Re sub-imperialism

Fred Feldman posted a contribution to the Green Left discussion group on Yahoo on the use of "sub-imperialism" to characterize a number of countries today, such as China, Russia and India.

I replied as follows:


--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "Fred Feldman"  wrote:

> Actually, if Green Lefters defend China as an oppressed nation against
> imperialism (not just "oppose an attack" but SOLIDARIZE WITH CHINA against
> an attack), that would be adequate since there is a basis for reasonable
> Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state. But in fact the
> trend seems to be toward proclaiming China an imperialist power (perhaps
> with the highly subjective category of "sub-imperialist" as a transitional
> characterization), which clearly implies no defense against anybody anytime.
>
> Thus a war between China and the United States or China and Australia would
> be an inter-imperialist war with "a plague on both your houses" as the
> indicated political stance.
>
> If Green Left's Marxism still includes "revolutionary defeatism" in a war
> between China and Australia, that would mean considering the defeat of
> Australia as the lesser evil in a war with China from the standpoint of
> making a socialist
> revolution in Australia.  From this standpoint, Chinese revolutionaries
> would be expected to take the same stand - defeat of their "imperialism" as
> the lesser evil.  Chinese people who took the side of their country against
> US, Japanese, and/or Australian imperialism would be regarded as traitors to
> socialism.

This shows how important the question of the character of the Chinese state is to revolutionary Marxists. Because it's so important it's crucial not to play fast and loose with the terms in which the characterization is made. To speak of a "trend" towards considering China imperialist while at the same time claiming that "there is a basis for reasonable Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state" is to play fast and loose with terms like "imperialism" and "Marxism", not to mention "reasonable".

Marxism would not "trend" towards a characterization in this way. Some Marxists might, but then the question would be how far a trending impressionist agrees with Marxist economic analysis, and whether this is "reasonable". Let's be clear. There is disagreement, even among serious revolutionary Marxists, about the class character of the Chinese state. But so far this has not been the subject of any serious large-scale debate. A key issue for those who originally held with the characterization of Deformed Workers' State seems to be how far the reforms of 1979 constitute a restoration of capital. But the bullet in this debate hasn't yet been bitten.

Why was the situation different in the mid-1930s regarding the Soviet Union? For this argument it's enough to say there was a revolutionary Bolshevik current in the USSR and the world that was strong enough and confident enough in its Marxism and place in the class struggle to bite the bullet and consider the hugely contradictory situation that had arisen after October succeeded in overturning the capitalist state of Tsarist Russia, but where this new non-capitalist state had either become capitalist once more or remained non-capitalist while displaying blatantly anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary characteristics.

I'm referring, obviously, to the Left Opposition and the embodiment of its Bolshevik leadership in Trotsky and those closest to him.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky came down firmly, Marxist-style, on the side of the most contradictory alternative - a state which was at the same time non-capitalist, anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary. He did this because it best fitted the facts, and his presentation of these facts and his reasons for interpreting them as he did convinced the non-Stalinist revolutionary left that was moving towards the foundation of the Fourth International after the catastrophic defeat of the workers movement in Germany.

The closest thing this movement has had to a similar decisive intervention concerning the character of a state is Peng Shuzi's work on The Causes of the Victory of the Chinese Communist Party (www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1951/nov/causes.htm) and the debate leading to the characterization of Deformed Workers' State.

Neither Peng nor the Fourth had the theoretical or organizational authority of Trotsky or the pre-war Left Opposition, so there was little to deter impressionist non-revolutionary Lefts like Tony Cliff from proclaiming early in the 50s that The Revolution Betrayed had been mistaken, that the USSR was capitalist and that China was too. Their Marxism couldn't stand up to the combined pressure of bourgeois witch-hunting and Stalinist propaganda.

The problem for us today is that this has been happening by default within the genuinely revolutionary tradition of the Fourth and closely allied movements. The bitter contradictions digested in The Revolution Betrayed have not been understood as such. It could even be argued that the bitterness and scale of the contradictions inherent in the Chinese state and regime are even greater than those in the Soviet Union.

Whatever the case, the contradictions have not been confronted openly and massively, so the trial is not just not over, it hasn't even started.

Which presents us with a huge and responsible task.

Including the main reason for my present contribution, which is to disagree flatly regarding the term "sub-imperialism".

Fred declares that the category is "highly subjective" and used as a "transitional characterization". Maybe he meant "impressionistic" - in which case he should have said so. But "subjective" can be compared to "objective" and related to facts, which Fred doesn't do. As for "transitional", well, things change, powerful states and economies become weak and vice versa, so there is a case for terms describing such change to be labelled transitional. Trotsky and the Fourth labelled their programme "transitional" for good reasons.

Fred writes:

> The sub-imperialist category is misleading because it effectively eliminates
> the qualitative distinction between imperialism and not-imperialism,
> oppressed and oppressor nations, and it is infinitely expandable and
> basically un-scientific. If China is imperialist or sub-imperialist, why not
> Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, or even Vietnam? If India is imperialist or
> sub-imperialist, why not Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia?

But this is not so if sub-imperialism has been defined clearly in terms of transition from less powerful to more powerful, and its preconditions have been set out. In the first place, it is misleading to lump together "imperialism and not-imperialism,
oppressed and oppressor nations", simply because imperialist oppression is not the same as any old oppression of one nation (or entity) by another. So we'll ignore that, although it forms the basis of most of the arm-waving examples Fred gives. It is not in the least intrinsically "infinitely expandable", as that depends on the definition and preconditions.

For instance, sensible definitions of sub-imperialist would have to include such empirical qualities as great size, great population, and economic and military viability on a grand scale. The military viability would include things like complete impossibility of total invasion and occupation. The history of Russia gives an indication of the kind of countries that might come into consideration here. The "sub" would have to include the transitional element of not yet big enough and ugly enough to face down the US in an open confrontation, despite a desire to do so and probable capacity to put up a good fight.

There is nothing strange about any of this, and in fact the definition would enable a good description of the relative strength of such acknowledged imperialisms as Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, etc.

Lenin takes relative change between imperialist countries for granted when he writes of "aspiring imperialisms" such as Japan and Germany and compares them to the old established imperialist powers of Britain and France. And in 1900, the US was the biggest aspiring "sub-imperialism" of them all.

And the definition given here, preliminary as it is, would be able to handle the status of Korea, Thailand, Pakistan and Indonesia without pausing in its stride.

Fred concludes by writing:

> The tendency is to envision an almost exclusively imperialist world - one in
> which almost every state not directly controlled by imperialism economically
> and politically like the Marshall Islands or Puerto Rico or Chad tends to
> "rise" to imperialist or subimperialist status, becoming a challenger to
> "old" imperialist powers for re-dividing the world (like Germany in the two
> world wars) and thus one of the driving forces toward world war.  This is
> not theoretically impossible, but highly improbable in anything like the
> near future.      

Which of course is as impressionistic as the approach he is criticising. Much as most governments would dearly love to elbow their way closer to the fleshpots and bury their snouts in the trough with the US, it is farcical for them, or us, to dream of such a thing, let alone "envision" it. Put this generally, it is in fact "theoretically impossible" - at least for a Marxist Marxist - and it certainly has no bearing on whether or not one or two of the most powerful and expansive non-acknowledged imperialist countries (say Russia and India, leaving China and Brazil aside for the moment) are in a position to challenge or actually even in the course of challenging the currently hegemonic imperialist power(s).

As I understand it, "sub-imperialism" refers to imperialist potential in a country that for a variety of reasons is still clearly 'sub'ordinate to the leading imperialist countries. Some countries might make it all the way, and watch once leading countries eat their dust as they fall by the wayside. Some might just hover mid-league for ever, so to say. But we have to acknowledge change as it happens, and do our best to grasp what's going on and why. That is our duty both to the working class as revolutionary socialists and to science as thinking citizens.

When did the USSR turn its back on Marxism?

On a discussion list I presented a mainstream of Marxist development this way: "Marx and Engels in the 1840s through the Paris Commune to the October Revolution in 1917 and on to the Left Opposition and Fourth International - it's Bolshevik-Leninist built on rock-solid Marxist (and that's Marx and Engels) foundations".

DV asked me: "So at what point does your allegiance split off (or maintain the true centre) of that line, later in the SU? And why?

And I replied:

The change in the political character of the USSR can be located most simply in the year 1924. Lenin died in January, 1924, and during the year Stalin was able to consolidate his power in the Bolshevik party apparatus, principally by opening the floodgates to new members with interests that were bureaucratic and careerist rather than class-based and socialist. The struggle against this development can be traced in the history of the Left Opposition to Stalin and the bureaucracy, which Trotsky founded in 1923 while Lenin was still alive, albeit incapacitated.

Evidence of healthy working-class socialist internationalism is abundant in the records of the first four Congresses of the Third International (ie before 1924). After 1924 the politics of the Soviet government turn against  all the principles of the Bolshevik party that carried out the October Revolution and led the successful defence of the new non-capitalist workers state against the imperialists and reactionaries of the surrounding world and Old Russia.

The best brief account of the general development can be found in Trotsky's book The Revolution Betrayed (1936)  (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm)

The Stalinist bureaucracy instituted a new regime in the Soviet Union that Trotsky and the Left Opposition characterized as politically counter-revolutionary, although on a non-capitalist economic foundation. In other words, the USSR remained a workers state, but was run by a degenerate and counter-revolutionary regime

The catastrophe of the Nazi capture of power in Germany in 1933, resulting largely from the appalling anti-Marxist leadership provided by the German Communist party following orders from Moscow - Social-Democracy was called the main enemy of the German working class, rather than Nazism - drove Trotsky and his comrades to conclude that the Third International was beyond recovery and led them to prepare the foundation of a new working-class socialist international - the Fourth International. This was achieved in 1938, and the founding document - the Transitional Programme, "The Death Agony of Capitalism" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm)- is the best short presentation of modern Marxist perspectives in the imperialist world after the victories of Stalin and Hitler. That is in a world dominated by counter-revolutionary regimes from the US to the USSR. At the same time as the world was split into two antagonistic economic camps - capitalist-imperialist in the US and Europe, and non-capitalist  (what we could call proto-socialist) in the Soviet Union.

On the economic crisis which isn't really an economic crisis...

In response to Mike Roberts's blog about a Greek pensioner killing himself in despair outside the Greek parliament, and a couple of comments there, 

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/tsolakoglou/

I wrote the following:

Well, from this and your previous blogs it's obvious that humanity's crisis at the moment is less and less narrowly economic and more and more overtly political. The Political in Political Economy is coming to the fore. As I showed a couple of blogs ago with lots of quotes from ch 27 of Book III of Capital (on the role of credit in capitalism), by 1867 Marx already considered that capitalism had outgrown itself and was taking on more and more socialized forms of production and circulation, although remaining trapped and crippled within bourgeois relations of production. So the problems to be solved aren't economic as such - the preconditions for a non-capitalist society run by democratically associated producers (socialism) are there and have been there for one and a half centuries.

The problem, the deepest crisis of humanity, is political. As Trotsky formulated it in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938: "

The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

You can't put it much clearer than that.

The leaderships of the working class on a mass scale are class traitors, from the Labour Party in Britain to the Socialist Parties in France, Spain and elsewhere, to various "revolutionary" left government parties in Latin America, to the Social Democrats of Sweden. Not to mention the counter-revolutionary regime running the non-capitalist Chinese state. The unions are as bad in their way, backing these governments, worldwide, and in the US even backing an openly bourgeois pro-plutocrat party.

In an economic perspective the most glaring symptom of this betrayal is the total capitulation to the bourgeoisie on the economic theory front. Nowhere among the working class leaderships is Marxist economics taken seriously - and hardly even among the more truly revolutionary (and small) parties.

So the working class is not just politically blind, in that it is force-fed bourgeois policies and whipped into the polling booths to vote for its own flaying, but it is economically blind as to the part it plays in creating society's wealth (flaunted by super-rich individuals and corporations) and running the whole system of production and distribution (against its own interests).

So basically if we are to resolve the deepest crisis of humanity we need to fuse the two aspects of social life, and bring more economics into politics and more politics into economics.

Someone once characterized Soviet citizens as "ferociously egalitarian", and what we need is to be "ferociously revolutionary" if we are to remove the capitalist system and create an egalitarian and democratically run society.

What causes a mode of production to change?

The discussion on China as a mode of production focused for a while on what lies behind the transition from one mode of production to another -- class struggle or the development of the means of production. That is, is it primarily an economic or a political question?

 http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/which-way-for-china-part-one/#comment-3839

'Waistline' wrote:

“Marx was quite clear about the antagonisms leading to the passing of one mode of production into another, including capitalism into socialism – they are *all* the product of class struggle. Relations between living people, not between dead things (ie not technology). To claim that new means of production bring about the final crisis of capitalism is a) to ignore the fact that human labour power is a means of production, and b) to fall into the trap of commodity fetishism attributing human qualities (living drives and aspirations) to dead things.”

In my opinion socialism is not a mode of production. It is precisely because socialism is not a mode of production that controversy existed over defining the economy of China and even that of the former Soviet Union. Socialism or rather industrial socialism in the past century was according to much of Marxism a transition society or the first stage of transition to a new mode of production. When Marx spoke of the bourgeois mode of commodity production (capitalism for short speak) he meant a specific form of property plus the industrial revolution. Means of production plus social relations of production, based on means and property form.

New means of production brings about the final crisis for every mode of production, not simply capitalism. By final crisis is meant “the condition of crisis – antagonism – that is transition to a new quality or the leap to a new quality. By antagonism I mean something different than “contradiction” or the unity and struggle of opposites.

Marx is clear. My view changed concerning the question of the law system immanent to capital and whether or not its crisis, understood as cyclical crisis, can usher in a new quality of means of production or a new mode of production. In his famous outline of transition from one mode of production to the next, Marx does not write about “class struggle” causing transition to a new mode of production. Let look at Marx again.

“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

“Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”

Further

“No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

The last paragraph is the enigma. “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.” In my opinion capitalism of the past century was not pregnant with socialism, precisely because socialism is a transition to something else. Further, there was still much room for development of the means of production based on the industrial revolution. In America we experienced destruction of the sharecropping system by the tractor, which changed the form of land tenure and the social organization of labor based on old implements of production. Determining how much “room is left in a social order” (does social order here mean mode of production) is tricky business Rosa L attempted to solve. I do not believe one can figure out how much “room is left in a social order” until new means of production actually appear and throw society into antagonism or a mode of destruction of the old society productive forces and social relations.

Without question history is about human beings, which we presuppose or there is no history. When Marx writes about the material power of productive forces he assumes the reader understands this material power is the product of the human, as they are productively active and form social groups and classes.

Class struggle most certainly plays a role. Specifically, there seems to be two distinct kinds of class struggle. The struggle between the two basic classes defining a mode of production, e.g. feudalism as serf and landowner/nobility, drives the feudal mode of production through all its quantitative boundaries. Then qualitatively new means of production enter the picture, the industrial revolution.

The struggle between the serf and nobility or all the classes defining the meaning of feudalism can never cause society to spontaneously leap to a new mode of production. To incite a leap to a new quality, something qualitative has to happen. A new quality has to be injected into the social process or something taken away that destabilizes the quality and set it into a qualitatively different kind of change cycle.

What happened in history was the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution created new classes (bourgeoisie and proletariat as basic class constituting the foundation of what becomes a new mode of production). Stated another way, a new social organization of labor arose on the basis of the industrial revolution. The new classes are connected to and express the self-movement of qualitatively new means of production. Marx uses the steam engine as a bookmark, but I understand this bookmark to mean the entire technology regime implied in the steam engine and its continuous development.

In my reading of Marx, history and society moves in class antagonism and not simply class struggle. The antagonism is not reducible to the struggle between the primary classes, e.g. serf and nobility. The serf and nobility in this example are the decisive contradiction defining and driving the feudal system through its quantitative stages. Capitalist and proletariat evolved within the society of feudalism. However, the serf and capitalist are not “connected together” as the unity of the mode of production identified as feudalism. Serf and nobility is the unity of feudal production. The proletariat and nobility are not connected together as the unity of production or rather the unity of production relation defining feudalism. Serf and nobility as the landed property relations define feudalism in its property form. In its material power feudalism spans centuries from handicraft to manufacture and then the industrial revolution brings the world of feudalism to an end, or rather set the condition for the leap to a new mode of production. In this sense Marx writes the steam engines get you industrial capitalist.

I do agree that people are decisive in shaping the society formed on the basis of new means of production.

What happen in my opinion is that bourgeoisie and proletariat evolve in external collision – antagonism – with the serf and nobility as these old classes constitute the decisive contradiction defining the world of feudalism. The world of the serf and nobility is not industrial. Of course there is much more involved in transition from one mode of production to the next. For instance gold as an expanding form of wealth begins the breakup of the landed property relations or what is the same, society based on landed property as the primary form of wealth.

I think. 

Waistline

I replied:

Waistline, if technological progress is all that is needed for a new mode of production to arise, all we need to do is sit back on our arses and wait for the great day.

You are trying to get Marx to argue this. But he doesn’t. If Capital III isn’t good enough an illustration of this, then how about:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

[...]

“We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

“Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

“A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.”

[...]

“The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. [...]

“The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

“But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.”

[...]

“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Surely this is clear enough? The forces of production grow – of course – but they grow because new relations of production, that is new class relations, replace old relations of production that strangled these forces. And the replacement of these all-important relations of production depends on the fighting out and resolution of class war – “open revolution” and “violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie” laying the “foundation for the sway of the proletariat”.

Economic fatalism, “objectivism”, led many Marxists (like Ernest Mandel and his followers to imagine that the Soviet Union had means of production that were too highly developed to be stuffed back into the straitjacket of bourgeois property relations. The class struggle, with a misled and disorganized working class and a rampant imperialist bourgeoisie proved them wrong. But to stuff the non-capitalist baby back into the capitalist womb, the baby had to be chopped into bloody pieces.

Our concern right now is to figure out what is happening in China in this historical political economic perspective. Forcing the Chinese baby back into the devil mother’s womb will require grinding it up. Our discussion is about how much of this is capitalism, how much is a new mode of production in becoming, and who is doing what on which side of the class divide, and where, and how.

I might add that this discussion is of burning urgency for the masses of the Indian subcontinent, too. And India and China make up almost half of humanity. We aren’t just engaged in academic chit-chat.