The following “contribution of the WPB” passed apparently without critic on the 11th International Meeting of Communists and Workers' Parties, November 20-22, 2009, New Delhi:
“We have decided to walk on two legs. On the one hand, we want to get rid of rigidity and dogmatism in our mass work: we must start from what people understand today: correct demands for which they are prepared to act - whatever the level - and support and help develop the struggles they undertake.
For example, we are currently engaged in a major campaign for a tax on millionaires, a tax that would hit the 72,000 euromillionnaire families in Belgium. Compared to the population, it is the largest number in the European Union. Taxing the very rich is a claim that has already met with some support in various trade union circles.... But bourgeois political circles claim… it is absurd and "unrealistic”.... We are also advocating a reduction of VAT on energy, from 21% - the current rate – to 6%. We have already collected over 200,000 signatures and we will continue this campaign as long as the measure has not been applied. I could give you a much longer list of demands or actions that we undertake and which are at a level people can engage with.(...)
The danger of turning to the right of course exists. ... This would be a real risk, if we did not also walk on the other foot: the strengthening of Marxist-Leninist education in our party, through party schools and our theoretical journal and through open conferences.[1]” Here Boudewijn Deckers (leading cadre of the WPB-PVDA-PTB (pvda.be, ptb.be) is protecting the often still present reformist ideology by a lot of combative workers and unionists. He is saying that a consequent “left” reformism is the same as the revolutionary strategy of a “real communist party”, with the condition of having a good Marxist (-sounding) argumentation......
How is the WPB linking “a real Marxist analyse” of actual capitalism with “propagating a program of reforms”?
I have already analysed how (to read beginning here....but it is -still- in Dutch) Peter Mertens (actual president of the WPB) in his publication “The working-class in the period of the transnational enterprises” (“De arbeidersklasse in het tijdperk van de transnationale ondernemingen”, Marxistische Studies no. 72, 2006, EPO, also to read in Dutch and French on marx.be) gives a very static and narrow view on what is called “the working class”. He analyses ACTUAL capitalism in a very GENERAL way, far from being CONCRETE (contrary as was Lenin in his study “Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism”. He proposes socialism as something “for which one can strive”, but not as an URGENT and BITTER necessity. (And about WHAT is in fact “socialism” he does not give anywhere a concrete explanation....) He is just talking about increased exploitation to make of the task of the communists just to: 'lead the resistance against the effects of this increased exploitation'. After “opposing the parliamentarism of Nadine Rosa Rosso” (the former general-secretary of the WPB expelled by a group of cadres round Peter Mertens, ....one of the reasons was “her parliamentarism”) he make a large bend to come to DEFEND the importance of participating to elections and evaluating the general strategy and working of the communist party on the results IN the elections (the number of votes).....which is in fact....”parliamentarism”
He emphasizes the importance that Lenin and Marx would have attached to “the struggle for reforms”, to make of it an autonomous task (standing on its own) of the communists. At the same time he tries to prove that he (and with him the WPB) is till authentic Marxist and revolutionary.
It is very difficult to accept that he is doing this “by accident” because of insufficient knowledge.... He proves to be to have an enormous ENCYCLOPEDIARY knowledge of history and Marxists works. By “insufficient knowledge” or CONSCIOUSLY, he is anyway fulfilling the wish of the bourgeoisie: developing and promoting IN THE CIRCLES of the revolutionaries a line that postpones the revolution to a far, very far future, that puts the strategy to revolution in formal, vague and very general terms and words, whereby the revolution is from being postponed to never to be realised and so PROTECTING the CONTINUANCE of capitalism.
Peter Mertens pretending to make '“true Marxist-Leninist analyse of actual capitalism (in its stage of imperialism)”in his book....:
“Tens of thousands of hands and minds are working on all continents for the same employers. So, the contradiction between work and capital has not disappeared, but has become planetary. That antagonism became sharper by the technological revolution. Not the humanitarian needs and necessities are counting. With patents, brevets and copy-rights all the new scientific evolutions are pressed in the bodice of profit-maximalisation. (....)
The technological evolution makes that continuously fewer people are producing more. The one is working to death; the other is condemned to unemployment. Undertakers, offices of temporary workers and little enterprises are taking care of a lot of out-sourced tasks. In the statistics are those the jobs that disappear out of the industry and are counted by those in the sector of services. In the reality those jobs are not disappearing out of the industrial production. They just are disappearing out of the collective power and social protection of the bigger sectors.... The working class has changed by the industrial transformations. But she is not gone to the margins of the society. The working-class is present more than in earlier days in the core-business of the industry and is its bounding heart that is producing all the wealth. And with this she is carrying the future inside.”
“....Today ....the capitalist monopolies rule no longer the sectors on the scale of each country but on a global scale. Mergers and buying state-enterprises have brought in the last decades a huge concentration. Just some transnational enterprises (TNE's) are controlling the sectors of the world-economy. Never in history are so many people working at just one product, be it a car, a plane or an oil-based product. In the twenty biggest TNE's a quarter of a million to a half million of workers are working.... that is without the undertaking business.
But also never in history so few are ruling the production; just three in the oil-sector, six in the car-production, just two on the corn-market, just four on the soy-bean-market, just six in the agro- chemical industry and two in the civil air-transport.
The contradiction between work and capital came so not “in a crisis”, in the way that she would disappear, as Antonio Negri is insinuating. The contradiction between work and capital on the brim of the twenty-first century has just become global.
And so the world has become ripe for the next production-system, socialism. 'When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organises according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organised manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds or thousands of miles from each other; when a single centre directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (the marketing of oil in America and Germany by the American oil trust)—then it becomes evident that we have socialisation of production, and not mere “interlocking”, that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed.[2]', Lenin wrote when he analysed imperialism. The shell today means that today just a couple of thousands of families (not more!) have the private ownership over the thousand biggest transnational enterprises, and those several of thousands families by the way of those thousand biggest enterprises are controlling almost the whole global economy. So are they also controlling directly or indirectly the work of almost one billion workers who sold their workforce and of al those families depending of those workers. They control also the technology, the (tele-) communication, transport, the organisation as their property. They are controlling not, while they support social development or social progress, but to maximalise their profits. So is private ownership of the means of production (enterprises, lands and grounds, means of communication and of transport) becoming the biggest break for social progress of humanity.”
Peter Mertens is here above all emphasising on the more and more CONCENTRATION in less but bigger monopolies. (And monopolies are for him just distinct enterprises although bigger than in earlier capitalism) He is NOT talking (although he COULD, with his “outsourcing” statement ....) about the increased SOCIAL character of capitalist production in the stage of imperialism. He let (here above) in a quote of LENIN, let LENIN talk about this, but Peter Mertens himself does not see it.....
Just for a part he is treating this but in just one limited aspect where he says that IN for example a car-assembling-monopoly very much workers are involved in the production of one car. Just “analysing” imperialism as almost only a QUANTATIVE transformation out of capitalism as it is concretely analysed by Marx, in HIS actuality is making a DOGMATIC OPPORTUNIST mistake in applying “Marxist analyse”. In the case of Peter Mertens it’s a conscious made “mistake” searching a “Marxist-sounding apology” for the defence of a REFORMIST strategy.
There is a SECOND aspect, a second rather QUALITATIVE characteristic of imperialism, namely where the monopolies are linked together (under a kind of “collective” or “shared” ownership of a same group of capitalists, read my point of view in my analyse in ........) where the resources-winning-or-digging-monopolies, the monopolies of refined, composed intermediary products, the production-machines-delivering monopolies, the logistical monopolies, the financing monopolies, the end-product-assembling monopolies, the distribution-monopolies are involving FAR MORE workers for the production of that final product that by selling will realise the surplus-value extracted from all those workers involved. This is the socialised production as characteristic of imperialism; this is THE important aspect of DEVELOPMENT of the working class and ENLARGING of the working class. Lenin analysed this aspect in his book talking there about “combinations” “trusts” and “cartels”. This is the characteristic of “the break on further possible development of the production-forces” making that -as Lenin says- “imperialism is the prelude of the social revolution of the proletariat”.
Peter Mertens LIMITS the revolutionary role of the working class to just a PART of the working class which he is calling “the industrial production workers”. In fact is for him that PART of the working class what HE defines as “revolutionary working-class”.
Peter Mertens want to give his “analyse of actual imperialism” an “authentic” character by quoting Lenin out of his book “Imperialism....” But the quote is really good chosen, talking there almost only about the quantative changes of the imperialist stage of capitalism with his earlier stage.
But even in this quote Peter Mertens has to negate what Lenin really said!
Lenin is here talking about the SOCIALISING of the production as a characteristic of becoming ripe of imperialism to replace it by socialism because the PRIVATE ownership of the means of production become the barrier to put that SOCIALISED production really in service of the SOCIETY of the workers. Using the phrase of “those thousand families” Peter Mertens has to be clear that he means here what is HIS definition of the ACTUAL capitalist class. Those “thousand families” don't only CONTROL “as if it was their private property”, but they OWN the means of production, the technology and are appropriating in first instance the whole global production, for then to be able to SELL it and so to realise the surplus-value extracted out of the work of “almost one billion people that are selling their workforce”. Peter Mertens is considering (but not clearly) those “almost one billion people that are selling their workforce” as the actual working class. .....
Quotes of Lenin where he is analysing this aspect, Peter Mertens will not give. I will do this for the sake of young Marxism discovering militants trapped by the revisionist Marxist phraseology of Peter Mertens.
“...A very important feature of capitalism in its highest stage of development is so-called combination of production, that is to say, the grouping in a single enterprise of different branches of industry, which either represent the consecutive stages in the processing of raw materials (for example, the smelting of iron ore into pig-iron, the conversion of pig-iron into steel, and then, perhaps, the manufacture of steel goods)—or are auxiliary to one another (for example, the utilisation of scrap, or of by-products, the manufacture of packing materials, etc.).
“Combination,” writes Hilferding, “levels out the fluctuations of trade and therefore assures to the combined enterprises a more stable rate of profit. Secondly, combination has the effect of eliminating trade. Thirdly, it has the effect of rendering possible technical improvements, and, consequently, the acquisition of super-profits over and above those obtained by the ‘pure’ (i.e., non-combined) enterprises. Fourthly, it strengthens the position of the combined enterprises relative to the ‘pure’ enterprises, strengthens them in the competitive struggle in periods of serious depression, when the fall in prices of raw materials does not keep pace with the fall in prices of manufactured goods.”[3]
The German bourgeois economist, Heymann, who has written a book especially on “mixed”, that is, combined, enterprises in the German iron industry, says: “Pure enterprises perish, they are crushed between the high price of raw material and the low price of the finished product.” Thus we get the following picture: “There remain, on the one hand, the big coal companies, producing millions of tons yearly, strongly organised in their coal syndicate, and on the other, the big steel plants, closely allied to the coal mines, having their own steel syndicate. These giant enterprises, producing 400,000 tons of steel per annum, with a tremendous output of ore and coal and producing finished steel goods, employing 10,000 workers quartered in company houses, and sometimes owning their own railways and ports, are the typical representatives of the German iron and steel industry. And concentration goes on further and further. Individual enterprises are becoming larger and larger. An ever-increasing number of enterprises in one, or in several different industries, join together in giant enterprises, backed up and directed by half a dozen big Berlin banks. In relation to the German mining industry, the truth of the teachings of Karl Marx on concentration is definitely proved; true, this applies to a country where industry is protected by tariffs and freight rates. The German mining industry is ripe for expropriation.”[4] [5] ....and his definition of the capitalist class (as owners of the means of production) as “just a couple of thousands of families (not more!) have the private ownership over the thousand biggest transnational enterprises, and those several of thousands families by the way of those thousand biggest enterprises are controlling almost the whole global economy.”....is also a proof of his dogmatism.
The “individual “capitalists exert their “ownership” over the globally integrated production-chains by their capital placed in financial institutions (bancs but also holding-enterprises and insurance-companies ...)
In the next quote of Lenin he is concluding that already Marx noticed this change of exerting the “ownership" of the capitalists over the “means of productions”.
“But facts remain facts. There are no trusts in Germany; there are “only” cartels—but Germany is governed by not more than three hundred magnates of capital, and the number of these is constantly diminishing. At all events, banks greatly intensify and accelerate the process of concentration of capital and the formation of monopolies in all capitalist countries, notwithstanding all the differences in their banking laws.
The banking system “possesses, indeed, the form of universal book-keeping and distribution of means of production on a social scale, but solely the form”, wrote Marx in Capital half a century ago (Russ. trans., Vol. III, part II, p. 144). The figures we have quoted on the growth of bank capital, on the increase in the number of the branches and offices of the biggest banks, the increase in the number of their accounts, etc., present a concrete picture of this “universal book-keeping” of the whole capitalist class; and not only of the capitalists, for the banks collect, even though temporarily, all kinds of money revenues—of small businessmen, office clerks, and of a tiny upper stratum of the working class. “Universal distribution of means of production”—that, from the formal aspect, is what grows out of the modern banks, which, numbering some three to six of the biggest in France, and six to eight in Germany, control millions and millions. In substance, however, the distribution of means of production is not at all “universal”, but private, i.e., it conforms to the interests of big capital, and primarily, of huge, monopoly capital, which operates under conditions in which the masses live in want, in which the whole development of agriculture hopelessly lags behind the development of industry, while within industry itself the “heavy industries” exact tribute from all other branches of industry.[6]” Peter Mertens is silent about a THIRD (also more QUALITATIVE) aspect of imperialism: the NECCESSITY (and NOT just “a possible choice”...) of developing COLONIALISM..... and in a world that is already divided we should talk about continuously RE-affirm a new division of the world, based on colonialism....
Just a quote of Lenin about this, a quote that Peter Mertens would never chose.....
“Alongside the colonial possessions of the Great Powers, we have placed the small colonies of the small states, which are, so to speak, the next objects of a possible and probable “re-division” of colonies. These small states mostly retain their colonies only because the big powers are torn by conflicting interests, friction, etc., which prevent them from coming to an agreement on the division of the spoils. As to the “semi-colonial” states, they provide an example of the transitional forms which are to be found in all spheres of nature and society. Finance capital is such a great, such a decisive, you might say, force in all economic and in all international relations, that it is capable of subjecting, and actually does subject, to itself even states enjoying the fullest political independence; we shall shortly see examples of this. Of course, finance capital finds most “convenient”, and derives the greatest profit from, a form of subjection which involves the loss of the political independence of the subjected countries and peoples. In this respect, the semi-colonial countries provide a typical example of the “middle stage”. It is natural that the struggle for these semi-dependent countries should have become particularly bitter in the epoch of finance capital, when the rest of the world has already been divided up.
Colonial policy and imperialism existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practised imperialism. But “general” disquisitions on imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background, the fundamental difference between socio-economic formations, inevitably turn into the most vapid banality or bragging, like the comparison: “Greater Rome and Greater Britain.”[7] Even the capitalist colonial policy of previous stages of capitalism is essentially different from the colonial policy of finance capital.
The principal feature of the latest stage of capitalism is the domination of monopolist associations of big employers. These monopolies are most firmly established when all the sources of raw materials are captured by one group, and we have seen with what zeal the international capitalist associations exert every effort to deprive their rivals of all opportunity of competing, to buy up, for example, iron-fields, oilfields, etc. Colonial possession alone gives the monopolies complete guarantee against all contingencies in the struggle against competitors, including the case of the adversary wanting to be protected by a law establishing a state monopoly. The more capitalism is developed, the more strongly the shortage of raw materials is felt, the more intense the competition and the hunt for sources of raw materials throughout the whole world, the more desperate the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.”[8] (Emphasising by me – Nico) ....and here is not meant, the official recognised “colonies” that existed in the stage of capitalism BEFORE becoming imperialism, so countering already a possible reaction about the so-called “decolonisation” after the Second WW.... as I will illustrate by a second quote from Lenin about the phenomena of colonisation linked to imperialism.
“The non-economic superstructure which grows up on the basis of finance capital, its politics and its ideology, stimulates the striving for colonial conquest. “Finance capital does not want liberty, it wants domination,” as Hilferding very truly says. And a French bourgeois writer, developing and supplementing, as it were, the ideas of Cecil Rhodes quoted above,[9] writes that social causes should be added to the economic causes of modern colonial policy: “Owing to the growing complexities of life and the difficulties which weigh not only on the masses of the workers, but also on the middle classes, ‘impatience, irritation and hatred are accumulating in all the countries of the old civilisation and are becoming a menace to public order; the energy which is being hurled out of the definite class channel must be given employment abroad in order to avert an explosion at home’.”[10]
Since we are speaking of colonial policy in the epoch of capitalist imperialism, it must be observed that finance capital and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world, give rise to a number of transitional forms of state dependence. Not only are the two main groups of countries, those owning colonies, and the colonies themselves, but also the diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically, are formally independent, but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence, typical of this epoch. We have already referred to one form of dependence—the semi-colony.”[11] I think that I have now given enough arguments to prove that Peter Mertens in his by dogmatism influenced analyse of imperialism led his public to a rather limited determination of what is the actual working class. And by a chosen quote out of “Imperialism,....” he want to give his analyse a “anti-imperialist” character without really analyse what are the real qualitative characteristics of imperialism that differs from capitalism noticed and analysed by Marx, in HIS time.
The REASONS of Peter Mertens of doing this are similar to those of Kautsky, against whom Lenin argued in his book “Imperialism,....” Again some quotes that Peter Mertens would never chose.....
“Special attention has been devoted in this pamphlet to a criticism of Kautskyism, the international ideological trend represented in all countries of the world by the “most prominent theoreticians”, the leaders of the Second International (Otto Bauer and Co. in Austria, Ramsay MacDonald and others in Britain, Albert Thomas in France, etc., etc.) and a multitude of socialists, reformists, pacifists, bourgeois democrats and parsons.
This ideological trend is, on the one hand, a product of the disintegration and decay of the Second International, and, on the other hand, the inevitable fruit of the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, whose entire way of life holds them captive to bourgeois and democratic prejudices.
The views held by Kautsky and his like are a complete renunciation of those same revolutionary principles of Marxism that writer has championed for decades, especially, by the way, in his struggle against socialist opportunism (of Bernstein, Millerand, Hyndman, Gompers, etc.). It is not a mere accident, therefore, that Kautsky’s followers all over the world have now united in practical politics with the extreme opportunists (through the Second, or Yellow International) and with the bourgeois governments (through bourgeois coalition governments in which socialists take part).
The growing world proletarian revolutionary movement in general, and the communist movement in particular, cannot dispense with an analysis and exposure of the theoretical errors of Kautskyism. The more so since pacifism and “democracy” in general, which lay no claim to Marxism whatever, but which, like Kautsky and Co., are obscuring the profundity of the contradictions of imperialism and the inevitable revolutionary crisis to which it gives rise, are still very widespread all over the world. To combat these tendencies is the bounden duty of the party of the proletariat, which must win away from the bourgeoisie the small proprietors who are duped by them, and the millions of working people who enjoy more or less petty-bourgeois conditions of life. " (Emphasised by me – Nico)
...and about the ROLE that those “hidden” reformists (I should speak of revisionists) have to play....
“A few words must be said about Chapter VIII, “Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism”. (...)
What is the economic basis of this world-historical phenomenon?
It is precisely the parasitism and decay of capitalism, characteristic of its highest historical stage of development, i.e., imperialism. As this pamphlet shows, capitalism has now singled out a handful (less than one-tenth of the inhabitants of the globe; less than one-fifth at a most “generous” and liberal calculation) of exceptionally rich and powerful states which plunder the whole world simply by “clipping coupons”. Capital exports yield an income of eight to ten thousand million francs per annum, at pre-war prices and according to pre-war bourgeois statistics. Now, of course, they yield much more.
Obviously, out of such enormous super-profits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And that is just what the capitalists of the “advanced” countries are doing: they are bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.
This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers. take the side of the bourgeoisie, the “Versaillese” against the “Communards”.
Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step can be taken toward the solution of the practical problem of the communist movement and of the impending social revolution.
Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide scale.”
With these warnings of Lenin against “pseudo-Marxists” as Kautsky, I want to warn anti-imperialists who are just about to discover Marxist analyse and the (ex-)comrades who refuse to do their own Marxist analysing work and just “follow” in a blind activist way, their pseudo-Marxist leadership:
“The argument about words which Kautsky raises as to whether the latest stage of capitalism should be called imperialism or the stage of finance capital is not worth serious attention. Call it what you will, it makes no difference. The essence of the matter is that Kautsky detaches the politics of imperialism from its economics, speaks of annexations as being a policy “preferred” by finance capital, and opposes to it another bourgeois policy which, he alleges, is possible on this very same basis of finance capital. It follows, then, that monopolies in the economy are compatible with non-monopolistic, non-violent, non-annexationist methods in politics. It follows, then, that the territorial division of the world, which was completed during this very epoch of finance capital, and which constitutes the basis of the present peculiar forms of rivalry between the biggest capitalist states, is compatible with a non-imperialist policy. The result is a slurring-over and a blunting of the most profound contradictions of the latest stage of capitalism, instead of an exposure of their depth; the result is bourgeois reformism instead of Marxism.
Kautsky enters into controversy with the German apologist of imperialism and annexations, Cunow, who clumsily and cynically argues that imperialism is present-day capitalism; the development of capitalism is inevitable and progressive; therefore imperialism is progressive; therefore, we should grovel before it and glorify it! This is something like the caricature of the Russian Marxists which the Narodniks drew in 1894-95. They argued: if the Marxists believe that capitalism is inevitable in Russia, that it is progressive, then they ought to open a tavern and begin to implant capitalism! Kautsky’s reply to Cunow is as follows: imperialism is not present-day capitalism; it is only one of the forms of the policy of present-day capitalism. This policy we can and should fight, fight imperialism, annexations, etc.
The reply seems quite plausible, but in effect it is a more subtle and more disguised (and therefore more dangerous) advocacy of conciliation with imperialism, because a “fight” against the policy of the trusts and banks that does not affect the economic basis of the trusts and banks is mere bourgeois reformism and pacifism, the benevolent and innocent expression of pious wishes. Evasion of existing contradictions, forgetting the most important of them, instead of revealing their full depth—such is Kautsky’s theory, which has nothing in common with Marxism. Naturally, such a “theory” can only serve the purpose of advocating unity with the Cunows!” (Emphasised by me -Nico)
.....as are to my opinion, the “analyses” of the actual leading cadres of the WPB, Boudewijn Deckers and Peter Mertens.
