Raya Dunayevskaya (1961)
FACING independence in 1960, Nigeria, the largest country in West Africa, with a population of some 35 million confronted anew the question of whether independence would mean a new nation or a place where imperialist exploitation might continue in a country geographically and tribally divided.
Had it to choose between Communism and Moral Rearmament, both equally well heeled and equally trying to bind the movement of liberation to one or other of the two poles of state capital — Russia and America?
The theoretical point of departure for the new type of nationalism called Pan-Africanism would seem to be the philosophy developed by Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, the distinguished American historian who, in 1907, founded the Niagara Movement for full rights for American Negroes.
Unfortunately, just as DuBois’ concept of the development of the American Negro has always been based on “the talented tenth” so his philosophy of Pan-Africanism is based on the twin concept of the “talented tenth” or “thinking intelligentsia" working through imperialist institutions. His very first pronouncement in 1919 read: “The Negro race through their thinking intelligentsia demand . . . establishment under the League of Nations of an institution for the study of the Negro problem.”
With World War II the scene changed totally. This time the African masses by the million were, and are, demanding freedom. They are on the road to freedom from centuries of imperialist exploitation, an exploitation which always wore a white face. Africa for the Africans now means taking destiny into one’s own hands, not just exchanging oppression with a white face for one with a black face, exhilarating as that exchange may be at first.
Pan-Africanism, as a theory, on the other hand, meant the goal of a United States of Africa, including kingdoms like Ethiopia and outposts of American imperialism with native black management like Liberia. Among the leaders who sprang up to lead the movement — and not a few of them were ex-Marxists — the question of a new nation’s destiny was reduced to a question of administration and power. Only afterwards would they search for an ideology to suit their power.
This certainly was no embodiment of the elemental surge for freedom, as we can see from the example of the West Indian writer the late George Padmore who had been in the Comintern hierarchy for a quarter of a century before he broke with it.1 His break was organisational rather than on essentials. His Communist, i.e. state capitalist, mentality turned out to be more deeply rooted than ever — now that African peoples too were achieving state power. The Soviet Union remained to him a state power that he looked up to. Not only had he not broken with Russian state power, he was not to break with any stale power which he thought he might "use", including those of Britain, de Gaulle’s France and America.
At the same time Padmore attached himself to the first independent African state, Ghana, as “adviser on African affairs” to Premier Nkrumah. Ghana and Nkrumah he called “Pan-Africanism in action.”
On to Pan-Africanism Nkrumah then grafted Gandhian “non-violence” and Asian “neutralism.” As one enthusiast put it: “In one of the remarkable episodes in revolutionary history, he (Nkrumah) singlehandedly outlined a programme based on the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Gandhi . . ."2 Be that as it may, the espousal of such Pan-Africanism is for the purpose of canalising African movements and making them function within the order of world state capitalism.3
This does not mean that things are going to remain that way. An elemental surge for freedom is not so easily subdued. The colonial revolutions of our epoch have brought into being some twenty-two new countries in the Far East, the Middle East and Africa. This historic wave has by no means run its course in West Africa, much less in East Africa, North Africa and apartheid-ridden South Africa. Even if we limit ourselves for die time being to West Africa, the question of industrialisation is by no means a one-way capitalistic road.
Powerful as the two big masses of world capital are, the new nations cease to be half-way houses doomed forever to stay at the cross-road of history once their reliance passes from the governments to the common people of the technologically advanced countries. This is neither mere wishful thinking nor a question of drifting on totally uncharted seas.
Let us not forget that the Korean war was the most unpopular war in American history whilst the Algerian war called forth actual mutinies on the part of French youth sent to fight it. The powers-that-be do not misread these signs; they know that they are being told to keep their hands off the Afro-Asian revolution.
On the other hand old radicals seem inclined to dismiss this revolution with ‘sympathy’ and a knowing look that betokens their belief that there is no road open to Afro-Asia but that of capitalist industrialisation. Their inability to move mentally into the new epoch is something that flies in the face of past theory and present facts.
Seemingly at the opposite end of the world from Africa, geographically, industrially and not only in terms of power but also insofar as its advanced, allegedly non-political workers are concerned, stands America.
Not only to the European intellectuals, but even to the European workers, the American working class appears a mystery. They recognise its militancy in industrial struggles, but because the American worker has not built a Labour Party he appears to be non-political. Yet while it is true that the American worker expresses his opposition to capitalism differently it is not true that he is non-political or less anti-war than his European brother.
The fact that despite the recession and the identification in the popular mind of Republicanism with Depression, millions voted for Eisenhower just because he promised to end the Korean war, is proof enough that peace predominated over all other questions in the minds of workers. And in voting the Truman Administration out of office, the working people also limited the new government's tenure of office.
The statement that the Korean war was the most unpopular war in American history did not refer merely to the brain-washing of some American soldiers by Chinese Communists. (So long as there are Governor Faubuses and Little Rocks then so long will brainwashing by Communists be easy. The most significant thing about brainwashing however, was the speed with which the word was picked up by workers in factories to describe “a talking-to” by management and labour leadership alike).
Our epoch has been rightly characterised as one of struggle for the minds of men. That struggle has just begun.
Truly the Afro-Asian revolutions are not “over there,” over two oceans, seven seas and great land masses, while we are “over here” safe, sound and unconcerned. It is not only war than hangs heavy in the air. It is that the new struggle for freedom in 'backward’ lands is very close to the hearts, minds and aspirations of workers in ‘advanced’ countries.
The thousands of workers and students who turned out to hear Tom Mboya of Kenya in his lecture tour of America are a sign of this. The larger sign is the daily struggle that the workers are carrying on against the conditions of labour which make them wage slaves, the daily struggle against the conditions of labour which transform their whole life’s activity into an appendage of a monster automated machine that both overworks them and throws them out of work.
When, where and how the two types of struggle, at different poles of the world, merge into a unified struggle for a totally new society, will to some extent be decided by when, where and how the national liberation movements answer the question — what next?
It is clear that World War II ended only because the two new contenders for world power, Russia and the United States, had had enough for the time being. As if to prove that peace was only an uneasy interlude between wars, they put markers all along the road — two Germanies, two Chinas, two Viet-Nams.
While the Russians embarked on looting everything in sight from East Germany to Manchuria, the United States the only rich victor, found it had to give rather than take. It promptly embarked on the Marshall Plan 'to save' Western Europe from direct assault by proletarian revolution.
The tide of colonial revolutions which were then putting an end to the empires of its "victorious allies” (Britain and France) the United States could not stem at all. The Far East, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Africa — all were seething with revolt. It therefore had also to embark on the Point Four programme of aid to the underdeveloped countries. Russia, too, found that if it wanted to keep in the race for world domination, it had better begin its own “help to underdeveloped countries.’ 4
The problem for Russia on the one hand, and the United States on the other, is where to get the capital to give underdeveloped countries when capitalism, at this advanced stage of its development and decay, is suffering not from ‘overproduction’ and excess capital’ but from a decline in the rate of profit in relation to the mass of capital invested. In a word, the total capital needed for ever greater expansion is woefully inadequate. How has this come about?
We live in an age when even from a ‘purely economic’ point of view Marx’s forecast of capitalist collapse has moved from theory to life. The decade of the 1950’s underlines vividly the problem of capital in narrow capitalistic terms while, at the same time, it illuminates Marx’s extreme assumption that capitalism would collapse even if "the fully twenty-four hours a day . . . (of the labourer) were wholly appropriated by capital."5
Marx’s contention was that the system would collapse because surplus value comes only from living labour. Yet the contradictory tendency in capitalist development that rests on this exploitation of labour is to use less of living labour and more of machines. The contradiction between needing ever lesser amounts of living labour to set in motion ever greater amounts of dead labour creates, at one and the same time, a massive unemployed army and a decline in the rate of profit.
In the heyday of imperialism, the super-profits extracted from the carve-up of Africa and the colonisation of the Orient seemed to contradict Marx’s prediction so that not only bourgeois economists, but even marxists of the stature of Rosa Luxemburg wrote that we might as well wait for “the extinction of the moon” as wait for the decline in the rate of profit to undermine capitalism.6
Lush as the mass of profits are, and heavily as the extraction of unpaid hours of labour weigh on workers’ backs, the truth is that there isn’t enough capital produced to keep the crazy capitalist system going with self-same profit motive on an ever-expanding scale. Just as the 1929 world crisis made this apparent in the advanced countries, so the Afro-Asian revolutions in the 1950’s disclosed that, even in prosperous times, the advanced countries do not have capital sufficient for the development of the underdeveloped economies. So long as the motive force of production continues to be the accumulation of surplus value (or unpaid hours of labour ) — whether for private plants or for state space-ships—the straining of the ruling class to appropriate the full 24 hours of man's labour still fails to create sufficient capital to industrialise ‘the backward lands.’ Theory and fact have moved so close to each other that it would be hard to find anyone who would claim today that there is an excess of capital anywhere in the world. This is obvious when one looks at underdeveloped economies like India, China, in Africa and Latin America. It is just as obvious in Western Europe, the United States and Russia. After centuries of world domination, capitalist ideologists must now admit that two-thirds of the world is still starving, and the other third is busy inventing ways to appropriate ever more of the worker’s labour.
Essentially there is no difference in this between private and state capitalism. Nineteen sixty-one brought dramatic confirmation when the greatest award that mighty Russia could find to give the first world cosmonaut. Major Yuri Gagarin, for his phenomenal achievement of orbiting the earth, was to giant him, his wife and two children, a four room apartment in place of the two rooms they had occupied up to that point.
There are some discerning bourgeois economists who, seeing the hopeless impasse of capitalism, wish to sell the idea of a 'Christian' internationalism to 'the West'. They feel that if they can invent some sort of instalment plan on which to base this idea, it would not be "too heavy a burden" for the capitalist class to bear and at the same time be sufficiently palatable to leaders in the underdeveloped areas who would then choose 'democratic capitalism' against totalitarian Communism, i.e. state capitalism.
One such discerning economist is Barbara Ward, chosen by Nkrumah, Premier of Ghana, to deliver a series of “lectures on world affairs” at the University of Ghana. She said: “America’s foreign ventures are barely one fifth of Britain's in the heyday of foreign lending . . . Shortage of capital is the world’s trouble today, not the struggles of rival capitalists to go out and invest”.7
Nevertheless Miss Ward wants to convince the West both to invest and to give outright. She cannot see the West “winning” in any other way. Hence her knowledge of the shortage of capital does not stop her from propounding her thesis that the “have powers” can give the Afro-Asians what their economies “at this stage” can “absorb.” Indeed she insists that the total amount needed represents “not even one per cent of the United States’ national income.”8
The joker is in the words “at this stage.” She emphasises that it is really the backwardness of the workers — “the shortage of trained manpower is a severely limiting factor” — that compels the economy to take only a little industrialisation at a time. The hand-out is to stretch over “four or five decades”— no less than half a century! It is clear that Miss Ward is in no hurry. But mankind gaining its freedom is.
The peoples of Afro-Asia have no intention of stretching the industrialisation of their economies (not to mention land reform and caste reorganisation) over centuries. It is precisely this snail’s pace of modernising the economy in India which has turned the coloured world to look longingly at China.
A seemingly new path to industrialisation was being carved out by China. By usurping and transforming the marxist concept of liberation and using it in sweeping away the corrupt Chiang Kai Shek regime, the power of Mao’s China to attract the coloured peoples of the world was greatly enhanced. Neither the Korean War nor the first seizure of Tibet changed the impression of freedom and of creative energies newly released for the reorganisation of the semi-feudal regime on new foundations. Compared to the snail’s pace of industrialisation of India, China with its Russian-styled Plans seemed to have leapt straight into the technologically advanced world, challenging Britain’s production of steel.9
It soon turned out, however, that whatever "great leap forward" was made, was made on the bent backs of the masses, not for them. What was being established, as the result of toil from dawn to dusk, was not a new society but state capitalist totalitarianism. The attempt of Mao's China to go one better than Russia, through the establishment of barrack labour, barrack discipline and barrack family life in what the Chinese Communist Party dared to call “Communes,” made the new coloured nations have second thoughts.10
It is not that the Tibetan revolt matched the grandeur of the Hungarian Revolution with its Workers’ Councils, nor were the Tibetans the first to revolt in the face of bureaucratic Communism. Years before, the Vietnamese peasants, unrelenting in their struggle against French imperialism, had turned away from Ho-Chi-Minh. But times were not then ripe for other coloured peoples to look again at Asian Communism. Today, however, Africa is ready to question the Chinese path to industrialisation.
The greatest obstacle to the further development of these national liberation movements comes from the intellectual bureaucracy which has emerged to “lead” them. In the same manner the greatest obstacle in the way of the working class overcoming capitalism comes from the Labour bureaucracy that leads it.
Ever since the depression of 1929 showed the bankruptcy of the capitalism of private property, the middle class intellectual has embraced the State Plan.
Instead of working, as previously, with the native middle class he leaves the city to lead and control the peasants against the private native capitalists who are tied to imperialism such as Chiang Kai Shek. His descent upon the countryside, to lead and mislead the peasantry, may be from a Parisian cafe table or it may entail the greatest personal sacrifices, but where he doesn't come to the position 'naturally’ (i.e. through counter-revolution as in Russia, where he is openly designated as the ruling class) he is perfectly willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary in order that he might become the representative of the State Plan in field and factory.
The inescapable fact is that in this epoch of state capitalism the middle class intellectual, as a world phenomenon, has translated ‘individualism’ into ‘collectivism,’ by which he means nationalised property, state administration, State Plan.
In the post-war years this has cropped up everywhere, from the ‘socialist’ trade unions of Israel (which are at the same time the biggest owners of factories), to the young officers who fought Israel in the name of Arab nationalism.11 It now appears in Iraq as a native brand of Communist nationalism challenging Nasser nationalism.
In backward land or advanced, the intellectual bureaucrat is a firm ally of the Labour bureaucrat against the proletarian revolution. His job is to control the peasant revolt, or any popular revolt, and prevent their self-development.
The prototype and master of them all is, of course, the ruler of China, Mao Tse-Tung, once a marxist revolutionary. In the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution Mao discovered the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. When the great revolution was defeated in the cities Mao discovered that the peasant revolt, just because it was so isolated from the centre, i.e. the seat of government, could continue. Contrary to what all other marxist revolutionaries before him had done when a revolution was defeated, Mao went, not to prison or into exile, but into the mountain vastness to become a guerilla fighter.
Irrespective of the fact that Mao no longer had a mass following, the thing that was new, and which seemed to be merely a matter of self-defence, was the transformation of a peasant following (not excluding bandits) into an armed force. As any war lord, he saw to keeping this army disciplined and in action, whether that meant the famous 6,000 mile Long March, forced upon him by Chiang Kai Shek’s relentless attack or just a raid on a village for supplies. Never before in the history of marxist movements did a leader build an army where there was no mass movement.
The second feature flowed from the first The Party, without a mass following and with its principles twisted to follow the leader principle, was then and forever bent on power. But power cannot really be won without a mass movement, and to build that movement, principle, a theory of liberation, marxism, was essential. But Mao made sure that no matter what allegiance was sworn to principles in general, in particular people followed Mao.
If anyone dares to refer to the principles of marxism they get the following vulgar answer: “There are people who think that marxism can cure any disease. We should tell them that dogmas are more useless than cow dung. Dung can be used as fertilizer.”
Thirdly, and of greatest importance, is consciousness of a centre, of state power. Even if that centre of power at first be only a cave, it is the strategically located form of power. The raiding party returns there with its supplies. The military departs from there with its instructions. The party propagandists get their interpretations there and bring to it their reports. Everybody works to support it, build it up, develop the “cadre for taking over power.”
By the time Mao’s Army-Party cadre met the city workers, it had actual state power and the workers were forced to recognise that they must work ever harder:
“We must by no means allow a recurrence of such ultra-left erroneous policies as were adopted toward the petty and middle bourgeoisie by our party in the period from 1931 to 1934, the advocation of uneconomically high standards in working conditions ; excessively high income-tax rates; . . . short-sighted, one-sided views of the so-called “welfare of the toilers” instead of making our objective the development of production, the prosperity of our economy, the taking into account of both public and private interests of both labour and capital.”12
The struggle for power may require that the confiscation of land mean no more than reduction of usurious taxation, or it may mean that it go outright to “communes.” In all cases and at all times the leaders lead and the masses toil. And when “excesses” are stopped, as for example in December, 1958. “Mao’s Thought” will prevail: “One must have eight hours sleep and not work more than 12 hours a day."
In our epoch of state capitalism, whether industrialisation be quick or slow, the outlook of the totalitarian state ruler percolates down to the lower strata of the intellectual bureaucrats in power or our of it This is why George Padmore so admired “ the political genius” of Mao. He did not take fright at barrack labour because he was sure of his place among the leaders. With elation he quoted Mao on cow dung as being more useful than marxist “dogma." That is how he fought what he called doctrinaire marxism,” i.e. any principled opposition to unprincipled opportunism.
Just as marxism developed in opposition to state socialism (represented in Marx’s day by Lasalle) so marxism in Lenin's day developed in total opposition to any short cut to workers’ power.
Lenin went so far as to say that the very principle of smashing the old state machine, the thing which marked the proletarian revolution, did not distinguish it: “The petty bourgeoisie in a frenzy may also want as much.”13
What did distinguish the socialist revolution was the way it was accomplished — from below: “We recognise only one road, changes from below, we wanted workers themselves to draw up, from below, the new principles of economic conditions.”14
The smashing up of the old state machine, done between October, 1917, and February, 1918, was the easiest part of the job. The difficult, the decisive task, followed. The population, he continued, must “to a man” run the state and manage the economy and for that: “It is necessary to abolish the distinction between town and country as well as the distinction between manual workers and brain workers.”15
The proof that that was the goal of genuine communism lay in the fact that the formulae of genuine communism differed from the pompous involved phrasemongering of Kautsky, the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries and their beloved ‘brethren’ of Berne, in that they reduced everything to the conditions of labour.16
If, then, the Communist Party did not become bureaucratised and did not begin thinking that it can do for the masses what only the masses can do for themselves, then and only then could people move to socialism.
“Every citizen to a man must act as a judge and participate in the government of the country, and what is most important to us is to enlist all the toilers to a man in the government of the state. That is a tremendously difficult task, but socialism cannot be introduced by a minority, a party.”17
This was not said merely for outside consumption. It was said to a Party Congress. Nor was it said by a man on the way to power. It was said by a man in power in order to stress that the party should not, in the revision of its programme, forget how and why it came to power. He said it to stress that a party in power is still but a minority of the class, whereas socialism “can be introduced by tens of millions of people when they have learnt how to do everything for themselves."
It was exactly this kind of perspective that impelled Lenin, two years afterwards, when the colonial revolutions burst upon the historic scene, to make these a new point of departure in his theory.
“Can we recognise as correct the assertion that the capitalist stage of development of national economy is inevitable for those backward nations which are now liberating themselves . . . ?” Lenin asked this, and then in the name of the Commission on the National and Colonial Question he answered unequivocally:
“We must reply to this question in the negative ... we must . . . give theoretical grounds for the proposition that, with the aid of the proletariat of the most advanced countries, the backward countries may pass to the Soviet, and after passing through a definite stage of development, to Communism, without passing through the capitalist stage of development”.18
It cannot be stressed too much that these precedent-shaking statements came from a man who had spent decades fighting the Narodniki (Populists) of his own country, people who had maintained that Russia could skip the capitalist stage of development.
Just as Nehru today thinks that through the Panchyat (village council) India can go directly to socialism so the Narodniki thought Russia could do that through the mir. Lenin fought them bitterly and won the theoretical debate. History has certainly upheld his judgment.
Only something very fundamental and objective could have wrought such a complete change in Lenin's concepts. Two world-shaking events brought about this transformation. Firstly the 1917 Revolution had established a workers’ state that could come to the aid of a land even more backward technologically than Russia, whilst secondly the colonial revolutions themselves illuminated the revolutionary role of the peasantry in the imperialist epoch.
It was this knowledge of the present stage of the imperialistic development of capitalism and the specific stage of national revolutions that impelled Lenin, ever since the Irish rising of Easter Week, 1916, to stress that not all initiative at all times comes only from the working class. He did not change this position when the proletariat did achieve the greatest revolution in history — the October Revolution in Russia. That revolution only underlined the truth of history's dialectic: just as small nations fighting for independence could unleash the socialist revolution, so the working class of industrialised countries achieving the revolution could help the underdeveloped countries avoid capitalist industrialisation.
This point of departure in theory — industrialisation without capitalism — rested, of course, on the proposition that the working class of the advanced countries could and would come to the aid of their brothers in the underdeveloped countries.
This page of Comintern history was lost, not only by Stalin whose policy ruined the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, but by Trotsky who chose just this moment to revive his theory of permanent revolution.
The idea of a permanent revolution, i.e. one that would not stop at the bourgeois but continue to the proletarian or socialist stage, was first developed by Karl Marx as a lesson to be drawn from the 1848 European revolutions. In 1903-06 Trotsky developed this theory both as analysis and anticipation of the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions. While, popularly, permanent revolution became simply synonymous with world revolution, Trotsky in 1930 stressed that his conception of it was that “the theory of permanent revolution established the fact that for backward countries the road to democracy passed through the dictatorship of the proletariat."19
Just when the era of state capitalism deepened the truth of Lenin’s analysis of peasant and national revolts, Trotsky more strongly then ever embellished his theory with the contention that the peasant revolts in China had been nothing but remnants of proletarian struggle and would arise again only after new stimulation from the proletariat.
First, according to Trotsky, in Tsarist Russia the ability of the socialist revolution to succeed was supposed to depend upon the working class leading the peasantry; then later it came to signify the Party leading the proletariat; finally it was a question of the workers’ state apparatus swallowing up the trade unions. That is why in his will, Lenin had to war against Trotsky’s “administrative mentality.” In the end, what began as a brilliant prophecy of a development in Russia showed itself in later life to be just the blinkers needed not to see what was developing in China.
Trotsky’s own words (about his estimation of the role of the peasantry) speak much louder than any stalinist charge against him for “underestimating the peasantry.” Where Mao at least grasped the new in the peasant revolt, in his 1927 report on Hunan province,20 Trotsky was at one with Stalin in disregarding it.
When, in 1930, he returned to the theme of the Russian Revolution he wrote: “The fact that the peasantry as a whole found it possible once more — for the last time in their history — to act as a revolutionary factor testifies at once to the weakness of the capitalist relations in the country and to their strength.”21 This judgment came despite the fact that he wrote of Lenin: “This exposition of the genuine historic meaning of the Russian agrarian movement was one of the greatest services of Lenin.”22
Trotsky claimed that on the agrarian question he was a pupil and follower of Lenin. One must question what he learned and whither it led him when, in 1938, 11 years after the 1925-27 Revolution, he denied the peasantry even a sense of national consciousness, much less any socialist consciousness: “The peasantry, the largest numerically and the most atomised, backward and oppressed class, is capable of local uprisings and partisan warfare, but requires the leadership of a more advanced and centralised class in order for this struggle to be elevated to an all-national level.”23
In his last writings, in 1940, he tiresomely repeats both his concept of the Russian Revolution and the theory of the permanent revolution: “By itself the peasantry was incapable even of formulating its own interests ... I repeatedly returned to the development and the grounding of the theory of the permanent revolution ... the peasantry is utterly incapable of an independent political role.”24
A theory thus far removed from the realities of the age of imperialism and state capitalism had to collapse of its own hollowness. That present-day trotskyists can swear by both Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution and the Mao “Communes” only shows that weightless abstractions and an administrative mentality would rather hold on to some state power than entrust elemental mass revolt to undermine authority.
Such ideas must not be allowed to blind us to the surge of the colonial revolutions. The maturity of our age is seen in the fact that even a mere palace revolution, as in the case of the officers' revolt in Egypt, was pushed by the revolutionary upsurge of the peasant masses and students to undertake some land reforms and to promise “revolutionary changes.”25
The point is not to start with the economic situation alone — the world stage of capitalism — but with political maturity. A people fighting and dying for freedom is mature enough to take destiny into its own hands, not just politically but in the very ground of politics — the kind of labour man performs.
People advanced enough to question the kind of labour man performs at the stage of automation have moved from the answer of more and more machines. They see that the class answer is the humanist answer. It remains to say just what that is.
Man does not live by bread alone ; but he must have bread to live. The humane materialism of Marx holds both the immediate and long-term answers to the present colonial revolutions.
Present-day Communist attacks on humanism are neither accidental nor are they hair-splitting points of doctrine. They concern nothing less fundamental than whether these national revolutionary movements, as well as working class movements, shall emerge from the death-grip of state capitalism.
We need to be aware that Stalin chose to revise the Marxist theory of value right in the midst of World War II as the heroic Russian people were driving back the Nazi invaders. 1943 was chosen as the year for a seemingly pedantic article, “Some Questions of Teaching Political Economy,"26 because that was the year the Russian production managers ‘discovered’ the American assembly line technique. It was Stalin's way of telling the Russians not to expect a change in the conditions of labour after the war.
Because Marx’s theory of exploitation is built on his analysis of the law of value as the law of capitalist development, the Russian theoreticians, up until 1943, had denied the operation of that law in their country, an allegedly classless society. A revision of marxism was necessary to make it possible, at one and the same time, to admit the law of value operating in Russia and still claim that it was “a socialist land.” It took the form of asking teachers not to follow the structure of Marx’s Capital.
As I wrote in my Marxism and Freedom: “Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing. Whereas Marx was concerned with the freedom of humanity and the inevitable waste of human life which is the absolute general law of capitalist development, Russian “communism” rests upon the mainspring of capitalism — paying the worker the minimum and extracting from him the maximum. This they dub “the Plan.” Marx called it the law of value and surplus value.” (p.24).
Just as the break of 1943 with the marxist analysis of value meant the continued exploitation of the Russian workers, so the 1955/6 attack on the humanism of marxism, in Hungary particularly, meant their continued imperialist control of Eastern Europe and their new intervention — by economic aid — in the colonial world.27
Some there are who think that Russian Communist ‘aid' is different from that of American imperialism’s Point Four programme. Others, as we have seen, are so desperate to sell ‘Christian internationalism’ to stop Communism that they claim that only one per cent of U.S. national income is needed to build up the underdeveloped countries. The truth is that neither Russian state capitalism nor the profits of the U.S. and 'it's wealthy allies' (including the wealth of the Krupp empire of West Germany) will ever rebuild the world economy.
The world economy must have totally new foundations operated by motive forces other than mere machine building and private or state profit. Only a qualitatively different kind of labour, one that comes from the release of the creative energies of the common people, can reconstruct the world on new human foundations.
We do, however, live in the atomic age. Atomic energy and automated machines could accelerate the whole industrial development to a point where Biblical miracles would be poor imaginative material. This is not utopia, nor tomorrow. Technologically this is today.
Power plants fuelled by atomic energy are already in operation. Russia claims plans to blast lake sites in barren Russian areas. Big business circles in America say there are plans in progress for blasting a huge harbour in northern Alaska with a single atomic explosion.
But if atomic energy is used to create man-made lakes in the Sahara and Gobi Deserts, to move mountains so that rain may fall where now there is drought — if these are not utopian dreams but things technologically possible today, it would nevertheless be the height of foolishness to imagine that capitalism, private or state, is or will be capable of their realisation.
Not only will capitalism not do it for the underdeveloped countries, it cannot do it for itself. Khruschev’s Russia, like private corporations in America that demand plush 'cost plus' contracts, must spend billions on rocket development, not for the touted “space exploration,” but for intercontinental ballistic missile production. Both poles of world capital are busy forcing science to work for a nuclear war, a war that might very well spell the end of civilisation as we have known it.
By the expression “forcing science” I do not mean to say that science, as at present constituted in a class society, pines to do otherwise. This, too, Marx foresaw long ago. In 1844 he wrote: “To have one basis for life and another for science is a priori a lie.”
Marx foresaw the impasse of modern science not because he was a prophet but because he took the human being as the measure of all development, and therefore saw that at the root of all class divisions was the division between the mental and the manual, between science and life itself.
If there are any who still think that anything but an exploitative society could result from such a basic division, let them take a second look at both Russia and America and see where science has led them to. The duality that pervades capitalist society and invests each thing with its opposite, has led to automation, something which instead of fructifying man’s labour simultaneously overworks him and throws him out of work. From the splitting of the atom came not the earth's greatest source of energy but its most destructive weapon.
The discerning scientist, for all his middle class identity, can see this now. It was Dr. William Pickering who stated that no matter who drops the bomb first “we are one-half hour's distance away from total annihilation.” Since, continued Dr. Pickering, the scientists cannot help themselves, we must find an entirely different approach to life, “a new unifying principle from the heart and mind of man.”
Such a unifying principle can be nothing but marxist humanism. It is the point of unity also between the masses in the underdeveloped countries and the common people in the advanced countries.
It is just for this reason that Russia engages in the struggle against humanism. The undercurrent of revolt against the Russian tyrants is uncompromising and continuous. In the satellites it gives them no respite.
The revolt has been reflected even within the ranks of the Communists. Thus in 1955/6, Imre Nagy, who had been expelled from the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party, wrote a letter in which he assured the Central Committee that when the masses turn to humanism it is not because they “want a return to capitalism . . . They want a people’s democracy where the working people are masters of the country and of their own fate, where human beings are respected, and where social and political life is connected with the spirit of humanism.”28
In the Petofi Circle, the Hungarian Communist writer, Tibor Dery, declared on June 19th, 1956: “We have been fighting for so many things that we have forgotten the chief thing — humanism." But the ruling bureaucracy would listen to none of this, especially since humanism was spelled out to mean “introducing self-management in the factories and workers’ democracy.”
As the whole world knows, the next stage in the humanist struggle was not theory but action — the Hungarian Revolution.
The ruthless totalitarian machine which crushed that revolution bore the not-so-smiling faces of Khruschev and Bulganin recently returned from their junketings in Burma, India, Malaya and their talks to people there about freedom from colonialism!
It was then that the Russian Communists bore down on all humanists. Kommunist (No.5 - 1957) gave out the line: Leninism “needs no sort of ‘humanisation’ nor any of the reforms proposed by the proponents of 'humanist socialism'". By then, the ruling Polish Communist bureaucracy had accepted ‘the line’ and the attack was launched against all “revisionists.” Jerzy Mirowski, Politburo member wrote on the eve of the Writers’ Congress: "All revisionists describe themselves as creative marxists. There is only one Marxism ; the one that guides the party.”29
This Party attack had to be that precise because it was from Poland that humanism had emerged and inspired the Hungarian Revolution. Though the Poles themselves stopped short of revolution, they made some attempt to take a stand on principle after the crisis in Hungary. Thus, Nova Cultura of April 28th, 1957, stated:
“The Communist ideal demands the liberation of humanity — and of the individual within the framework of society — from alienation in all the domains of society. The aim is to obtain the real sovereignty of the masses, to destroy the division between those who are deprived of freedom and the ruling group which is not responsible to the people. The idea of Communism, of humanism put into life, is universal.”
By 1959 the iron curtain was shut tight and the Third Party Congress of the Polish Party directed a good deal of its resolution against “the revisionists, fencing with pseudo-left wing phraseology . . . (that) pushed many honest but ideologically weak comrades into the ranks of dogmatists who with the help of demagogical chatter presented themselves as allegedly the only authentic defenders of Marxism and Communism.”30 30
On the last day of the 21st Congress of the Russian Communist Party (February 6th, 1959) their chief, M. B. Mitin — who bears the august title of ‘Chairman of the Board of the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge’ — told us where to look if we were searching for true(!) humanism. “The magnificent and noble conception of Marx-Leninist socialist humanism” was in Khruschev’s Report!31 The rule “if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em I" seemed to hold.32 The hypocrisy was evident in the very next paragraph. Mitin hit out against all “revisionists” and especially against “Yugoslav revisionism.”
"What is it if not apostasy, if not full retreat from Leninism, slanderously to claim as they do that the development of the soviet state signifies 'a bureaucratic statist trend', that the principle that the socialist state plays a decisive role in the building of socialism and communism is nothing but a 'pragmatic statist revision of marxism'".
The reason this struck a raw nerve among the Russian Communists was not, however, due to theory, deviationist or otherwise, but because Tito knows the importance of the new Afro-Asian nations. He travels widely among the ‘neutral’ countries and does so for the purpose of exposing Russia's role.
The question is — what does Tito propose in its stead? Whether state capitalism calls itself ‘Communist’ or not, it has nothing more than private capitalism to sell. Both attempt to stop the new forces finding the path to immediate freedom.
The leaders of the African Revolution are not relying solely on the creative energy of the masses, proletarian, peasant or primitive, not because they are independent of “doctrinaire marxism” but because they are dependent upon the capitalist road to industrialisation.
Of course the underdeveloped countries do need help. First of all they want water. But where the economy is not under workers’ control — and it is nowhere in that condition at the moment — the help will be miserly, with strings attached calculated to involve the recipient in one of the power complexes that are bent on nuclear war.
Short of finding the principle that unifies their struggle for freedom with that of the common people of the advanced countries, there is no way out. There is no in-between road via Pan-Africanism, and the road via the Chinese Communes is a short cut not to freedom but to totalitarian state capitalism.
The fact that there is no way out except by a unified struggle of the masses the world over does not condemn the colonial and ex-colonial countries to ‘inevitable’ capitalist development.
A people mature enough to fight for its freedom is mature enough to take destiny into its own hands in the matter of reconstructing its own society. Marxist cliches are as bad as any others and it is a cliche of an utterly mistaken order to tell a people that has no working class to speak of, that “only if the proletarian revolution occurs ...” etc., etc.
It was just this that was Lenin's new departure in theory. The revolutionary initiative is not always with the working class. The road to Berlin may lead through Peking, said Lenin in the days of Sun Yat Sen. The overwhelming majority of the population of the world is in the East and one must take the new elemental force of the colonial revolutions as a new point of departure in theory.
This is no longer theory but fact. To disregard it is to read oneself out of history. The proof lies in the opposition to Communist totalitarianism which has taken a humanist form both in theory and practice. The same is true of the Afro-Asian revolutions against Western imperialism. The same is true in the workers’ movements in the technologically advanced countries. The freedom movements everywhere have an international character. The tremendous demonstrations in Japan were aimed both against Eisenhower and Kishi. The protest against the murder of Lumumba was world-wide. World-wide also is the support of Cuban Revolution. The refusal of the Belgian workers to lie down to the Loi Unique, the determination of young Americans to end racial discrimination by sit-ins, the gathering anti-war feelings in the Aldermaston Marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament — all these manifestations of yesterday and today will deepen tomorrow. They sound the call for a different politics, a new world order.
Mankind will not sit idly by and see itself destroyed.
1 Pan Africanism or Communism, The Coming Struggle for Africa by George Padmore.
2 J. R. Johnson's Facing Reality, p.77. I admit that combining Marx, Lenin and Gandhi is quite a feat. But for a pamphleteer like J. R. Johnson who thundered so for the Soviet United States of Europe, Soviet United States of Asia, world revolution, the struggle against bureaucracy “as such,” the self-mobilisation of the masses and for new passions and new forces to reconstruct society on totally new beginnings — to end with Nkrumah as the representative of the new, the new, is rather pathetic. There is nothing to add but to say, with Hamlet, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him."
3 In addition to Nkrumah's autobiography, Ghana, the reader can make a rapid inspection of his principles as well as those of other African leaders like Leopold Senghor in the October 1958 issue of the Western World which featured a debate on “Independence and Sovereignty of the African People.”
4 The first fairly comprehensive statement of this can be read in Joseph S. Berliner's Soviet Economic Aid.
5 Capital, Vol. III p.468. See also the section called “The breakdown of Capitalism: Crises, Human Freedom and Volume III of Capital" of my Marxism and Freedom (1958) which deals with Marx’s theoretical concept against the background of the 1929 crash.
6 As I wrote in Marxism and Freedom — “The single capitalist, call him 'Collective Leadership under Khruschev, Inc.’ if you will, will have at a certain stage a magnificent plant, completely automatized, or a jet bomber, but he cannot stop to raise the standard of living of the masses of the workers. He may be able to avoid the more extreme forms of ordinary commercial crises, but even within the community itself he cannot escape the internal crisis of production . . . That is why Marx, throughout Capital, insists that either you have the self-activity of the workers, the plan of freely associated labour, or you have the hierarchic structure of relations in the factory and the despotic Plan. There is no in-between." p.136.
7 Barbara Ward: Five Ideas That Change The World, p.139.
8 Barbara Ward: Interplay of East and West. p.93.
9 Ygael Gluckstein: Mao's China, also the latest work. Economic Planning and Organisation on Mainland China by Chao Kuo-Chin.
10 The most interesting comments and factual evidence appear in the Yugoslav press. The “Communes" were covered in their daily, weekly and monthly press. The New Leader (July 15th, 1959) has a special supplement on the subject.
11 See The Philosophy of Nationalism by Gamal Nasser.
12 Mao Tse Tung: “On the Present Situation and Our Tasks,” December 25th, 1947, also quoted in Moscow and the Communist Party by John H Kautsky.
13 Lenin, Selected Works. Vol. VII, p.337.
14 Ibid, p.277.
15 Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. IX, p.433.
16 Ibid, p.439.
17 Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. VIII, p.320.
18 Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. X, p.243.
19 Ibid, p.242.
20 Mao Tse Tung's Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (February, 1927) can be found in A Documentary History of Chinese Communism by Conrad Brandt, Benjamin Schwartz and John K. Fairbank.
21 Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. I, p.407.
22 Ibid, p.408.
23 Introduction by Leon Trotsky to The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution by Harold R. Isaacs.
24 Stalin by Leon Trotsky, Appendix 3, " Concepts of the Russian Revolution,” p.425.
25 Egypt in Transition by J. & S. Lacouture.
26 The article was first published in Pod Znamenem Marxiimp ("Under the Banner of Marxism") No. 7-8. 1943. It was translated by me and published in American Economic Review (September, 1944) with a commentary “A New Revison of Marxian Economics." This caused a controversy that lasted an entire year in that journal and at the end of it I came back with a rejoinder “Revision or Reaffirmation of Marxism? Both this controversy and the one over the 1955 revisions of marxist humanism are dealt with at length in my Marxism and Freedom.
27 See Questions of Philosophy (1955). available only in Russian. When the debate moved from the theoretical to the practical field of attacking and putting down the revolutions in Eastern Europe it was well documented in Polish and Hungarian journals. Much of the material has since been made available in English.
28 Imry Nagy on Communism, “In Defense of the New Course." p.49.
29 Those who cannot follow the Polish publications can find many translations in the magazine East Europe. Jerzy Mirowski’s report is in the February, 1959. issue.
30 East Europe, May, 1959, and June, 1959.
31 Pravda, February 6th, 1959. It is translated in the “Current Digest of the Soviet Press," June 3rd, 1959. This “Digest” is generally the most authoritative publication available to English-speaking peoples since it contains nothing but translations from the official Communist press.
32 This characterises not only the Communists, but the Trotskyists too. In the winter and spring issues of “International Socialist Review” (1959) they opened an attack on the philosophical manuscripts of the young Marx. These pretentious articles, entitled “Socialism and Humanism” assure us that humanism was a stage Marx “passed through.” William F. Warde, their author, presumes to call these great writings the products of “the immature Marx.”
The Communists have finally, after a delay of 32 years, brought out an English edition of Marx’s Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 only to append to them some fantastic footnotes. Does Warde go along with the Communist editors in this too? Where Marx writes: “Communism as such is not the goal of human development — the form of human society," the Communists comment: “Under 'communism as such' Marx here means crude, equalitarian communism ...”
It is not Marx’s alleged criticism of “equalitarian communism” that bothers today’s Communists. What cuts to the quick is Marx’s emphasising not the nationalisation of property, but the freedom of the individual. Thus his prophetic warning against State Communism: “We should especially avoid re-establishing society as an abstraction opposed to the individual. The individual is the social entity."