[Marxism] (More) Thinking Out Loud

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Ed George writes:

"Having been in and around revolutionary socialist organisation for about 25
years, the fact that socialist revolutions have been entirely absent from
the north American and west European theatres for around 60 years has
increasingly seemed to me to be a fact whose existence we have spent
insufficient time trying to understand and explain."

You might want to look at the supplementary thesis of the Second Comintern
Congress on the national and colonial question, presented by MN Roy with
Lenin's support and the endorsement of the commission on the national and
colonial question:

"2. European capitalism draws its strength in the main not so much from the
industrial countries of Europe as from its colonial possessions. Its
existence depends on control of extensive colonial markets and a broad field
of opportunities for exploitation. England, the bulwark of imperialism, has
already suffered from overproduction for a century. Without the extensive
colonial possessions that are essential for the sale of her goods and at the
same time form the source of her raw materials, the capitalist order in
England would long since have collapsed under its own weight. At the same
time that British imperialism makes hundreds of millions of the inhabitants
of Asia and Africa into slaves, it also keeps the British proletariat under
the domination of the bourgeoisie.

"3. The super-profits made in the colonies form one of the main sources of
the resources of contemporary capitalism. The European working class will
only succeed in overthrowing the capitalist order once this source has
finally been stopped up. The capitalist countries try, not indeed without
success, to restore their shaky position by extensive and intensive
exploitation of human labour and the natural wealth of the colonies. As a
result of the exploitation of the colonial population European imperialism
is in a position to grant the labour aristocracy in Europe a whole range of
concessions. While on the one hand European imperialism tries to force down
the absolute minimum level necessary to keep the proletariat alive by the
import of goods produced by the cheaper labour power of the workers of the
colonial countries, it is on the other hand prepared to sacrifice the
increased profits it could make in the home country in order to receive the
super-profits it can obtain by exploitation in the colonies."

The most striking thing to me about this is Roy's flat-out statement
--supported by Lenin, the commission and the Congress as a whole-- that
socialist revolution in the European imperialist countries is impossible
until imperialist super-profits have "finally been stopped up." 

But what about the United States?

The two delegates from the U.S. were the first to speak in the discussion
--almost certainly this was consciously arranged-- with John Reed speaking
about the conditions of Blacks in the United States and Fraina on
immigrants, whom, he reported, made up the majority of the U.S. industrial
workforce. The striking thing here is that the national and colonial
question was seen as encompassing these sectors also (and, indeed, Lenin
went out of his way to refer to Blacks in the U.S. as an oppressed people in
his theses). 

Fraina makes the point explicitly: "The last speaker talked about the
Negroes as an oppressed people in the United States. We have at the same
time two other kinds of oppressed people: the foreign workers and the
colonial inhabitants. The terrible suppression of strikes and of the
revolutionary movement in general is in no way a result of the war, it is
much more a more forceful political expression of the earlier attitude
towards the unorganised and unskilled workers. These workers' strikes are
suppressed violently. Why? Because these workers are in the main foreigners
(they form 60 per cent of the industrial proletariat), who are in fact in
the same position as a colonial population."

I think those two contributions to the discussion may also help explain why
Roy's theses limits the point about the impossibility of socialist
revolution in imperialist countries until superprofits have "finally been
stopped up" to Europe. Because the majority of the American proletariat was
"in fact in the same position as a colonial population." It wasn't because
Roy was unacquainted with conditions in the Americas, as he'd been in both
Mexico and the U.S.

There's been, I think, significant thinking and analysis done on the
extension of "full white privilege" so to speak to European immigrants and
their children during WWII and in the immediate postwar period, so the
situation in the U.S. changed from what Fraina describes.

*  *  *

On Respect, I've not followed British events or the (UK) SWP so closely that
I can really accept or dispute the overall assessment that you present in
one of your footnotes: 

"I've never been in favour of the Respect project, not for the usual
sectarian reasons offered by the British state left, but because I don't
think that the radicalisation on the streets that the SWP projected was ever
really there. If it _had_ been, what the SWP did in setting up Respect would
have been _exactly_ what one should have done."

But my *impression* from afar is that Respect really did get some traction
in some Muslim communities: the generalized radicalization may have been far
less than the SWP thought or even mostly an illusion in terms of the
population or the working class as a whole. But given the offensive against
Muslims and immigrants in general in the UK, it would seem to me that the
Respect project had at least partial validity --even if it wasn't conceived
of consciously in this way-- as an expression in the political arena of
those communities.

Obviously, my thinking is very much influenced by the situation we went
through here in the states with the explosion of protests by the Latino
communities in defense of immigrants a year and a half ago, whose lessons I
don't believe we have fully assimilated. A central one being that a crack in
bourgeois political-ideological domination or hegemony in oppressed
communities cast as the other, the non-white, or non-American, or
non-English or non-British, can unleash a tremendous explosion of energy and
motion, a social pressure that has been there all along, accumulating as
potential energy in reaction to the pressure of the ruling class attacks. My
guess is that Respect managed to tap into some of that potential energy and
give it an outlet, which accounts for its electoral successes.

Joaquin