Comment by Reihana Mohideen
In his recently published book Socialism: What Went Wrong?, Irwin Silber, long-term activist in the US left and editorial member of Crossroads magazine, argues that there has been no objective basis for socialist revolution this century.
The book is subtitled An Inquiry into the Theoretical and Historical Sources of the Socialist Crisis. Silber's main thesis is:
"If we are to develop a relevant politics, we must come to terms with the fact[!] that the material conditions for a proletarian-based socialist revolution have not appeared in any[!] capitalist country in all the years when Marxist-Leninists were proclaiming its imminence — nor do they prevail anywhere in the world today.
"It is time to acknowledge that Lenin was wrong. For capitalism retains its capacity to revolutionise the forces of production and if it likewise continues to generate an economic surplus which it is willing to use — however sparingly under protest — to curb revolutionary impulses amongst the workers, how imminent are the prospects for the emergence of an army of proletarians prepared to struggle to overturn the system? In other words, Lenin not withstanding, the delay in the world revolution was due not to subjective but objective factors."
Silber presents explicitly ideas which have a certain currency in sections of the socialist movement. Similar views, though not so clearly argued, have arisen in the debates taking place over political strategy in El Salvador, Nicaragua and South Africa. They are the basis on which the revolutionary perspective is abandoned for the view that the best the workers movement can hope to achieve in this period is a democratic, welfare-state capitalism.
But Silber doesn't limit it to a particular national context or period; he extends it to a whole epoch. What is possible in this epoch, he argues, is only the winning of reforms from a still essentially vibrant capitalism.
In Silber's view the "future lies with mixed economies and political systems reflecting them". In China, for example, this means "instituting some form of bourgeois democracy".
His thesis on the non-revolutionary nature of the epoch rests in large part on his claim that Lenin's theory of imperialism has "crumbled" in the light of historical developments. According to Silber, Kautsky's theory of "ultra-imperialism" (which predicted that through the further development of monopoly capitalism inter-imperialist antagonisms could be peacefully reconciled within a global capitalist cartel) bears more resemblance to the actual state of affairs.
Much of Silber's critique of Lenin's theory is aimed at Lenin's analysis that capitalism in its imperialist stage is "moribund".
Silber writes that "nothing has discredited Marxism-Leninism's claims to 'science' more than its adherents' stubborn insistence on retaining Lenin's thesis".
But in rejecting Lenin's view of imperialism as a "moribund capitalism", Silber caricatures it. First he attributes to Lenin the crude Stalinist distortion of the impending collapse of capitalism (most graphically expressed in Mao's infamous quote which compared imperialism to a "paper tiger"). Secondly, Silber somewhat dishonestly attributes to Lenin the view that the monopoly stage of capitalism is characterised by the end of all technical progress — a "paper tiger" which Silber then easily tears apart.
Lenin in his 1916 book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was very careful to qualify his use of the term "moribund capitalism".
According to Lenin, the "tendency to stagnate and decay, which is characteristic of monopoly, continues to operate, and in some branches of industry, in some countries, for certain periods of time, it gains the upper hand" (italics in the original).
What Lenin emphasises here is an uneven tendency to stagnation, not a uniform decay across all industries, in every country.
Neither did Lenin exclude the possibility of capitalist economic growth or technological progress. Just the opposite:
"It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a greater or lesser degree, now one and now another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing more rapidly than before: but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (Britain)."
In the epoch of "freely competitive" capitalism (from the industrial revolution to the end of the 19th century) Marx and Engels predicted that developing capitalist countries would follow in the path of the developed capitalist countries (the USA, Germany and Japan, for example, increasingly caught up with the richest capitalist country, Britain). But a central point in Lenin's thesis was that the 20th century is characterised by increasing disparity between the developed and "developing" capitalist countries, and by the industrial decay of the countries that are richest in capital.
The decline, first of Britain and more recently of the USA as the leading imperialist economy, and the phenomenon of the underdeveloped capitalist economies of the Third World, a central feature of 20th century capitalism, have certainly borne this out. Imperialism remains the principle source of underdevelopment in the Third World.
(While Silber implies that the more recent "newly industrialising countries" represent a break from this dependency and imperialist exploitation, there is no serious attempt in the book to prove this thesis.)
There is no disputing that important changes have taken place in the international capitalist economy, particularly since the end of the second world war. The colonial countries were transformed into semi-colonial countries; the export of capital was reoriented so that it now moves mainly from one imperialist country into another; and certain semi-colonial countries have experienced semi-industrialisation (mainly restricted to manufacturing industry).
This era of "late capitalism" has also been marked by the acceleration of technical innovation, the replacement of the national monopolistic trust by the multinational company as the basic unit of monopoly capitalism, a major restructuring of the working class (the emergence of the white collar work force, the expansion of service industries and the growth of the industrial working class in the Third World) and the accelerated internationalising of capital, which has partially restructured the role of the state.
All this requires that Lenin's thesis be modified and further developed in the light of new trends. However, what Lenin described as the "basic features" of imperialism, have not only stood up remarkably well to the test of history, but have developed to unprecedented levels.
According to Lenin, "in its economic essence imperialism is monopoly capitalism". Monopoly has increased. The facts are that today five transnational companies control 80-90% of world trade in cereals, that some 30 of the largest chemical companies control 100% of the chemical products market, that 12 companies produce 60% of the world's synthetic fibres and control 85% of their trade, and that around a dozen monopolies in the energy industry dominate the production, refinement and marketing of all major energy resources.
Silber unconvincingly counters these facts by arguing that monopoly hasn't "completely[!] taken over production" because a "countervailing trend ... has carved out a new[!] role for small capital". Silber doesn't tell us if he thinks that this "countervailing trend" is developing into the determining trend or is in any way seriously challenging the growth of monopoly capital.
Small-scale capitalist enterprises in general exist by the grace of the monopolies. In fact monopolisation continually generates a stratum of small capitalists who fill gaps in the system of production, distribution and services, thus in general complementing the role of big capital. When small capital starts to get in the way of the monopolies, it gets driven out or taken over. Ultimately even Silber is forced to admit that "the tendency towards monopoly has not slowed down".
Silber also attempts to discredit Lenin's thesis that imperialism is a "parasitic" capitalism. According to Lenin, a main feature of this parasitism was "the extraordinary growth of a ... stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by 'clipping coupons', who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness".
Lenin regarded this parasitism as endemic to monopoly capitalism. So the vast speculative investment in real estate and the stock market in the 1980s wasn't just an aberration in the "normal" functioning of the capitalist economy: this is the capitalist economic system in the epoch of imperialism. This characteristic, far from having disappeared, continues into the 1990s.
A graphic example is provided by the case of New York City, whose once diverse economy has been transformed into one based on office and luxury construction chiefly for tenants in finance, insurance and real estate companies — known as the FIRE sector. This restructuring has wiped out the manufacturing sector, which has lost around 600,000 jobs since 1969.
In the 1990s, despite the sharp decline in jobs, income and consumption, the city's financial sector did rapid business. Wall Street made record profits from takeovers and leveraged buy-outs and boasted the first $1 trillion business year in its history. But despite the record profits in the financial sector, which accounts for a substantial portion of the income generated in New York, overall retail sales in the city slumped for their fifth consecutive year and the public and private sector together produced fewer that 5000 units of housing, a record low. The FIRE-dominated local economy, even when performing flat out, can't pull the rest of the city out of decline.
Robert Fitch, analysing this phenomenon in the September-October 1994 New Left Review, correctly points out that "Trading stocks, selling bonds, suing people, are activities which transfer rather than reproduce another value. Evidently what Wall Street and its helpers in the so-called 'producer services' produce is not value or wealth, but claims on wealth." FIRE is essentially "a shift from the production of wealth to the production of claims on wealth".
The world today is rife with examples of such parasitic capitalism. In the case of Mexico almost 80% of the $85 billion poured into the economy from 1991 through mid-1994 was in the form of portfolio investment (stocks and bonds), and only 20% went into productive investment. And now that the bubble has burst Mexico is set to pay dearly for its rescue package from Uncle Sam. Mexico faces $70 to $80 billion in interest payments and maturing principal this year, or more than twice its 1994 exports. The "coupon clippers" are set to do very well from the Mexican crisis.
In relation to the Third World as a whole, this parasitism takes on obscene proportions. As a result of debt servicing and unequal terms of trade, for much of the 1980s, these countries transferred wealth to the developed capitalist economies.
The recent GATT agreement not only legitimises this parasitism, but further expands it, through the further opening up of Third World markets, and through patent laws (trade related intellectual property rights or TRIPS) which give corporations potential ownership of entire living species.
In rejecting Lenin's assessment that imperialism is moribund and decaying capitalism, Silber rests his case on the prolonged expansion of capitalism's productive forces after World War II. He ignore the costs on which this expansion was predicated — the destruction of the lives of millions of workers and peasants, and enormous productive forces, as a result of depression, fascism and war, and the increasing destruction of the natural environment. Further, Silber seems strangely oblivious to the fact that the long post-World War II "boom" has been over for two decades now!
And while he makes repeated reference to the class struggle in his analysis of why "socialism" failed, Silber almost completely ignores the subjective factor in his treatment of the class struggle in the 20th century.
A book which claims to be an inquiry into the "historical sources of the socialist crisis", is startlingly lacking in any serious historical analysis of revolutionary struggles. Not once does he explain why pre-revolutionary and revolutionary situations arose in a number of developed capitalist countries in the course of the 20th century.
Nor does he devote any attention to examining whether these struggles — Germany in 1918-1919 and again in 1923, France and Spain in the mid-1930s, France, Italy and Greece in 1944-45, France in 1968, Portugal in 1974 — failed because of objective or subjective factors. Perhaps this is because any serious examination would show that the decisive factor blocking these mass upsurges of the working class was the dominance of social democratic and Stalinist reformism within the workers movement.
The Stalinists rationalised their role by asserting that there weren't revolutionary situations in these countries at the time. Silber's claim that the failure of revolution in the West was due to objective conditions ultimately amounts to an acceptance of the "official" Stalinist version of these events.
His attitude towards the Stalinist popular front policy of the 1930s, which derailed the revolutionary upsurges in France and Spain, is indicative of this. According to Silber, this policy, which he disingenuously calls the "united front against fascism", "was probably the international communist movement's most signal political and theoretical accomplishment during the Stalin years".
Silber is no novice to socialist politics. He was an activist in the Stalinist movement from 1941. One can only deduce that his myopia towards revolutionary working-class upsurges in the West and the anti-revolutionary role of the Stalinist parties reflects his past adherence to Stalinist reformism.
The collapse of Stalinism and the weight of the capitalist propaganda barrage about the "death of communism" have led to a major ideological crisis in sections of the socialist movement. The inability to come to terms with Stalinism has led them to renounce a revolutionary perspective and embrace a social democratic one.
Ultimately one can only understand Silber's rightward shift as another example of this ideological surrender.
Meanwhile certain capitalist commentators are far less confident than Irwin Silber of the stability of their system. In a recently republished book, The Great Reckoning, well-known capitalist commentators William Rees-Mogg (former editor of the Times) and James Dale Davidson have this apocalyptic prediction to make to the capitalists:
"We have tried to be objective and not merely say what would sell. We have forecast wars, revolutions, recessions and even depression ... We would have preferred not to have to tell you about a world falling apart. But given that it was falling apart, we wished to find ways to help put it back together."
That's a good antidote to Silber's pessimism and any notion of capitalist triumph that may haunt some socialists today.