated your life to
this defence of human rights everywhere in the world: the
defence of the exploited, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the
despised.
There
is no better way to be a good human being in this world than to
dedicate your life to this great cause. That's why the future is
with Marxism.
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