Part 2 - Continued from previous page
A phase of domination of the counter-revolution
Nevertheless, there was an undeniable defeat. Defeat in politics directly signifies a modification of the correlation of power. It is of great importance to evaluate whether we live in the low or high tide of the revolutionary movement, whether the main trend in the world is the revolution or whether we live in a period when the correlation is favorable for the counter-revolution. To “read” the reality as it is, is neither sacrilege nor passiveness or lack of revolutionary optimism. The discovery that we live in a phase of domination of the counter-revolution does not mean that we do not live in the period of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. The restoration of capitalism is not the deepening of revolution, but the prevalence of counter-revolution in a given area. An epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions is exactly what we have experienced during all this century: revolutions, counter-revolutions, wars. In all the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions, the elements of retrogression, zigzags, etc. are included. Furthermore, the estimation that we live in a period of domination of the counter-revolution does not mean the exclusion of revolutions and revolutionary movements in some parts of the world; but these do not have the necessary gravity to reverse the general situation. Therefore, we do not agree with some evaluations put forward in the ‘80s:
“Today the world is on the threshold of momentous events. The crisis
of the imperialist system is rapidly bringing about the danger of the outbreak
of a new, third, world war as well as the real perspective for revolution
in countries throughout the world. The scientific accuracy of these words
from the Joint Communique of our First International Conference in autumn
1980 have not only been fully bonre out by the recent developments in the
world, but the world situation has been further accentuated and aggravated
since that time.” (RIM Declaration, 1984).
“We start from the understanding that revolution is the main trend,
and this continues to be so, this trend put forward by Mao continues to
develop. In our view, there has been no stability since World War II, not
even relative stability. The whole world has been shaken by great revolutionary
storms. They've come in waves, of course, because it couldn't be any other
way.” (Interview with Chairman Gonzalo, El Diario, Peru, July 1989).
In the same interview, Chairman Gonzalo evaluates that the situation
in Europe is revolutionary, “a revolutionary situation developing unevenly”.
We have referred to estimations of the early and late ‘80s. In any case the developments have not verified these allegations, their scientific accuracy or their super-optimism. We refer to them because they were the most serious evaluations for that period within the marxist-leninist movement; other important parties of our movement were experiencing during those years serious problems of orientation, which were resolved only in the early ‘90s. The conclusion drawn is that the departure from the exploration of a general line, the lack of all co-ordination and discussion about the general line has led to serious mistakes and estimates. At the best of times these reveal super-optimism, which is still subjectivism and at the worst of times extreme pragmatism, which can take an openly right or “super-left” mantle; these normally cost quite a few years of retrogressions, crises, splits, lost opportunities etc. In the same period (1988-1989), A/synechia estimated that:
“A whole period of confrontations, having as an object whether a new
qualitative leap forwards in the social evolution will take place or not,
has been concluded. The Counter-revolution bearing the coat of ‘revolution’
would occupy the place of the Revolution, or the opposite? From this event,
the new period, under the flag of the autonomy of the ‘technological revolution’,
would be characterized by an unprecedented restructuring of the capital
and, consequently, of the productive and social relations, since the conditions
for such a development would be completed. This is not the ‘cyclic’ (big
or small) crises-restructurings, but a new qualitative restructuring.”
“The succession of phases of rising of the Revolutions and Counter-revolutions
is a characteristic of our century. Globally the Revolution and the Counter-revolution
have been expanded on all the sectors, whether we realize this or not.
Quite often, in the same phase both sides co-exist.”
“Today the Counter-revolution is developing in the name of the crisis’
overcoming, through the answering of the challenge of the post-industrial
epoch or society. The eastern or ‘socialist’ world is not outside this
kind of answering; the eastern world is focusing its ‘challenge’ to the
modernizations of Gorbachov and Teng.”
“The convergence of restructuring policies the world over is the one
face of the coin; it does not reflect something more than the potentialities
of a victorious counter-revolution over a Revolution which, exactly because
it has not been ‘overstepped’, uses ‘revolutionary’ external characteristics.”
Nowadays a lot will agree that the main fire should converge against the New World Order. However, it is of significance to find out how each party and organization conceives it. One Party, for instance, supports that “The international transformations of the capitalist basis of production are a new condition of class struggle... Since the beginning of the nineties, there is no longer any country in the world that is not involved in the system of international production... The most productive and profitable business locations in the world form an integrated international production system…”. This view leads to two conclusions. The first one has to do with the evaluation regarding the contradictions in the present world, or with where the centre of revolution is detected; it has to do even with its international character, whether a revolutionary process is possible in one country or whether we necessarily will proceed to an international revolution. The second one has to do with another serious issue: how we conceive the nature of this internationalization, whether it is positive or negative. In this case an objectivist view can be developed through other paths, a repetition of the theory of the productive forces, which forgets all the lessons/teachings of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in those issues.
But, on the other hand, we believe that the way in which a series of new phenomena and trends occurring in the restructuring process are dealt with, leads to their underestimation. The over-stressing of the contradiction of imperialism/peoples and oppressed nations leads to the seeking of ways to solve it. The perspective of the new-democratic revolution and its transformation into socialist mainly under the strategics of people’s war, is “obliged” to study the conditions in the modern world almost just as this was done three decades ago, at least as regards the main trends and developments. Quite “naturally” the consequences of the restructuring process are diminished, since the analysis “has” to reach the conclusion that few changes have occurred on international level considering social stratification, class relationships, etc. The fact that today’s world is very similar to that before 1917 is also summoned up. A unified world market, intense competition among imperialist powers, etc.
Although we live in a country where we have to combat eurocentrism, although we agree that the future of humanity will basically be decided in the vast areas of the world inhabited by the 3/5 of the world population, still we are of the opinion that the communists’ attention should be focused on the developments and processes in the production sphere of the most developed capitalist countries. Because this is where they will draw a series of arguments from, where they will base a series of potentials and other choices, which not only can but also have to be made. It is on this level that a big ideological and political juxtaposition with capitalism takes place. Even if the revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries is weak, this does not mean that the great advances in theory will be made on the ground of movements and experience of areas where the conditions for the development of revolutionary movement are most favorable. Any theory reproducing the views of super-imperialism must be combated nowadays, the views claiming that we have passed to a new stage of capitalism and that imperialism is out-of-date should be criticized; but at the same time we ought to study and detect the new phenomena which are marking the contemporary imperialism. The restructuring of the capitalist/imperialist system has brought about a series of convulsions in all sectors, in order to deal with its prolonged general crisis.
3.2.1. The most important changes in the material production and the contemporary forms of monopolistic alliances
The objective of the restructuring as far as it concerns the productive process was double: economic and social. From the economic point of view, it aimed at the reduction of cost per product unit through the squeezing or even the wiping out of the living labor. From the social point of view, it aimed at restricting and “emptying” the workshops from a homogeneous workforce, especially in peak sectors. The “flexible workshop”, which was realized through a complex process, is nothing but the condensation of these aims.
However, in order to reach the “flexible workshop”, so that it acquires flexibility and gets over rigidity - after having been of service to the profitability of capital for 30 years, now rigidity had to be abolished at all costs – the capital had to carry out an unprecedented over-concentration and over-accumulation on an international level. It also had to promote a continuously increasing underemployment of the productive work force, so as to be able to cater for the frenetic search of technological innovation, which would permit the approach of the objective of the restructuring process, offering advantages to the sections of the capital achieving it. The blow against the labor movement and the workers’ achievements (against all the “anachronisms”, as these achievements were called by the economic and political world), the “anti-corporatist” struggle, etc., were and still are the other side of the restructuring process. Without the latter, the emptying of the “productive workshop” from a homogeneous work force would not be achieved. These changes and modifications take place in an environment of crisis and intense competition, the environment of the contemporary international economic war among the main centres of the capitalist world. That is, within an unremitting course towards the shattering of the barriers set by one subtotal to the other in the name of the acquisition of “free space”.
It is on this constantly changing material basis, on this simultaneous withdrawing and expanding process of the capital, that its “over-mobility” was developed, that the “leaps to the intangible” were programmed, that we reached the “globalized” capitalism, that we were led to the development and domination of the multi-branched multinational monopolies and their creation, the “economy-world” or “world-economy”. The capital, while developing its productive forces, reduces the socially necessary labour, but it has to continually find ways to increase overwork, either completely or relatively. Human labour is the one creating values, adding value. Therefore, the capital (as a relationship) cannot exist without the constant and increasing production of overwork, of surplus value.
The multinationals: real protagonists of the restructuring process
The capital, while trying to reduce to a minimum the human labour, to compress it to an intolerable extent, to expel it from the workshop, to create a factory without workers, is obliged at the same time to use, to exploit human labour in order to extract surplus value. This is the reason for which nowadays the most anachronistic and out-of-date forms of production co-exist with and survive next to the most advanced ones. It is on the over-exploitation of human labour and the maintaining of backwardness zones that the take-off in the most modern sectors is based both socially and economically. Consequently, capitalism, the capital, cannot and will not exist without labour, without a working class. Therefore, the view of the transition to a new stage of capitalism, the post-industrial stage, in which the working class has been eliminated or its role in the production process is unimportant, is a propagandistic myth, which is useful, however. The economic and social objective of restructuring (reduction of the cost and emptying of the workshop from the homogeneous class) needs the ideology, the politics, etc., in order to be achieved.
An essential part is played in this case by the process that started at the beginning of our century, but was intensified after 1929-31 and has acquired vast dimensions nowadays: that is the virtual subordination of science and technology to the capital. The slogans “knowledge=power” expresses exactly this situation. Nowadays the main part in the post-industrial model is played by knowledge, information (for the bourgeois “knowledge=information”). The “revolution” in the technologies of production control and management, made possible by the applications of microelectronics and computers in the production process, leads to the arbitrary equation: “production = knowledge or information”. The “leap to the intangible”, so much propagandized by the rulers and worshippers of the technological determinism, is nothing but the completely material adaptation of the productive basis to the possibilities provided by the new technologies. The result of the “leap to the intangible” is also absolutely material and leads to the reduction of the cost through the compression or elimination of human labour and the emptying of the peak sectors from the homogeneous work force.
The real protagonists of restructuring are today’s monopolies, the multi-branched multinational monopolies or, in more simple words, the multinational companies. The UN Centre of Research for the Multinationals (abolished in 1993…) gave some revealing data in its last report: the total turnover of multinationals represents over 25% of the world gross product (the bourgeois statistics estimate that about 35.000 multinationals and 170.000 subsidiaries exist all over the world. Not all of them are multi-branched multinational monopolies). However, the biggest 200 of these multinationals, while appropriating more than 1/4 of the world gross product, employ only 3% of the world active population. They employ 10% of the total employment in the developed areas. In the South they employ a little less than 1% of total employment.
So, when 1/4 of the world production is a “family” matter, this has tremendous consequences on the world modelization. First and foremost, it has to be clarified that this 1/4 (standing for 1 trillion 200 billion US dollars) is generally “production”, meaning that it represents goods and services. That is “material” and “energy”, or the intangible. For the year 1991-92 it had been estimated that 10% of this sum was commercial transactions and the rest 90% intangibles. This ratio changes according to the “conjuncture” and the demands of the hard cell, which has become autonomous to a great extent and plays the part of the leader of the whole world economy. These multinationals are the modern international “society of citizens”, the “economy-world” or the “global economy”. They are the core, the steam engine of the world capitalist economy.
This “world” is closed, unaccessible as far as it concerns the top; but it stands because it rules over the “base”. Depending on the evaluation of the cost, it expands or shrinks the networks of subcontracts horizontally and vertically, so that the most modern techniques co-exist with the most obsolete ones. Although it rules and forces huge economic and social scales to depend on it, it cannot do without all those it rules and who depend on it. Its development would be impossible without and against the national and international state power. It expands and contracts according to the correlation of power in the world, both peripherally and “nationally”. This “world” derives from different starting points, therefore, the history of its component parts presents peculiarities (“national”, “peripheral” particularities), but also special “moments” of concert, agreements, common objectives, all this with simultaneous conflicts and confrontations. The competition and the struggle for domination obey the following rule: no agreement or concert is final.
The multinationals represented, and still do, the degree of concentration and centralization of economy on both national and international scale, something that is from a quantitative aspect evident in the data of the former service of the UN. Multinational companies, in conjunction with their countries-metropoles, dealt with the crisis. For example, they do not seem to have been generally affected by the prolonged crisis: their total turnout, from 3 trillion US dollars in 1982, reached 5.9 trillion in 1992. Their share in the world gross product from 24.2% in 1982 reached 26.8% in 1992. 172 of the 200 biggest multinational companies belonged to five countries: USA, Japan, France, Germany and Great Britain. There have been many changes regarding the 200 first companies. The US multinationals, numbering 80 in 1982, decreased to 60 in one decade. The Japanese ones increased from 35 to 54. The German and French ones increased, whereas the British ones decreased. The Swiss ones have an important position, having increased from 2 in 1982 to 8 in a decade. The Korean ones have increased, too. (Of course it would be interesting to examine the new changes after the recent crisis in Asia, but also in Russia and in Latin America). Executives of these multinationals staff the governments in the countries of the “economy-world” (the main imperialist centres) and the international economic networks (IMF, World Bank, OECD, etc.), as well as the international political organizations (UNO, NATO, Conference for Safety and Co-operation in Europe, peripheral integrations, etc.).
When we talk about multi-branched multinational monopolies, we refer to companies whose turnover exceeds the budgets of many countries, we refer to giants which are active in all the spheres of the international economy, which have their own credit and finance enterprises and are closely related to state entities. Such giants can mobilize colossal sums in the search of technological innovations, etc. Those monopolies create production networks spread to any part of the planet is the most beneficial to them, and control networks of capital consumption and flow, from which an insignificant minority of the world population benefits, that is the internationalized and globalized monopolistic big-bourgeoisie. The multinationals are the immediate vehicles of the capital’s nomadism (over-mobility) and flexibility, since they have all the information and knowledge, as well as the technological potential to spread production, the workshop and all their services, in order to extract surplus value on an international level. The information network they have created, in which they have trapped and on which they have made the economic activity all over the planet dependent, forms the nervous system of the globalized capitalism. It is the necessary base which is giving to the capital the flexibility potential, it allows the spread of companies all over the planet, it enables the rejection of human labour and the extraction of surplus value to an unprecedented extent on a global scale. However, there is another side of the electronic informatics nomadism of the capital, which created another “industry”, the financial one.
The financial, paper economy
In the over-accumulation crisis there are capitals that cannot find outlets, due to the fall of the profit rate. Thus, they are not invested in productive activities, but they cannot also stay “still”, unemployed. The only economy literally flourishing and developing at an extremely fast rate within the crisis is the financial one. The liberation of the stock markets, a term for which the financial capital fought hard and achieved it, was one of the most profitable investments of the jostling capitals. At the same time, however, it was, and still is, the ground for global profiteering at the expense of the small saving, but, also, on the whole, at the expense of the working people and the peoples all over the world. To form an idea of the gigantic dimensions of the “paper economy” and its distance from the real economy, we should note that at the years of Keynes the ratio of paper to real economy was 2 to 1. Nowadays this ratio has become 50 to1! The “new products” of the financial economy, that is all the inventions and tricks in the game of the golden yuppies, the gambling on stocks, currencies, bills, etc., have over-tripled their turnover within two years (1992-94). Up to now, about 1.200 of these “new products” have been registered. The hight of the so-called “derivatives” of finance products has reached twice the gross national product of the biggest economy in the world, the USA. The daily transactions in the exchange market follow a similar rate: in 1986 they reached the sum of 290 billion dollars, in 1990 they were 700 billion dollars, and in 1994 1.000 billion dollars.
Nowadays there is no economy in the world not relating to this paper economy. This economy is necessary for the “economy-world”, in order to be able to drain and exploit the work force on a global scale. When the debt-device is set to work, all this broadened finance-economy system is activated. Loans are provided by this complex, but the latter determines in turn the terms of the debt’s paying off and settlement. When the IMF and the World Bank announce programs of “structural readjustment” as a precondition, in order to provide loans and to “support” economies, what they practically do is to lead to the disintegration and drain of the “supported” countries. When, finally, the debt is gambled on in the international finance market, when the handling of deficits depends on this market too, then the association of virtual economy (paper economy), with the process of draining the world produced surplus value, becomes obvious. Finally, through the mechanism of finance industry the flow of resources for the support of the metropoles is encouraged, so that the various leaps to the intangible and the dominance of the “economy-world” are feasible. This economy-casino (the term has been first used by the bourgeois side) is not a deviation, a foreign body within a system, but the precondition for its perpetuation. The present globalized capitalism would be impossible without this economy. It is flesh of its flesh. It is the intangible, the real intangible to the utmost. Both the intangible and the parasitical together.
Supranational integrations
We live, as they keep telling us, in the globalized, internationalized
capitalism, in the global village, in the globalized economy. Apart from
the multinationals, there are other active factors and rulers of this world,
as well: the supranational or international organizations. Such are the
IMF, the World Bank, but also the European Union (EU), NAFTA, OPEC, etc.
We can distinguish two types of such monopolistic alliances:
1. The supranational integrations, that is the organizations formed
by several countries, whose main role is the enlargement and liberation
of the market within the specific imperialist poles. This process serves
the multinational multi-branched monopolies to create a super-speed in
the interior of the pole in which they are dominant, to transfer waves
of the crisis to the weaker parts, turning them into satellites to a great
extent, so that they can respond to the competition against the other imperialist
poles. This is the case with EU in Europe or NAFTA in North America.
2. The supranational organizations playing a more intense role. These
stand on higher level than each separate country and their objective is
the promotion and planning of spherical strategics of dealing with the
capitalist crisis. Such organizations are the IMF and the World Bank, which
dictate rules for the policies applied by the national states. They are
the real economic gendarmes of the “economy-world”.
There is an immediate substantial and organic connection between the multi-branched monopolies and the supranational organizations and integrations. Both the former and the latter are direct supports of imperialism in its development. Imperialism cannot be perceived merely as a foreign policy based on gunboats and the military aspect of its expansion. Imperialism must be perceived, first and foremost, on the basis of its main characteristic, which is the activity of monopolies and the enormous concentration and centralization brought about by this activity. In each sector 3-4 multi-branched monopolies control more than 50% of the world economy. These cannot be seen outside the imperialist alliances, which are necessary for the existence and activity of the monopolies. The question posed and racking many analysts’ brains is what the role and relationship of the national state is within the globalized capitalism.
According to some analysts, the transposition of multinationals to “everywhere and nowhere”, leading to globalization and nomadization, results in a situation in which the national base of the multinationals is a thing of the past. This nomadism results in the power centres not being either in Washington or Tokyo or another metropole. Consequently, those analysts are explaining, the state as we knew it, as a regulator, a balancer, is pushed aside or turned into a mere conveyor of the decisions taken by these, ideal and real at the same time, power centres. Unquestionably, all the changes having occurred have brought about the crisis of the form of state as we knew it until now (national state – main field of organization of the internal market and basic pivot of the economic life of a country, etc.). However, the generalization of the crisis to one direction only is a mistake made by those sinking into elements and aspects of reality, finally creating virtual realities themselves. They reach the conclusion that there are two forms of state: the states, including the “great” states together with the supranational organizations on the one hand, and the “globalized” multinationals-states on the other hand. The formers are on the decline, the latter decide about everything. As a result, this fact lays the issue of the existence of the form of state, as we know it, on the table. This is where repetition starts: the world state-company, or a more clear repetition of the super-imperialism theory.
The “economy-world”, with the activity of multinationals and supranational organizations and integrations, has necessarily formed its needs each time through modifications and changes in the form of state. The resultant of the present needs, which bring about the modifications, is the constant race for the conquest, or the maintaining of the competitive position achieved through globalization. These necessarily alter the form and content of the modern state. But this is where the essence lies, the “economy-world” is a fact, that is, it consists of capitalist giants with imperialist mechanisms, which are a composition of “exchanges” between the form and content of the individual components of this “economy-world” with the corresponding forms of state.
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