Seymour Faber
Seymour died on Sunday, of kidney failure. He was
79 years old and had been seriously ill for over a year. At his and Toby's
request I spoke at his funeral yesterday. I can imagine that he would have had
that big broad smile of his, if he'd been able to see me standing there beside
the rabbi, wearing a kippah on my shiny bald
head. You can listen to a recording of the service here.
The summation by Rabbi Schwartz is worth waiting for, as are the songs and
stories of Seymour's cousins.
Seymour was my teacher, a mentor and a friend. We'd met in the 1970s, when he was a professor of sociology at the University of Windsor and I was a rank-and-file activist working on the assembly lines at Chrysler. It was through Seymour and his friend Marty Glaberman that I discovered the writings of their mentor, CLR James. They were unlike any of the other socialists I had known. They believed it was their job as Marxists, not to lead or incite revolution, but to observe, report, teach and inspire. Accused of being spontaneitists by the vanguard left, they had a firm belief that it would be workers, not intellectuals, who would lead the struggle to create a new world based on freedom and equality. I still share that belief.
Seymour was my teacher, a mentor and a friend. We'd met in the 1970s, when he was a professor of sociology at the University of Windsor and I was a rank-and-file activist working on the assembly lines at Chrysler. It was through Seymour and his friend Marty Glaberman that I discovered the writings of their mentor, CLR James. They were unlike any of the other socialists I had known. They believed it was their job as Marxists, not to lead or incite revolution, but to observe, report, teach and inspire. Accused of being spontaneitists by the vanguard left, they had a firm belief that it would be workers, not intellectuals, who would lead the struggle to create a new world based on freedom and equality. I still share that belief.
Marty and Seymour wrote Working
for Wages: The Roots of Insurgency, some small parts of which were
based on descriptions of factory life Seymour had extracted from me, often over
lunch and occasionally in his
classes.
Seymour and I were supposed to get together this week and continue a discussion we've been having about the nature of imperialism in the 21st century. Last winter we'd argued a lot over Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he suggested we take a step back and refocus on a broader question, one that Marty had raised back in 1976. Marty thought Lenin's famous work on Imperialism, written 60 years prior, was out of date.
Seymour was willing to entertain the proposition that after 30 more years Marty's article on imperialism might need some updating as well. He told me about a news story he had read, about the Chinese government recently buying a Brazilian engine plant from DaimlerChrysler. The plant was 'deconstructed' and shipped piece by piece to China where it was put back together and into operation. I told him that my new iMac computer from Apple was built in China and that it wouldn't surprise me if China becomes home to most of the world's manufacturing in the next few decades.
I don't know where we would have gone with that discussion. At the funeral I found out that Seymour had been circulating Marty's piece and asking for comments. I spoke to Peter to see if there would be any problems if I republished his dad's article on the web. He told me to go ahead. So, in honour of Seymour, I am.
There is a collection of some of Marty's writings, including several with Seymour, at the Marxist Internet Archive. I am going to ask them to add the following to the list.
Update: Thanks to Chris for proofing the article and correcting several typos and OCR weirdness. I've amended the text as she has suggested.
------
Peninsular Papers
Journal of the Michigan Sociological Association
Vol. II Number 1 Fall 1976
pages 11 - 20
IMPERIALISM AFTER LENIN
Martin Glaberman
These sentences, used again almost twenty years later in a footnote in Capital, provide the basis for examining Lenin's work on imperialism and its validity today. They represent a conception of capitalism as a constantly changing, revolutionary system. The nature of capital and the relations between capitalists; the nature of work and the working class and of the organizations of the working class; the relations between workers and capitalists; all these relations and all other social relations are assumed to be in constant flux.
It is not surprising, in this context, that almost seventy years after these words were written Lenin found it necessary to examine the changes in capitalism and found them extensive and substantial enough to call them a new stage of capitalism: Imperialism.
It is worth remembering that he did not do this as an exercise in Marxist methodology but in response to a specific problem. The international organization of the working class, the Second International, dedicated verbally to Marxism and to revolution, had collapsed as a revolutionary organization in 1914. Its major sections, in violation of its declared resolves, had turned to support their own capitalist governments in the first World War.
Lenin's philosophical assumption was that a catastrophe on so large a scale, the collapse of the International, could not be assumed to be accidental or the result of ill will or evil men. He sought to find the changes in capitalist society that were the objective basis for the subjective defection of the major socialist parties. He looked for the contradictions within the working class that had been brought about by the changes in society.
We are now fifty years beyond Lenin. It is appropriate to investigate Lenin's work on two levels, levels that seem to be in contradiction with each other. The first level is the one from which Lenin's work on imperialism is ordinarily viewed by friend and foe alike. It is the level of his conclusions. They are assumed to have a rigidity that brooks no modification over time. But this is quite evidently in contradiction with a more fundamental level, the level of methodology. Within the framework of the dialectical method, with the assumptions of a constantly changing society that go back to the Communist Manifesto and before, it would be a more damaging attack to insist that Lenin's conclusions were still valid than to prove that there were not. To pretend that capitalism has undergone no significant changes in the last fifty years, therefore, not only does violence to the evidence, it does violence to Lenin's own assumptions and methods of thought.
What are the changes wrought during a period of wars, of revolutions, of world-wide depression, of totalitarian dictatorships, of H-bombs and space flights ? Do they confirm or clarify what Lenin saw or do they contradict it?
II
Lenin took note of the substantial development of investment by the major corporations in the underdeveloped world in the years preceding World War I. This was the result, among other things, of the narrowing of the fields for profitable investment at home and of the super-profits available from investments in the colonial and semi-colonial world. Lenin did not view this as an absolute. That is, the export of goods did not disappear or even diminish; it was simply overtaken in significance to the functioning of the system as a whole by the export of capital.
Today, the export of capital remains a fact of fundamental importance. The character of this export, however, has changed substantially in two ways. In the first place, the export of capital, which had been a movement from the industrial to the underdeveloped world, has changed so that more and more the movement of capital is between the industrial nations. About half of the flow of capital from the industrial nations is now to other industrial nations. The industrial nations invest in each other. Private investment in the underdeveloped world tends to be overwhelmingly in oil and mining and agriculture.
In the second place, the movement of capital which was once overwhelmingly private is now about one half government or public funds, loans and aid from governments and from semi -governmental international monetary institutions. These two new tendencies relate to each other. Private investment has been leaving the underdeveloped world for newer fields which turn out to be the older fields in the industrialized countries. And governmental institutions now dominate in the export of capital to the underdeveloped world. At the very least, it is clear that, with a few exceptions, such as oil, the underdeveloped world is no longer the haven of super-profits. It should be understood that what is being discussed is new investment, not the relinquishing of old investments, which are maintained and slightly expanded throughout the world.
The change in the nature of foreign investment has, for all practical purposes, undercut the traditional argument that the investment of the great powers helps to industrialize the underdeveloped world. in point of fact, when the possibility of going beyond simply agricultural and extractive industry becomes a reality, investment goes off in other directions. Very often, when factories are built in the formerly colonial countries they turn out to be assembly plants, which increase the dependence on products manufactured in the metropolitan countries and do not provide for any independent productive capacity. The battle then takes place over the allocation of government funds which tend, overwhelmingly, to be oriented toward military aid, aid in the form of surplus products of the great power, etc. , and only minimally (and as a result of special factors) such productive achievements as major dams or other substantive additions to basic productive capacity.
III
Lenin took care to show that this "surplus" was only relative. There was no surplus in terms of human needs, in the need to develop agriculture, in the need to develop other areas of economic and social life. There was a surplus specifically in terms of profitable investment. In this area, too, there is a considerable turnabout, although here it is more apparent than real. The situation in the industrial world can best be understood, not in terms of a surplus, but in terms of a shortage of capital. This must be understood entirely in a relative sense. There is obviously more capital in the world today than in the past. But the massive changes in technology, development of new techniques and products, the totality of capitalist production, has reached a stage in which the amounts required for the expansion of the system are beyond the capacity of the system.
This is not a simple concept to see because the appearance. the huge masses of capital that seem to be everywhere, belies the reality. An example from the auto industry may illustrate one aspect of what is involved. The Packard Motor Car Co. and Hudson Motors were huge corporations by any standard. In many industries (other than auto, steel, etc.) they would have been the giants in their field. But in the period of the 195O's, the period of automation and technical innovation on a large scale, they could not keep pace with what was required, and they went down the drain. Even the Chrysler Corporation almost lost out in the 1958-61 period. What was true of auto was true of most industries. The new technology substantially increased the scale of investment required.
There are other examples of what is involved in this relative shortage of capital. It was a major issue in the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign. The Democrats charged the the growth rate in the United States (that is, the expansion of capital) was inadequate to sustain America's competitive position in the world. Ironically, Khrushchev was overcome by the same problem in the Soviet Union. He could not expand the accumulation of capital in the Soviet Union at the rate required to close the gap separating it from the United States. Connected with this is the rather startling fact that, despite automation, the increase in productivity in the United States in the period since 1950 has been at a lower rate than the increase in the period around World War I which saw the development of the electric motor, the moving assembly line and advances in chemistry.
There may be a very few corporations such as General Motors that do not seem to reflect this problem, but in reality this problem dominates both the U.S. and Europe. Machines Bull, for example, was a great French electronics firm. Olivetti was its Italian equivalent. They were massive corporations and received considerable support from their governments. Yet they did not have sufficient capital to compete on the international market with IBM and in 1964 began to turn to American corporations to maintain themselves, giving up control in the process.
In the United States certain contradictory phenomena appear. In part, the movement toward conglomerates is a reflection of the fact that there is no longer sufficient capital to expand certain basic industries although the absolute amounts of capital available may be entirely adequate in other fields with considerably lower capitalization such as retail trade, service industries, publishing, etc. What appears as a surplus of capital is in reality a shortage of capital because it is inadequate to do what needs to be done. One consequence is that from 1957 to 1964 the percentage of expenditures for plant and equipment in commercial enterprises rose from 28% to 34% at the expense of industrial and related firms.
IV
Lenin himself, in the years following the publication of Imperialism, had begun to modify the term "monopoly capitalism" and more often used such terms as state-monopoly capitalism or, simply, state capitalism. What was essentially still a tendency toward greater domination of the economy by the state in Lenin's day has since become an established fact. Boosted by the world-wide depression of the thirties and then by World War II, statism, or state capitalism, has become the decisive form of capitalist society. It appears under a variety of political guises: fascist and nazi totalitarian state capitalism appear in the same period that welfare state capitalism becomes the dominant aspect of British, French and American society. In Russia a Stalinist version of totalitarian state capitalism appears which, after World War II, is exported to the Soviet bloc.
We have for so long taken state intervention into the economy and into the society generally for granted that most of us are unaware of the substantial changes that have taken place in the last forty years. It was only in the thirties, for example, that the major Western powers assumed effective control of their currencies. The abandonment of the gold standard, the nationalization or national control of the major banking institutions, government control of the credit system, massive intervention in agriculture, the initiation of social security systems, the use of fiscal policy to juggle employment levels, all these date from the New Deal in the United States and from the equivalent periods in the countries of Western Europe. The processes, begun during the great depression, were significantly intensified with the advent of World War II and the emphasis on war economies in the post-war years.
Much of this is documented in Andrew Shonfield's Modern Capitalism, a book which views state control of the economy with approval, although not always with understanding. The specific development of the necessary forms and institutions and the means used for state control vary from country to country, but the basic features are common to all and are so significantly different from the period on which Lenin based his study that they can legitimately be called a new stage.
Widespread nationalizations took place in France and Great Britain after the second World War. in the former they were easily accomodated in the traditionally strongly centralized state. In Britain they tended to allow for considerable decentralization in administration. In the United States no nationalization took place. Yet all three countries have reached an effectively similar level of national control of the economy, long range planning, social welfare plans and relatively stringent control of the free market.
The recognized power and influence of the giants of capitalist enterprise leaves open the question of who controls the state in capitalist society, but it does not alter the shift in ultimate decision making from corporate boards of directors to political bodies and institutions. Even President Eisenhower's widely accepted phrase, the military-industrial complex, indicates the acquisition by the military, that is, the federal government, of power which once resided overwhelmingly in the hands of private industry. The purchasing power of the government, alone, gives it a dominant position in most major industries. The power of the government is not, of course, always used. But the fact is that power is now held that was not available to the government forty years ago.
The significance of the military-industrial complex tends to be lost sight of because of the evident fact of capitalist control of the state. But that can be most deceptive. Capitalists have always controlled their state. What is new in the present situation? The growth and power of the military, that is, an arm of the government. This, therefore, limits and modifies the powers of decision formerly contained entirely in the hands of private industry.
V
Lenin was concerned with the need of imperialist powers for direct conquest and political control of the underdeveloped world. With the nonindustrial world almost entirely divided up among the great powers he foresaw a major struggle for the redivision of the world. That struggle was a major factor in the tragic explosion of World War II. The results of the war, however, were not foreseen, particularly as they effected the colonial world. The basic characteristic of the post-war underdeveloped world is the widespread achievement of political independence by nations that were formerly colonies and semi-colonies. Lenin was aware of the growing movements for national liberation, particularly in Asia, but of course there was no way that he could predict the concrete consequences.
The result of the post-World War II colonial revolution has been twofold and, seemingly, contradictory. Political independence has not been a panacea that has cured the ills of underdevelopment. The concept of colonialism has now been replaced by the concept (or at least the term) of neo-colonialism that indicates an awareness of the continuing economic (and related) subservience of Asian and African countries to the industrial powers. What appears to have taken place is a shift in imperial power. The winning of political independence and the removal of the direct political restrictions imposed by the older imperialist powers, particularly England and France, has made it possible for the United States to move in to places where it had been largely excluded. In South America, in Africa, in Asia, the United States as the dominant neo-colonial power has replaced the former dominance of England, France, Japan, and so on. The United States takes over from France in Vietnam, from the Netherlands in Indonesia, from Great Britain in the Caribbean. Political independence has, thus, appeared to have little effect on the overall power of imperialism over the underdeveloped world. It seems, mainly, to have aided the shift in power in favor of the most powerful economy.
To see only that aspect of the present situation, however, would be very deceptive. The manner in which independence was won in the decisive areas of the world makes it most unlikely that the ultimate result will simply be a shift in imperial power. The example of two different African nations are an important indication of what is involved. In Kenya, during the uprising that was called Mau Mau, the military forces of Great Britain succeeded in achieving a total victory over the rebels. A very similar result was reached by the military forces of France in Algeria. Yet in both cases, within a few years of the imperialist military victory, political power had to be turned over to the rebels. The imperialists could not continue their rule.
What is involved is a dual phenomenon. First, it is impossible in the modem world to continue to rule indefinitely a population which refuses to be ruled. Algeria and Kenya are one form of this impossibility. Ghana is another, China another, India still another. The list can be continued indefinitely. And it leads to the second aspect of the duality. The achievement of national independence has, in most cases, been based on a mobilization of the entire population, on the involvement of masses of people in the politics of their societies to such a degree that the potential forces for taking the next step, economic freedom, are already in existence. The unrest and instability in many of the newly independent nations are the reflection of this. Political independence did not achieve the kind of new society that the people had in mind and so attempts continue to be made to find new forms for the organization of society. The basic pressure on the politicians and the military remains, however. That is the power of people who have mobilized themselves for massive achievements and whom no one can return to some dark closet to be ignored.
The apparent strengthening of American imperialism at the expense of England, France and the other colonialist powers is balanced out by an overall weakening of imperialist power resulting from the release of popular energy throughout the underdeveloped world. Nowhere is imperialist power and investment stable and assured. Everywhere it has become subject to surprise blows which have put it on the historical defensive. And which, it must be noted, weaken the ability of the industrial powers, including the U.S. , to deal with their own internal problems, above all, the control and domestication of their own workers and national and racial minorities.
VI
This is the heart of Lenin's analysis. It is here that he pointed out the reasons for opportunism and conservatism of the political and economic organizations of the working class, the socialist parties and the trade unions. What adjustments need to be made for our own day?
That there is an aristocracy of labor that adjusts itself to life within the framework of capitalism remains a fact of working class life. It is amply demonstrated in the conflict between black workers and the skilled workmen of the building trades unions taking place in numerous cities. That simply duplicates what was true over fifty years ago. The charge today, however, heard from both the right and the left is that the entire working class of the industrial countries has been coopted into the service of capitalism and is a staunch bulwark of the status quo. The leading exponent of this view on the left has been Herbert Marcuse with his concept of "one-dimensional man, " that is, man who is fattened up with a mass of consumer goods and manipulated by the products of the culture industry.
However, when ten million French workers occupied factories in France in 1968, that destroyed that theory. At the very least it destroyed the universality of that theory, and it requires that a closer look be taken. The new stage of capitalism that we have attempted to indicate, state capitalism, brings with it a new stage of working class and working class organization. Again the crucial period of transition is the thirties. It is there that the old forms, the old labor aristocracy proved inadequate to control the situation. American workers bypassed the AFL and formed the CIO. The socialist and communist parties of Germany were destroyed and a totalitarian dictatorship was put in their place. The British Labor Party proved entirely inadequate to the depression years and a timid, ineffective leadership was ultimately replaced by a new type of post-war leader.
The crucial difference is that the new labor aristocracy is not the skilled worker and his representative, subservient to the capitalist, timid and easily bribable. The new labor aristocrat is prepared to manage capital in his own name and, above all, prepared to discipline workers in production. Thus, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson were prepared to nationalize industry while Macdonald and the pre-war labor leaders were terrified at the thought of achieving power. Whether a CIO plant committeeman, a Labor Party administrator in a nationalized industry in England, a Communist functionary in the Renault plant in Paris or the equivalent auto plant in Russia, he is a labor bureaucrat, ruling "in the name of" the workers but as separate and distinct from workers, their feelings and interests, as the old labor aristocrats or the old private capitalists. He is a statist, believer in the Plan as the solution to all problems but, above all, believer in a quiescent, backward working class that must be led and ruled by an elite.
It is only on the basis of a dichotomy between this new labor bureaucracy, arising out of state capitalist society, and an alienated, unrepresented working class, that certain essential features of modern society become intelligible.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 arose out of that conflict. A nation which was completely dominated by statist planners for ten years exploded without benefit of parties or leaders and formed a new society based on Workers' Councils. In Western Europe the same essential condition gave rise to the French revolt of 1968 which, in turn, further exposed the tremendous gap between workers and the organizations and leaders presumed to represent them.
Are these two events accidents of history? The fact is, they did not take everyone by surprise. There were a very few who based their conception of the world in which we live on the explosive opposition between forces that made their appearance in Hungary and France.
What is involved it would seem is the continued viability of a methodology which looks for contradiction as the source of change and development. If the categories have changed considerably since Lenin's day, that should not be surprising. But it would be foolhardy to discard a viewpoint and a methodology which has so illuminated (and helped to produce) the world in which we live.
The formation of the CIO brought to the fore a new breed of labor leader in the United States. Whether intellectuals in origin or production workers, they based themselves on the need for a substantial (but not total) reorganization of society. They were made uneasy by the sitdown strikes and the spontaneous militancy of millions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers and were constantly restraining and limiting rank and file activity. But they were the ones who gathered the fruits of victory. The direct negotiations between workers and supervisors on the factory floor was rapidly replaced by a union hierarchy speaking for the workers and seated off from them by a growingly complex legal structure of union contracts, labor law, court and umpire's decisions and the like. The imposition of this heirarchy took a number of years. it was speeded up by the incorporation of the higher echelons of the labor movement into government boards and administrative bodies during World War 11.
Ultimately the personnel in the lower levels of the hierarchy began to reflect the new requirements of union leadership. The glib lawyer- politician type replaced the rough-hewn militant of the organizing days. The stewards and committeemen of the early years who could not find their way in the growing legal swamp of "labor relations" went back to the bench or to the machine. Many, finding the changes in the unions they had built incomprehensible, became alcoholics and deteriorated as human beings. But the basic consequences of the formation of a new type of labor leadership, of a new labor bureaucracy, was the increasing separation between the union and the rank and file. By the 1950's this separation had become explosive and under the pressure of growing automation new forms of activity emerged, or the new use of old forms. The wildcat strike, in its nature a rejection of both company and union, became a major form of working class activity.
The wildcat strike is only a halfway house. In the thirties American workers for the first time imposed their own power in the process of production. The discipline that had disappeared from the plants was restored through the new federal labor laws and the union contract. The unions became full-fledged partners with management in the disciplining of workers. This was recognized by C. E. Wilson, the president of General Motors, who first proposed the cost of living escalator clause in 1950. When this was accepted, Wilson announced that GM had just bought itself five years of labor peace. But this arrangement whereby the unions maintain labor peace in return for high wages and fringe benefits has become a shaky one. The growing number of wildcats has made it more and more difficult for the unions to deliver their members. Now more permanent and stable shop floor organizations are beginning to appear, first among black workers who already dominate certain basic industries such as auto.
What has developed over the years since the thirties has not been cooptation but the almost total separation of production workers from their union leaders and a continuing subterranean warfare that goes on unseen and unrecorded. The French spring of 1968 is evidence of the explosive possibilities of this division. It is also evidence of the fact that affluence and full employment do not over come the contradictions inherent in modem industrial society. They sharpen them.
So long as those contradictions cannot be eliminated it would be foolhardy to discard the methodology that Lenin used in Imperialism. State capitalist society is a new imperialism, not post-imperialism. To view the world in this way is as fitting an extension of Lenin's view of the capitalism of his time as his was of Marx's view of mid-nineteenth century capitalism. It might very well prove as fruitful.
Seymour and I were supposed to get together this week and continue a discussion we've been having about the nature of imperialism in the 21st century. Last winter we'd argued a lot over Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he suggested we take a step back and refocus on a broader question, one that Marty had raised back in 1976. Marty thought Lenin's famous work on Imperialism, written 60 years prior, was out of date.
Seymour was willing to entertain the proposition that after 30 more years Marty's article on imperialism might need some updating as well. He told me about a news story he had read, about the Chinese government recently buying a Brazilian engine plant from DaimlerChrysler. The plant was 'deconstructed' and shipped piece by piece to China where it was put back together and into operation. I told him that my new iMac computer from Apple was built in China and that it wouldn't surprise me if China becomes home to most of the world's manufacturing in the next few decades.
I don't know where we would have gone with that discussion. At the funeral I found out that Seymour had been circulating Marty's piece and asking for comments. I spoke to Peter to see if there would be any problems if I republished his dad's article on the web. He told me to go ahead. So, in honour of Seymour, I am.
There is a collection of some of Marty's writings, including several with Seymour, at the Marxist Internet Archive. I am going to ask them to add the following to the list.
Update: Thanks to Chris for proofing the article and correcting several typos and OCR weirdness. I've amended the text as she has suggested.
------
Peninsular Papers
Journal of the Michigan Sociological Association
Vol. II Number 1 Fall 1976
pages 11 - 20
IMPERIALISM AFTER LENIN
Martin Glaberman
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without continually revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production and all the social relations ... Constant revolution in production, uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, ever-lasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from ail earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations , with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
These sentences, used again almost twenty years later in a footnote in Capital, provide the basis for examining Lenin's work on imperialism and its validity today. They represent a conception of capitalism as a constantly changing, revolutionary system. The nature of capital and the relations between capitalists; the nature of work and the working class and of the organizations of the working class; the relations between workers and capitalists; all these relations and all other social relations are assumed to be in constant flux.
It is not surprising, in this context, that almost seventy years after these words were written Lenin found it necessary to examine the changes in capitalism and found them extensive and substantial enough to call them a new stage of capitalism: Imperialism.
It is worth remembering that he did not do this as an exercise in Marxist methodology but in response to a specific problem. The international organization of the working class, the Second International, dedicated verbally to Marxism and to revolution, had collapsed as a revolutionary organization in 1914. Its major sections, in violation of its declared resolves, had turned to support their own capitalist governments in the first World War.
Lenin's philosophical assumption was that a catastrophe on so large a scale, the collapse of the International, could not be assumed to be accidental or the result of ill will or evil men. He sought to find the changes in capitalist society that were the objective basis for the subjective defection of the major socialist parties. He looked for the contradictions within the working class that had been brought about by the changes in society.
We are now fifty years beyond Lenin. It is appropriate to investigate Lenin's work on two levels, levels that seem to be in contradiction with each other. The first level is the one from which Lenin's work on imperialism is ordinarily viewed by friend and foe alike. It is the level of his conclusions. They are assumed to have a rigidity that brooks no modification over time. But this is quite evidently in contradiction with a more fundamental level, the level of methodology. Within the framework of the dialectical method, with the assumptions of a constantly changing society that go back to the Communist Manifesto and before, it would be a more damaging attack to insist that Lenin's conclusions were still valid than to prove that there were not. To pretend that capitalism has undergone no significant changes in the last fifty years, therefore, not only does violence to the evidence, it does violence to Lenin's own assumptions and methods of thought.
What are the changes wrought during a period of wars, of revolutions, of world-wide depression, of totalitarian dictatorships, of H-bombs and space flights ? Do they confirm or clarify what Lenin saw or do they contradict it?
II
Typical of the old capitalism, when free competition held undivided sway, was the export of goods. Typical of the latest stage of capitalism, when monopolies rule, is the export of capital.
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism
Lenin took note of the substantial development of investment by the major corporations in the underdeveloped world in the years preceding World War I. This was the result, among other things, of the narrowing of the fields for profitable investment at home and of the super-profits available from investments in the colonial and semi-colonial world. Lenin did not view this as an absolute. That is, the export of goods did not disappear or even diminish; it was simply overtaken in significance to the functioning of the system as a whole by the export of capital.
Today, the export of capital remains a fact of fundamental importance. The character of this export, however, has changed substantially in two ways. In the first place, the export of capital, which had been a movement from the industrial to the underdeveloped world, has changed so that more and more the movement of capital is between the industrial nations. About half of the flow of capital from the industrial nations is now to other industrial nations. The industrial nations invest in each other. Private investment in the underdeveloped world tends to be overwhelmingly in oil and mining and agriculture.
In the second place, the movement of capital which was once overwhelmingly private is now about one half government or public funds, loans and aid from governments and from semi -governmental international monetary institutions. These two new tendencies relate to each other. Private investment has been leaving the underdeveloped world for newer fields which turn out to be the older fields in the industrialized countries. And governmental institutions now dominate in the export of capital to the underdeveloped world. At the very least, it is clear that, with a few exceptions, such as oil, the underdeveloped world is no longer the haven of super-profits. It should be understood that what is being discussed is new investment, not the relinquishing of old investments, which are maintained and slightly expanded throughout the world.
The change in the nature of foreign investment has, for all practical purposes, undercut the traditional argument that the investment of the great powers helps to industrialize the underdeveloped world. in point of fact, when the possibility of going beyond simply agricultural and extractive industry becomes a reality, investment goes off in other directions. Very often, when factories are built in the formerly colonial countries they turn out to be assembly plants, which increase the dependence on products manufactured in the metropolitan countries and do not provide for any independent productive capacity. The battle then takes place over the allocation of government funds which tend, overwhelmingly, to be oriented toward military aid, aid in the form of surplus products of the great power, etc. , and only minimally (and as a result of special factors) such productive achievements as major dams or other substantive additions to basic productive capacity.
III
An enormous "surplus of capital" has arisen in the advanced countries.
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism
Lenin took care to show that this "surplus" was only relative. There was no surplus in terms of human needs, in the need to develop agriculture, in the need to develop other areas of economic and social life. There was a surplus specifically in terms of profitable investment. In this area, too, there is a considerable turnabout, although here it is more apparent than real. The situation in the industrial world can best be understood, not in terms of a surplus, but in terms of a shortage of capital. This must be understood entirely in a relative sense. There is obviously more capital in the world today than in the past. But the massive changes in technology, development of new techniques and products, the totality of capitalist production, has reached a stage in which the amounts required for the expansion of the system are beyond the capacity of the system.
This is not a simple concept to see because the appearance. the huge masses of capital that seem to be everywhere, belies the reality. An example from the auto industry may illustrate one aspect of what is involved. The Packard Motor Car Co. and Hudson Motors were huge corporations by any standard. In many industries (other than auto, steel, etc.) they would have been the giants in their field. But in the period of the 195O's, the period of automation and technical innovation on a large scale, they could not keep pace with what was required, and they went down the drain. Even the Chrysler Corporation almost lost out in the 1958-61 period. What was true of auto was true of most industries. The new technology substantially increased the scale of investment required.
There are other examples of what is involved in this relative shortage of capital. It was a major issue in the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign. The Democrats charged the the growth rate in the United States (that is, the expansion of capital) was inadequate to sustain America's competitive position in the world. Ironically, Khrushchev was overcome by the same problem in the Soviet Union. He could not expand the accumulation of capital in the Soviet Union at the rate required to close the gap separating it from the United States. Connected with this is the rather startling fact that, despite automation, the increase in productivity in the United States in the period since 1950 has been at a lower rate than the increase in the period around World War I which saw the development of the electric motor, the moving assembly line and advances in chemistry.
There may be a very few corporations such as General Motors that do not seem to reflect this problem, but in reality this problem dominates both the U.S. and Europe. Machines Bull, for example, was a great French electronics firm. Olivetti was its Italian equivalent. They were massive corporations and received considerable support from their governments. Yet they did not have sufficient capital to compete on the international market with IBM and in 1964 began to turn to American corporations to maintain themselves, giving up control in the process.
In the United States certain contradictory phenomena appear. In part, the movement toward conglomerates is a reflection of the fact that there is no longer sufficient capital to expand certain basic industries although the absolute amounts of capital available may be entirely adequate in other fields with considerably lower capitalization such as retail trade, service industries, publishing, etc. What appears as a surplus of capital is in reality a shortage of capital because it is inadequate to do what needs to be done. One consequence is that from 1957 to 1964 the percentage of expenditures for plant and equipment in commercial enterprises rose from 28% to 34% at the expense of industrial and related firms.
IV
If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. . . (1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this "finance capital, " of a financial oligarchy... (4) the formation of the international monopolists capitalist associations which share the world among themselves ....
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism
Lenin himself, in the years following the publication of Imperialism, had begun to modify the term "monopoly capitalism" and more often used such terms as state-monopoly capitalism or, simply, state capitalism. What was essentially still a tendency toward greater domination of the economy by the state in Lenin's day has since become an established fact. Boosted by the world-wide depression of the thirties and then by World War II, statism, or state capitalism, has become the decisive form of capitalist society. It appears under a variety of political guises: fascist and nazi totalitarian state capitalism appear in the same period that welfare state capitalism becomes the dominant aspect of British, French and American society. In Russia a Stalinist version of totalitarian state capitalism appears which, after World War II, is exported to the Soviet bloc.
We have for so long taken state intervention into the economy and into the society generally for granted that most of us are unaware of the substantial changes that have taken place in the last forty years. It was only in the thirties, for example, that the major Western powers assumed effective control of their currencies. The abandonment of the gold standard, the nationalization or national control of the major banking institutions, government control of the credit system, massive intervention in agriculture, the initiation of social security systems, the use of fiscal policy to juggle employment levels, all these date from the New Deal in the United States and from the equivalent periods in the countries of Western Europe. The processes, begun during the great depression, were significantly intensified with the advent of World War II and the emphasis on war economies in the post-war years.
Much of this is documented in Andrew Shonfield's Modern Capitalism, a book which views state control of the economy with approval, although not always with understanding. The specific development of the necessary forms and institutions and the means used for state control vary from country to country, but the basic features are common to all and are so significantly different from the period on which Lenin based his study that they can legitimately be called a new stage.
Widespread nationalizations took place in France and Great Britain after the second World War. in the former they were easily accomodated in the traditionally strongly centralized state. In Britain they tended to allow for considerable decentralization in administration. In the United States no nationalization took place. Yet all three countries have reached an effectively similar level of national control of the economy, long range planning, social welfare plans and relatively stringent control of the free market.
The recognized power and influence of the giants of capitalist enterprise leaves open the question of who controls the state in capitalist society, but it does not alter the shift in ultimate decision making from corporate boards of directors to political bodies and institutions. Even President Eisenhower's widely accepted phrase, the military-industrial complex, indicates the acquisition by the military, that is, the federal government, of power which once resided overwhelmingly in the hands of private industry. The purchasing power of the government, alone, gives it a dominant position in most major industries. The power of the government is not, of course, always used. But the fact is that power is now held that was not available to the government forty years ago.
The significance of the military-industrial complex tends to be lost sight of because of the evident fact of capitalist control of the state. But that can be most deceptive. Capitalists have always controlled their state. What is new in the present situation? The growth and power of the military, that is, an arm of the government. This, therefore, limits and modifies the powers of decision formerly contained entirely in the hands of private industry.
V
Of course, finance capital finds most "convenient," and derives the greatest profits from a form of subjection which involves the loss of the political independence of the subjected countries and peoples.
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism
Lenin was concerned with the need of imperialist powers for direct conquest and political control of the underdeveloped world. With the nonindustrial world almost entirely divided up among the great powers he foresaw a major struggle for the redivision of the world. That struggle was a major factor in the tragic explosion of World War II. The results of the war, however, were not foreseen, particularly as they effected the colonial world. The basic characteristic of the post-war underdeveloped world is the widespread achievement of political independence by nations that were formerly colonies and semi-colonies. Lenin was aware of the growing movements for national liberation, particularly in Asia, but of course there was no way that he could predict the concrete consequences.
The result of the post-World War II colonial revolution has been twofold and, seemingly, contradictory. Political independence has not been a panacea that has cured the ills of underdevelopment. The concept of colonialism has now been replaced by the concept (or at least the term) of neo-colonialism that indicates an awareness of the continuing economic (and related) subservience of Asian and African countries to the industrial powers. What appears to have taken place is a shift in imperial power. The winning of political independence and the removal of the direct political restrictions imposed by the older imperialist powers, particularly England and France, has made it possible for the United States to move in to places where it had been largely excluded. In South America, in Africa, in Asia, the United States as the dominant neo-colonial power has replaced the former dominance of England, France, Japan, and so on. The United States takes over from France in Vietnam, from the Netherlands in Indonesia, from Great Britain in the Caribbean. Political independence has, thus, appeared to have little effect on the overall power of imperialism over the underdeveloped world. It seems, mainly, to have aided the shift in power in favor of the most powerful economy.
To see only that aspect of the present situation, however, would be very deceptive. The manner in which independence was won in the decisive areas of the world makes it most unlikely that the ultimate result will simply be a shift in imperial power. The example of two different African nations are an important indication of what is involved. In Kenya, during the uprising that was called Mau Mau, the military forces of Great Britain succeeded in achieving a total victory over the rebels. A very similar result was reached by the military forces of France in Algeria. Yet in both cases, within a few years of the imperialist military victory, political power had to be turned over to the rebels. The imperialists could not continue their rule.
What is involved is a dual phenomenon. First, it is impossible in the modem world to continue to rule indefinitely a population which refuses to be ruled. Algeria and Kenya are one form of this impossibility. Ghana is another, China another, India still another. The list can be continued indefinitely. And it leads to the second aspect of the duality. The achievement of national independence has, in most cases, been based on a mobilization of the entire population, on the involvement of masses of people in the politics of their societies to such a degree that the potential forces for taking the next step, economic freedom, are already in existence. The unrest and instability in many of the newly independent nations are the reflection of this. Political independence did not achieve the kind of new society that the people had in mind and so attempts continue to be made to find new forms for the organization of society. The basic pressure on the politicians and the military remains, however. That is the power of people who have mobilized themselves for massive achievements and whom no one can return to some dark closet to be ignored.
The apparent strengthening of American imperialism at the expense of England, France and the other colonialist powers is balanced out by an overall weakening of imperialist power resulting from the release of popular energy throughout the underdeveloped world. Nowhere is imperialist power and investment stable and assured. Everywhere it has become subject to surprise blows which have put it on the historical defensive. And which, it must be noted, weaken the ability of the industrial powers, including the U.S. , to deal with their own internal problems, above all, the control and domestication of their own workers and national and racial minorities.
VI
Imperialism ... which means high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries, makes it economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby fosters, gives shape to, and strengthens opportunism.V. I. Lenin, Imperialism
This is the heart of Lenin's analysis. It is here that he pointed out the reasons for opportunism and conservatism of the political and economic organizations of the working class, the socialist parties and the trade unions. What adjustments need to be made for our own day?
That there is an aristocracy of labor that adjusts itself to life within the framework of capitalism remains a fact of working class life. It is amply demonstrated in the conflict between black workers and the skilled workmen of the building trades unions taking place in numerous cities. That simply duplicates what was true over fifty years ago. The charge today, however, heard from both the right and the left is that the entire working class of the industrial countries has been coopted into the service of capitalism and is a staunch bulwark of the status quo. The leading exponent of this view on the left has been Herbert Marcuse with his concept of "one-dimensional man, " that is, man who is fattened up with a mass of consumer goods and manipulated by the products of the culture industry.
However, when ten million French workers occupied factories in France in 1968, that destroyed that theory. At the very least it destroyed the universality of that theory, and it requires that a closer look be taken. The new stage of capitalism that we have attempted to indicate, state capitalism, brings with it a new stage of working class and working class organization. Again the crucial period of transition is the thirties. It is there that the old forms, the old labor aristocracy proved inadequate to control the situation. American workers bypassed the AFL and formed the CIO. The socialist and communist parties of Germany were destroyed and a totalitarian dictatorship was put in their place. The British Labor Party proved entirely inadequate to the depression years and a timid, ineffective leadership was ultimately replaced by a new type of post-war leader.
The crucial difference is that the new labor aristocracy is not the skilled worker and his representative, subservient to the capitalist, timid and easily bribable. The new labor aristocrat is prepared to manage capital in his own name and, above all, prepared to discipline workers in production. Thus, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson were prepared to nationalize industry while Macdonald and the pre-war labor leaders were terrified at the thought of achieving power. Whether a CIO plant committeeman, a Labor Party administrator in a nationalized industry in England, a Communist functionary in the Renault plant in Paris or the equivalent auto plant in Russia, he is a labor bureaucrat, ruling "in the name of" the workers but as separate and distinct from workers, their feelings and interests, as the old labor aristocrats or the old private capitalists. He is a statist, believer in the Plan as the solution to all problems but, above all, believer in a quiescent, backward working class that must be led and ruled by an elite.
It is only on the basis of a dichotomy between this new labor bureaucracy, arising out of state capitalist society, and an alienated, unrepresented working class, that certain essential features of modern society become intelligible.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 arose out of that conflict. A nation which was completely dominated by statist planners for ten years exploded without benefit of parties or leaders and formed a new society based on Workers' Councils. In Western Europe the same essential condition gave rise to the French revolt of 1968 which, in turn, further exposed the tremendous gap between workers and the organizations and leaders presumed to represent them.
Are these two events accidents of history? The fact is, they did not take everyone by surprise. There were a very few who based their conception of the world in which we live on the explosive opposition between forces that made their appearance in Hungary and France.
What is involved it would seem is the continued viability of a methodology which looks for contradiction as the source of change and development. If the categories have changed considerably since Lenin's day, that should not be surprising. But it would be foolhardy to discard a viewpoint and a methodology which has so illuminated (and helped to produce) the world in which we live.
The formation of the CIO brought to the fore a new breed of labor leader in the United States. Whether intellectuals in origin or production workers, they based themselves on the need for a substantial (but not total) reorganization of society. They were made uneasy by the sitdown strikes and the spontaneous militancy of millions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers and were constantly restraining and limiting rank and file activity. But they were the ones who gathered the fruits of victory. The direct negotiations between workers and supervisors on the factory floor was rapidly replaced by a union hierarchy speaking for the workers and seated off from them by a growingly complex legal structure of union contracts, labor law, court and umpire's decisions and the like. The imposition of this heirarchy took a number of years. it was speeded up by the incorporation of the higher echelons of the labor movement into government boards and administrative bodies during World War 11.
Ultimately the personnel in the lower levels of the hierarchy began to reflect the new requirements of union leadership. The glib lawyer- politician type replaced the rough-hewn militant of the organizing days. The stewards and committeemen of the early years who could not find their way in the growing legal swamp of "labor relations" went back to the bench or to the machine. Many, finding the changes in the unions they had built incomprehensible, became alcoholics and deteriorated as human beings. But the basic consequences of the formation of a new type of labor leadership, of a new labor bureaucracy, was the increasing separation between the union and the rank and file. By the 1950's this separation had become explosive and under the pressure of growing automation new forms of activity emerged, or the new use of old forms. The wildcat strike, in its nature a rejection of both company and union, became a major form of working class activity.
The wildcat strike is only a halfway house. In the thirties American workers for the first time imposed their own power in the process of production. The discipline that had disappeared from the plants was restored through the new federal labor laws and the union contract. The unions became full-fledged partners with management in the disciplining of workers. This was recognized by C. E. Wilson, the president of General Motors, who first proposed the cost of living escalator clause in 1950. When this was accepted, Wilson announced that GM had just bought itself five years of labor peace. But this arrangement whereby the unions maintain labor peace in return for high wages and fringe benefits has become a shaky one. The growing number of wildcats has made it more and more difficult for the unions to deliver their members. Now more permanent and stable shop floor organizations are beginning to appear, first among black workers who already dominate certain basic industries such as auto.
What has developed over the years since the thirties has not been cooptation but the almost total separation of production workers from their union leaders and a continuing subterranean warfare that goes on unseen and unrecorded. The French spring of 1968 is evidence of the explosive possibilities of this division. It is also evidence of the fact that affluence and full employment do not over come the contradictions inherent in modem industrial society. They sharpen them.
So long as those contradictions cannot be eliminated it would be foolhardy to discard the methodology that Lenin used in Imperialism. State capitalist society is a new imperialism, not post-imperialism. To view the world in this way is as fitting an extension of Lenin's view of the capitalism of his time as his was of Marx's view of mid-nineteenth century capitalism. It might very well prove as fruitful.
Posted: Wed - July 5, 2006 at 12:24 PM
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Published On: Sep 12, 2007 03:13 PM
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