International capitalism has entered a new stage in its economic crisis. Today’s deepening depression is an expression of the final phase of the last stage of the general crisis of world capitalism.
The commodity glut is throwing the capitalist world into a state of economic barbarism in which starvation persists in the midst of plenty.
Capitalism can no longer expand its system or market. The scramble for markets has resulted in an unprecedented application of science to industry. This qualitatively new revolutionization of the means of production has driven the antagonism between the productive forces and relations of production to the revolutionary brink.
No longer able to absorb the production of the colonies and neo-colonies, imperialism is shifting the burden of the crisis onto these countries. The burden takes such forms as 50 percent unemployment rates and widespread starvation. The neocolonial “gorilla” regimes will not be able to contain for very long the resultant revolutionary upsurges.
The increased exploitation and oppression of the neo-colonies and colonies is not enough to contain the crisis. Thus the monopoly-capitalists are compelled to attack their own national working class, the foundation of their international political stability. The most reactionary representatives of industrial capital are assuming political power to facilitate this process.
The bribery of the North American workers is being attacked. It is being withdrawn from the most exploited and oppressed workers. Over the past 40 years bribery of the worker in the Anglo American nation has been qualitatively different from, for instance, bribery of the working class in England. In the rest of the capitalist world bribery was mainly a political tool and quite restricted to the upper strata of the working class. This was especially true among workers in the skilled trades.
In the United States of North America (USNA) bribery has played an economic and political role since World War II. In a country as large and productive as ours, a country that encompasses a huge portion of the world market, the rapidity of circulation and realization of profit is a life and death question for the system. The problem this creates was solved by a very high wage standard. These high wages had to be spent as soon as received so as to guarantee profit.
The gap was closed between wages (the price of labor power) and the prices of commodities by the super-exploitation of the workers in the neo-colonies and colonies. For example, while the Ford worker in Detroit was making $70 per day, the Ford worker in Monterrey, Mexico was making $6 and the Ford worker in South Africa even less. The huge bribe given to workers in Anglo America is the basis for the belief in many countries that there are no classes in the USNA.
Economic laws always assert themselves. Less and less blood money could be wrung from the colonial and neocolonial proletariat. The national markets began to shrink. The inevitable commodity glut has appeared and the economy of the USNA has slid into depression. The high wages that helped fuel the economy have become a fetter to the capitalists’ maximum profit and the bourgeoisie has reacted with a sharp attack on the bribe in certain strata of the working class.
The attacks against the standard of living of a section of the working class allow for wage increases for a bribed stratum that daily becomes more narrow. This is necessary to retain a section of the working class that remains actively loyal to the capitalists. Furthermore, this bribed stratum provides a market for certain goods that the rest of the workers are no longer able to purchase. This is being accomplished by totally cutting off strata of the class who in the past would have found low-paying jobs or received welfare. The laws of imperialism are coming home. For the first time we are witnessing the formation of a real polarity of wealth and poverty in the USNA.
The sum total of these economic and political factors show that there are no reforms left in imperialism. Consequently the reform demands for food, shelter and clothing by the most oppressed and exploited workers are assuming a revolutionary character. Throughout the advanced industrial world an objective communist movement is arising. The revolutionary communist parties will inevitably emerge as the subjective expression of that objective movement.
The world communist movement is completing the final quantitative stage of a process that started with the Khrushchev era. That stage began with the overthrow of the direct colonial system and is ending with the revolutionary assault against not only neocolonialism, but against its creator – monopoly capitalism.
The communist movement, like all movements, is an objective process. Its contradiction is formed by the relationship between its subjective and objective aspects. The objective movement must provide the foundation for its subjective expression, the communist party. If that objective movement is in fact the petty bourgeois wing of national liberation, the Party will inevitably become the subjective expression of the petty bourgeoisie and eventually take on its characteristics. As that social motion declines its subjective expression must also decline. This is the basis of the intensifying crisis in the traditional communist parties.
The traditional communist movement is moribund. It is in transition. One section is dying while another is being born. Its most striking contradiction is expressed in the fact that the parties of the former Comintern – and many others – represent a social motion that is not revolutionary. Consequently the objective revolutionary movement is developing in contradiction to these parties. The qualitative elimination of the feudal and tribal areas of the world has objectively evened up the world proletarian revolutionary front. The unbearable and intensifying economic depression is driving the subjective process forward. The outlines of the developing world revolution are becoming clear.
The economic crisis is destabilizing the revisionist ruling communist parties as well as the bourgeois parties. These revisionists are under a new kind of attack: the growth of the revolution apart from their leadership and control.
The situation is creating common ground for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of China and the major political parties of the imperialist world. Despite all the jingoism and military adventurism on the part of the Reagan administration, there is a definite motion towards uniting USNA imperialism and Soviet and Chinese revisionism.
The Soviet Union needs trade as a means of overcoming certain economic problems. The economic crisis in the USNA demands an expansion of trade. The Soviet Union needs a peace agreement with the USNA to end the arms race. The USNA needs peace between the neo-colonies, colonies and imperialism. The deal is being struck. This is not a motion toward detente, but toward an extremely dangerous counterrevolutionary front. It will fail because the objective revolutionary motion that is developing on the basis of the economic crisis is in flat contradiction with their political aims.
There is no way for the imperialists and the revisionists to negate the objective contradiction between imperialism and socialism. The revisionists tacitly admit this when they select the struggle for peace as the modern “foundation” for the communist movement.
The overwhelming reality of our moment lies in the fact that the main body of troops, the massive proletariat of the USNA is slowly, but definitely moving into position to complete the world revolutionary front. Consequently the basis of the struggle against revisionism is moving from theoretical activity to practical revolutionary activity.
A revolutionary process operates throughout a qualitative stage of history. The current process in the USNA got underway with the beginnings of the revolution of 1776 and will continue through the socialist revolution, which will end the present qualitative stage of history.
The revolutionary process is the ongoing motion of the basic contradiction of capitalist production through each quantitative historical stage. This includes the specific, but historical political forms within which these contradictions are fought out. These political forms of the struggle are raised to higher levels with each quantitative stage of the revolutionary process but they do not change.
One of the first acts of rebellion against England took the form of the colonists’ armed resistance to England’s interference with the slave trade. Engels characterized the USNA constitution, which resulted from the revolution, as “Class rights proscribed, racial rights sanctified.” In fact, ever since the 1600s politics in the USNA has meant direct control of the blacks and through that control, indirect control of the white workers.
This revolutionary process is again expressing itself clearly. The vote for Reagan in the last election meant nothing less than leading the mass of white workers into a trap of unemployment and poverty by promising to control and drive back the blacks.
This ongoing process can be utilized by the revolutionaries only by fighting for the self-determination of the Negro Nation. Until now the black toilers have basically been pawns in the struggle. Under current conditions the black workers are emerging as a social vanguard. All the slander about the black “underclass,” and “black crime” is nothing less than an ideological thrust by the bourgeoisie designed to isolate and render ineffective this emerging social vanguard. The current developing social struggle is the necessary prelude to the inevitable class conflict which is a battle for political power.
There has never been a lumpenproletariat in this country because there has never been feudalism. There is a criminal element that some workers get pulled into. What is sometimes referred to as a lumpenproletariat is simply the coming to pass of the statements made in the Communist Manifesto regarding the position of the proletariat and the proletarian family during the final days of the rule of capital.
Today in every sector of the developing communist movement, the black workers form the most compact and experienced sector. Objective reality is placing the question in a new way to the white majority: Either unite with the black worker in the struggle for bread or starve. Under the present conditions the process is proceeding in such a manner as to allow the revolutionaries to take the fight off of the moral level and approach national liberation and class unity in a revolutionary manner.
History and the revolutionary process itself demands that the very cornerstone of revolutionary strategy must be the call, in its proper form, for the self-determination of the Negro Nation.
The political question in the USNA which began to be shaped with the capture and enslavement of the African has historically taken a number of forms. Its current form is the oppression of the Negro Nation. This oppression is distinct from but dependent upon the savage discrimination, oppression and exploitation of the blacks. This national oppression is the essential factor in control of the Anglo American proletariat. So long as this national oppression exists, the veneer of democracy in the Anglo American nation will be stabilized. Such a veneer tends to stabilize reformism.
The fight against the oppression of the Negro Nation has to take the form of the struggle against national inequality. This is the only path leading to the unity of the working class and the placing of national consciousness on a revolutionary basis.