The Capitalist Mystique Shatters!

Submitted by dalcassian on 25 September, 2008 - 1:23 Author: Editorial

“For us the bourgeoisie is not a stone dropping into an abyss, but a living historical force which struggles, manoeuvres, advances now on its right flank, now on its left. And only provided we learn to grasp politically all the means and methods of bourgeois society so as to each time react to them without hesitation or delay, shall we succeed in bringing closer that moment when we can, with a single confident stroke, actually hurl the bourgeoisie into the abyss" - Leon Trotsky, 1922

1968 went down in history as the year of tremendous shifts in world politics that led to an enormous upsurge of the left all over the world. 2008 will go down as the year in which world capitalism, and the bourgeoisie which embodies it, received a tremendous blow to its credibility.

For twenty years, since the collapse of European Stalinism and the enthusiastic acceptance of market economics by the Stalinist rulers of China, capitalism has gone through “globalisation” and tremendous growth.

It has been seen by its direct beneficiaries, their college professors, hired journalists and pigs-wallowing-in-mud politicians, as impregnable and, in its fundamentals, unquestionable.

Working-class socialist alternatives had, they said, been left for dead by history long ago — buried in the same grave as Stalinism and the once-vigorous social reformism of parties like the old Labour Party. They were the property only of unteachable individuals and stupid groupuscules.

Capitalism has been seen as the Only Possible System even by many of those who dislike or detest it — the only system there is, or ever can be.

Now, all across the media, the idea has erupted that capitalism is not only a grotesque, wasteful, savagely unjust system; it is also unstable; and it may not, after all, be permanent.

Writers in the ultra-Tory Daily Telegraph (20 September) feel compelled by events to admit that the capitalist “cycle” has been “more accurately predicted by Karl Marx” than by bourgeois economists.

Capitalism is a system which works by way of periodic economic and social tsunamis that leave in their wake tremendous destruction in many millions of lives. A manic-depressive system which, like its equivalent in individual psychologies, plunges from crazy heights to destructive, paralysing depths.

“The Market” has been elevated to the place in the social and economic theology of the ruling class occupied in religion by God. It is a harsh and relentless, and sometimes a very cruel and destructive, God, to be sure; but also one who essentially looks out for human beings and continuously bestows a tremendous stream of gifts on us.

A professor, a one-time Maoist, David Marsland, speaking in a debate at a Workers’ Liberty event in 1991, put it with arresting crassness: “The better part of intelligence is to marvel at the market’s gifts to mankind”.

This became the ritual formula under which immense numbers of former socialists, some with a numbed sense of horror and tragedy, and some with relief, simply gave up, committed moral and political suicide, and made their peace with the system which, in their braver youth, they had vowed to fight to the death.

An old early-19th meaning of “social-ism”, as any sort of social or government intervention to correct, shape, or supplement dog-eat-dog market “individualism” regained some of its meaning and relevance in the ultra-confident bourgeois era of “let the markets decide”. It was a feeble caveat, by believers in the “social market”, a “reformed” version of the dominant capitalist “religion”, to the extremes of the market-is-God ideologising.

Now, eighteen months after the opening of the credit crisis — the collapse of immense inverted pyramids of usurious money-lending constructed by greedy bankers — the leading bourgeois governments have themselves been driven to find, if not alternatives to the market, then non-market ways to supplement and supplant the normal workings of the market.

The British government nationalised Northern Rock. The right-wing bourgeois government of the USA has nationalised the country’s two biggest mortgage companies and its biggest insurance company. And now it proposes, using taxpayers' money to the tune of $700 billion — that is, seven hundred thousand million dollars — to buy up the bad debts of the bankers!

The US rulers feel and recognise an urgent need to stop the capitalist system working according to its own rules and its own deepest logic. If not, it will just seize up — like it did in March 1933, when US banks closed their doors and the normal workings of the system simply ceased for four days!

They are “all socialists now”? Yes, in the primitive, historically long-outmoded sense of “society-ists”, people who recognise the need for some sort of government intervention.

But, of course, no, in the sense that “socialism” has had for 150 years — the regulation of society by, and in the interests of, the working class and other working people.

bosses’ socialism

Of course what the US and British governments have done and propose to do has nothing in common with that socialism. Bush’s proposed $700 billion bail-out is a proposal to avert the consequence of capitalism’s workings by way of looting the public treasury for the benefit of the very rich.

• The crisis, which may yet spiral down into something resembling the crisis of the 1930s;

• The panicked resort by right-wing bourgeois governments to “social-ist” emergency measures;

• The governments’ rescue measures for the capitalist victims of their own system;

• The manifold demonstrations that this is a system that can go on privatising gains only if obliging governments are prepared at a pinch to step in and help by socialising losses.

These events show, or with the help of socialists seizing our chances can be made to show:

• Capital, by its own processes, has concentrated and centralised itself so much that, for instance, the two mortgage companies now nationalised in the USA control three-quarters of all new mortgages in that enormous country of 300 million inhabitants. It has created concentrations so gigantic that governments can aspire to control the economy by way of controlling some of the conglomerates, almost as one takes hold of the steering, braking, and accelerating controls of a car.

• These gigantic enterprises have already to a very great extent been socialised — organised on a society-wide basis. Within states and internationally, they control very large areas of society. But they are “social-ised” by capitalist profiteers and run on their behalf, by their governments. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, it is socialisation of the very rich, by the very rich, for the very rich.

• Government intervention to regulate, administer, and sometimes rescue those gigantic enterprises is necessary if society is not to break down. Even the most right-wing bourgeois government ideologists proclaim this loudly! Even froth-at-the-mouth advocates of big business and “the free market” like George W Bush and Gordon Brown — yes, Brown! — understand that and act on it.

• In so far as governments intervene, they do it as governments of the big bourgeoisie, to preserve this system, run for private profit. Even when they are forced in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole to nationalise enterprises, everything is done for, or mainly for, the big bourgeoisie. These governments rule for the bourgeoisie.

• The working class, and working people in general, need a government of our own, a workers' government that will serve our interests as Brown and Bush and Berlusconi and Merkel and Sarkozy serve the bourgeoisie. That government will organise the already-socialised economy in the common interest, not in the bourgeois interest.

It will expropriate the bourgeoisie and substitute proper, continuous, planning for the gyrations of the market. It will organise the economy for human need, and for the preservation of the environment on which humankind depends — not for the greed of those who now run the economy and society in their own private interests. It will socialise the gains.

Society moves spontaneously, in its normal capitalist workings, towards the socialisation of the economy. Frederick Engels called that “the invading socialist society”. Like a human pregnancy, this “socialisation” needs to be delivered from its integument before it is a viable independent organism.

“Socialism” needs to be delivered from the rule, and the highly structured anarchy, of the capitalist profiteers and the governments prepared to loot society on their behalf.

The job of socialists now is to seize the chance to explain to our class the craziness of the system under which we live and the possibility of something better. To explain that a working-class democratic socialist alternative is necessary, urgently necessary, and that it can be won. To explain that democracy is more than the very shallow, merely political thing which, at best, it is now, under the bourgeoisie. That real democracy, democracy worthy of the name, must be democratic control of the economy on which society and humanity depend, as well as a greatly expanded and deepened political democracy. That a socialist revolution of the working class is necessary. And that it is, now as in Russian in 1917, when the working class seized power, possible.

The extant left has been battered out of shape so much by the events and the despair of decades that it is in no shape to do the work of socialist education and organisation now becoming possible. It is simply not “fit for purpose”. Therefore, we must make it fit.

Here, there is a certain parallel with 1968. Then too the left was not in good shape. Decades of defeat and massacre lay on us like a giant crypt-stone. Stalinism was vigorous and still expanding.

When the French general strike of May-June 1968 erupted, many socialists had half given up on the European working class. They thought it had been corrupted by prosperity, coming after the enormous historical defeats of the 1930s and 40s; and they looked to “Third World” revolutions, led by Stalinists, as the leading “front of the World Revolution”.

Today the working-class movement has not yet recovered from the defeats and setbacks of the 1980s and 90s. Much of the ostensible left is delirious with incoherent and often reactionary “anti-imperialism” that looks to Islamist clerical-fascists as “the best fighters against imperialism” now.

As so much of the left in 1968 looked to “Third World” totalitarian-Stalinist movements? Yes, but worse. Much of the left in 1968 thought of Stalinism as either the socialist revolution or an intermediary first stage of that revolution. It was, of course, nonsensical; but even the most pixillated fantasists and allies of clerical-fascist “anti-imperialism” today do not have any comparable positive expectations from it. That testifies to realism? No — it testifies to a relapse into pure negativism towards advanced capitalism, utter political demoralisation, and disabling loss of self-identity.

The left is not ready for the situation we are now entering: we must make it ready.

One of the great lessons of the 20th century is that there is no such thing as an insoluble crisis for capitalism. Given time, given the chance to hold on tight, given the lack of a politically coherent alternative to itself, it recovers. Economic devastations, immensely tragic for vast numbers of people and even for individual capitalists, can, paradoxically, clear the way for capitalist economic revival. The manic-depressive system climbs out of the trough and begins a rise to peaks from which it will again, in time, plunge down. The cycle goes on.

Capitalism will not jump into history's abyss; it has to be knocked on the head and resolutely pushed!

That requires an adequate socialist movement. It requires that socialists put our affairs in better order than they are now. It requires honest and free discussion of our political differences and difficulties, and study of the lessons of our own history, recent and distant.

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty will take the working-class socialist message out to as many of those newly alerted to the realities of capitalism as we can; and we will educate, discuss, and debate to get ourselves and the broader left in condition to do that work better.

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