Towards a Socialist Polynesia
September, 1982.
(for Charles Davis, Aotearoa’s first Maori Trotskyist who defended revolutionary meetings against fascists.)
What You Do Now, Brother (To a Comrade Worker)
What you do now, Brother?
they sack you again
the fifth time now but
you got your big aiga to feed?
You just sit and nod
like a puppet your head
to promises sprout like words
out of the shiny teeth
of our leaders? Or
Sunday sleep in church
obey the yelp of the dog-
collared pastor? Or
lie bellyhungry in your shack
like prison in the swamp
you rent and watch the fat-
bellied limousine of the vampire
man and woman fin
by like a tagifa?
What you do now, Brother?
let the vampire man and bitches
continue for to feed on the gut
of your dream?
What do you tell your to’alua
and fanau? That they
suffer cos it god’s
wish and scheme?
Why not feed them
on anger like bullets brother
then go hunt the vampire men?
Why not feed them
on bullets like anger brother
then go hunt the vampire bitches?
brother, we got nothing to lose
this tropical paradise it all
a vampires lie
Albert Wendt
(1) Racism, Marxism and Internationalism
New Zealand’s massive demonstrations against the Springbok Tour in 1981 became, especially in Auckland, demonstrations of Polynesian protest against racism. In spite of every effort by Halt All Racist Tours (HART) leaders and the Workers’ Communist League (WCL) and the loyal opposition of ‘labour left’, it proved impossible to limit the struggle against racism to South African apartheid. The slogans directed against South Africa were also directed against the New Zealand government’s racist policies at home. ‘Protesting’ every inch of the way, the HART leaders were forced to accept that the struggles against racism in South Africa and New Zealand were both part of the same international struggle against racism.
So long as South African racism alone was attacked, postures of moral outrage could be adopted and political issues avoided. The New Zealand movement refused to even discuss the political differences between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress (PAC). Once it could no longer be denied that racism was at home and alive and well in Queen St., the need to bring the South African struggle home forced the movement to rub its nose in grubby politics. Turning moral outrage against Bantustans into moral outrage at the oppression of Maori people, black radicals adopted the positions of the PAC, hiding behind Protestant morality and issuing ultimatums that the ‘black movement’ should be given the same uncritical support as that HART gave to the ANC/PAC.
This is not only a means of avoiding political debate about the relationship between race and class, but of keeping democracy out of the anti-racist movement. Without political debate on the character of racism in Aotearoa, its relation to capitalism, and the working class, white militants turning toward anti-racist working class internationalism, away from single-issue moralism, will not move forward.
Just as the entire South African left has chosen, is choosing, and will chose between the opposed political lines of ANC and PAC (and also the Non-European Unity Movement) so, at a time when a mass movement in Aotearoa is forced to take a stand on New Zealand racism, it must face political choices between different political lines. The same choices present themselves, essentially as on the pakeha left, between populism and Marxism, but it is always populism which tries to avoid debate and political struggle.
The anti-racist movement will grow powerful and break the alliance Muldoon tried to forge with the backward sections of the working class during the Tour only by making New Zealand racism towards its own Bantustans in the Pacific and at home an issue with workers. That involves raising, debating and resolving the relationship between race and class – the issue which ‘Black Unity’ evades in every way at every point. The task is to bring the South African war back home by showing that racism is an international creation of imperialism, and that it can only be brought to an end by the international working class.
“Communists” wrote Marx, “are distinguished from other working class parties by this alone: in the national struggles of the proletarians of all the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality, in the various stages of development which the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interest of the movement as a whole.” (Communist Manifesto)
The working class of this area of the Pacific, Polynesia, is made up of both Pakehas and Polynesians. They work in the same factories, queue for the same unemployment benefits, and live in the same boarding houses. Their interests are common interests; their fight against imperialism, capitalism in its epoch of parasitism and decay, is a common fight. In the South Pacific, the working class cannot develop a clear consciousness of its interests and goals outside the framework of working class internationalism. Against imperialism and its class collaborators, the Spartacist League opposes the revolutionary tradition, the tradition of the Communist Manifesto, the tradition of working class internationalism.
In this pamphlet, the Spartacist League puts forward its position on the question of racism and capitalism. We oppose those white ‘left’ chauvinist groups like the Socialist Unity Party and the Workers’ Communist League, who suppress the history of the Polynesian working classes and subordinate the national rights of Polynesians to a white-racist, reformist, programme to “fight racism”. We oppose just as firmly the petty-bourgeois black populists who too turn their backs on the proletarian history of their peoples, in order to establish “sovereignty” on capitalism’s terms. We also oppose those radical groups like HART, the Socialist Action League and the Republican Movement, who in giving their uncritical support to black populism, also give their support to imperialism’s attempts to deepen divisions in the working class in order to smash working class internationalism. The Spartacist League is uncompromising in exposing those forms of petty-bourgeois chauvinism, and we expect to be called all sorts of names for doing so. But let them be called in public debate, and the real issues argued.
(2) Super-Exploitation, Super-oppression and the reserve army of ‘cheap labour’
The weakness of the New Zealand ‘Marxist’ left finds its clearest expression in the fact that the debates about the special characteristics of Australasian capitalist development take place among Northern Hemisphere Marxists, with no participation from nor even echo among New Zealand Marxists. Sutch and Roth, whose incomprehension of Marx’s analysis of the Wakefield system leads to the acceptance of a racist theory of the export of English capitalism to New Zealand still dominate the little debate there is on the development of Australasian capitalism. [1]
Meanwhile in European debates over the crucial issue of the character of the contemporary world imperialist system, much discussion has taken place on the position of relatively high-wage agricultural exporting capitalist countries such as Australia and New Zealand. The purpose of the debate, in particular between Emmanuel on the one hand, and Mandel and Bettelheim on the other, has been to explain the differences separating such countries from poorer third-world countries whose exports are predominantly agricultural also.[2] In contrast, to Marxists groups whose ‘New Zealand-centredness’ impoverishes Marxism, such as the Workers’ Communist League, we intervene in the debates of the internationalist Marxist movement.
The importance of this debate is that of clarifying the explanation of why there emerged in New Zealand a high-wage largely white working class and a relatively low-wage Polynesian ‘reserve army of labour’, combining in the one country the divisions introduced into the world proletariat by imperialism. Without such an explanation, there can be no Marxist, materialist, explanation of the evolution of the Maori proletariat, and its history as the most advanced section of the New Zealand working class.
Mandel, in his book Late Capitalism, argues that:
“In the ‘empty’ countries of Australia and New Zealand the whole population was incorporated from the outset into the capitalist production of commodities. This population consisted principally of independent commodity producers who were themselves owners of their means of production (proprietors of extremely cheap or free land which was available in abundance) and who were therefore guaranteed a high minimum level of existence from the very start, with which the prices of commodity labour power had to compete in order to allow wage labour to come into being at all. In Portugal or Algeria, by contrast, the mass of the population existed outside the realm of capitalist commodity production. The slow displacement of pre-capitalist relations of production led to the increasing immiseration of the indigenous population, which became willing to sell its labour power at ever lower prices in order to be able to bear at least part of the ever more oppressive burden of ground-rent, usury and taxes. The destruction of the native (sic) handicrafts and the separation of indigenous peasants from their land and soil was therefore accompanied in the long run by the secular growth of an industrial reserve army, which explains the blocking of wages and needs instead of simply proceeding from it axiomatically.” (p.364)
Mandel’s acceptance of the ‘empty country’ hypothesis in the case of carries a stage further a racist myth: capitalism was not simply ‘exported’ from Britain, its establishment required the prior expropriation of the Polynesian population, who far from ‘disappearing’, continued in existence as a section of the proletariat. Mandel’s argument, however, does nave the merit of recognising (unlike his Socialist Action League ‘co-thinkers’) the significance of independent producers in 19th century New Zealand.
This being so, Mandel’s destinction between New Zealand on the one hand, and Portugal and Algeria on the other, breaks down. The dominance of white independent commodity producers followed from the land wars fought to expropriate by force large areas of the best and most strongly coveted Maori land; increased during the long period of ‘slow displacement’ – through the operation of the capitalist land market – of the remnants of the Polynesian mode of production, which maintained a tenuous existence on increasingly marginal land, that least attractive to capitalist farmers. On this marginal land, Mandel’s statement about Portugal and Algeria applies: “the mass of the population existed outside the realm of capitalist commodity production. The slow displacement of pre-capitalist modes of production led to the increasing immiseration of the indigenous population, which became willing to sell its labour power at ever lower prices…” Side by side with the rise of white independent commodity producers, in Mandel’s words, “guaranteed a high minimum level of existence from the very start”, the expropriated Maori population was denied by the facts of continuing expropriation, and land alienation, access to this “high minimum level”.
But while expropriation and continued land sales made possible the rise of commodity production, it was the survival of remnants of the Polynesian mode of production which made the super-exploitation of the Maori rural reserve army of cheap labour possible.[3] Pre-capitalist forms of property in land and traditions of mutual economic support within tribes provided means of subsistence outside that which could be bought with wages in the market. This meant that Maori workers could be paid low wages (below the cost of reproduction of labour power in the market) and employed as casual or seasonal labour. As land values dropped further and more land was alienated, the dependence of the Maori rural reserve army on its own means of subsistence lessened but without any equalisation of the low wage and the ‘high minimum level” set by commodity production.
The history of the super-exploitation of the Polynesian workers is the history of the continued existence of the Polynesian mode of production within the framework of the dominant capitalist relations of production. So long as the Polynesian mode of production survives within the hostile capitalist environment, the wages of Maori workers are forced below the value of labour power. While the continued possession of some Maori land may slow down the proletarianisation of the Maori people, it cannot prevent and has not prevented it. It ensures, on the contrary, that when Maori workers enter the proletariat, they do so on the worst terms, as the lowest stratum of the class. This is not the result of racism, though this process has produced and will continue to produce racism. It arises rather from the logic of a slow and protracted expropriation of a pre-capitalist mode of production by the capitalist mode, at every point representing continuous immiseration of the indigenous population as the value of Maori land declines and the amount of land owned is reduced in area and fertility. Similar processes take place in other Polynesian islands but even more slowly.
So long as capitalism had a revolutionary character, it smashed the remnants of feudalism in its European centres, expropriating thousands of proletarians and throwing them onto the labour market as a reserve army. Before this first stage of ‘primitive accumulation’ had been completed in Europe, imperialism had penetrated into the colonial periphery to organise large-scale capitalist production of raw materials and to generate super-profits based upon the super-exploitation of cheap colonial labour power. This primitive accumulation in the colonies set limits to the expropriation of pre-capitalist modes of production, creating dependent national economies each with specific combinations of pre-capitalist, semi-capitalist and capitalist relations of production. The dominance of imperial capital from the outset limited the power of local capital to escape its dependence on imperialism and to develop its industrial base and its proletariat, allowing pre- and semi-capitalist modes of production to survive.
In New Zealand the specific combination of modes of production involved the Polynesian mode of production, petty commodity production as well as capitalist farming. The result was that wages offered to white workers had to be higher than the subsistence level of small-scale farming, while those paid to the Maori reserve army of cheap labour enabled the development of capitalist agriculture in New Zealand. [4] The establishment of the arbitration system after 1894 represented state acceptance of the dual labour market – relatively high wages and good conditions for urban white workers subject to arbitration, and low wages to rural Maori workers whose wages and conditions were not protected by state-enforced labour laws.
In Mandel’s terms, New Zealand combined some of the features of the United States and Australia as high-wage countries along with characteristics of low-wage countries like Algeria and Portugal. With changes in Maori land laws, ‘Maori land’ became less a site of a Polynesian mode and more a site of a peasant mode of production based upon subsistence agriculture. As the petty commodity mode of production among white farmers is transformed into intensive capitalist agriculture, the peasant mode of production is consolidated in ‘Maori land’. It is this form of economic organisation which today is defended in struggles for ‘Maori land rights’. This transition from a Polynesian to Peasant mode of production was not accomplished peacefully –Te Whiti’s struggle at Parihaka, and to some extent Rua’s as Maugapohatu, mark definitive defeats of attempts to defend the Polynesian mode of production in unfavourable historical circumstances.
New Zealand’s combination of high and low-wage workers is best understood by comparison with South Africa. There the land wars to expropriate the indigenous modes of production were carried through by the Boers, who replaced them with small-scale petty commodity production similar to New Zealand sheep farming. Then, in the Boer war, the states set up by the Afrikaner petty producers were militarily defeated by British imperialism. The British represented the interests of large mining capital, and used the ideology and practice of Boer apartheid to divide the working class on colour lines, and so force down wages. It was the existence of white peasant farming which set relatively high wages for white workers, while the African population, like the Maori, was pushed out of the capitalist economy to form a reserve army of labour. When the African re-entered the capitalist economy, it was under conditions that one writer describes as follows:[5]
“When the migrant labourer has access to means of subsistence outside the capitalist sector, as he does in South Africa, the relationship between wages and the cost of the production and reproduction of labour-power means the capitalist is able to pay the worker below the cost of his reproduction”.
This as we have argued, is similar to the position in New Zealand. In both cases part of the costs of reproduction of indigenous labour-power is being met by the traditional labour of those (particularly women) outside the capitalist mode of production. South Africa’s development diverged from New Zealand’s in that the CMP displaced the petty commodity MOP in agriculture by force, a result of British imperialism’s drive to protect large-scale mining capital. The absence of any large-scale mineral or other raw material resources in New Zealand meant that massive capital investment such as in South Africa did not take place. This held back the development of industry and the rate of conversion of petty commodity production into capitalist agriculture, and allowed the survival of comprador small capital dominated by British finance, shipping and meat exporting capital. These differences however, are differences of pace and scale, not of substance. An accelerated concentration of capital in New Zealand and the South Pacific would utilise existing wage differentials between white and Polynesian workers to entrench an apartheid-like system. Under capitalism, South Africa represents the future of Polynesia.
It is because Marxists understand and have a programme to end the super-exploitation and super-oppression of non-white racial groups under capitalism that they reject all subjective conceptions of oppression. Super-oppression exists because of super-exploitation of ‘cheap labour’, that is, the payment of wages below the socially necessary average for the reproduction of labour-power. Super-oppression exists because of the exploitation of Polynesian workers in the factories and freezing works of New Zealand and the South Pacific. A ‘return to the land’ under capitalism will only increase existing super-exploitation, by enabling white capitalists to pay wages more and more below subsistence level. Only under socialism – that is through the conquest by black and white proletarians of both industry and the land –can a nationalised land be restored to the Polynesian people, together with the abolition of wage slavery. ‘Land rights’ under capitalism means Bantustans – the Pacific Islands are becoming more like Bantustans year by year – or ‘native reserves’ like those in Queensland, and intensified exploitation of black labour-power.
(3) The Workers of Polynesia: Their Role and History
The real history of the working class in Aotearoa and the Pacific has still to be written. It begins with the strikes against the first agents of imperialism, the missionaries, for the most basic and elementary requirement of the worker – the payment of wages. The struggle against capitalist missionaries, shipowners and ‘traders’ for the conversion of unpaid labour into wage-labour, was a long and bitter struggle. In many cases Polynesian people resorted to the use of arms to coerce the agents of European imperialism into giving themselves and pakeha workers alike the same wages and conditions. Throughout the history of capitalism in Polynesia, the existence of a Polynesian mode of production in any form has always been used by the white capitalist ruling class to ‘justify’ a ‘special’ wage rate for Polynesians – initially a ‘special’ rate which was no wages at all!
In 1841 in Nelson, the first strike of pakeha workers in Polynesia for piece work at higher rates took place. The ruling class feared that the labourers would rise and take possession of the fort at Nelson. The Maori population, dispossessed of their land, and turned into wage workers, also threatened this fort. The two groups opposed to the ruling class failed to make common cause, the colonial authorities maintained their power, and the pakeha workers were bought off by leases or sales of small pieces of land. The land became the wedge driven by British imperialism between pakeha workers and Polynesians who were expropriated and turned into a reserve army. This division between pakeha and Polynesian workers remained through most of the nineteenth century: the pakeha worker, when militant, was offered land, so that he ceased to depend for his livelihood solely on wages. Maori land in the Polynesian island most suited to farming, Aotearoa, was purchased, and the Maori forced more and more to work for wages for a living, as the Polynesian mode of production was increasingly subordinated to the Capitalist mode.
Together the pakeha and the Capitalist mode of production arrived in Polynesia, displacing the formerly existing Polynesian mode of production in Aotearoa, the centre of white settlement, by force of arms in the land wars, and ‘peacefully’ by land sales and duplicity before and after those wars. Imperialism in the South Pacific meant the imposition of capitalism, ultimately by force or arms (Tahiti, Hawaii, and Samoa as well as Aotearoa) on the Polynesian peoples. In the centre of Polynesian capitalism, Aotearoa, the destruction of the Polynesian mode of production began the process of proletarianisation of the Maori people with the expropriation of the Waikato people. There was bitter class conflict even before the New Zealand ruling class aided by British imperialism turned their armies against the Taranaki and Waikato people. Maori workers’ strikes for higher wages, for mail carriage and transportation services, and the building of colonial government institutions, increased. Maori producers boycotted European markets until reasonable prices were paid. So not only did the ruling class use force to grab the land for future petty capitalist agriculture, they picked up the gun to put an end to these bitter class struggles and to maintain Maori ‘cheap labour’.
New Zealand is the exception rather than the rule among Polynesian islands where only Hawaii and Tahiti besides New Zealand have large white settler populations. Elsewhere, the older Polynesian mode has been transformed into a predominantly peasant mode of production (with many survivals of the older mode however) with the same result of enabling overseas companies, usually from the dominant colonial power, to pay Polynesian labour-power below its cost of reproduction while exploiting Polynesian resources. As communal labour and land ownership under the Polynesian mode has been eroded, productivity and food exports have fallen, and with them living standards. The island governments have themselves required support of aid and wages earned in New Zealand to help meet the costs of government and its services.
The incorporation of the island states into the world capitalist economy increases the pressure on peasant economies, and proletarianises thousands of islanders. Their land becomes inadequate even for subsistence agriculture as individualisation of land titles is linked to population increase – an example of the capitalist law of surplus population. At the same time, colonial practices of indirect rule through chiefs and others has assimilated the traditional role of chief in the Polynesian mode to a role approaching that of landlord, claiming a large part of the workers’ surplus-labour. As well as this, the world capitalist economy forces the small island economies more and more towards bankruptcy, limiting drastically what they can buy, lowering living standards and pauperising the people. The possession of land no longer guarantees adequate income. The depreciation of Polynesian-owned land values outside Aotearoa serves the same purpose as the expropriation of land in Aotearoa – forced proletarianisation.
The more advanced country, Aotearoa, shows the future of the less developed. As the world crisis deepens, and national barriers to the expansion of the productive forces reflect capitalist social relations which threaten the very existence of Polynesian island economies, the illusions of harmonious co-existence between the Polynesian/peasant modes and the world capitalist mode in crisis will be ruthlessly destroyed, as the Polynesian mode collapses, completing catastrophically the proletarianisation of Polynesia. Island independence will become an even more transparent fiction, masking the dictatorship of the Polynesian islands’ imperialist creditors whose power will be more absolute than that of the former colonial rulers, completing land alienation, increasing white petty bourgeois settlement, and subordinating the islands to imperialism’s war plans. Today these islands are on the edge of their own land wars, which they can win if they combine and fight against imperialism with the class struggle for international socialism they can learn about in the New Zealand working class.
The history of working peoples in the world is a history of the rise and development of the Capitalist mode of production, of its colonisation of pre-capitalist societies, of the sometimes violent, and sometimes economically forced ‘peaceful’ separation of the wage-workers from the land, and their herding into the big cities as an industrial reserve army of labour. Marx wrote in Capital about the history of the proletarianisation of European workers. Their migration to Polynesia, and their integration into the Capitalist mode, meant that they formed the bulk of the workers as capitalism shifted from agriculture towards manufacture, and began to form a labour aristocracy based on the privilege of high wages. As in England, there was a gap in time between the taking of the land and the dispossession of the Maori people – more or less complete by the end of the nineteenth century – and their employment as wage-workers in urban industry, which became a steady trend from the 1940’s onward. In this interval, trade unions had grown up whose members were predominantly pakeha and which were controlled by a white labour bureaucracy more and more under the domination of the racist apparatus of the capitalist state. Polynesian workers had to struggle to have their voice heard and their interests defended by these bureaucratic organisations.
European annexation of Polynesia meant and still means the imposition of a white ruling class on the Polynesian people, and their forced conversion from owners of common land, into increasingly landless, dependent wage workers. ‘European civilisation’ means the expropriation and immiseration of pre-capitalist people. But in creating a Polynesian proletariat, capitalism creates its own gravediggers. Capitalism expropriated Polynesians in armed struggle; in turn, capitalism will similarly be destroyed. The Polynesian people will regain their land as proletarians, be expropriating their expropriators.
(4) ‘Capitalism’ – the Stalinist ‘export’.
In Polynesia the history of the formation of the working class has not been written in the same way that Marx wrote about the formation of the European working class. The whole struggle has been ignored by generations of pakeha ‘labour’ historians, who camouflaged the truth to allow the labour bureaucrats and Stalinists to sell out Polynesian workers. While the labour bureaucrats suppress class struggle in general, the Stalinist history of the workers in Polynesia suppresses the documentation of the proletarianisation of the Polynesian people. This is a betrayal of both Marxism and the Polynesian people. The legacy of this Stalinist ‘fake’ communism in New Zealand is a ‘Marxism’ that refuses to call for the expropriators to be expropriated!
Stalinist ‘Marxism’ combines with imperialist ideology to argue that the entire Capitalist mode of production –capitalists, workers and all – was exported to Polynesia lock, stock and barrel, from Britain, and is purely Anglo-Saxon. This racist ‘Marxism’ denies the Polynesian people a place in capitalism as members of the working class which is reserved for whites only. Just like the fate of the national peoples in the USSR under Stalin, Stalinists in the South Pacific put their white racist chauvinism before the rights of the Polynesian people and tell them to wait until the white revolution before they can be liberated.
The Stalinist Workers’ Communist League claims (WCL) it has a ‘class’ analysis of racist and colonial oppression in New Zealand. But their programme itself is clearly racist. For them, the history of New Zealand’s movement towards independence is a pakeha history, to which the Maori people are an appendage. The racist suppression of the brutal and atrocious record of the expropriation of the Polynesian people is aided and abetted by these ‘friends’ of the working class (whose real ‘friends’ are white union bureaucrats) – in the name, naturally, of breaking with the ‘Trotskyist’ theory of permanent revolution. For them, the achievement of white settler power based on denial of Maori suffrage in New Zealand is an “advance”. The failure to see that white ‘independence’, achieved at the expense of Maori independence, assumed a reactionary and imperialist character leads logically to a recognition of Polynesian workers as a class with no revolutionary potential, but which must limit itself to a ‘minimum program’ of democratic rights, forgetting ‘independence’ and ‘socialism’.
The WCL does not see the split between Maori workers and the white labour aristocracy it seeks to represent has its basis in the reproduction of a reserve army of labour. It says racist ideas are “learned” by white workers, ignoring capitalism’s use of racism to justify the super-exploitation of Polynesians in the reserve army to the privileged white labour aristocracy. It is not enough for the WCL to say that 90% of Maori are workers and that they are a “powerful component of the working class”. Rather it has to be said that it is because Maori are oppressed as members of the reserve army that they have been and must be in the vanguard of the proletariat. In ‘allowing’ Maori to lead the ‘anti-racist struggle’, but in limiting their demands to “full equality” and “minority rights”, the WCL actively suppresses the revolutionary potential of the Maori proletariat in order to maintain its ‘leadership’ of the white working class.
When Polynesian workers overstep the ‘minimum programme’ of the WCL the white chauvinist ‘Marxist’ Graeme Clark will do exactly the same as the white chauvinist ‘Marxist’ Bill Andersen – call the cops on Polynesian militants to get them thrown out of the labour movement. The WCL have refused to attack coplover Andersen in public and that for a very good reason: they must repeat his performance (Andersen after all had a ‘minimum programme’ which Black Unity overstepped). WCL student bureaucrats are still ready to refuse to let Auckland University Student premises to Te Moana. However, in this period of mounting capitalist attacks on Polynesian workers they will not be held back by reactionary white labour bureaucrats from understanding that their history of imperialist oppression is a revolutionary history and that their future is that of proletarian revolution.[6]
Yet such is the legacy of Stalinism in Polynesia – that of dressing-up petty-bourgeois chauvinism as ‘Marxism’ – that it infects the thinking of national peoples and diverts them from revolutionary class struggle. In Aotearoa, the most influential Polynesian group, Black Unity, has so far been unable to overcome the legacy of white racist ‘Marxism’. Black Unity tries to talk about the overthrow of the Maori mode of production by the Capitalist mode, and least one group, referring to itself as “Black Marxists” identify the Maori people as “an oppressed layer of the proletariat”.[7] But Black Unity is unable to draw out any revolutionary significance from this analysis. Rather than arriving at a revolutionary Marxist position on racism and imperialism, it arrives at a petty-bourgeois psychological one.
Ripeka Evans in a recent Suva speech for which she has been inexcusably ‘punished’ by eviction from the Trade Union Centre, argued that the Capitalist mode of production was an “export”.[8] She said “it is the responsibility of the white working class” to remove the “super-oppression” of the Maori people. In blaming white racist workers for the super-oppression of Maori workers, Ms Evans accepts the divisions introduced into the working class by imperialism. Ms Evans rejects the racist ‘Marxism’ which says that Polynesians should not act separately, but wait for the ‘real’ white working class to hand them their liberation bit by bit. Naturally, Black Unity is not prepared to wait for ever – especially since the eviction of Te Moana from the Trade Union Centre has shown tat the Stalinists mean what they say! But the lessons Black Unity have drawn from the white racist paternalism of the labour bureaucrats have fallen short of Marxism which makes it the responsibility of the Polynesian proletariat to remove their oppression by leading all workers to smash the white ruling class.[9]
In Chapter 25 of Volume 1 of Capital, ‘The Modern Theory of Colonisation’, the only chapter of Capital with direct bearing on early New Zealand economic development, Marx argues strongly that the Capitalist Mode of Production cannot be simply ‘exported’. Wakefield, wrote Marx, “discovered that in the colonies, property in money, the means of subsistence, machinery, and other means of production, do not suffice to stamp the owner as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing: the wage-labourer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things”.[10] Wakefield, according to Marx, found that “in the colonies the divorce of the workers from the requisites of their labour, and from their root, the land, has not yet been effected, or has been affected only here and there”, an so developed the theory of ‘systematic colonisation’ for this purpose.
In spite of what bourgeois historians write, Marx argued that Wakefield’s scheme had to fail in New Zealand. It was not that easy to create a proletariat, because this meant that the capitalist had to use force to “clear out of his way the modes of production and appropriation that are based upon the independent labour of producers”. For Marx, that whole point of his discussion of Wakefield was to demonstrate that “political economy has discovered in the new world…that capitalist private property demands…the expropriation of the worker”. The succession of stages Marx had noted in English capitalism, first petty production (based in England on Henry VIII’s massive expropriations) followed by developed industrial capitalism (also requiring large-scale land expropriations) must necessarily recur in New Zealand. In both stages of development, the expropriation of a Maori proletariat was necessary for capitalism, first to establish itself and then to develop. This expropriation was largely completed by 1945.
Therefore, capitalism, according to Marx, cannot exist in the colonies, either as a petty commodity production or industrial capitalism, until such expropriation has taken place! So without the expropriation of the Maori people it would have been impossible for capitalism, even in the form of the sub-mode of peasant production, to develop. It is not surprising that pakeha historians refuse to admit that New Zealand capitalism is built upon the ‘compulsion’ to sell black labour-power “voluntarily”. They do not want to think about the possibility of capitalism being “voluntarily” expropriated in its turn.
But Black Unity too, deliberately misunderstands Marx. It is not possible for the Polynesian mode of production to survive “outside” the capitalist mode of production, one the latter is dominant. The remnants of Maori society, its land and labour, served during the nineteenth century as partial means of subsistence for a rural reserve army of wage-labour. Maori social relations of production were increasingly converted into wage-labour/capital relations using the remnants of traditional cooperative labour on the land to hold down wages. Whilst the Maori people retained elements of their culture, these could only survive in a form reproduced by capitalism, either being turned into fetishised folk relics, or kept alive in the struggle of the Maori reserve army against imperialist super-exploitation. It is the fusion of the traditional culture of the Polynesian mode of production with the developing proletarian culture which explains the vital role of the Maori people in the vanguard of the proletariat, and not as Black Unity claims, its role in defending a traditional “culture” separate from, and “outside”, the proletarian culture. This is ‘cultural nationalism’ not Marxism.
The Polynesian people are victims of capitalism in Polynesia; they have been proletarianised; they are workers on whose surplus-value pakeha capitalists have made their multimillions; they can act to achieve their demands. Far from waiting for the ‘white working class’ to ‘liberate’ the Maori people from their super-oppression, it is the white workers not bribed by the privileges of the labour aristocracy who will wait for the Polynesian proletariat to take a revolutionary lead, even on such bread and butter issues as jobs, wages and conditions. But this revolutionary lead will not come from Black Unity which repudiates Marxism. The Polynesian proletariat deserves a revolutionary Marxism which can develop its potential in the leadership of the struggle for a Socialist Polynesia.
(5) Permanent Revolution in Polynesia
Polynesia (except Tonga) was annexed by various European powers in the nineteenth century, and
the history of struggle against annexation is long and bloody. Throughout Polynesia, King Movements developed as forms of Polynesian self-government, following European monarchical traditions, initially under the influence of missionaries. These movements generally lacked the strength to control European land purchases, and their surrender to the market made inevitable their surrender to European governors. In Aotearoa, however, a King Movement developed after annexation rather than before it, against European opposition and using its monopoly of physical force in certain areas to control the activities of pakeha farmers.
This movement, because of its totally Polynesian character and its effective control of agricultural production was seen by the white settler ruling class – who had achieved ‘responsible government’ in 1852, excluding Maori from the vote – as part of an insurrection. Forms of Maori sovereignty directly confronted pakeha sovereignty, in opposed forms of government based upon conflicting modes of production. The King Movement once under attack from the white settler government, lost effective power because it did not gain military support from all sections of the Maori population in the land wars. The white government, protesting its ‘loyalty’ to Britain – so as to use the British army’s guns to facilitate land expropriation – conceded to the Maori people the struggle for national independence.
A minority of the King Movement saw itself as opposed to British rule – Te Hokioi, the King Movement paper, pointed to Haiti’s success in maintaining its independence – but the majority could not rise to the conception of a national movement cutting across tribal divisions. Yet the King Movement, before its suppression, exercised more economic and political power over both Maori and pakehas within its jurisdiction than any similar movement elsewhere in Polynesia, learning as it did from similar movements in other islands.
The defeat of the King Movement had several effects. It confirmed the white settler government in its role as a dependent satellite of British imperialism. It led to the rise of Christian churches independent of the pakeha missionaries, most notably Ringatu, whose view of the lessons to be learnt from defeat was not only that the pakeha missionaries were servants of imperialism, but also that the Maori people were being proletarianised.
“Each tohunga therefore must earn his living with his own hands and anything that in any way resembles tithing is not tolerated”. “ The love-feast whish is held in the morning of the second day of a monthly Ringatu festival, is a feast in the literal sense of the term. When a large crowd is gathered…the feast is held in the open, the ‘tables’ being laid on the ground in true Maori fashion…The tohunga offers grace, and the meal is eaten with relish. Truly only the best is provided, the motive being that it is a love-feast to God. A collection is taken toward the close of the meal, the money being used for church purposes only. The collection must not be used for defraying the expenses of the meal, or making other provision for the entertainment of the gathering. It is also a rule of the church that the money given must be earned by the sweat of the brow – interest on investments, proceeds of sale of land or leases not being acceptable.”[11]
The withdrawal of many North Island Maori from the only white institutions they had previous links with – the pakeha churches – was their verdict on the ruling class’s land war. Now, in a period of Maori political decline new white missionaries have emerged to tie Polynesian workers to white capitalism.
The formation in 1892 of a Kotahitanga, or union, deriving from the 1835 Declaration of Independence by a confederation of united tribes, was another effort by Maori in Aotearoa to achieve their own form of government. While it was claimed that Kotahitanga did not aim to limit the authority of the British Crown, both the New Zealand and British ruling classes refused to recognise it. Had its leaders seriously based themselves on the 1835 Declaration, they could have claimed the Kotahitanga had more right to existence than the pakeha parliament. They did not do so. Although the movement later subsided (as was inevitable because its success relied on pakeha parliamentary approval) it was nonetheless an expression of Maori lack of faith in capitalist parliamentarism, and an attempt to develop their own institutions instead.
By contrast, the so-called ‘Young Maori Movement’ (praised by Donna Awatere and the Socialist Action League), was an abandonment of the Polynesian revolutionary tradition, and a surrender to European parliamentarism, leading to such racist attacks on Maori culture as the Suppression of Tohungaism Act. With Apirana Ngata’s impeachment in 1934, it was shown that even the better elements in the Movement, given opportunities at the highest level, could not work through colonial parliamentary institutions. The Ratana Movement, in reaction, linked itself to the Labour Party, in endorsing Tawhiao’s view of the unity of the working class.
“…in London, Ratana was snubbed by his own High Commissioner, Sir James Allen, who was happy for the party to perform haka and poi dances at the Wembley exhibition but laughed when Ratana asked that arrangements be made for him to meet representatives of the British Government. This rejection deeply wounded Ratana and, standing on Westminster Bridge, he prophesied in the words used by Tawhiao: “When all your stone houses are destroyed in time to come, then will the carpenters, the blacksmiths and the shoemakers be in power and I will be the government.”[12]
Although their links with the labour movement have enabled the Ratana Church to play a continuing political role in Maori affairs, again it has failed to achieve its objectives through parliamentary means.
The history of the Maori people in Aotearoa has been a history of struggle for its own form of government. So long as the Polynesian mode of production continued to have vitality, traditional leaders basing themselves on the survival of Maori social relations tried, always unsuccessfully, to persuade white settler governments to tolerate forms of Maori self-government. When traditional leadership failed, now leaders emerged – often as apparently ‘religious’ leaders in a society where distinctions between religion and politics are not clear cut – giving expression to the proletarianisation of the Maori people and their links with other workers outside the framework of parliamentary politics. The refusal of Maori to fight imperialist wars have been the direct result of the emergence of this formally religious, but proletarian in reality, tradition – mass actions with little echo and no support from the ‘official’ pakeha labour movement.[13]
As the old social relations of the Polynesian mode of production fused with the social relations of the Capitalist mode, as the Maori people became fully proletarianised, the early forms of proletarian ideology lost their religious shell and took on the form of self-government in opposition to imperialism and colonial racist parliamentary rule. The New Zealand colonial ruling class has and will refuse to concede the demand for self-government, but this demand will be achieved in spite of the ruling class, by smashing it. The King Movement and the Kotahitanga were imitations of European class institutions, their monarchies, their parliaments. It is necessary to go beyond European class society and its imitation.
The Polynesian people, their land having been expropriated, now constitute a section – potentially the most revolutionary section because of their tradition as an oppressed nationality – of the working class. The struggle for self-government has now become the workers’ struggle for power: instead of Kings and parliament, workers’ councils are on the agenda. The tradition of the Maori people, a tradition of armed struggle and revolutionary aspiration, now fuses with the international working class culture, developed by Marxism and its tradition of revolution to form the science and culture of the Polynesian socialist revolution.
This struggle has always had an international dimension. The King Movement of the Waikato drew on the lessons of Tahiti, Hawaii and Haiti in the nineteenth century. Today, as the Spartacist League predicted fifteen years ago, the Polynesian islands which have been conceded formal independence by imperialism, experience as a result the crisis of the nation-state in holding back the development of the forces of production, in its most acute form.
Political independence only deepens the economic dependence of the Polynesian island states, accentuating the dependence of the national economies themselves on the remittance of wages of Polynesian migrant workers in New Zealand. Therefore, the achievement in the less developed island states of what has proved impossible in the most developed island with its white culture – the objectives of the King Movement and Kotahitanga –shows that these forms of independence do not halt the pauperisation, immiseration and proletarianisation of the Polynesians by the Capitalist mode of production.
In Polynesia, the less developed island states are to Aotearoa what Transkei and Ciskei are to South Africa – reserves of cheap labour-power which can be forced back into poverty during any economic downturn in the sacred name of respect for ‘national sovereignty’. But the Polynesian proletariat has outgrown ‘nationalism’, which is another name for starvation behind national frontiers, and which intensifies imperialist exploitation instead of abolishing it. Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue and to a certain extent Tonga, are New Zealand semi-colonies whose colonial dependence can be ended only by socialism. Tahiti, Eastern Samoa and Hawaii, are victims of the final ruse of imperialism – incorporation of the colony into the metropolitan imperialist state. We demand for them the right of secession!
What is needed is a Socialist Union of Polynesia! The revolutionary tradition of Samoa, Hawaii, and Tahiti – the history of uprisings against imperialism – must now directed beyond independence to socialism. Now that large numbers of Polynesian workers have been concentrated in Auckland and other parts of Aotearoa, it is there that they will exchange experiences and prepare for united revolutionary action. This pamphlet has concentrated on Polynesia since (with the exception of Tahiti and Hawaii) it is largely within the sphere of interest of New Zealand as a small imperialist power. A Socialist Polynesia would, however be only a step toward a Socialist Union of the Pacific.
(6) Racism and Imperialism
Capitalism in the South Pacific entered its imperialist stage, the stage of decay, virtually at its birth. The rise of capitalist social relations in Polynesia, the last act of the capitalist division of the world, was an expression of the uneven development of world capitalism, being incorporated by imperialism at the onset of its epoch of decay. This means also that the Polynesian economies combine within them per-capitalist social relations and advanced international capitalist social relations, principally in the form of the super-exploitation of cheap labour-power and resources by giant multi-national forms.
The imperialist ruling class is typically white and male, reflecting Europe the birth-place of capitalism and the patriarchal family. Those who try to rise in imperialist society ape the secondary characteristics of the ruling class. Being white and male is seen to be an admission ticket to the profits of corporate capitalism. The ruling class, a very small privileged minority, encourages these racist and sexist illusions – which form part of the ideology of equality of opportunity – in capitalist society. During the period of capitalist youthful expansion – the late nineteenth century – a privileged white male labour aristocracy was formed, bribed by colonial super-profits. But in its imperialist epoch of decline, this privileged stratum in the working class is not only bought-off with bribes, but also corrupted into political collaboration with imperialism.
The form of imperialist state which travelled furtherest on the road to total decay, fascism, showed the underlying logic of such petty bourgeois ideologies based on privilege. The ruling class surrounded itself with a privileged social stratum based on race and sex, a ‘master race’, which proletarianised and even enslaved new oppressed nationalities as ‘Untermensch’. As the defeat of fascism proved, however, the logic of capitalism is not based on sex or race but on the rate of profit and victory in global bloodletting for control of labour-power and resources. The imperialists who dope themselves with their own ideological opiates commit suicide in catastrophic military defeat.
Imperialism has, does and will continue to try to split the working class on race and sex lines, between the white male labour aristocracy and the predominantly non-European and female reserve army. But as the fate of fascism proved, it is impossible to organise a capitalist economy on this basis without catastrophe. In day-to-day struggle, the working class exposes the limits of imperialism’s ability to exclude Polynesian workers from white wages, to keep women in the reserve army, and to provide decent wages for the bulk of white workers. The guerilla struggle for wage increases cannot destroy the basis of the system – only revolution can do that – but it can force the capitalist system to adhere to the historic value of labour-power and act as a brake on tendencies to divide the working class permanently. The conversion of advanced capitalist states into ‘paradises’ for the master race only accelerates their economic and military decline. The accelerated tempo of economic development in political independent states, once relieved of a white ruling class living at the expense of the bulk of the people, goes far to prove the same socially and economically decadent character of racism and colonialism.
The laws of social development of the capitalist economy are social, economic and political, not racial or sexual. Racism and sexism represent reactionary political and social strategies: strategies for dividing the working class and co-opting sections of it in collaboration with the ruling class. When large social strata accept such incentives and privileges as imperialism offers, imperialism must ensure that the working class pays for them. There are limits, however, to imperialism’s ability to increase exploitation to pay for these privileges. These limits are set by the most advanced sections of the proletariat who reject ruling class ideology an the intensified oppression that increased exploitation brings; that is, the black workers against whom the racist ideology of the mainly white labour bureaucracy is directed. What is decisive in this attempt to use racism to perpetuate the splits in the working class, is the extent to which the most oppressed sections of the working class, despite race and sex, reject imperialist ideology, and develop a class conscious struggle against imperialism. As the rate of profit falls, exacerbating the tendency to crisis in the more developed capitalist societies, imperialist super-profits can no longer be utilised to prop up the special privileges of labour aristocracies based on race and sex, even though labour aristocracies will attempt to defend their privileges at the expense of other sectors of the working class.
As our fraternal Australian party, the Communist Left states in its programme, “the revisionist theory of ‘double oppression’ (sometimes treble or quadruple oppression) on racial, national or sex lines, is designed to divert the most oppressed workers from their oppression as wage workers to some other kind of exploitation, usually one denounced by petty bourgeois ideologists. It should be said that for the petty bourgeoisie, this ‘special oppression’ is usually psychological. “It is not the most exploited workers who are only partially exploited as wage slaves,” the programme goes on, “in fact, under capitalism, racism and chauvinism are only made possible by wage slavery.” Under capitalism there is no independent source of exploitation and oppression outside of wage-slavery. [14]
But while there is only one possible source of exploitation and oppression under capitalism, as we have shown, it is the reserve army of ‘cheap labour’ who are the most exploited and oppressed. We have defined super-exploitation as the payment of wages below the costs of reproducing labour-power. In New Zealand both Polynesian and pakeha workers, in different ways, find that the land issues are used to divide them, and to force down wages, directly and indirectly. The existence of ‘nation states’ in the islands is used to casualise and therefore reduce the wages of island workers. Maori populism is used to divert Maori workers away from struggles on the job back to the land. These divisions are used to blind pakeha workers to the need for class unity. At the same time a limited privileged stratum of white workers is bribed (quite openly as in the 1981 Budget) to maintain racist attitudes and split the working class. In all cases, forms of populism, whether Maori or pakeha, introduce a false radicalism into existing class consciousness to prevent the development of a revolutionary class consciousness across race lines.
As we have shown in this pamphlet, Polynesians in the South Pacific were the first proletarians in the area, whose conversion into wage-slaves was a result of the destruction of the Polynesian mode of production and the expropriation of the land. At every point, and in every way, capitalists use and still use competition and racism within the working class to worsen the conditions of Polynesian workers. All competition between different groups of workers, forces wages for all workers down to the advantage of the capitalists. Without wage labour, the division of the working class on race and sex lines would not have the same effect. This historically entrenched division takes the form of special privileges for that section of the white working class ready to abandon class struggle and collaborate with the ruling class, that is, the white labour aristocracy and their representatives, the labour bureaucrats of the trade union leadership.
(7) Maori Nationalism – Real and Fake
To throw off the colonial yoke, all national oppression and all privileges enjoyed by any particular nation or language, is the imperative duty of the proletariat because it brings the socialist revolution closer. But to go beyond these strictly limited and definite historical limits is helping bourgeois nationalism means betraying the proletariat and siding with the bourgeoisie.
“Combat all national oppression? Yes, of course! Fight for any kind of national development, for national culture in general? Of course not… The proletariat, far from undertaking to uphold the national development of every nation, on the contrary warns the masses against such illusions, stand for the fullest freedom of capitalist intercourse and welcomes every kind of assimilation of nations, except tat which is founded on force and privilege.” [15]
So Lenin wrote in his Critical Remarks on the National Question, opposing the reactionary conception of ‘national culture’ with the conception of an international working class and democratic culture.
In her recent Broadsheet articles, Donna Awatere also contrasts ‘national oppression’ with ‘national culture’. She tells us that the basic contradiction in New Zealand is not the “alienation of wage labour” (which we suppose to mean the alienation of wage-labour from the means of production), but “white alienation of our land and white destruction of hat is more important than money, or wage-labour – our culture, Maoritanga.” [16] Here Ms Awatere substitutes for the ‘basic contradiction’ between the forces and relations of production, which we have shown brought about the destruction of the Polynesian mode of production and the proletarianisation of the Maori people, a ‘contradiction’ between white racism and Maoritanga.
This means that so long as Ms Awatere imagines that the basic contradictions of capitalism have nothing to do with the alienation of Maori land, she is abandoning any fight for the Polynesian proletariat. Naturally, in abandoning Marxism for Maoritanga, Ms Awatere also has to repudiate ‘the left’; not just the so-called ‘white left’, but the left in general. Yet although the ‘white left’ she repudiates has suppressed the historic struggle of the Maori proletariat as we have shown, Ms Awatere, too, is diverting the Polynesian proletariat from the class struggle. The Spartacist League, therefore, repudiates both ‘white’ and ‘black’ lefts who abandon Marxism and the working class.
But how far does Ms Awatere support the reactionary concept of ‘cultural nationalism’, a criticism made of her by the Polynesian Panthers which she has yet to answer. In fact, while vociferous about ‘culture’ she is very vague about what ‘nationalism’ she stand for: “Maori sovereignty”, “autonomy” or “reclaiming the land”.
The Maori tradition is a tradition of demanding forms of self-government: the Maori King and his rununga, Kotahitanga, and today, the appropriate form is the Workers’ Council. This tradition is rejected, though the majority of Maori are workers as Ms Awatere knows. Independence, without a definite form of government is unreal – Ms Awatere does not even call for a ‘black government’. Her conception of “Maori Sovereignty” is instead to persuade them that the present endless series of land struggles unwon, and in continued isolation, unwinnable, have some kind of ‘nationalist’ goal and should be intensified. Ms Awatere, far from introducing a new ‘political’ element into Maori struggles, is following a reactionary traditionalism.
It is clear that Ms Awatere uses the term ‘sovereignty’ in an economic sense, referring to reclaiming the land. We ask: how does Ms Awatere wish to reclaim the land? In a recent speech at a Public Service Conference, she said that Maori have to fight for traditional objectives in “pakeha ways”. Among these “pakeha ways” she listed union activity (apparently unaware that unions are a product of capitalism, and while often led by pakehas have large numbers of Maori members). But these “pakeha ways” do not apparently include ‘green bans’, nor struggles such as that at Bastion Point – even as a step by Polynesian workers to regain possession of part of their land. How then will she regain the land? There is no answer. We have a proposal: expropriate the expropriators! But this proposal, it seems, is rejected along with any other ‘left’ solution.
The ‘cultural nationalists’ Lenin attacked fought in their bourgeois way for independence and for protection of their land. Ms Awatere does not. Instead of linking herself to the Maori tradition – those traditions of resistance and struggle which are today being incorporated in an international working class culture wherever workers meet in Aotearoa – she borrows a set of phrases from Pacific peoples’ national liberation movements and from Azania’s Pan African Congress. Not surprisingly, she cannot translate these phrases into a consistent Maori nationalism with its roots in traditional Maori struggle, but instead popularises a petty bourgeois cultural chauvinism. Why is this?
Pacific islands outside Aotearoa have retained their language and most of the land and traditional cultures. Yet they form a group of states almost bankrupt in the world economy. Vanuatu, frequently held to be a good example of a successful ‘national liberation’ has expelled the imperialist master only to invite him in the back door with offers of tax-free investment and other incentives at the expense of the labour-power of the people of Vanuatu. The immiseration of the ‘liberated’ Pacific peoples reaches levels that would be intolerable in Aotearoa, but in Ms Awatere’s terms they have their culture, so what does the alienation (read starvation) of labour-power matter? This is where cultural nationalism leads.
Donna Awatere and Ripeka Evans are familiar with these islands and their leaders. They frequently attend international conferences of nationalist leaders in the Pacific. In her Broadsheet articles, Ms Awatere seems to identify with bureaucrats when she says that the conference on the Public Service in a multicultural society “produced an impressive collection of people who would be acknowledged as leaders by the Maori people themselves”. Here affinity with the Pacific leaders also reflects her social position as a Maori professional earning far more than the unemployed or part-employed Maori proletarian, a position of social privilege which she shares with Pacific island leaders outside Aotearoa. The social position which tends to produce a rejection of the working class also provides Ms Awatere’s “tools of analysis”: the psychological techniques used in measuring “white hatred” and “white paranoia”.
For example, Ms Awatere’s account of workers in a capitalist city – Auckland – a phenomenon written about by Engels in his Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, is psychologising in its most extreme ideological form. In early capitalist England, the proletarian sections of the city were always the worst, the middle class refused to live in those areas. The most class conscious proletarians, who lived in these areas, were Irish migrant workers who experienced both national and class oppression. Yet Ms Awatere invents her pyschological ‘explanations’ for a class phenomenon documented as such for more than a century. What is her reason for such deception? Even with her bourgeois professional credentials as a psychologist, she will not convince Maori workers, who are all too conscious that their situation is directly caused by lack of money and not white racism. (It is a curious “white hatred” that can determine property values with such precision).
Such populist psychologising does however, influence those white liberals whose economic interests are served by a psychological rather than class analysis of racism. Liberals who can be ‘blamed’ for racism, whose guilt feelings are manipulated by Ms Awatere, and who accept their ‘responsibility’ to fight their personal racism. As Ms Awatere abandons the other Polynesian peoples, abandons the feminists, and abandons the ‘left’, who has she got as allies but the white liberals and their guilt complexes? Side by side with Ms Awatere at meetings and conferences sit clerical advocates of ‘racial harmony’ – National Council of Churches education officers on racism. Churches remain throughout Polynesia, a major white racist influence on the Polynesian proletariat. In her articles, Ms Awatere does not attack these phonies and the “opiate of the people”. Her seminars on ‘confronting racism’ are full of rich white liberals made to fell ‘uncomfortable’ but without challenging their support of a white ruling class which exploits Polynesian labour-power. The Polynesian proletariat will wait forever for emancipation if they have to wait for whites to ‘confront racism’. Racism will be smashed when the white ruling class is smashed. In this a Polynesian vanguard of the working class can take a lead.
(8) Proletarian vs bourgeois culture
Capitalism attempts to obliterate the culture of all indigenous peoples by commercialising and trivialising what it cannot physically destroy, and by reducing the cultural level of the worker to that of the non-unionised factory – to barbarism. In resistance to capitalism, international working class culture takes all the revolutionary elements of traditional cultures and fuses them together as the ideological weapons of the world’s workers. The Maori wars, Maori resistance to conscription, the May Rebellion, the Tahitian uprising against the French – all these live on in the world proletarian culture to inspire and further the Polynesian socialist revolution. International working class culture has absorbed and will continue to absorb far more from Polynesian culture than from crass Ango-Saxon empiricism, sterile emotional withdrawal and pacifism.
Phrases like ‘Maori culture’ and ‘international working class culture’ are not mere abstractions. In Aotearoa, there is an international working class, a class consisting of pakehas and Polynesians from Aotearoa and other island states. The Maori culture of the past which survives is the culture which is remembered now by Maori workers on job sites and passed on to their mates; the culture which they remember when they are on a long, bitter strike and recall past records of courage, endurance and fortitude, which inspires other workers as it inspires Maori workers. Rewi Maniapoto at Orakau is now remembered by many workers who are not of Maori ancestry but are in the class struggle together with Maori comrades. Maori culture too, links Maori workers with other Polynesian workers: Polynesian languages are used to beat the boss, to attack his exploitation or discuss industrial tactics in a language he does not understand. Difference groups of Polynesian workers find their struggles against imperialism have been part of a common struggle. The Maori tradition of community now maintains a closer union solidarity than pakehas can achieve.
Against this living Maori culture absorbed with other cultures into a common stock of ideological weaponry needed to fight bosses and to survive as workers in day-to-day industrial work and conflict, there is a dead Maori culture, a culture from and remaining in the past, with no relevance to where the Maori people are now, which tries to isolate them, and keep them apart from other workers, allowing the pakeha ruling class to smash the Maori people by dividing them from their allies.
The praise of “cultural treasures’ of indigenous peoples is not restricted to black radical. De Wit Wel, the South African Minister of Bantu Affairs and Development said in 1959:
“…there is something…which binds people, and that is their spiritual treasures, the cultural treasure of a people. It is those things which have united other nations in the world. That is why we say that the basis of our approach is that the Bantu, too, will be linked together by traditional and emotional bonds, by their own language, their own culture, their national possessions…” [17]
Apartheid and Bantustans are at the end of the road of “cultural” or “spiritual” autonomy! While this is clear to South African apologists for apartheid, it escapes white radicals in New Zealand. The Republican applauded Ripeka Evans’ speech as the first clear statement of “Marxist spiritualism”, reinforcing the black radicals’ abandonment of Marxism for Maoritanga.[18]
Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations, saw fascism’s role as rendering politics aesthetic, while “communism responds by politicising art”.[19] His understanding of the reactionary implications of making politics ‘cultural’ still expressed the perspective of Leninism. “Cultural treasures” writes Benjamin are the spoils of wars between ruling classes which owe their origin not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries – in Maori society, all those who could not claim to be an ariki or a rangatira.
“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.” [20]
Maori culture as it is now consists of the spoils of war which the white ruling class has plundered. Historical materialism, on the contrary, wishes to retain that image of the Polynesian past which unexpectedly appears to the Polynesian worker in crisis, singled out by history at the moment of danger. That danger affects both the content of Polynesian tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every area the attempt must be made anew to wrest Polynesian tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Only that militant: “will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the [Polynesian] past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And that enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”[21]
The Maori people, at this stage of their history, have become proletarians. Their self-determination mans the emancipation of the working class. It is both utopian and reactionary, in this context, to move backwards in history for a vague goal of a classless ‘autonomy’. The Maori people from where they are now in the working class must reclaim a culture which the pakeha ruling class is trying to bury in order to judge what is living and what is dead within it. Capitalism is trying to destroy Maori culture before it can make the contribution it should to international working class culture. It tries to erase from history the Maori victories in the land wars, the successes in military tactics, their declarations of independence from imperialist rule, their economic achievements, their community feeling extending over all areas of life, their revolts against pakeha religion, their history as workers.
Maori culture, unlike other Polynesian cultures, and certainly unlike pakeha culture, requires effort to reclaim from commercialism and pakeha philistinism. Marxists recognise that the present revival of the Maori people demands a re-discovery of their culture and their history, and that Maori workers without links to their culture, and the pride and independence that go with such links, will have nothing of their own to contribute to working class culture, and so will fail to find their destined place in the class vanguard. A new consciousness of Maori identity is necessary if the conquest of power by the working class is to be the final historic realisation of the Maori national struggle.
Over Maori culture, hermetically sealed from the present and cut off from the working class, however, hangs the spectre of the disintegration of other Polynesian cultures which have been turned into state institutions by ‘independent’ Polynesian governments. Albert Wendt has written of this in one of his most biting poems: [22]
The faa-samoa is perfect, they sd
From behind cocktail bars like pulpits
…
and we all have alofa
for one another, they sd
drown me in your alofa, then, I sd
…
their imported firstclass whisky
was alove with corpses: my uncle
and his army of hungry kids,
malnutritioned children in dirty wards,
an old woman begging in the bank,
my generation migrating overseas
for jobs, while politicians
and merchants brag obesely
in the RSA, and pastors bang
out sermons about the obedient
and righteous life – aiafu
all growing fat in
a blind man’s paradise
(9) Whose Right to Self-Determination?
The logic of petty-bourgeois “cultural nationalism” is to struggle for the suppression of other nationalities. On this question, Ms Awatere in her one sympathetic reference to a Marxist thinker, manages to turn poor Gramsci on his head.[23] While Gramsci understood the need to make Marxism a hegemonic ideology, Ms Awatere wants to make Maoritanga a hegemonic ideology. Where Gramsci saw the need for class alliances to this end, Ms Awatere substitutes for alliances, ultimatums, in the best left sectarian tradition. These ultimatums are enforced, not by ideological arguments, but by threats of future repression.
The reactionary character of the struggle for ‘cultural autonomy’ which displaces class struggle, is shown by Ms Awatere’s attack on ‘multiculturalism’. Petty bourgeois nationalists, whether on the cultural or political level always, when in power, oppress other nationalities, but Ms Awatere argues for the suppression of other national cultures before she has any power! It is all too clear how cheap talk of oppression is when it goes hand in hand with threats of repression [24] It is not the theory of the “four oppressions” that is important for cultural chauvinists but the theory of the “four repressions” – Samoa, Cook Islands, Niue and Tonga, the four island groups whose culture is represented in Aotearoa. In disallowing other Polynesian cultures ‘rights’ in Aotearoa, Maori chauvinists limit the right to self-determination to those ‘homelands’ within the South Pacific designated as ‘nations’ by the colonial master.
However, Ms Awatere and other chauvinists are not alone in the advocacy of cultural repression. The Socialist Action League (SAL) in their youth paper Rebel, ‘raise’ this suppression from the cultural to the political level with their demand for a “bi-national state” – Polynesians whose ‘homelands’ are outside Aotearoa will not doubt (as now) be deported.[25] The Spartacist League, in part of its 1970 programme commenting on the SAL’s “Maori Programme”, pointed out to it that Polynesian islands outside Aotearoa existed and that people from such islands were in the working class too.[26] Neither reality nor political debate over the ensuing twelve years have brought them to realise these facts. Like Ms Awatere, the Socialist Action League also depart from the Maori tradition in failing to give any definite form to their demand for a bi-national state. But unlike Ms Awatere, they do at least discuss political issues, however abstractly and wrongly.
Rebel contends that “Maori workers are called upon to fulfill two historic tasks” 1) leading the Maori people in their fight to end their oppression as a people. 2) leading the working class as a whole to overthrow capitalist rule and the institution of a workers’ and farmers’ government to achieve socialism. We have argued in this pamphlet that these two goals are not separate, but identical. To pose them separately is to adhere to a Stalinist two-stage theory of revolutionary change. If, however, two stages are really necessary, what is the content of the first stage? Rebel does not raise directly the issue of ‘national independence’ (we will discuss later what this might mean), rather, it supports “full national equality” between Maori and pakeha and the “right of Maori people to live under whatever political, social and economic forms they choose.”!
It would appear that the pakeha revolutionaries who dominate the SAL will twist and turn in every direction to avoid commitment to the real meaning of the right to self-determination: the Maori right to secede from pakeha New Zealand if they so choose. If SAL supports ‘national independence’ as a first step to socialism, it should say so plainly. If not, it should also make that plain. Certainly the Rebel document is so convoluted it can in no way lay the basis for a Marxist programme, either for a ‘bi-national state’ or for international workers’ power in Polynesia.
If the Maori people as a whole decided to break away from pakeha New Zealand, and form their own black government of Aotearoa – and no organised group has yet raised this demand – the Spartacist League would support them. While the Spartacist League is not a nationalist party, it uncompromisingly opposes all national oppression and all privilege based on race and nationality. If national and racial exploitation becomes intensified to the point where Maori are forced to set up their own state, revolutionary black and white workers will fight for that state’s establishment.
In the Maori movement the demand has already been raised for a black government. Ms Awatere is afraid of it: the SAL is afraid of it; the Spartacist League is not. Whether in the context of a black or a multiracial government in Aotearoa, the Spartacist League will argue for workers’ councils as the form of government to replace the existing racist and capitalist state, and the incorporation of such a government of Aotearoa in a socialist united states of Polynesia. If the demand for a black government is raised by the majority of the Maori people, their secession will form part of a movement to socialist revolution.
It is possible for a ‘black nationalism’ to come to power in Aotearoa, in the sense that a black comprador bourgeoisie have come to power in other Polynesian islands. Although we see those ‘black nationalism’ as now totally economically subordinated to white racist New Zealand – the Bantustans of Muldoon’s imperialist labour policy- we support those islands’ achievement of political independence; but we wish to make political independence more of a reality, through socialist internationalism. ‘Black nationalism’ instead of socialism, has been secured in the less developed islands of Polynesia because of the undeveloped character of the working class in these islands.
Such a situation, however, does not exist in Aotearoa. But, if Andersen’s expulsion of Maori workers from working class organisations was intensified, and the white ruling class and white labour bureaucracy combined to force the vast majority of Polynesian workers into the reserve army of labour, we should then support declassed Black Nationalists movements by trying to win working class support for them. At present, though, the forms of ‘black nationalism’ which are dominant represent the ideological pressure of a Maori petty bourgeoisie on the Polynesian proletariat. While we do not wholly oppose such movements – they are an important and probably unavoidable first step in the political re-awakening of Polynesian workers, which in the absence of a strong Marxist movement, must inevitably take a populist form – we show their real class character, and demonstrate that their progressive tendencies result from their proletarian composition, and not their petty bourgeois leadership.
If Aotearoa were open to free migration from other Pacific islands, the proletarians entering Auckland and other cities to find work would increase the size of the Polynesian proletariat. The ruling class and its National and Labour Party hacks fear nothing more than a black majority in Aotearoa – as the panic reaction to the Privy Council decision to grant New Zealand citizenship to some Samoan citizens showed. Numbers alone do not add up to fundamental political and economic change, as in the case of Azania, but the white ruling class’s response to a growing Polynesian proletariat would be to turn to even greater racist repression than at present. Such repression, would inevitably spur a united internationalist working class to take power for all working people.
The perspective of a black majority in a Socialist Polynesia is the perspective of the Spartacist League alone. The history of the proletarianisation of the Polynesian people must and should end with Polynesian working people who earn wages in Aotearoa controlling that country, along with pakeha workers. It is for these reasons that we demand that Samoans choose whether or not they wish to retain New Zealand citizenship; the end to all racist immigration laws which discriminate against non-Europeans; and equality of all Polynesian languages along with English as official languages.
(10) Land Struggles
Bastion Point is one of many struggles to regain land for the Maori people, lost to Europeans or the state. The attitude of Marxists to such struggles is determined by their understanding that the expropriation of Maori land is inevitable under capitalism. Survivals of the Polynesian mode of production were, are, and will be forcibly expropriated by pakeha capitalists (for example, for forestry), unless in the fight against expropriation, elements of a new, socialist mode of production emerge side by side with (or even combining with) survivals of earlier modes of production.
Donna Awatere, in a recent speech, emphasised that such combined forms of fightback are emerging, when she spoke of defending traditional Maori society in all possible ‘pakeha’ ways (by ‘pakeha’ in this context, she meant working class). In the Bastion Point take, the Auckland Trades Council placed a green ban on development of the site, effectively threatening industrial action to keep control of the site in Maori workers’ hands. The capitalist economy divided the Ngati-whatua by offers of money over the last century, with many Maori succumbing to offers of ready cash for land. Now the tribe is split in two, with a group of reactionaries under the bourgeois professor Kawharu who say Bastion Point land is the government’s because if was “sold” – abandoning traditional Maori rights in the ‘sacred’ name of capitalist private property – while others, led by Joe Hawke, reject the sales in the name of traditional Maori claims.
If Bastion Point land reverts to Maori ownership and control, it will not be to Kawharu (who would either refuse to accept it or re-sell it) but to a section of the tribe supporting Joe Hawke. In the struggle against land sales – which effectively means capitalist property relations – economic sanctions have split the tribe, and divided it on political lines, so that those who will regain the land when Muldoon is defeated will be those Maori workers who are opposed to private property (whether they see themselves primarily as such or not). Capitalism has successfully split the tribe, and the more militant the struggle for land rights – themselves a traditional Maori claim – the deeper that split goes, polarising the traditional hapu or tribe and politicising its members, so that it is not finally the traditional tribe, but a working class vanguard, which expropriates the expropriators, with the aid of industrial action.
Bastion Point, as a relatively advanced struggle in an urban context, illustrates processes at work in all land struggles. In any take of this kind, Marxists support most Maori land claims as first steps in a class struggle for land nationalisation, not endorsing all traditional claims, but bringing into the open the (usually hidden) class character of the struggle. Most struggles to retain or regain Maori land are seen by the Spartacist League as workers’ struggles against private property in land and are supported as such. We call for total working class unity in such issues, white racist pakeha bureaucrats representing the labour aristocracy (and middle class) such as Andersen, and ‘professional people’ advocating black seperatism equally help the pakeha governments and ruling class by fragmenting class unity.
It will be proved in practice who really supports Maori land struggles. The Stalinist Andersen (of the so-called Socialist Unity Party) has shown that Stalinism, the attempt to link white racist chauvinism with a phoney ‘Marxism’ made by the Russian misleader Stalin, necessarily means racism and the disruption and splitting of land struggle in Aotearoa. Equally, ‘middle class’ black nationalists have shown that they phoney ‘Marxism’ which separates the land struggle from the class struggle results in the splitting of the land struggles along national and racist lines. For the Spartacist League, the land struggle is the best practical demonstration of the disastrous results of the fake positions adopted on the issue of racism by the white and black ‘left’ in New Zealand. The struggle for land nationalisation can be won if the land issue is not separated from the struggle for workers’ control and expropriation of the factories, the banks and the state power.
Rural and urban land struggles can only be resolved by nationalisation of land under a workers’ and small farmers’ government; Maoris forming what is probably the majority of working farmers not employing hired labour. The Spartacist League Programme for agriculture applies most particularly to Maori on the land.
(11) Mana Motuhake
As the Labour Party under Rowling has moved steadily to the right – as the Spartacist League predicted in 1970 – its ties to the trades unions under threat, the Maori proletariat reacted to this rightward shift first, and most strongly, when Matiu Rata split from Labour to form Mana Motuhake. This split however, generally resulted from a wrong assessment of the reasons for Labour’s degeneration. It is therefore doomed to repeat Labour’s failures. At one level, Mana Motuhake exists as an alternative Labour Party for Maori voters in an area of work were Labour’s party organisation has never been strong. It is a predominantly parliamentary party, against the bias of the Maori proletarian tradition, but has yet to gain a single parliamentary seat. It has failed to make any appeal to non-Maori workers against Labour’s betrayal of the working class as a whole, and it has also failed to gain the support of Maori cultural radicals. It has considerable support from a Maori intelligentsia, which is in most ways unrepresentative of the Maori proletariat.
On crucial issues such as Te Tiriti o Waitangi, it is divided. It has failed to win support on the basis of a clear programme, instead relying on the traditional rotten ground of ‘Maori politics’, loose diplomatic alliances of tribal and religious groupings. As such Mana Motuhake can only be an unstable and transitional formation, though it is transitional from the Labour Party toward revolutionary Marxists positions. Within Mana Motuhake, therefore, the Spartacist League gives critical support to those elements moving to the left, toward direct action, and opposition to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. ‘Critical support’ however, must recognise that there is at present no wing of Mana Motuhake that is in any sense consciously Marxist, and that understands the position of the Maori people as proletarian. Such a consciousness can develop among the rank-and-file of the Mana Motuhake left. We support for this reason, the present democratic demands being raised by this grouping and try to carry them further.
(12) For a Socialist Polynesia
From the history of the rise of the New Zealand bourgeoisie, a chapter is missing that was, in Europe, the opening chapter of the history of capitalism: the struggle against imperialism. That chapter is missing from its history, for the New Zealand white settler bourgeoisie always too dependent on imperialism to oppose it, relied on imperialism to suppress the King Movement; and to colonise Polynesian people elsewhere in the Pacific. Independence struggles in the Pacific were not begun by the bourgeoisie, but by Polynesian people. The New Zealand bourgeoisie, therefore, became mainly a comprador bourgeoisie, lacking either political or economic independence from imperialism. As the pressure of the USA forced an unwilling New Zealand toward de-colonisation in the Pacific – to aid continued direct US colonialism – designed to promote more, not less, political and economic dependence, Polynesian ‘bourgeoisies’ emerged, black petty bourgeois compradors for a New Zealand comprador bourgeoisie.
The extremely small scale of local capitalism in Polynesia intensified the colonial character of exploitation of small capital outside New Zealand by relatively large New Zealand capital, itself dominated by Britain, the USA or Japan (most usually by Britain, the most backward major imperialist state). The growth of state bureaucracies outside Aotearoa took on a colonial character also. The unwillingness of white labour bureaucracies to challenge the colonial character of New Zealand’s economic development derives from the same uncritical acceptance of imperialism’ domination of ‘foreign’ workers by colonialism, and led to the purely ‘economist’ character of the struggles of the labour movement.
The failure of the New Zealand bourgeoisie to develop beyond comprador status led and still leads to the extreme industrial underdevelopment of New Zealand. Small-scale secondary industry vulnerable to every world depression, developed as an ancillary to a state-supported agriculture which was bound hand and foot to the British market, British shipping lines and British freezing company and stock and station agency capital. The lack of large-scale industry held back the formation of a strong multi-racial working class, and ‘big labour’ which successive which successive governments from Balance to Muldoon, have feared as their worst enemy. The relatively privileged position of agriculture tied New Zealand to a dependence on British imperialism for more than a century, and allowed the New Zealand ruling class a ‘Polynesian empire’, while at the same time held back the intensification of class war in an underdeveloped economy.
The failure of the New Zealand bourgeoisie to win its independence from imperialism – so as to facilitate its plans of annexation and expropriation in Polynesia – naturally means that the bureaucracies manipulated by New Zealand imperialism adapt state apparatuses created by colonialism. Where New Zealand can no longer export a white capitalist ruling class, it creates a block comprador bureaucracy. What this means in the epoch of imperialism, is that oppressed national peoples, imprisoned in imperialist chains as workers or poor peasants, can achieve their ‘national liberation’ only in the vanguard of the international socialist revolution, which alone can strike these chains from the working people.
————————————————————————————————————————
Reprinted and put on our website in February 2004. Some editorial notes [in square brackets] have been added to explain obscure references.
First published by Spartacist League of New Zealand [SLNZ] in September 1982. The SLNZ was a 1972 split from the NZ Spartacist League formed on the basis of its 1970 Programme. Members of the SLNZ moved to Australia and formed the Communist Left of Australia on the basis of its Programme of 1975. CLA puts out the paper RED. Its website is www.geocities.com/communistleft/
The SLNZ became the Communist Left of NZ in 1984, fused with Worker’s Power in 1992, splitting in 1995 to form the Communist Workers’ Group of NZ. CWGNZ puts out Class Struggle bi-monthly. Its website is http://www.redrave.blogspot.com
NOTES
[1] See in particular, Sutch’s Quest for Security in New Zealand. Sinclair, in his A History of New Zealand, accepts Sutch’s account of Marx’s view of the Wakefield system in order to attack Marxism.
[2] A. Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (which includes comments by Charles Bettelheim, and E. Mandel, Late Capitalism.
[3] For a description of the characteristics of the Polynesian Mode of Production see M. Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, Cambridge, p 112 etc.
[4] See the discussion of the peasant mode of production in D.Bedggood, Rich and Poor in New Zealand. And on the ‘combination’ of modes of production, see J.McRae and D.Bedggood, ‘The Evolution of Capitalism in New Zealand’, Red Papers, No.3.
[5] H. Wolpe, ‘Capitalism and Cheap labour-power in South Africa: from segregation to Apartheid’, in Economy and Society, 1 (4), 1972, p 434. See also R.Davies, ‘Mining Capital, the State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa’, in Journal of South African Studies, 3 (2), April, 1977, p50-51.
[6] See Workers Communist League Manifesto, November 1980. Also Unity, July 1982,
[7] Witches, Bitches and Dykes. Vol 1 (4), November, 1981, p 20-21.
[8] “A statement on the attempt by white leftists to divide Pacific peoples”. Reprinted along with other material on the eviction of the Polynesian Resource Centre in The Republican, No 41, July 1982.
[9] That one of their number at least now recognises she is not a Marxist, is admitted by Donna Awatere in the Auckland Star, 7-9-82
[10] [page 932 in Chapter 33 in the penguin edition of Capital. Marx uses the example of Mr Peel who took his money and machines to the Swan River region of Western Australia where he bought land but could not obtain ‘free’ labourers. “Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English social relations of production to Swan River!” p. 933]
[11] Greenwood, The Upraised Hand, or, The Spiritual Significance of the Rise of the Ringatu Faith. P. 54
[12] Tony Simpson, Te Riri Pakeha. P 227-8
[13] Peter Gibbons, Oxford History of New Zealand. First edition. p. 313
[14] Programme of the Communist Left of Australia. 1975 p 2-4
[15] Collected Works, Volume 20, page 35
[16] Broadsheet, June, and October. No 101 and 103, 1982.
[17] Quoted in H. Wolpe, Economy and Society, Vol. 1 (4), 1972.
[18] Editorial, The Republican, No 40, May 1982.
[19] Fontana/Collins 1982 Pages 243-244.
[20] Ibid 258-259
[21] Illuminations, p 257.
[22] “The Faa-Samoa is Perfect, They Sd” From Inside us the Dead. Longman 1976
[23] Broadsheet, October 1982
[24] Rebecca Evans, in Broadsheet, October 1982, rejects Samoan claims to New Zealand citizenship and tell them to “fuck off”.
[25] Young Socialist Rebel, ‘liftout’ May 1982
[26] Socialist Action’s reply to the Workers Communist League, August 13 and 17th 1982, doesn’t add anything to the Rebel article.
On the Domestic Mode of Production
The past two decades has seen the women’s movement move to the right and split into numerous fragments. Why has the position of most women remained subordinate to that of men? Is this simply discrimination, the result of male biology, or the reproduction of women as a class of domestic producers? I argue here that any attempt to reduce women’s oppression to biology, politics, ideology or exchange-based economics, trivialises oppression and dooms most women to permanent domestic slavery. Alternatively, the concept of the Domestic Mode of Production is a means of theorising women’s historic subordination and advancing the struggle towards the goal of future emancipation. Materials available on the struggle over the historic subordination of women during the colonisation of the Pacific and Australasia can be used in an attempt to test the explanatory power of the Domestic Mode.
[Reprinted from Gender and Development Volume 2, eds, BN Ghosh and PK Chopra, Wisdom House, Leeds, 2002]
1. WHAT’S THE QUESTION?
The position of women today can be viewed from a number of standpoints. Conservative feminists defend the position of women as natural and ‘different’ rather than unequal [Paglia, 1993]. As a deviant form of neo-liberal feminism, post-modern feminism celebrates identity and diversity without taking responsibility for the universal ‘exclusion’ of the majority of women [Butler, 1990; c.f. Webster, 1993]. For example, Yeatman [1995; 1998] claims that neo-liberalism has opened up the possibility of eliminating the paternalist state.
Liberal feminists applaud the ‘gains’ of the second wave of feminism, and despite the resistance of the gender gap to change, argue that it is open to future reforms in liberal democracy once the paternalist state is overrun with women. In New Zealand, Waring [1989] solves the problem by ‘valuing’ domestic labour. James and Saville-Smith [1994] solve the problem by legislating against the cult of domesticity. Yet the evidence shows that much more elementary reforms have failed to advance the majority of women significantly from a position of subordination [Mies, 1986]. So what is the problem?
The radical feminists’ answer is that the gender gap goes much deeper than re-educating males. Radical feminists make short shrift of post-modern feminism.[1] Male domination of females is historically universal, is rooted in our biological origins or psychological makeup and/or sustained by men’s power over women. Thus radical feminists have an account for the success of some women, but only as ‘honourary’ males at the expense of the continued subordination of most women. The fate of most women then hinges on their ability to overturn male power over women. Put to the test this would seem to be an ill-fated strategy if men indeed have an ultimate biological drive to dominate women. An explanation of oppression that reduces to biology is ultimately incapable of generating a politics of social transformation. [Bell and Klein, 1996].
Socialist or marxist feminists’ attempt to account for the reform-resistant gender gap, but without falling into the trap of assuming a fatalistic universal male drive to dominate women. Socialist feminists argue that women’s position in capitalist society stems from their historic subordination as domestic labourers. The ‘overthrow’ of women occurred historically as men seized the opportunity to control women’s labour and extract surplus labour to turn into their private property. Therefore, if men came to dominate women historically to appropriate their supplies-labour it is necessary to stop this appropriation to end women’s subordination as domestic labourers!
Most socialist feminists recognise that ‘exploitation’ of women as domestic labourers is the primary cause of gender discrimination in the capitalist wage-labour market explaining why women make up a disproportionately part of the reserve army of labour. But they don’t all agree on how to bring an end to both forms of exploitation. Some argue after Marx and Engels that capitalism will socialise domestic labour and bring greater equality with men in the wage-labour market so that both genders can unite as workers to overthrow capitalism [Stone, 1996].
Others argue from a materialist feminist standpoint against the identity politics of ludic/pomo feminism that celebrates difference, that post-fordist flexible accumulation means a worsening of women’s oppression.[2] Still others argue that domestic labour is necessary for capital, and that women’s struggle to escape domestic slavery must also fight against their position in the reserve army of labour.[3] This poses the question: what is the relationship of domestic labour to capitalism? Which theoretical standpoint – liberal, radical, socialist or marxist – looks best after a test?
2. A TEST CASE: ‘SPEAKING ABOUT RAPE’
In the late 1980′s a debate blew up in Australia over who should ‘speak’ for Aboriginal people. Diane Bell a white radical feminist and Topsy Napurrula Nelson an Aboriginal woman from Central Australia spoke out about the high incidence of rape of Aboriginal women by Aboriginal men [1989]. They also claimed that middle class feminists and activists were silent on this abuse while women’s refuges and rape crisis centres that were “modelled on Aboriginal women’s traditional use of social space” were meeting an immediate need.
Shortly after this there appeared an open letter attacking Bell’s right to speak for Aboriginals, Nelson’s right to speak at all on this issue, and their advocacy of traditional solutions to the problem, signed by 12 prominent educated, Aboriginal activists led by Jackie Huggins [Huggins et. al. 1990]. It accused Bell of “creating divisions within the ‘Aboriginal Community’, of appropriating Topsy Nelson’s voice by citing her as ‘co-author’ rather than ‘informant’, of exhibiting white imperialism, and of exercising middle-class privilege. As Bell [1996] points out, the authors regarded her as racist and sexist for speaking on behalf of Aborigines, and made no mention of the issue of intra-Aboriginal rape.
What had happened was the Bell was being scape-goated for a widely held view among Aboriginal women that rape had to be stopped by empowering Aboriginal women. The Aboriginal activists saw this as a white feminist blaming Aboriginal men who were the victims of white racism. It is true that historically white feminists have been implicated in the white racism that virtually destroyed Aboriginal society and subordinated Aboriginal women to Aboriginal men. But Bell in speaking of the need to restore the autonomy of Aboriginal women against racism, was at the same time attempting to deal with sexism as an effect of this history. This surely is a first step to overcoming the destructive gender divisions that prevent Aboriginal men and women from jointly fighting racism itself [Bell and Nelson, 1989; c.f. Yeatman, 1993; c.f. McGrath 1995a: 388].
The problem with both positions is that in dealing with effects they have lost sight of the fundamental root cause of both racism and sexism in Australasia. Racism was introduced into Australasia by white settlers imbued with a sense of historic mission as the carriers of a superior civilisation. But this ideology was that of British imperialism justifying its conquest of indigenous peoples and invasion of ‘new lands’ [Wolfe, 1999]. What united the settlers across class lines was their expectation that they would all benefit from the rent extracted from the land when combined with capital and labour [Steven, 1985]. Aboriginals and Maori, if they survived and became assimilated as civilised human beings, would become landless labourers in the new capitalist economy – that is wage-workers [Bedggood, 1978].
In both Aboriginal and Maori society the old social order was largely destroyed. As the land was taken the kinship basis of the social relations was undercut and the gender division of labour undermined. Where gender autonomy had existed, indigenous women now became subordinated to white settler society, were abused by white men, and in turn their own men. Sexism in Aboriginal and Maori society was introduced by a racist and sexist culture that accompanied capitalist colonisation. The widespread abuse of women (and children) by Aboriginal and Maori men is therefore the result of colonisation and can only be reversed by decolonisation [Bedggood, 1980].
Therefore it is possible to speak about the rape of those marginalised by colonisation provided one is prepared to remove the root cause. If one speaks for Aborigines as Bell does but only against male rape, then one is stuck in a liberal feminism that reproduces racism, sexism and classism. If one speaks for Aborigines as Jackie Huggins does but only against racism then one is stuck in reformist anti-capitalism that continues to reproduce racism, sexism and classism. But if one speaks for the marginalised indigenous peoples as a revolutionary anti-capitalist, committed to decolonisation by means of a working class revolution, then one does not reproduce racism, sexism or classism, but tries to end it.
In other words, as this test case has revealed, if one opposes rape by attacking its class roots, then it is possible to unite the struggles against sexism, racism and classism into one revolutionary struggle against capitalism itself. But to make this point is to argue for the view that sexism is ultimately caused by class. To do this convincingly it will be necessary to go back to the beginnings of gender oppression in history. For to prove that gender oppression had an historic class origin is to prove that it can have an historic classless ending.
3. THE QUESTION OF ORIGINS
Each of the feminist standpoints attempts to solve the problem of women’s oppression in its own way. But none can succeed without explaining first the original causes of women’s oppression as unpaid domestic labourers. Without such knowledge there can be no real attempt to remove those causes and bring about women’s liberation. This makes the question of ‘origins’ important. Unlike those who argue against such an approach [Delphy, 1984; Connell, 1983] I suggest that if we cannot explain the origins of the material bases of women’s oppression how can we identify the causes and eliminate them?
So if liberal feminism cannot explain the persistence of gender inequality; if radical feminism cannot prove the universality of gender inequality; if socialist feminism and marxist feminism cannot convince us that gender inequality will be eliminated by a successful socialist revolution, then it is necessary to question each of these standpoints on the issue of ‘origins’ and come up with the answer to the historic ‘woman question’ and a programme for ‘women’s liberation’.
Is marxist analysis up to the task of solving the great mystery of the ‘missing link’ in history i.e. the origins of the material basis of women’s oppression? How do we explain the anomaly that the family is not part of capitalist mode of production as such, yet unpaid domestic labour is a vital source of ‘non-valued’ goods and services for the capitalist economy. Could it be that ‘non-valued’ production, originating outside capitalism– an ‘added’ ingredient to capitalist production – is a vital ‘subsidy’ to capital accumulation?[Mies, 1986] What is this source of unpaid domestic labour? What are its historical origins, its development and its future?
For those who do seek and answer to the question of origins, radical feminists, socialist feminists and Marxist feminists invoke the evidence of the historic roots of women’s oppression by a ‘patriarchy’ in pre-capitalist society. The radical argument is the least satisfactory. Consider for example, Lacan/Kristeva’s attempts to turn biological universals into psychological universals based on the Oedipus complex [Cornell and Thurschwell, 1987; Connell, 1983]. Appeals to biological universals (with psychoanalytic derivations) cannot explain women’s oppression, its origins or changing forms, and is ultimately idealist [Kuhn and Wolpe, 1978]. This is because it advances an a-historical abstracted ideological effect of women’s’ oppression (e.g. women as negativity) as the root cause of that oppression.
If oppression cannot be explained by genetic (or linguistic) universals –male power or sexuality –without contradicting the anthropological evidence and lapsing into idealism, then it must be explained by historically specific conditions i.e. the emergence of a gender inequality. Thus both socialist feminists and marxist feminists link the origins of gender inequality to the rise of class society or capitalism. Women’s subordination is seen as a by-product of class exploitation, though it is not reducible to it. However, socialist feminists and marxist feminists are divided over the concept of social class.
Socialist feminists are usually neo-ricardian feminists who see classes as distributional phenomena, struggling over the shares of national income, of wages versus profits. For them, the capitalist class “rips-off” profits by underpaying wages. In the same way, women are kept in the home doing unpaid domestic labour by a male patriarchy. Class may be defined as relations of production where surplus labour is deducted, but in practice this becomes a matter of ‘unequal exchange’ that relies not on complex reproduction of modes of production, but male power and authority [Delphy and Leonard, 1992]. As always, such an exchange analysis backslides into reformism so that progressive legislation can ‘re-educate’ males, equalise exchange, and return a full and fair wage to wage-labour as well as to house-workers. So socialist feminists join with liberals in the campaign for wages for housework [Connell, 1983; Waring, 1989].
Marxist feminists, on the other hand, define class in terms of historically specific relations of production. Some Marxists reduce class society to capitalist private property [Adamson et.al 1976]. Most say that class society precedes capitalism [Engels, 1976: Leacock, 1972]. But this creates a problem for Marxists. How can a persistent historical gender gap that survives under capitalism be explained as an add-on ‘after-effect’ of other modes or classes? Marxists normally conceive of capitalist class exploitation as the primary source of oppression. This is because wage-labour is ‘forced’ to work for wages and be subordinated to the labour process in order to live. Other forms of oppression such as gender, race and sexual orientation are secondary to wage-labour oppression. They arise as an effect of wage-labour and are not a condition of wage-labour itself. In other words, wage-labour does not require gender, racial or sexual oppression, though these forms of oppression facilitate the reproduction of wage-labour. The usual way of putting this is to say that capitalism is ‘gender blind’. This surely means then, that women’s oppression is secondary to, even if derived from, economic class oppression. What are the political implications of this?
In the case of class, oppression results from wage-labour itself and from the use of state power to enforce wage-labour/capital relationship. For example, the capitalist state helps to create private property by dispossessing labourers of their means of subsistence, and reproduces the wage-labour/capital relationship by protecting private property. Oppression is therefore, logically, a means to the end of class exploitation. This means then, that class oppression can only be ended with the end of class exploitation.
With secondary forms of oppression this does not follow. Such oppression is not necessary to the constitution or reproduction of the wage-labour/capital relation. Gender oppression is not fundamental to capitalist class society. This is paralleled in the liberal view that ‘racism, sexism and classism’ can be reformed out of existence without overthrowing capitalist social relations. Or, in the radical view, such oppressions are separate from ‘class’ and can persist despite the ending of capitalist class relations as in the case of ‘actually existing socialism’ [Delphy and Leonard, 1992:39].
Unconvinced by the ‘class reductionist’ argument, many women remain trapped in a political position that makes men, including Marxist men, the ‘main enemy’. Christine Delphy [1977] made a well-known statement of this position in rejecting the Stalinist, androcentric reduction of women’s oppression to this ‘by-product’ argument. Given the male chauvinist leadership of the French Communist Party she had no cause to take their pronouncements on women on faith [Delphy, 1996].
Therefore, if women’s oppression is not to be reduced to capitalist class oppression, we are left with the weak and unsatisfactory claims that women’s oppression is a by-product of class society, or has nothing to do with class, and may not disappear as a consequence of overturning class society. The belief that women can join men on the barricades and liberate themselves in socialism is unnecessary for the liberals, and utopian for the radicals [Marshall, 1982]. The challenge is for Marxists to rethink the class argument in relation to women without reducing class to capitalism.
4. MARXISTS ON DOMESTIC LABOUR
Attempts by Marxists to theorise this problem have tended to be conventional, reflecting a rather dogmatic application of Marx’s method. Engel’s sketch of the historical evolution of the family is used as the basis for explaining the shift from women’s social production to private production in the home, ‘outside’ the capitalist system [Leacock, 1972; Reed, 1975; Aaby, 1977; Coontz and Henderson, 1986; Delphy and Leonard, 1992]. Under Capitalism private domestic labour in the home reproduces the ‘labour power’ of wage labour for exploitation by capitalists, but itself is not part of the Capitalist Mode of Production (CMOP).
Here, an interesting anomaly arises. Much of the surplus value derived from capitalist production has its origins in unpaid domestic labour (UDL) and is useful, and some would say necessary, for capitalism’s reproduction. This is because UDL produces labour-power as a use-value for capitalists to exploit. The use-value of labour-power is not its exchange-value (V) but its capacity to produce more value than its own exchange-value. Labour-power is the only commodity with this use-value and thus is the source of all value and surplus-value. Yet domestic labour is not directly productive of exchange-value in capitalist terms, and therefore women as unpaid domestic labourers are not exploited capitalistically and their specific oppression is a secondary aspect of capitalism [Smith, 1978].
It works like this. Domestic workers (who reproduce labour-power in the home or state services) are paid out of V – i.e. Variable Capital or the wage paid by the capitalist as the market ‘family’ wage plus the social wage discussed below. This total wage bill is supposed to meet the reproductive needs of the ‘family’ including domestic workers. The wage bill of state reproductive workers (in health, education, social welfare etc) is part of V. This is because the capitalists leave workers to reproduce themselves privately but will agree to de-privatise, or ‘nationalise’, domestic work if the wage bill of state workers is less than the additional cost of the family wage that would be necessary to reproduce the same wage labour [Adamson, et. al.1976].
Of course most people don’t see the capitalist as paying the state’s wage bill, but rather taxpayers that include the working class. However, although workers pay taxes, most are deducted at source from their wage, and are actually paid by capital. Even consumption taxes paid by workers are on top of the value of labour power necessary to buy what workers need to live on. Of course, while it is the capitalists who pay the taxes out of their surplus value, we should not forget that it is the productive working class that creates the value in the first place.
Because state reproductive workers are in effect maintaining the value of labour power (by providing health, education and welfare services that would otherwise be done by privatised domestic workers) they are paid out of V. This in effect has seen the so-called ‘family wag’ eroded by individual market wages supplemented by the ‘social wage’. In the last two decades there has been a return to the ‘social wage’ but in the form of ‘minimum family incomes’ financed by negative income taxes (i.e. direct transfers) that fits the neo-liberal model of individual consumers buying their welfare in the market. The payment of state reproductive workers out of V is distinct from the wages of unproductive workers (e.g. finance workers who transfer money) who do not produce commodities or maintain labour power. They are paid out of the capitalists’ revenue as a deduction from profits. Yet both V and revenue are ultimately deductions from the capitalists’ surplus value. This explains why capital faced by a crisis of falling profits tries to re-privatise domestic labour to cut its total wage bill (V), and the additional spending on unproductive labour, so as to reduce the drain on S [ibid.].
While this account may be correct as far as capitalism is concerned it does not explain why unpaid domestic labour (udl) exists in the first place. It recognises that udl as an important and even vital ‘additive’ to capitalist production that is cheaper under some conditions than paying V to state workers. But it leaves unexplained the non-capitalist social base of the production of use-values by domestic labour. It doesn’t go much beyond Engels in explaining the origins of women’s oppression in the patriarchal household that has a mysterious parallel evolution alongside (or inside) of class society. It doesn’t explain the different historic forms of women’s oppression. It doesn’t overcome the huge theoretical gap in Marxist analysis – how can we come up with a historical materialist explanation of historic gender inequality without reducing it to ‘capitalist relations of production’? [4]
The failure of Marxism to fill this gap does not mean that it cannot.[5] Marxism is the production of knowledge that apprehends reality in thought in order to transform that reality in practice. The failure to produce knowledge of something that exists can only mean that either it is deliberately ignored, or that knowledge is aborted or suppressed by ideology in the form of bourgeois hegemony.
Marxists usually claim that Marx chose to exclude any consideration of pre-capitalist modes in his abstract analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism because it was not necessary to his analysis of capitalism as an historic mode of production. Yet Marx found survivals of previous modes (and a future mode – socialism) within capitalism and speculated fruitfully on their nature. The analysis of modes of production today draws on these writings on primitive communism, slave society, feudalism and the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ [Taylor, 1980].
So why, when he and Engels investigated the anthropology of Morgan and others on Ancient society, did they refer to the ‘world historic overthrow of mother right’ in terms of men as ‘bourgeois’ and women as ‘proletariat’ yet not identify a specific Domestic Mode of Production where men and women are two distinct classes? Did this mean as many feminists claim, that Marx and Engels discovered slave society and ‘Oriental Despotism” yet overlooked women’s class oppression because they were proponents of a patriarchal ideology?
Settling this question requires that we go back to Marx’s method yet again [Rosdolsky, 1977]. Marx analysed capitalism by abstracting its basic elements in isolation from ‘extraneous’ factors, including domestic labour, which he took as ‘given’. This was not a moral judgement about domestic labour, or a sexist rejection of its historical importance. Rather it meant that Marx analysed capitalism as a specific historical mode of production by deliberately removing all the complicating factors such as surviving modes of production. Once the analysis of capitalism was complete, it was then necessary to recognise that the everyday Capitalist Social Formation was a complex structure of past modes surviving, present capitalism, and the embryo of a future mode, socialism.
The failure of ‘marxists’ (with little `m’s) to understand Marx’s method made them dogmatic about the family. This has led to a failure to deal with the ‘anomaly’ of the domestic social relations; or in the case of Delphy and others, a failure to link their ‘materialist’ analysis of a Domestic Mode (DMOP) with that of the CMOP. It is my argument that the solution is not to abort the analysis, nor to ignore, but to retry; to follow Marx’s own method, and his own intentions in applying his analysis of CMOP to other modes, including a possible DMOP, and then showing how they articulate together in the Capitalist Social Formation (CSF). The historic specificity of women’s oppression must be explained materially, or not at all.
5. AGAIN ON MARX’S METHOD
Marxism recognises the basic truth that consciousness is the product of social relations. Marxism itself was the product of capitalist social relations. But it has a science of these social relations as historic and exploitative, and not an ideology that reflected those relations as natural and just. It was a scientific critique of bourgeois ideology that penetrated the mystified appearances of capitalism and exposed the basis of exploitation of wage-labour by capital [Yaffe, 1973; Yaffe, 1975].
For Marx, every pre-capitalist historical Mode of Production had to be ‘invented’ intellectually and reconstructed from their surviving forms under capitalism. He and Engels were not interested in living in the past. They wanted to explain how capitalism, which had developed out of these old forms, would necessarily lead to socialism. One problem that intrigued Marx was whether or not it was necessary for all pre-capitalist forms, such as the Russian peasant commune, to be transformed into the CMOP, in order to reach socialism? This ceased to be a problem by the 1880′s however, once he decided there were no pure pre-capitalist modes that were not already transformed, if not destroyed, by capitalism.
This is the point. The ancient Russian commune was now part of the modern world. So was the patriarchal family. Marx and Engels recognised the patriarchal family as an historically specific social relationship where women were turned into ‘domestic slaves’. They used the language of ‘class’ to convey this oppression – men = ‘bourgeoisie’; women = ‘proletariat’.[6] However, capitalism was in the process of transforming these earlier forms of society. Similarly the development of the CMOP would ‘transform’ domestic slavery into wage slavery in the literal sense. Why did Marx and Engels think that capitalism would totally transform all pre-capitalist social relations in its own image?
The answer to this is both scientific and political. Marx showed that capitalism was the motor of modern history. Feudal hangovers in Ireland, family life in Soho, South Seas communes, did not make the earth move, capitalism did. Marx died before he could finish his work of applying the scientific laws of Capital to the everyday world of experience in all of its complexity. Where he and Engels sketched in explanations of current political affairs, they used historical examples that were familiar to them.
In the white-settler colonies, like Australia and New Zealand, pre-capitalist peoples were all but destroyed. In South America, and India, the capitalist market had largely displaced the old methods of production. There were no scientific grounds available that would lead Marx to reject the revolutionising thrust of the universal and general laws of capitalist development. The market would forcibly transform pre-capitalist production methods and by allowing capitalism to develop to the full, clearing the ground for a worldwide socialism.
The political element added to this expectation that men and women would be equalised as wage workers, was Marx and Engels revolutionary optimism that the pre-conditions for socialism had in their life time already matured inside capitalism.[7] With hindsight was can now see that this was before capitalism had reached the height of imperialist expansion, when pre-capitalist modes where allowed to survive to some extent in order to exploit them. Imperialism discovered that surplus-labour could be pumped out of pre-capitalist producers as ‘unfree’ forms of wage labour. Not only did most colonial workers remain peasants, most women remained domestic slaves [Lenin, 1965].
This did not contradict anything basic about capitalism, but it complicated the problem for Marxists. Either they had to develop Marxism, like Lenin and Trotsky, to keep pace with its modern forms, or fall back on dogma, like the Mensheviks and Stalinists. Marx would not have been surprised by any of these developments at all.[8] In the Grundrisse he anticipated the methods by which the CMOP incorporated ‘stunted’ or even ‘travestied’ pre-capitalist forms, into its circuit of capital accumulation. Surplus-labour would continue to be pumped out of pre-capitalist modes. But in order to take stock of the historical complexity since Marx’s time it has been necessary to develop a theory of modern world capitalism as a CSF. This in effect completes Marx’s unfinished project to “reconstitute the concrete” with its many determinations at the level of the state, world trade, crises and international relations [Rosdolsky, 1977].[9] Lenin’s theory of Imperialism and Trotsky’s theory of “combined development” a notable attempts to develop Marxism to complete this task. [10]
Part of the complication was that ‘combined development; of capitalism also divided the producing classes. The working class was composed of different forms of labour (slave, indentured, peasant, as well as wage-labour) and fragmented along the lines of gender, race and nationality on a world scale. This caused privileged layers of workers to take sides with their national bourgeoisies against foreign or indigenous workers; male workers to stand against female workers; European against Asian, African or Latin American migrant workers and peasants, and so on.[11]
The survival of pre-capitalist modes was now not only a theoretical question of the articulation of past present and future modes, but a practical, political question of strategy and tactics to unite pre-capitalist forms of labour with capitalist wage-labour in order to overthrow capitalism. The dogmatic Marxists took the view that the bourgeois democratic revolution had to happen in ‘backward’ countries to follow the historical route already marked out by the advanced capitalist states. Capitalism had to ‘mature’ and transform all pre-capitalist modes, and all producers, into wage-labour under capitalism, before the conditions for socialism were ripe. The working class as the ‘grave-digger’ of capitalism had to come into existence before the grave could be dug. Women too, obviously, according to this schema would be transformed into wage workers and join with men in the socialist revolution. However, the revolution came and went in Russia, and with it, clearly, no lasting women’s liberation.
But life is not as simple as some would like to think. Lenin and Trotsky understood that imperialism dominated backward countries economically and politically. The weak national bourgeoisie could not break from imperialism, and acted as agents (compradors) in exploiting their own peasants and workers on behalf of imperialism. The super-exploitation of pre-capitalist peoples would make them rise up and join in revolutionary bourgeois-democratic movements against imperialism, combining the democratic demands of peasants for land, women for equal rights and the end of domestic slavery, and wage workers for bread.
Under the leadership of a revolutionary party these revolutionary nationalist movements would come up against the reaction of their own bourgeoisie siding with imperialism. Such anti-imperialist movements would develop into civil wars that could succeed in realising democracy only under socialism. This would require an international revolutionary organisation capable of overthrowing imperialism not only at its ‘weakest link’ but also in its strongest links – the imperialist countries.[12]
Included in this struggle were women. Imperialism has not liberated women from domestic slavery any more than it has created a universal CMOP by destroying the remnants of all PC modes. In most of the ‘third world’, the former ‘second (soviet) world’, and even the ‘first world’, women are still the most oppressed and exploited labourers. Capitalism continues to extract the surplus-labour of women as privatised domestic workers, and as a consequence, as members of the reserve army of wage-labour. As imperialism spread across the globe it incorporated existing gender relations into capitalism so that women comprise a major part of the global reserve army. They are more unemployed or underemployed than men; work under worse conditions than men, while remaining the source of unpaid domestic labour. Therefore, typically, women remain second-class citizens under capitalism, because they are primarily privatised workers who are often excluded from the market, except when they function as reservists in a specific range of ‘women’s’ jobs performing ‘nationalised’ domestic services, or during times of war or economic boom.
It is this prior engagement as domestic slaves that makes them part of the reserve army of wage-labour. However, in times of crisis or of expanding accumulation, women compete with men for equality in the labour market. In the post war boom, this movement of women into wage-labour and up against the gender gap has generated a gender consciousness of oppression. The women’s movement can be seen to have developed in stages along with capitalist development as a movement for equal bourgeois rights that must, however, necessarily fall short of full equality. Why?
Bourgeois political rights reduce to market rights i.e. the right to own and exchange commodities. Ideally bourgeois equality is achieved by equal access to the market and to commodities.[13] But these political demands come up against the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, and against the ultimate reality of domestic social relations. As I have argued, capitalism has no interest in liberating women from domestic slavery or socialising domestic production relations. If women were not available as domestic labourers and as a wage-labour reserve capitalists would have to ‘commodify’ unpaid domestic labour and convert domestic labour into wage-labour. This would mean that most capitalists would have to share some of the surplus-labour produced with those capitalists that took over producing these commodities. That would be in their interests only if these commodities were cheaper than the goods and services produced for nothing in the home [Adamson, et al 1976].
Since capitalism necessarily creates an expanding reserve army and since women are always available as domestic slaves, there is no way that capitalists can produce domestic goods and services more cheaply than those provided by unpaid domestic labour. Because of capital’s class interest in exploiting unpaid privatised domestic labour, and using women as reserve army labour, democratic demands for equality of women cannot be achieved under capitalism. Some women may achieve relative economic equality, especially under the ‘new’ conditions of post-fordist flexible accumulation, but most women will remain in the reserve army [Ebert, 1996].
All of this shows that modern capitalism is a system in which pre-capitalist domestic social relations are indirectly ‘exploited’ by the capitalist class. The consciousness of that reality at the level of distributional relations produced post-war feminism. The scientific explanation of that reality, as a development of historical materialism on the basis of Marx’s method, must now turn to the question of the reproduction and ultimately, the revolutionising, of ‘domestic social relations’.
The current advanced stage of capitalist development, and the particular form of domestic oppression that accompanies it, now demands more than ever that knowledge of this specific oppression transcends the spontaneous feminist ideology which either radically ‘naturalises’ or (ludically) ‘trivialises’ the material basis of gender oppression, and demonstrates that its roots are in historically specific domestic social relations of production (crudely class relations) so that they can and must be overthrown.
Therefore it is necessary to theorise women’s historic oppression, in all of its concreteness, first, to resolve the theoretical anomaly and establish the historical laws of a Domestic Mode of Production (DMOP) and second, to link the theory and practice of domestic labour to the strategy and tactics of women’s liberation as an integral part of the struggle for socialism.
6. THE MISSING LINK – THE DOMESTIC MODE
The Marxist concept mode of production (MOP) identifies a specific form of society in terms of “mode” of production. A MOP comprises a certain level of development of the ‘forces of production’ –the means (tool, instruments etc) which allows humans to transform natural raw materials to meet social needs for shelter, food, clothing etc. It also comprises a particular set of ‘social relations of production’ i.e. how the production process is organised socially and reproduced over time. Marx and Engels classified the history of human societies into six modes, from the most simple, primitive communism to the most advanced, communism.
Outside the Capitalist Mode of Production (CMOP) which they studied in detail, the previous modes –primitive communist, ancient, feudal and Asiatic –were only sketchily described. Marx and Engels were less concerned with their existence and more with the transition from one to the other.[14] They argued that one mode followed another when the existing social relations became barriers to the further development of the forces of production. Those relations were transformed by revolutions and a new MOP with new social relations that allowed the forces to develop further, emerged. In this way they expected capitalism, the most advanced mode to date, to give way to socialism.
There is nothing in this historical sketch that makes it a dogmatic evolutionary blueprint. There was, and is, no inevitability about each transition from one mode to the next. Each revolutionary overthrow required the leadership of a class-conscious vanguard. In Europe a ‘line of succession’ could be seen from the ancient mode to the capitalist mode. But elsewhere no successive stages were evident. However, even the downfall of the ancient slave mode in Europe saw elements of it continue to coexist in the towns, side by side with the clan communities of rural Europe. The same was true of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It occurred unevenly, incompletely, and at different rates and periods from country to country.
As we have seen, it is clear that the concept of ‘mode of production’ is an abstraction from actual history. It is a method of expressing the basic structure and dynamics of particular social forms which in reality coexist together in actual historical social formations. However, each MOP is succeeded as the dominant mode subordinating all other modes to its organising principle. By the beginning of the 20th century the CMOP came to dominate all other forms, eliminating them or converting them to the requirements of capitalist production of surplus value for private profit.
This is clearly illustrated in Australia and New Zealand. Aboriginal society was largely destroyed where it came into contact with settlers, but still survived in a residual form in areas remote from white settlement. In the early period of colonisation, the impact of new forces of production pushed the Maori mode in the direction of the Asiatic mode – towards classes and kingship as in Tonga and Hawaii [Bedggood and De Dekker, 1977]. Maori society survived alongside peasant family farming as a truncated Lineage mop (LMOP). Under colonisation all the remnants of Aboriginal and Maori society coexisted under the dominance of the CMOP which allowed for the extraction of surplus-labour from several different ‘sub-modes’ of production [Macrae and Bedggood, 1979].
If it is now recognised that historical modes can survive today as sub-modes of the CMOP then perhaps the ‘unrecognised’ Domestic Mode (DMOP) has survived as well. But before this can be established, we have to make the case for the DMOP against the most obvious objections.
7. THE CASE FOR A DOMESTIC MODE
The case for the DMOP is based on the assertion that the watershed social ‘revolution’ which created the patriarchal family as the ‘embryo’ of all class society, and which persists to this day, must have had material causes. In other words it must represent a revolution in social relations of production to overcome a barrier to the development of the forces of production. Specifically, it signifies the end of ‘primitive communism’ and collective property that had reached its historic limits, and the beginning of ‘private property’ as the basis for further social development.
Following Marx and Engels many have argued that the ‘overthrow of mother right’ and the establishment of ‘father right’ was motivated by the interests of men to retain the new wealth from pastoralism in the hands of males rather than see this wealth distributed to the whole clan through the female line [Reich, 1976; Leacock, 1972; 1981; Leacock and Safa, 1986; Reed, 1975; Coontz and Henderson, 1986; Delphy and Leonard, 1992]. These commentators agree that the consequence of the overthrow of mother right was to appropriate domestic labour as a form of ‘slavery’ [Leacock, 1972:41]. Yet it seems that none have seen the need to take this analysis to its logical completion and make the case for a specific DMOP that would first arise out of primitive communism and before the formation of ancient society.
Engels stated the obvious point that the ‘overthrow’ served the interests of men and talked about the male/female relationship in ‘class’ terms. Yet, apart from documenting its historic reality, and virtually demonstrating that ‘private property’ originated as the ownership of ‘women and children’ Engels never followed this argument back to its social roots. Reich [1975:76] tried to find a mechanism for the overthrow in a change of rules of cross-cousin marriage allowing the bride price to return to the father’s family rather than stay in the mother’s family. Reed [1975: 420] suggested that the bride price was transformed into a ‘child price’ so that father’s blood family now owned the mother and their children, rather than the mother’s blood family.[15]
However, while this overthrow is politically and ideologically one in which men gained historic ascendancy over women, the class interests of men as a patriarchy who have undermined collective property rights in order to establish private property, is lost to history. For these marxist feminist anthropologists and historians, ALL men’s interests become immediately subsumed to that of SOME men who constitute the ruling class of a new mode, the AMOP. It seems the ability of ALL men to enslave their women, and to accumulate collective property as private property, becomes historically downgraded into merely the “embryo” of all successive social antagonisms and contradictions in which SOME men (and even fewer women) constitute ruling classes; hence my hypothesis about the ‘missing link’. Has there ‘gone missing’ in history a social revolution where men overthrew women in order to privatise collective property?
Not all Marxists have entirely overlooked this missing link. There have been some attempts to go beyond patriarchy to class relations [e.g.McDonough and Harrison, 1978] but none have developed a full analysis of a DMOP. Delphy, for example, takes Engel’s use of class terms seriously. She says that the history of classes has excluded women so far into the privatised realm. Delphy rejects the search for origins but not a ‘materialist history’ [Delphy, 1997]. She wants a scientific approach to women by starting with ‘oppression’ and she and Leonard theorise the family as a ‘socio-economic institution’ with ‘relations of production’ that comprises a ‘domestic mode of production’ [1992:158]. Yet for Marxists, ‘oppression’ must be a concrete manifestation of a deeper reality, that of class exploitation. What is the source of the specific oppression of women?
Logically, for Delphy and Leonard to justify their view that men and women are social classes, they have to ground their conception in a theory of origins. When their ‘domestic production relations’ are scrutinised, they are actually a form of contemporary non-market relations which accompanies capitalist market exchange relations. But neither ‘modes’ have a ‘materialist history’. Women’s labour is appropriated by men, and this ‘social relation’ is reproduced by power and ideology, but there is no explanation of where this DMOP originated, or just as important, how it has articulated as a sub-mode with a succession of dominant modes [ibid: 158-159]. Ironically, this has obvious political consequences for women’s liberation. Far from freeing the authors from ‘biologism’ as they claim, it locks them into biologism, empiricism, or both. The danger of tacking on a neo-marxist analysis of modes of production onto radical feminism, is to remain trapped in essentialising or trivialising assumptions of the causes of women’s oppression.[16]
Other important attempts to ‘theorise’ the origins of ‘patriarchy’ are that of Coontz and Henderson [1986] and Chevillard and Leconte. Coontz and Henderson expand on Leacock’s broad account to suggest that it was necessary for only a few societies to make the transition to male dominance to demonstrate its ‘efficiency’. They pose the problem in terms of the development of social needs in lineage society, which stimulates exchange and warfare, placing men in higher rank positions that then allows them to transform the kinship property relations into ‘patriarchal’ relations gradually over a long period of time. Once this had occurred women’s gender oppression was worsened by the emergence of class society in which accumulation of private property and the rise of the state further excluded them from a ‘social’ existence into the private realm. Despite their materialist approach, Coontz and Henderson [1986: 158-159] do not regard the shift to male dominance as leading to a new mode of production or the class oppression of women.
Chevillard and Leconte’s [1986] work is more interesting. They agree substantially with Coontz and Henderson (and ultimately Engels and Leacock) on the material transformations in lineage society. However, for them male appropriation of female labour is a much more violent and sudden overturn, or ‘upheaval’, involving a struggle over female labour.[17] Men’s labour in exchange and warfare allowed them to alter the marriage rules, institute patrilocal marriage and benefit from the exchange of women and the exploitation of their labour. Hence ALL women become a class in a new mode of production in which SOME men become a ruling class.
In my view this work comes closest to adequately theorising the DMOP, (or patriarchy in their terms) and falls short only because it confuses levels of analysis. Rather than pose the class relations as strictly gender relations, they apriori (and therefore ideologically) allow SOME men to escape characterisation as members of a ruling class in the patriarchy, on the grounds that they subsequently are reduced to slaves or workers in other modes of production. In other words, the author’s approach ahistorically conflates modes one with the other, rather than analysing them in terms of an historically specific articulation of modes.[18]
It may very well be that as soon as more advanced modes dominate the DMOP as a sub-mode, most men do not benefit materially to any significant degree from the expropriation of female labour, however this in not an augment against the end of male/female relations of production.[19] Even for the most advanced materialist analysis of the patriarchy then, the common failing is the adoption by socialist feminists and marxist feminists of an eclectic post-structuralist neo-marxism that abandons the analysis of the historical specificity of modes of production for a neo-ricardian analysis of exchange relations in the capitalist market, and in the family, both of which are projected idealistically back into history.[20]
8. OBJECTIONS TO THE DMOP
(1) “Marx and Engels didn’t discover a DMOP, therefore it cannot exist”.
Apart from the quasi-religious quality of this objection, we have seen that Marx and Engels discovered past modes from their survivals in the CMOP. Maybe they didn’t see the DMOP survival in mature capitalism. They lived during a period of capitalist development where women (and children) were exploited as wage-labour alongside men as well as in the home. Yet as we have seen, neither saw the prospect of capitalism freeing women from domestic labour and the oppressive monogamous family. Marx and Engels coined the term ‘domestic slavery’ and they traced the origins of the patriarchal family from its existence in Ancient slave society through feudalism to capitalism.
I suggest that Marx and Engels did discover the DMOP but did not recognise it as a distinct mode because under capitalism it was a sub-mode in an extremely ‘stunted’ form; that is, the privatised domestic production in the family was excluded from social production for the market. As such, compared with other survivals, such as the FMOP and AMOP, even slavery in the American south, the DMOP was literally ‘marginal’ to the basic analysis of capitalism as a mode of production defined as “generalised commodity production”.
2) “The patriarchal family does not have the necessary constituents of a mode of production, i.e. forces, relations, means of production, or a state to reconcile class antagonism.”
This is not a strong objection, because all these elements are already present in ‘embryo’ in Marx and Engels’ account of ‘the overthrow of mother right’ and backed up by more recent research [Reed, 1975; Leacock and Safa, 1986; Tratt, 1998]. It is not too difficult to specify the level and type of forces of production necessary for the DMOP. These include the land, tools and labourers, now owned as slaves. The social relations are the two classes involved –men who appropriated the labour-time of women and other slaves. The ideology of ‘father right’ authorised men to own their wives, children and slaves as private property. As Marx says, this ideological shift was achieved by altering existing kinship rules such as the naming of children as members of the father’s rather than mother’s clans [Engels,1976:57]. This ideology was backed up by the use of legitimate force necessary to reproduce a set of social relations in which men could punish, rape and kill women and children to ensure that they remained their property [ibid:58]. So the exercise of power and ideology of patriarchy against the clan was to establish and reproduce a new set of social relations in which men were able to appropriate unpaid domestic labour of domestic slaves.
3) “Where is the historical evidence of the origin of gender class relations in the transition from classless lineage modes to a DMOP?”
The answer must take the form of showing how a transition from the PCMOP or LMOP to the DMOP occurred as the result of a social barrier to the further development of forces of production under the control of men. It is only on this basis that a ‘social revolution’ can occur to unblock the barrier of existing social relations to the further development of the forces of production. Primitive communist clan social relations, because they coexist with relatively under-developed productive forces do not allow for a significant surplus to be produced, because they require that the distribution and consumption of the surplus be relatively equal across the whole of society so that it can reproduce itself by meeting the needs of all.
Historically, as new techniques made labour more productive, the existing clan relations prevented the accumulation of a growing surplus in the hands of any one lineage group as the basis for further developing the forces of production i.e. buying more stock, land etc. The ‘overthrow’ of these clan relations by male elders therefore allowed the surplus to be accumulated and inherited by the patriarchal family as ‘private’ property. The means of production that had been formerly owned collectively now became the private property of patriarchal male family heads. The clan social relations of production that were based on lineage i.e. “mother right” had ensured that the productive forces met the collective needs of society. Class social relations of production now replaced these where the patriarchal family as private property expropriated labour, and the social surplus was accumulated and passed down to male heirs.
4) “But how was it that men were already primed as those who controlled the new techniques which increased labour productivity, and therefore were in a position to bring about this revolution in social relations?”
To meet this objection it is necessary to show how an emerging social division of labour where men took responsibility for the domestication of animals, trade and warfare, gave them the initial advantage. Men became elders in these areas of activity since they had the sex-specialised knowledge of hunting, warfare and animal herding. Women had sex-specialised knowledge in other areas of activity – usually that of domestic production.[21]
Engels referred to this as the natural division of labour, though it is obvious that male and female tasks were not rigidly determined by biology. Women were not confined exclusively to domestic duties, nor was it men only that hunted and gathered [Tratt, 1998]. Women were not ‘cut off from social production’ since ‘in primitive communal society, the distinction did not exist between a public world of men’s work and a private world of women’s household services. The large collective household was the community, and within it both sexes worked to produce the goods necessary for livelihood.’ [Leacock, 1972: 33].
Nevertheless the social division of labour made it possible for male elders who controlled land and communal property in pastoral production to convert that control into their own private property by manipulating the bride price into a child price. So while elements of biology enter into the social revolution, they do not determine it. Men made the revolution determined to take advantage of new sources of wealth in their own private, rather than collective, interest. Rather than see this wealth collectively consumed, the new class accumulated it as private property that in turn enabled the productive forces to develop and generate yet more wealth.
5) “Why didn’t the DMOP disappear when it was superseded by more advanced Modes like the AMOP, the FMOP, or the CMOP?”
Like other modes that preceded it and succeeded it, the DMOP had its limits. The surplus generated by women as a slave class inside and outside the home that was expropriated and consumed to the advantage of all men, became in itself a barrier to further accumulation. Once collective property had been privatised, slave labour could then extend to the realm of social production. A ruling class of patriarchs developed the ‘embryo’ of domestic slavery to full blown slavery-in-general in the Ancient mode. Of course this mode proved to have limits as well as the need to capture more slaves came up against the costs of imperial conquest.
However, in the AMOP, FMOP and ‘Asiatic’ or Tributary Mode (TMOP), the ruling classes made up of patriarchal families could appropriate the unpaid domestic labour of non-ruling patriarchal families. Historically, the surplus from domestic slavery was augmented by that produced by subordinate males as slaves or bonded peasants. The DMOP becomes a sub-mode of these dominant modes, because unpaid domestic labour remained an important source of labour contributing to the social surplus. But this surplus from the DMOP was no longer appropriated by all men as a class, but by the men (and to a very much lesser extent, women) of the dominant ruling class. [22]
So there is no reason to abolish the DMOP while it can contribute unpaid domestic labour to the dominant MOP (any more than other pre-capitalist modes that have contributed surplus labour to capitalism). It will not be superseded unless domestic labour is ‘socialised’. While capitalist society depends upon unpaid domestic labour to reproduce part of the use-value of labour power, the DMOP will remain as a sub-mode. Moreover, this reality becomes all the more pressing when we understand that capitalism in crisis always puts the burden of solving the crisis onto wage-workers and non-capitalist producers by intensifying the rate of extraction of surplus-labour in all modes within the CSF. Therefore, following on from this analysis, the political interests of all these subordinated classes including the unpaid domestic workers is to unite in the overthrow the dominant CMOP. I will return to this point towards the end of this paper.
9. A DOMESTIC MODE IN THE PACIFIC?
If this argument is correct, with the emergence of capitalism, previous modes and sub-modes, including the DMOP become articulated into capitalist production in a process of uneven and combined development. Rather than speculate further on the historic overthrows in Europe and Asia Minor, or even North America, we can look at the Pacific, the last region to be penetrated and colonised by capitalism in the 19th century, to prove the point. Here the relatively recent penetration should allow us to observe the process of overthrow much closer at hand using the work of anthropologists some of whom adopt a broadly Marxist standpoint. Not only can we document the recent overthrow of mother right much more accurately, it should be possible to observe, and participate in, forms of resistance which are preventing the completion of the overthrow or even reversing it.
The best documentation of this process can be found in Leacock’s work on the overthrow and resistance of ‘mother right’ in the Pacific and elsewhere [1981, Leacock and Safa, 1986]. The Pacific was unique in the expansion of Europe not only because of its late colonisation but because the CMOP came up against relatively uncontaminated pre-capitalist MOPs. Marxist Anthropologists like Godelier were able to use these examples of penetration to develop the Marxist theory of MOPs in terms of their concrete history. First, Pacific PCMOPs were theorised, following African and Asian work, as LMOPs modes in transition to AMOPs or TMOPs. Godelier argued that in the Pacific we can observe a shift from non-class society such as Maori and Australian Aborigine to distinct class society such as Hawaii. This reflects the development of the forces of production and a sufficient surplus to allow a elder class to separate itself from the common lineage [Godelier, 1977:118].
Second, Marxist-feminists critiqued this work for failing to incorporate the analysis of women’s oppression. For example, Molyneux’s [1977] critique of Terray, and Bradby’s [1977] critique of Godelier and ‘male rationality’, both make the point that Marxist anthropologists continued to ignore the gender dimension. Both Terray and Godelier take the ‘gender division of labour’ as a given and treat women’s work as of no ‘value’. This is a fundamental error for Marxists since it takes the gender division of labour to be ‘natural’ and not the product of an historic overthrow of ‘mother right’. Moreover, as Molyneux comments, to recognise that in these societies women’s labour is un-rewarded certainly poses the question of women’s subordinated position and therefore the question as to whether women constituted a class!
Third, this work on modes and women sharpened the tools of the Marxist critique of the bourgeois analysis of the position of women in the Pacific and Australian Aboriginal society, not only of the traditional Eurocentric and androcentric analyses, but also more recent post-modern fashions. Marxist analysis of the relatively recent subordination of women in Tongan society.
10. TONGA: FROM KINSHIP TO KINGSHIP
As a case study of the recent overthrow of mother right in the Pacific, I want to use Christine Ward Gailey’s [1987] study of the emergence of the oppression of women in Tonga. Gailey argues the traditional Marxist position that women’s oppression came into existence “alongside” class society in Tonga. Is it possible that she has overlooked evidence in support of a DMOP, which under the impact of colonisation, emerges alongside, but is subordinated to a CMOP?
Following Engels and Leacock, Gailey argues that the emergence of a “gender hierarchy” was caused by the overthrow of female authority in reproducing non-class kin society. Pre-contact Tongan society was hierarchical but not class-based [ibid: 54]. However, she allows the possibility of earlier class forms and an on-going dynamic tension between kin and class [ibid: 81]. Yet not until colonial contact did the establishment of property rights and production of commodities for the market on a permanent basis occur. And this required a decisive defeat of women as authority figures in kin-based society [ibid: 79]. A land-owning class could emerge only if rights to goods in the kin-based society were devalued and replaced by rights to patriarchal inheritance. Since it was men who gained from commodity production, and women who lost their position as producers of use-values for kin society, a gender hierarchy was established. Today, women’s social authority is “contingent on class position” though some residual kinship authority remains in conflict with social class [ibid: 266].
However, to talk merely of a gender hierarchy, obscures a more basic inequality. The colonial contact precipitated the incipient tendency towards a tributary (or Asiatic) sub-mode (TMOP) articulated to the CMOP, in which male peasants or agricultural workers produce cash crops as commodities for the market, and pay rent to a ruling class. This tributary sub-mode appears to introduce a stunted form of the Feudal rather than Asiatic mode since it entails a payment of rent to a new land-owning class, rather than tribute to a chiefly ruling class.[23]
Gailey recognises the essentials of both of these modes. But what she doesn’t recognise is the formation of a DMOP which accompanies this process. This is perhaps not surprising, since she is theoretically predisposed not to look for one. Moreover, the parallel uneven and combined development of these modes in a short historical period of less than 200 years in North America, Asia and the Pacific, makes their theoretical ‘disarticulation’ difficult but not impossible, as Marx [1974] describes a process of overthrow and resistance over a relatively short period in Ancient Greece .
Not only is women’s right, mana, or authority, overthrown by the development of class society in Tonga, but the social relations of equality that underpin it. In the LMOP women’s labour-time was not exploited – women consumed their labour-equivalent in goods and services. But under the tributary sub-mode, where men have rights to land, they now control women’s social labour. Gailey refers to the example of coconut oil production. Traditionally women’s work, and now produced for the market, this has become controlled by males [ibid: 222]. These men are able to extract surplus-labour from women to pay their rent to the landlords. I suggest that new gender production relations had arrived in the form of the DMOP articulated to both the tributary sub-mode and CMOP.
The domination of the CMOP over the two sub-modes can be seen in the following example. When the hydraulic press replaced manual methods of extracting oil, copra became the main cash crop. This was traditionally men’s work so women were now displaced from the main social labour and expected to perform privatised domestic labour, as well as augmenting the wage-labour force. The form of ‘patriarchal’ relations associated with more developed capitalism had arrived. Now women’s surplus-labour was extracted mainly from privatised domestic labour.
The Tongan case is a very clear example of what happened to women with the penetration of capitalism into the Pacific. It shows that the recent and incomplete overthrow allows both the practical proof of the survival of a domestic mode that sustains a material interest in kin-based social relations of the lineage mode. There is therefore a surviving material base within the domestic sub-mode to sustain the knowledge of mother right that can inform and strengthen contemporary forms of resistance and reversal! ere is the potential to unite the interests of women fighting to reverse the overthrow with those of poor peasant women in the petty commodity sub-mode, and with female wage-labour in the CMOP![24]
11. A DOMESTIC MODE IN AUSTRALASIA?
Like the rest of the South Pacific, in pre-European New Zealand and Australia the evidence from early contact onwards is that neither Maori nor Aboriginal societies were class societies. As Wolfe [1999: 84] has argued 19th evolutionary anthropology saw Aboriginal society as a matrilineal lineage society i.e. pre-social, pre-patriarchy and pre-private property. It was a convenient rationale for the doctrine of terra nullius. 20th century anthropology reinstated the principle of male dominance through the theory of totemism [ibid: 178].
Despite much commentary on the relatively unequal roles of men and women, especially in pre-contact Aboriginal society, there is no convincing evidence against a DMOP. Recent work that attempts to correct for androcentrism finds that gender relations were “autonomous”, but that with colonisation there was a clear “shift” towards the subordination of women [Bell, 1993; Bloodworth, nd]. Employing a feminist methodology that avoided the preconceptions of androcentrism, Bell found that the independence and relative equality of women in pre-contact society was based upon their ritual role in maintaining land both as a material resource and of spiritual value. She was then able to theorise [1993: 247] the “shift from female autonomy to male control” as due to the impact of colonisation “shattering” this relationship.
Maori society was also a simple form of kinship-based society in which the shift towards the CMOP began to emerge only with colonial contact as was the case in Tonga, Fiji and Samoa. Women were seen as unequal though this was not interpreted as male dominance [Heuer, 1972]. More recent work by female anthropologists and academics has exposed the assumption of inequality as Eurocentric and androcentric [Smith, 2000 ]. It is now recognised that there was no structural subordination of women by men. Smith says that: “Indigenous women would argue that their traditional roles included full participation in many aspects of political decision making and marked gender separations which were complementary in order to maintain harmony and stability.” [2000:151]. [25]
If we can interpret this “shift” in the position of Aboriginal and Maori women with colonial contact as the “overthrow of mother right”, how are we to explain it? Like Tonga it seems that this was a process that only took place under the impact of the CMOP and an accompanying ‘patriarchy’. Perhaps we can re-theorise this recent overthrow as part of a wider revolution from the primitive communist (LMOP) to the DMOP that accompanied the introduction of capitalism in the Pacific?
Most existing accounts of the impact of colonisation on the position of Aboriginal women are in terms of the effects of patriarchy rather than the introduction of the DMOP sub-mode articulated to the CMOP. McGrath [1995b] in particular argues that the acceptance of new gendered roles was based in part upon existing gendered roles. This view accepts that the settlers more easily subordinated Aboriginal women because Aboriginal men already dominated them. We can critique this standpoint and show how the mode of production analysis is superior. Why? Because we can account for the ‘resistance’ put up by Aboriginal women to their gender subordination during colonisation.
First, Aboriginal women’s traditional autonomy in the control of land resources meant that they did not passively submit to dispossession and sexual subordination by white settlers. That is, aboriginal women could be incorporated into semi-feudal pastoral production and still resist the imposition of universal ‘patriarchal’ power relations. Not until capitalist landed property was formed and capitalist social relations extended to include Aboriginals in a reserve army of labour and historically specific gender relations did the ‘overthrow of mother right’ occur. Thus it allows us to explain why Aboriginal women could do “mens” work as drovers etc before they were subordinated under the ‘colonial system’ (understood as a Peasant or simple-commodity sub-mode and a DMOP sub-mode articulated to the CMOP). It shows how Aboriginal men too came to adopt the gender role of male dominance of the ‘bourgeois family’ once the reproduction of the LMOP was subordinated to the CMOP.[26]
In the case of the Maori much the same can be said. Webster’s neo-Marxist account supports Bedggood’s argument that the articulation of modes in NZ was one in which the Maori LMOP was adaptive and resistant to the CMOP. It also reinforces the position of Macrae and Bedggood who argued that the Maori mode continued as a sub-mode influencing the capitalist mode as a base for a rural reserve army, and sustaining a collectivist working class culture in the most low-paid sector of the proletariat [Webster, 1998]. Within this sub-mode however, the effects of the DMOP as a sub-mode were also felt. Not just as a political or ideological transmission effect of the ‘cult of domesticity’ as James and Saville Smith [1994] argue. Nor only as a downstream effect of unequal exchange which reinforced the patriarchal family and the family wage in settler society as Steven [1985] argues. I shall look at each of these rival non-production based theories in turn.
12. GENDERED CULTURES?
If we apply the articulation of modes model we can make sense of the introduction of the DMOP as an integral part of the impact of colonisation in Australia and New Zealand. The indigenous peoples of Australasia were in general not required by the colonists for plantation agriculture, so a Tributary (or Asiatic) mode did not evolve out of kin-based social relations.[27] White settlers expropriated the land and established peasant family production for subsistence and later for the capitalist market, introducing peasant family production. Thus the form of ‘patriarchal’ social relations corresponding to feudal production were also established but under the dominance of the CMOP. Women were involved in social production of commodities for the market as well as in privatised domestic labour. Rich farmers or pastoralists could employ domestic servants and eliminate most if not all of the unpaid domestic labour of their wives and daughters. But the poorer the peasant family, the more intense was domestic labour in providing subsistence and commodity labour. Often women were abandoned, or left to farm alone, while husbands looked for work.
It is not difficult to find plenty of evidence to show that under peasant family production women performed two sorts of labour, social and privatised. In both forms, surplus-labour was extracted in varying amounts and appropriated by men in the form of use-values, and by capitalists in the form of rent and interest. While men may not necessarily have benefited directly from women’s surplus-labour, the domestic social relations meant women were economically dependent on men’s property rights and subjected to their ideological and ‘political’ dominance. That is, for this exploitation to continue, women had to accept their gendered role as natural and just, to see it as part of a hegemonic gendered culture.
Some liberal feminists and socialist feminists interpret this subordination as evidence of a unique gendered culture that was reproduced by the colonial state to reinforce unequal gender roles. James and Saville Smith recognise the importance of legislation that sanctioned the roles of ‘housewife’ and ‘family man’ as reproducing family relations. However they do not go on to show that the state was actively reproducing gender relations of production. Lacking that hard theoretical edge, their analysis backslides easily into the liberal or radical feminist view that men controlled the state and imposed unequal gender relations by this means [1994]. Analysis of the DMOP however, demonstrates that the state intervenes to reproduce capitalist social relations, and at the same time reproduces domestic social relations. However it does this not merely to reproduce difference, or unequal power relations, but rather domestic social relations of production. [28]
13. UNEQUAL EXCHANGE?
Similarly, Steven’s theory, which argues that male ‘family wage’ earners benefit at the expense of white-settler women, is over-simplified. As its starting point is exchange relations, the distribution of surplus results from the ability of various classes to extract rent at the expense of the others. Steven’s theory can be easily applied to Australia since the early accumulation of capital depended also upon differential rent. Steven claims that differential rent derived from stolen Maori land was distributed not only to landowners but also to manufacturers and ultimately male workers. That is, he argues that the family wage was a ‘historic compromise’ between pakeha male bosses and pakeha male workers to share the ill-gotten rent at the expense of Maori and women [1985, 1989].
Because the sharing of rent from indigenous people’s lands sustains a racist alliance this theory can partly account for white women’s racism towards Aboriginal and Maori women. It has the advantage of locating the cause of racism in the economic motives of the settlers to benefit from stolen land. However, this theory does not begin with relations of production and cannot account for the ‘overthrow of mother right’ as a revolution in production relations. It posits the subordination and the emancipation of women at the level of exchange.
Such a theory starts with the assumption of unequal exchange of labour in the household as well as the marketplace. So it deals with one level of reality only – how the ‘patriarchy’ was reproduced under capitalism by the state and ideology to ensure ‘exploitation’ based on unequal exchange in both domestic labour and wage labour. Yet ‘exploitation’ does not begin and end at the level of exchange. Production relations determine Exchange relations since what is exchanged is value determined by the mode of production. The theory marks a gain over ahistorical or cultural theories of the reproduction of patriarchy but is incomplete, as it does not recognise the domestic sub-mode and its social relations of production. By itself therefore it cannot provide a full explanation of the causes of women’s oppression in Australasia. It follows that it has no political programme for women’s liberation. Its political programme is one of moderating the market to correct the unequal exchange of labour. As we have seen and will see in subsequent chapters, reliance upon the capitalist state to bring about the end to oppression is a fatal example of ‘sleeping with the enemy’.[29]
14. DOMESTIC POLITICS
If the DMOP is a mode in its own right, patriarchal power and ideology serves to reproduce that mode. Its historical origins can be reconstructed to fill the huge gap in Marxist analysis of women’s oppression. Its historic importance was in overcoming the barrier to `progress’ constituted by kin-based social relations in the primitive community and freeing-up the development of the forces of production. But the price of this progress was that the domestic mode was not superseded and was to remain a subordinate mode articulated to a sequence of dominant modes for which it provides unpaid domestic labour. It cannot transcend itself until such time as domestic labour is socialised. In the classic Marxist literature there is no cause to suppose that this will happen before the transition to socialism. Therefore since its origins in the first social revolution the evolution (and forms) of the DMOP has been largely determined by the dominant mode to which it is articulated.
Today within a sub-mode articulated to the CMOP, the domestic class struggle over unpaid domestic labour, is subordinated to the capitalist class struggle over the rate of exploitation. The residual DMOP ‘ruling class’ of males, act as agents of the dominant CMOP ruling class. At all times, but particularly in times of crisis, when capital imposes its solutions onto the backs of the workers and underworkers, men may support the intensification of domestic labour and reinforce patriarchal ideology by the use of male violence. Therefore, before women can free themselves of capitalism as the main enemy, they have to free themselves of capitalism’s male agents. The only conclusion that we can draw from this is that women must struggle to take their place alongside and as equals to men in the vanguard of the socialist revolution.
[1] The radical critique of post-modern feminism is good but limited by its own radical assumptions. It can describe but not explain why false consciousness is separated from social being [Brodrib, 1992, 1996]. See also Delphy and Leonard who act as a go-betweens for radical and marxist feminists. They characterise their position as ‘radical feminist’ which uses ‘marxist methodology’ [1992:2].
[2] See Ebert [1996] and Hennessy[1993] and Hennessy and Ingraham [1997] Both these critics come from a neo-Ricardian perspective in which globalised post-fordist, flexible accumulation has altered the conditions of reproduction of the family, released some women from domestic labour, but still traps the vast majority in domestic drudgery. Hennessy’s critique of post-modern feminism is based on a post-Althusserian standpoint. She demolishes the emancipatory posturing of pomo very well but from a weak neo-marxist position that is open to left critique. Ebert’s critique comes from a broad regulation school position where post modernism is seen as adapting to the needs of flexible accumulation to assimilate and promote difference as part of the commodity fetish. Neither can escape the defects of a neo-ricardian concept of exploitation.
[3] Adamson et al [1976] pioneered a classic post-war marxist analysis of women’s position grounded upon Marx’s method. Domestic labour is seen as non-value producing, but essential to the reproduction of capital. This analysis provides a theoretical basis for a revolutionary politics against the reformist ‘wages for housework’ position, or the mechanical ‘socialisation of housework’ position.
[4] A more common objection within socialist feminisim is to any attempt to graft onto Marxism a theory of patriarchy as a social structure [Young, 1980]. Yet unless a materialist analysis of women’ oppression is made along the lines of Engels’ analysis, ‘oppression’ is detached from its productive/reproductive roots, and ultimately the basis of materialism, social being, becomes reduced to political and cultural relations.
[5] The attempt to theorise a Domestic Mode of Reproduction to fill this gap is inadequate. It takes concepts which reflect a productive reality and illogically invents a ‘mode of reproduction’ alongside the mode of production [Saville-Smith, 1988]. This breaks with Marx’s method in basic ways. First, Marx considers ‘nature’ and ‘society’ to be a unity within each historic MOP. Biological reproduction cannot be separated from social reproduction. See Marx [1973:88-100] on the four moments which include production and reproduction! Therefore the concepts which already incorporate biological reproduction in each historic mop cannot be subtracted and artificially reconstituted outside production. Edholm et al [1977] critique Meillassoux’s [1972] argument about male control of women as a means of controlling labour. However, we shall see that once Meillassoux’s one-sided reproductive analysis is integrated into a mode of production framework, male control of labour can be see to be the basis for the emergence of a DMOP[cf Aaby, 1977]. Much the same can be said for Mies [1986] theory of men as hunters forcibly appropriating women’s labour.
[6] Engels [1976:57-58] says: ‘The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reigns in the house also, the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding children …Famulus means a household slave and familia signifies the totality of slaves belonging to one individual …then quotes Marx : “The modern family contains in embryo not only slavery (servitus) but serfdom also, since from the very beginning it is connected with agricultural services. It contains within itself in miniature all the antagonisms which later develop on a wide scale within society and its state”.’
[7] This does not mean that Marx or Engels though that the emancipation of women was possible under capitalism. Engels [1976] states clearly that: ‘…the emancipation of women and their equality with men are impossible and must remain so as long as women are excluded from socially productive work and restricted to housework, which is private. The emancipation of women becomes possible only when women are enabled to take part in production on a large, social scale, and when domestic duties require their attention only to a minor degree. And this has become possible only as a result of modern large-scale industry, which not only permits of the participation of women in production in large numbers, but actually calls for it and, moreover, strives to convert private domestic work also into public industry’ [158]. Tratt [1998] suggests that Engels ‘idealised individual sex-love’ in the proletarian family because ‘large-scale industry has transferred the women from the house to the labour market and the factory and makes her, often enough the breadwinner of the family, the last remnants of male domination in the proletarian home have lost all foundation, except perhaps, for some of the brutality toward women which has become firmly rooted with the establishment of monogamy…’ However, to recognise this fact as Engels does, is not to ‘idealise’ it : ‘Thus full freedom in marriage can become generally operative only when the abolition of capitalist production, and the property relations created by it, has removed all those secondary economic considerations which still exert so powerful influence on the choice of a partner.’ [Engels, 1976:81].
[8] In fact Marx and Engels both developed their ideas about pre-capitalist forms in the later life. Writing in 1884 Engels [1976:66] says: ‘In an old and unpublished manuscript, the work of Marx and myself in 1846 I find the following: “The first division of labour is that between man and woman for child breeding.” And today I can add: The first antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male…It is the cellular form of civilised society, in which we can already study the nature of the antagonisms and contradictions which develop fully in the later’.
[9] See the more ‘concrete’ investigations of Marx’s [1974] Ethnological Notebooks were he extends his historical analysis beyond that of the Grundrisse and Capital, and provides much of the material that Engels used in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.
[10] This concept of the law of ‘Combined Development’ [Trotsky, 1932:25] can be applied here to incorporate the articulation of the DMOP so that we can explain why the original overthrow of mother right in Ancient Greece has only recently occurred in the Pacific with the penetration of the Pacific by capitalism.
[11] The classic discussion of this is the concept of the ‘labour aristocracy’ who are a privileged layer of workers in the imperialist countries bribed by the super-profits extracted from the colonies [Lenin, 1977:193-4].
[12] The failure of an international socialist revolution has apparently refuted this theory. On the contrary the failure is more correctly attributed to the failure of revolution in the ‘strongest links’ in the imperialist chain – in Europe and America. The history of the Russian Revolution reinforced the Bolshevik position. It was women factory workers who sparked off the February Revolution. For about 5 years women in revolutionary Russia made huge steps, gaining rights far exceeding those possible under capitalism. However, with the isolation and containment of the revolution in the USSR, the petty bourgeois bureaucracy came to power and the position of women suffered dramatically. The degeneration of the revolution in the ‘weakest link’ was not inevitable. It followed from the failure of the German revolution in 1923. Therefore, the outcome in the USSR and the other ‘degenerated workers states’ does not prove the futility of women siding with men in the struggle for socialism. Since the only case of any real progress in the liberation of women took place in Russia during and after the revolution, this shows that oppressed nationalities and women cannot liberate themselves in full without a successful international socialist revolution. See Ebert [2001].
[13] Much hot air is vented in bourgeois thought on the question of ‘rights’. For Marx, rights are specific to a MOP [Marx, 1964:98-101]. Under capitalism, rights are property rights. Freedom and liberty are the right to own and dispose of property including one’s right to buy and sell the commodity labour-power which creates more value than its own exchange value. So bourgeois rights reduce to abstract labour i.e. the value of commodities, and obscure the surplus-value that is extracted from wage-labour.
[14] It is the static nature of the Asiatic mode which explains the rudimentary level of analysis given to it by Marx and Engels and not as often argued, Eurocentrism. See Melotti [1977].
[15] However as Leacock [1981: 183-194] points out, Reed follows Engels in assuming an original matriarchy, and links the overthrow of mother right to the conscious intention of men to control their biological heirs, inserting a spurious idealist motivation for what was a social transformation as men gained control of new wealth generated by exchange and warfare [ibid: 215-216]. See also Giminez, [1987].
[16] For example, Young [1990] also invokes a neo-marxist method in locating the ‘structure of labouring activity, broadly defined, as a crucial determinant of social phenomena’. Yet it is not possible to ‘reclaim anti-capitalist feminism’ without theorising ‘gender-differentiated labouring activity’ in terms of a social relations of production in a specific historical articulation of modes of production [Hennessy and Ingraham, 1997].
[17] The authors cite a universal mythology of men overturning women’s power suggesting both the universality of the myth of male dominance, but also the ongoing struggle to resist the overturn. See also Saliou [1986].
[18] In effect modes of production become modes of exchange. By this I mean that the contradiction between relations and forces of production which implicitly causes the onset of male dominance, is now forgotten, and it its place a calculus of uneven exchange in which male/female production relations become equated with male/female exchange relations. The problem with exchange analysis is that it reduces exploitation to a technical question. If no labour is appropriated directed by some men, they cease to be exploiters despite their continuing social role in reproducing the DMOP via male violence and ideology. A major consequence of this is the familiar criticism directed at Marxists for failing to explain the ‘universality’ of male violence and the ideology of sexism. Thus the ability of articulation theory to explain the continuing subordination of a sub-mode, including its relations of production, in the reproduction of the dominant mode, is lost.
[19] This of course contradicts the evidence of a universal violent upheaval or overthrow of mother right, and tends to support the position of Coontz and Henderson who view only the high ranked males as the beneficiaries of female labour. Thus the authors write: “We may note that the upheaval out of which patrilocal (and patriarchal, in the usual sense of the term) societies arose, did not institute equality among men. At the same time as they gained power over women, men entered into strongly hierarchical relations. What is significant here, is that the true beginnings of a process of domination not only set man against women, but ruling men against the rest of humankind. The exploitation of man by man did in fact begin as an exploitation of woman by man. But within this original exploitation lay the seeds of the exploitation of humans of both sexes by the ruling human who is again male” [op.cit:107].
[20] Molyneaux’s [1977] critique of Terray [1972] offers an approach that does not separate production from reproduction, and which shows how ALL men come to be ‘elders’ by means of harnessing privatised domestic labour. While she can demonstrate why it was necessary for men to attempt to control women’s productive and reproductive labour, she does not attempt to explain “why” and “how” women come to be subordinated to men. Her approach is however, consistent with the existence of a DMOP. Other unsuccessful attempts include McDonough and Harrison [1978]. They do deal with origins, and try to theorise the historic specificity of patriarchy and capitalism. However, they continue to separate production from reproduction so the unity of labour appropriation and control of procreation in the DMOP is lost. Instead we have patriarchy in which social relations of production regulate procreation, alongside modes of production in which relations of production regulate labour appropriation.
[21] There is much evidence to show that the emergence of this social division of labour increased ranking in lineage society, without altering the reciprocity of matrilineal distribution. Sahlins [1972:132] says: ‘The economic role of the headman is only a differentiation of kinship morality. Leadership is here a higher form of kinship, hence a higher form of reciprocity and liberality.’
[22] This opens the way for a political alliance between women and non-ruling class men against the capitalist ruling class. But it requires that men become conscious of the history of unpaid domestic labour and join with women to fight for the socialisation of domestic work rather than a ‘fair’ redistribution of unpaid domestic labour between the two genders. While an important step in freeing women to participate as wage workers, and to contribute to political struggle, distributional solutions even if they were possible, do not overcome the fact that capitalism depends on unpaid domestic labour which is exploitative and oppressive.
[23] But this is probably because the form of surplus – rent to land owners – was partly imposed by the fact that cash cropping entered into the capitalist market and represented a particular articulation of LMOP, with peasant production, subordinated to capitalism. Thus Godelier’s argument that the Lineage mode in the Pacific tended to develop towards the Asiatic mode has to be modified to allow for the actual historic articulations between Lineage modes and the CMOP that allows surplus to be generated and accumulated by capitalism in a way that would not have been the case had the surplus been appropriated by a chiefly ruling class.
[24] Molyneaux [1977] suggests a parallel case in her account of the historic process of the subordination of women that fills in some of the gaps left by Engels’ own version. In the Gouro society, male elders are able to set up private families alongside the communal society and direct social surplus into private wealth. Women’s unpaid labour contributes to this as women’s collective labour is increasingly privatised, and they contribute also to the private labour to the private property of the family!
[25] Note however, the limits of Smith’s critique of colonisation. The “euroconcepts’ reproduced within this ‘decolonising’ discourse e.g. ‘indigenous’ which is used as the antipode of ‘coloniser’ ; also there are historical abstractions such as ‘harmony’ and ‘stability’ which do not refer to the specifics of Maori social organisation. There is no analysis of the way in which the labour of women is used and the rewards distributed to reveal a gender division of labour such as is found in Marxist anthropology. Not surprising since there is a paucity of Marxist anthropology in applying Marxist concepts to Maori society. I would say here, that I have no reason to doubt, that in NZ like Australia and the Pacific, imperialism introduced the DMOP as a sub-mode of the CMOP.
[26] Wolfe [1999: 69-87] comments on the way that 19th century evolutionary anthropology ‘discovered’ that traditional matrilineal society lacked ‘property’ to justify the later shift to the idealised ‘nuclear family’ and patriarchal private property. However, this ‘shift’ was driven by the much more powerful dynamic of the expansion of capitalist social relations. The documented struggle on the frontier of both Aboriginal women and men to resist this ‘shift’ demonstrates that they were defending social relations of production, not merely cultural or ritual practices. This resistance could only be broken by separating Aboriginals from their social relations on their land and forming a reserve army of labourers dependent on wages augmented by subsistence on their remaining land.
[27] Where labour only is required by the CMOP the LMOP may be no more than a labour reserve. For example, when plantation agriculture was set up in Queensland workers were ‘blackbirded’ from the Torres Straight Islands (and other islands). Wolfe [1999::202-3] makes the point that this did not involve a massive loss of land and was the basis for the successful Wik claim that was able to prove continuous land occupancy.
[28] These social relations are given by the articulation of modes. CMOP set up capitalist agriculture where the form of the patriarchal household reproduced gendered relations in which white settler women contributed to unpaid domestic and commodity production. The impact of these relations upon Aboriginal and Maori women can then be explained as the outcome of their resistance to the imposition of these new relations upon their existing gendered relations of production which may appear as a ‘cultural’ or ‘political’ process if taken in isolation of social relations.
[29] The well documented variability in women’s roles on the ‘frontier’ can be explained as responses to the transition from one mode to another mediated by gendered roles. Women’s economic roles in pre-contact society allowed much more scope and flexibility than the new relations of peasant and pastoral capitalist production relations, yet women often inverted or resisted these relations. Not until capitalist relations in the countryside accompanied by protected domestic manufacturing consolidated the capitalist class relations in the 20th century did Maori and Aboriginal women’s complete overthrow take place.
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Why is China Imperialist?
In a previous post written in July 2008 (Is China the new US?) I explained the restoration of capitalism in China and its move towards imperialism. It was however, not yet an imperialist power. I concluded with this statement:
Is China Imperialist?
Today by the measure of the LOV China is capitalist. In that sense a rapidly growing powerful capitalist China could be considered imperialist. But what do we mean by imperialist? According to Lenin and imperialist country has a surplus of finance capital which must be exported to counter falling profits at home. That is, the possibilities of growth at home can only be sustained by the export of capital to earn super-profits in other countries, and be imported to the home country to maintain the rate of profit. Less important was the need to find new markets in which to sell the commodities produced in the home market. Historically, the powers that clearly meet this definition are the USA, Japan and the main European powers like Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Others are not imperialist, or may be former imperialist, and are more like semi-colonies, such as Portugal, Greece, Poland, etc. Others may be small imperialist powers such as Sweden, Austria etc.
Does China today meet these criteria? As yet it doesn’t appear so. China has a big trading surplus from its commodity exports but this is mainly invested in US bonds. It is a peculiar sort of finance capital that must accept US petrodollars to fund the massive US external deficit. Most of China’s growth is driven by its internal market which is huge and expanding rapidly. In that sense China’s internal market is sufficient to maintain its profitability, while its exports are more re-exports of foreign mainly overseas Chinese companies (mainly Hong Kong and Taiwan) that have invested in China. So far from being evidence of the export of China’s surplus finance capital, China is the source of imperialist (Japanese, overseas Chinese, EU, US etc) FDI which reaps massive super-profits from China’s cheap resources and labor power.
While the organic composition of capital in China is growing it doesn’t seem yet to have reached the point of an overproduction of capital necessitating an export of productive capital. China today, then, is still developing its internal market, making huge infrastructural investment and is only beginning to establish FDI overseas in Africa, Latin America, and the rest of Asia to create its own so-called ‘empire’. Nevertheless, China is being driven by the rapid growth in demand for cheap raw materials and markets to become a major competitor to the existing imperialist powers, a fact that is clearly behind the growing alarm with which the EU and US views its aggressive role in Africa.
For some China’s capitalist growth has many of the features of industrialization in Europe in the 19th century. However, the form of combined and uneven development that Trotsky and Lenin spoke of in the case of the Soviet Union, and which Marx foreshadowed in China, is today manifest in a pace and scale that would have been beyond even their imaginations. Not only has China become the key driver of the world economy at a time of US dominance and relative decline, it is now at the center of the world historic contradiction between labor and capital. Emerging out of a bourgeois national revolution and the aborted socialist revolution China has within the space of two decades created a powerful capitalist economy. Whether it is contained as a semi-colony exploited by the other capitalists, or succeeds in re-dividing the world economy at the expense of the other capitalist powers, remains to be seen. China may be on the road to displacing the US but will it be as an imperialist China or a socialist China?
This was written over a year ago. At that time China’s capitalist dynamic was clear, but evidence that it had emerged as a new imperialist power was as yet unclear to me. In the time since then there has been a continued rapid development of Chinese economic expansion. Moreover this expansion has been at a time when most of the rest of the world was in recession. FDI into China has fallen significantly due to the financial crisis in the US, Japan and EU. So inward FDI cannot account for China’s growing share of global capital accumulation.
Moreover ‘decoupling’ shows that China is not dependent on trade with the US.
Questions then arise as to the reasons for this dynamic capitalist growth facing what is systemic stagnation in the forces of production globally. Is there something specific to capitalist development in China that allows it to become the main driver of capitalist boom while the rest of the world is in a slump? The question of China as emergent imperialism needs to be re-examined.
Why does China boom amidst global slump?
The continued growth of China (probably around 10%) while the rest of the world, apart from India is either stagnant or in recession, has not gone unnoticed. Those who think that China is state socialist, or mixed capitalist/socialist, put it down to it ability to avoid the worst excesses of capitalist crisis. Others who don’t think China is socialist agree that its powerful central state ownership of the banks has been able to compensate for falling exports by pumping up the domestic economy. Ironically, China is able to implement a fully blown Keynesian counter-cyclical policy to protect itself from the global cycle.
What these positions all point to is the vast accumulated reserves of China. Clearly they are not the result of socialist planning which led to stagnation, but rapid capitalist growth. So China’s phenomenal capitalist accumulation over the last 20 years is the key to explaining its continued rapid growth in the crisis.
But China is not only boosting its growth by domestic spending. In the middle of the world recession it has made a “great leap forward” in foreign investment; i.e capital export, the critical characteristic of imperialism. What this means is that China has not only sufficient accumulated surpluses to spend on domestic infrastructure, social spending on the unemployed etc it has accumulated surpluses in the profits of the massive SOEs that enable it to rapidly expand its foreign investment, either as outward FDI in foreign companies, as Joint Ventures like that with Venezuela for oil production, and loans for oil in a number of countries. As we shall see below this is Chinese finance capital, not the FDI of other imperialist countries using China as a proxy in capital re-export.
In other words China has turned the crisis of US and EU finance capital which is in crisis and suffering massive devaluation, into an opportunity to export its own finance capital. As a result, China is now entering directly into competition with the existing imperialist powers as an emerging imperialist in particular posing a major challenge to the US, the EU and Japan. What accounts for this amazing performance when the rest of the imperialist states are in recession or stagnating?
The answer this is to answer the question: Why is China Imperialist?” The answer can be found by going back to the salient point that the secret of China’s “success” rests in its highly centralized state banks and SOEs which can act to take advantage of the global recession. An while this is no longer a feature of a so-called ‘socialist’ society, it is the legacy of China’s history as a degenerated workers state (DWS). In other words if China had not been a DWS it could never have become a dynamic capitalist country. It would have been fated to be divided and ruled by imperialism from the the early 20th century to the early 21st century. Like all other semi-colonies, China would never have been in the position to accumulate sufficient capital to force its ruling class to export surplus finance capital and emerge as a new imperialist power.
This would be what Trotskyists would expect on the basis of Lenin’s theory of imperialism which in the epoch of imperialism – capitalism’s highest stage – spoke of imperialist powers competing to re-divide the world. New imperialist powers could only arise on the basis of expanding into parts of the world as yet not dominated by other imperialist powers. Once the world was divided, imperialists could only advance by redividing it at the expense of other imperialist powers. There was no possibility of colonies and semi-colonies oppressed by one or other imperialist power to transform themselves by means of national revolutions into imperialist powers. Therefore, no new imperialist powers can emerge in the epoch of imperialism. Two World Wars were proof of the correctness of this theory.
To characterize China today as imperialist then, appears to contradict the logic of Lenin’s theory of imperialism which states that no colony or semi-colony can make a national democratic revolution and emerge as a new imperialist power. However, if it can be proved that China did make its national revolution and win independence as a DWS, and that the restoration of capitalism did not cause it to lose that independence then there is no contradiction with Lenin’s theory. We would find that the essence of his theory explains the anomaly that a former workers state can do what is apparently impossible – become a new imperialist power.
The Law of Value
What distinguishes the DWS from capitalist colonies or semi-colonies is its relative isolation and independence of the from the global capitalist market. Thus the DWSs have been “partitioned” by revolutions that overthrow capitalist social relations putting them outside the spheres of imperialism. Of course their isolation means they don’t escape capitalist imperialism entirely. It oppresses them indirectly by stopping them developing the forces of production by means of new technology. By definition (as explained in the post on “Is China the New US”) DWSs are isolated from the direct effects of the law of value. The prices of production of state produced goods and services are not determined by the value of labor power as is the case in the capitalist market. Prices are determined by a plan.
Whether or not that plan is under the control of the people or a bureaucratic caste makes big difference. In the former case prices are used to signal the amount of necessary labor that workers democratically decide should to used to produce goods and services to meet their needs. In the latter case labor is allocated to produce goods and services that favor the luxury consumption of the bureaucracy and not that of the workers. But in both cases the planned economy develops the forces of production to a greater degree than is possible in a semi-colony where production is controlled by a division of labor imposed by imperialism. Such a planned economy requires a centralized production process and a centralized state. Hence the origins of the strong central state and state owned enterprises (SEOs) in the DWSs.
As I argued in the earlier post, China’s revolution in 1949 was a national revolution that was led by Stalinist army of peasants in isolation of the working class that was forced to go on to become a socialist revolution because the weak national bourgeoisie was aligned with imperialism and incapable of completing this task. But from the outset the ordinary peasants and workers never had control of the revolution so that the form of workers state that emerged was ‘degenerated’ or bureaucratized from its birth. The planned economy under the control of the party elite developed the forces of production beyond that of any semi-colony but never to the point that they could match that of the most advanced capitalism. The isolation of the economy from the world market prevented it from acquiring new technology to increase the productivity of labor other than by increasing its intensity.
The resulting stagnation meant that the privileges of the bureaucracy who lived a parasitic existence on the labor of the workers were threatened. This led the Communist Party to reintroduce private property rights (a sort of NEP) in agriculture to stimulate production and hence its share of the surplus product. Thus the LOV was planted in the countryside. The LOV spread to industry and commerce and caused a full blown restoration of capitalism around 1992. As Trotsky had already predicted, the form of capitalism that is restored in a DWS is state capitalism that uses the existing state machinery and SOEs to reproduce the production of surplus value and profit. It does this by allowing the law of value (the market) to determine prices as opposed to the planning process. China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 marked its full entry into the world capitalist economy.
To recap: China as a DWS ‘partitioned’ itself from the capitalist economy and developed the forces of production internally beyond that possible in a semi-colony oppressed by imperialism. Yet its isolation led to economic stagnation and the Communist Party planned the restoration of capitalism to stimulate growth and the transformation of the bureaucracy parasitic on the plan into a new national bourgeiosie in a restored capitalist economy. Thus, as I am arguing, capitalism that is restored in a former workers state has special characteristics which are critical in allowing it to escape the fate of a capitalist semi-colony and to emerge as a new imperialist power.
China’s legacy was therefore a strong centralized state and massive SOEs under the control of a strong and united new national bourgeoisie. China’s re-entry into the capitalist world economy was managed in stages so that the new bourgeoise remained independent of all imperialist powers. As the imperialists sought to use China as a semi-colony to re-locate their maquiladoras using cheap Chinese labor, the Chinese ruling class retained control of the key state sectors of the economy and restricted the freedom of entry of FDI and in particular the big imperialist banks.
In other words, US and other imperialist powers could not fully ‘re-partition’ a restored capitalist China as their own spheres of interest. The new Chinese bourgeoisie retained control of the national economy and could use the centralized state to monopolize the process of capital accumulation on the same basis as the existing imperialist powers. That is, it operated on the basis of the law of value which sets prices in terms of labor power, but in reality it extracting super-profits and monopoly rent on its own account – the defining feature of imperialism. Let us expand on this point.
Super profits and monopoly rent
In a previous post (“Is Russia Imperialist”) I argued in support of Lenin that imperialism is characterized by monopoly which in the last analysis extracts super-profits in the form of monopoly rent. Marx defined monopoly rent as the difference between the price of production and market price where the latter is determined by a few firms that act as a cartel, or trust i.e. a monopoly. This concept simplifies our understanding of super-profits arising from so-called cheap labor as well as the plundering of raw materials and energy sources. The price of production consists of labor costs, raw materials etc., plus average profits where competition allows a redistribution of surplus-value. That is, in the epoch of competitive capitalism, the price of production reflects competition where average profits result from a process of the equalization of profits from the least efficient producers to the more efficient, given that there is sufficient demand.
Imperialist monopoly ends competition at the level of the market as a few firms control the prices by preventing the ability of more efficient firms to undercut their price. Prices of production now include not the average profit resulting from equalization but a set monopoly price. Thus ‘equalizing’ of profits is done by “fixing” the price in advance of production and not by the market after production. This is why Lenin observed that the imperialist epoch is dominated by monopolies as a few major firms – cartels, trusts, monopolies – set the world prices in various sectors of production such as oil, steel, railways etc.
A short sidetracking is necessary here to distinguish between imperialist monopoly and the so-called monopoly of state planning in the DWSs. While the central state apparatus may in fact by formally the same, as the Communist Party is like a giant monopoly firm planning, or fixing, prices, the law of value separates out these two forms in their essence.
Ideally socialist monopoly (ie in a democratically determined plan) sets prices without any reference to the law of value. Prices are just a means of allocating labor to different branches of production to meet collectively determined needs. Capitalist monopoly however, determines super-profits by calculating monopoly rent as value in excess of the ‘real’ market price of production set by the law of value. By ‘real’ I mean that monopoly looks for the lowest labor and raw material costs (this is the point of investing FDI in colonies and semi-colonies) so that the excess of monopoly price of production over the real price of production i.e. monopoly rent, is a great as possible. Nevertheless, when it comes to the role of the central state, it is a relatively simple matter to switch the state monopoly over the allocation of workers labor in a Degenerated Workers State like China to the monopoly of value produced in a capitalist economy.
China as state monopoly imperialism
If the above argument is correct, China has been able to use its legacy as a DWS to convert its centralized state apparatus into a monopoly capitalist state to escape the trap of semi-colonial partition, oppression and super-exploitation by the existing imperialist powers. It has done this by monopolising land which remains nationalised, and by heavily regulating FDI in terms of both relative and absolute share of value produced in China. Thus the Joint Equity Ventures law of 2001 (No. 48) states the basic criteria on which FDI enters China. FDI operates under ‘business licences’ under Chinese law, pays taxes, and if the national interest requires can be “nationalised with payment of compensation”. Generally, FDI shares in JVs is limited to less than 25%. The Foreign Investors law of 2000 allows 100% FDI in companies that meet the criteria of “economic cooperation” and “technological exchange” and are “export oriented”. If these firms do not fulfill these criteria their licenses can be canceled.
The state retains a monopoly control over the key sectors of industry, energy, and banking via its State Owned Enterprises and State Banks. Typically the SEOs do not pass on their profits to the state but accumulate them for further reinvestment. Does FDI share in this bounty? The share of FDI in SOEs is limited to around 10%. The fact that FDI does not control the SOEs is confirmed by attempts to block them taking over established US and other monopoly firms. For example, the third ranking oil and gas SOE and biggest offshore operator, CNOOC Ltd had its bid to buy the US oil major Unocal in 2005 rejected as it was 70% owned by and getting a cheap loan from its 100% state owned parent SEO. Interestingly one commentator pointed to the hypocrisy of this rejections. Any state monopoly support gained by CNOOC in the process of this acquisition would be matched by big US oil corporations, including Chevron which was the preferred buyer of Unocal at a lower price. It seems that the Chinese SOEs do not “play by different rules” but the rules of state monopoly imperialism!
The big international banks do not own China. For example the BOA has a 10% shareholding in the China Construction Bank . China accumulates its capital on its own account and has a massive sovereign wealth fund that has no need for large borrowings from international banks. Also China is a large US creditor with around US$800 billion in US Treasury bonds. This results from China’s trade surplus in supplying cheap wage goods to US workers and keeping down their real wages. That relationship is not a imperialist parasitic relation as it reflects China’s low domestic wage costs and so does not result from the export of finance capital.
However, while US domestic capitalism benefits from cheap Chinese imports, the FDI in the manufacturing export sector that buys inputs sourced from Chinese SOEs does not get them cheaply because of the SOEs monopoly pricing. A recent analysis showed that China’s return from FDI in copper mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo was higher than that of the giant US mining firm Freeport. The profits of the FDI manufacturing export sector in China are therefore dependent on cheap labor not a share of the superprofits of Chinese state monopoly capitalism. This is true of FDI in JVs that produce for the China market like GM which has as 50/50 partnership with the the SOE Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. Of course the GM parent company is currently 61% owned by the US Treasury, 17% by the UAW union, and 11% by the Canadian state following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy!
As China rises, other imperialists fall
If China can monopolise capital accumulation at home and is now embarking on a rapid expansion offshore, is this a classic case of the export of finance capital of an emergent imperialist power? For China to emerge as a new imperialist power it must do so by redividing the sphere’s of influence of existing imperialist powers. That means a growing rivalry with these powers as competition for scarce resources such as oil, gas and minerals intensifies. As we have seen China as a DWS asserted its historic control over Greater China and the autonomous territories etc. It has not had to contest control over these territories with existing imperialist powers. Everywhere else China has to fight for control of these resources.
On what terms? Is this OFDI done on behalf of other imperialist powers? To do so the SOEs would have to pass on cheap inputs to its rivals. We have seen that this is not the case in China. This means that China is a rival not a patsy. Why else were the Unoco and Riotinto deals stopped? This would have seen China gain more control over the energy sector internationally. Is this not protectionism?
Why is China accused of exploiting the Congo? Why is the US beefing up its military presence in Africa in the form of AFRICOM which is training African troops in several countries where China has significant investments as well as journalists in Kinshasa? Why is the SCO and military agreement led by China/Russia being projected as the main threat to US hegemony in Central Asia by the US itself?
But China is not the new US. It is an emerging imperialist power that can only expand at the expense of other imperialist powers by “re-partitioning” their spheres of interest. Which will these be? In East Asia, Japan is the main competitor. Is China developing at the expense of Japan for hegemony in East Asia and the Eastern Pacific? South East Asia? Australia? These are questions for ongoing research.
In Central Asia China is part of a bloc with Germany, Russia, India and Iran that are all experiencing growth at the expense of of the US/Japan/UK/France bloc. Germany is an established imperialist country, while Russia is also a newly emerging imperialist power. India and Iran are relatively independent semi-colonies that have never been able to complete the national revolution to emerge as a form of workers state.
In Latin America China is doing deals under the nose of the US, France and Britain. Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina.
In Africa the China is rapidly becoming the major rival to the US led bloc. Ghana, Nigeria, Lesotho, Congo (Katanga), Sudan, Zimbabwe etc.
These and other questions of the expansionary role of China can only be explained by recourse to Lenin’s theory of imperialism. In a global capitalist economy growth is only possible by means of capital accumulation. Expansion overseas into the existing markets or spheres of interest of imperialist powers, can only occur at the expense of the existing imperialist powers. This has direct effects of the workers and peasants over whose surplus value these powers are fighting. If we cannot explain what is driving China in its expansion we are theoretically and programatically disarmed in our struggle against the super-exploitation and oppression of all imperialist powers.
Crisis of Overproduction
If one thing unites the left of all shades right now its a sort of satisfaction that the market has been shown to fail dramatically if not yet apocalyptically. On the left there are broadly three responses. The first is social democratic or Keynesian, of which Krugman, Henwood or Monbiot are examples. The second is radical, such as that of the Monthly Review School and many others who call themselves ‘socialist’, and the third is what I would call classic Marxist; Marx, Lenin and Trotsky of course, but also others like Paul Mattick who lived through the 1930s depression, David Yaffe in the 1970s and Anwah Sheikh today. We can call these standpoints Keynesian, Radical and Marxist for short. Each has a theory of how the capitalist economy works and as a result a theory of crisis and crisis solutions. All three are attempts to rectify what they see as the shortcomings of neo-classical, or what Marx called vulgar, political economy.
Keynesian model
As Mattick notes (in Marx and Keynes p.20) Keynes was hardly a revolutionary. In fact he could be said to have “partially” returned to the classical theory of Adam Smith in which labor produced value. Keynes did not think that the market could establish an equilibrium between consumption and production without state intervention. Say’s Law that supply creates demand did not work in reality and capitalists would tend to hoard rather than invest in production to meet demand. Only the intervention of the state to boost consumption would stimulate production, and that too would have to be pump primed by state investment to start.
For Keynes then the business cycle was a thing of the past and could be eliminated by judicious state policies to balance consumption and production. This does not mean ideally building pyramids in Eygpt or military expenditure, since these do not normally increase workers incomes and consumption. Keynes policies were designed to transfer income from the savings of employers to the consumption of workers. This is why social democracy has seized on Keynes and applied it where possible, drawing on the lessons of the New Deal and Labour Governments in UK, Australia and NZ.
A good example of that is George Monbiot’s call for a return to Keynes.
Today the response of social democrats to the financial crisis is to jump at the opportunity to redirect social spending at increasing the incomes and hence consumption of workers. However the sheer scale of the crisis has taken them by surprise and they have been overwhelmed by the banks and goverments spending pontentially many trillions of dollars to stave up the collapsing financial system. Calls for social spending on jobs, wages and consumption have been lost in the rush to bail out the banks.
Social democrats have a problem. They know that state spending on the banks and big corporates does not necessarily mean more production since there is no matching consumption. The bailing out of the banks could end up being hoarded. The logic of Keynesianism is therefore to take ownership of the banks or to found state banks to ensure that productive investment takes place. This however would end up in the state regulating and even owning production itself. Yet social democrats have not seized the time to demand complete nationalisation of the economy. Why is this?
One interesting comment is from Steve of Marx Redux Blog
Henwood in my view is not a Marxist, but a left Keynesian. His claim that “If the credit markets could not function properly, the economy would grind to a halt and cause immense suffering to those who could least afford it” is clearly false, since it is being shown to us every day since August 2007 that the intermediation of the “credit markets” can be replaced by the direct financial intermediation of the state. Unfortunately, actual state intervention is being perverted into intermediation for the purpose of preserving the position of the financial sector in the economy rather than for the benefit of the economy as a whole, not even for the benefit of capitalist sectors excluded from the charmed circle of military-financial parasitism, much less for the rest of the population.
But since state intervention IS occurring on a massive scale in full public view (if except for the details of the diversion of enormous sums from the U.S. Treasury), why not call for direct state intermediation NOW (Doug!) and cut out the middleman who, after all, precipitated the crisis. These “too big to fail” operations should, of course, be taken over, shutdown, broken
up, their officers imprisoned and the remainder restricted to public utility functions.
But no, Henwood can’t even bring himself to support this minimal reform because there is no “realistic” chance of it occurring. But it is precisely this diversionary hijacking of the Treasury that will now be an immense barrier to any US economic restructuring that would constitute a “way out”
of the crisis, even in narrow capitalist terms. Henwood in his call to support the AIG bailout therefore is calling for a worsening of mass misery, not its alleviation. Henwood refuses to see that the immediate PROBLEM is that the advancement of “future wages” in the form of credit in lieu of actual wages earned (and actually stagnant and declining) – the “Payday Loan Economy” – has exhausted itself at the point where significant sectors of workers no longer earn actual wages to minimally pay the interest on this credit, resulting in a profit crisis for finance and a massive devaluation of financial capital. Reinflation of the balloon will not address this fundamental contradiction.
Doug’s call is now directly opposed to what should now be called for: the reversal of the Treasury hijacking. Realize a stanza of the International: “That the thief return his plunder”. Without that there will be no class struggle over where these funds should be going: in essence to bail out the capitalists or the workers. They will all be gone down the financial rathole. Instead this is the line at present in the class struggle and once
again Henwood is to be found on the other side of the front line as it presently stands.
This comment is interesting as it confirms the views of radicals and Marxists that the social democrats franchise is not to expropriate capital, merely to reform its workings. Radicals are summed up by the line from the Internationale: capitalists “steal” their profits from workers and the task is to take it back. But both radical and Marxists agree that Keynesian policies are designed to rescue capitalism from a crisis of excess capital by boosting consumption, not take over the banks and corporates. For that would be socialism!
Radical model
The radicals objection to neo-classical equilibrium theory goes beyond a rejection of Say’s law. Radicals argue that the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the ruling class is at the expense of the impoverishment of the working class. This theory goes back to a radical reading of David Ricardo the best political economist before Marx came along. Hence as wages are kept down to maximise profits, underconsumption is a chronic condition of the market and cannot be simply corrected by Keynesian policies. Because normally the ruling class controls the state boosting of jobs and incomes is always subject to their resistance to funding such a redistribution adequately. Of course radicals support Keynesian policies but say it is necessary to go further to nationalise the means of production so that it can be planned to meet the needs of consumption.
Again, as with social democracy, the capitalist state is the instrument of this radical reform. Just as the welfare state redistributes income to boost consumption in the Keynesian system, the radical advocates state investment in industry to plan production. Thus the radical response to the current crisis is to push the state intervention to support the banks and corporates further to public ownership and control of finance and industry.
For the Monthly Review School and many others including Robert Brenner and Noam Chomsky, public ownership of finance and industry would overcome the basic cause of the failure of the market – the tendency for capitalists to hoard their wealth unless they can drive down wages and conditions sufficiently to justify further investment. The social democratic solution is no solution for them because taxing their profits to pay a social wage prevents wages falling and profits rising.
Given that understanding radicals go to the ‘root’ of the problem as they see it, the cause of inequality itself, the unequal exchange between capitalist and worker when the capitalist buys labour power below its real value. In the place of the capitalist the state steps in and in the name of the democratic people creates an equal exchange between labour and state capital.
There is therefore no shortage of radicals calling for state bailouts of the banks to go further then state shareholding to complete nationalisation and control of the banks. Similarly, as big corporates like Ford, General Motors and Chrysler start to fall over, the call is for these firms to be nationalised.
This call is now being made as the banks being bailed out by the taxpayers (whose taxes draw on future labor) refuse to themselves bail out bankrupt firms. Example: Republic Windows in Chicago occupied the plant to get their redundancy from the bailed out Bank of America. They won and are now reemployed by a new boss. What is at issue here is workers using direct action to force the employer to shell out some of the public bailout money. Its about getting what is ‘fair’ and not about workers control of production!
While workers limit their actions to pressure the nationalisation of the banks however, their political solution to the financial crisis does not go beyond the nationalisation of money. Marxists call this radical theory of capitalism ‘utopian socialism’ as in Marx’s critique of radical Ricardians and in particular of Proudhon.
Marxist model
Marxism was a development of classical political economy, so Keynes return to Smith and the radicals return to Smith and Ricardo, are a return to a pre-Marxist political economy. Keynes system is a redistribution of income towards the social wage. It assumes equal exchange as did Smith. Radicals assume unequal exchange after Ricardo and want the state to intervene to equalise exchange. Marxism critiques both these theories as limited by the level of analysis.
Marxists critique Keynesians as theorists of capitalist distribution. To illustrate this lets look at one ex-Marxist, James Heartfield, who has moved from Marx back to Keynes. Ironically, Heartfield was once a member of the British Marxist Revolutionary Communist Party that was founded on the economic analysis of David Yaffe who was heavily influenced by classic Marxists Paul Mattick and Henryk Grossmann.
In a recent article Heartfield claims that the current crisis has nothing to do with a crisis of overproduction, but rather a ‘subjective’ psychological aversion of capitalists to productive investment that has led to speculation. Heartfield argues that a crisis of overprodution results from the TRPF and while the crisis of the 1960s could be seen as such, today the crisis originates in the sphere of finance.
Steve of Marx Redux again has pointed to the arguments against this that Heartfield must be aware of.
Of all the cases Heartfield could have chosen to illustrate supposed ‘subjectivism’ (aka psychologism), he made an unfortunate choice.
There is absolutely nothing novel about the burgeoning of finance and its attempts to distance itself from capitalist production. The case of the money market is *precisely* the one which Engels uses in his classic letter to Schmidt (Oct 27 1890) about historical materialism to discuss the relative independence of certain social developments from production – without ever having to resort to a deus ex machina or any form of idealism.
His account of the reception of Mattick’s ‘Marx and Keynes’ is ignorant – it was one of Merlin Books’ Book Club choices and was widely read and debated on the British left in the ’70s. Mattick remarks:
‘A depression may “sneak” into existence by a gradual slowing down of economic activity, or it may be initiated by a dramatic “crash” with sudden bank failures and the collapse of the stock market. The crisis itself is merely the point at which the reversal of business conditions is publicly recognized. … Even the last phases of the boom preceding the crisis are, viewed in retrospect, already unprofitable; but recognition of this fact has to await the verdict of the market. Commitments made on the assumption of a continuous upward trend cannot be met. The conversion of capital from commodity to money form becomes increasingly more difficult. The crisis of production is at the same time a financial crisis. The need for liquid funds and the attempt to avoid losses intensify the fall of securities and commodity prices.’ p84.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1969/marx-keynes/ch09.htmAs for copy-editing Grossman, Heartfield seems to have skipped several pages, at the end of Chapter 3, where Grossman clearly, if briefly explains how the expansion into finance is actually a consequence and symptom of overaccumulation!
‘I have shown how the course of capital accumulation is punctuated by an absolute overaccumulation which is released, from time to time, in the form of periodic crises and which is progressively intensified through the fluctuations of the economic cycle from one crisis to the next. At an advanced stage of accumulation it reaches a state of capital saturation where the overaccumulated capital faces a shortage of investment possibilities and finds it more difficult to surmount this saturation. The capitalist mechanism approaches its final catastrophe with the inexorability of a natural process. The superfluous and idle capital can ward off the complete collapse of profitability only through the export of capital or through employment on the stock exchange.’ p 191 and so on for pages.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/grossman/1929/breakdown/ch03.htmAs an alumni of the RCP, Heartfield seems to have forgotten, probably for good reason, ‘RC Papers’ tedious attack on Yaffe and Bullock’s ‘Inflation, the Crisis and the Post-War Boom’.
(http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/marxism/rc3-4_inflation.html)
There, several pages (22-26) describe in detail exactly the evolution of the financial crisis showing how it comes about precisely because of the constraints imposed by overaccumulation! Although developed to explain the limits on state expenditure (since Keynesianism was still the dominant economic ideology) the article is virtually a tutorial on the relationship of Marx’s theory of credit to his theory of overaccumulation, and can readily be used to understand the current financial crisis.Heartfield is clearly well aware of these three sources which refuted him in advance. Yet he either fails to mention them or gives the impression that they don’t address the issue of the connection of the financial crisis with overaccumulation.
So, on these long cold dark winter nights, drawn up a chair close to the fire, pull down volume three and take another gander through parts 4 and 5, perhaps with some help from Yaffe and Bullock, the latter end of Grossman’s chapter 3, and Mattick’s analysis of the Great Depression, all conveniently online … and reassure yourself that things are undoubtedly going to get worse – thanks to the overaccumulation of capital, not to the fleeting whims and tastes of capitalists.
Not only does Heartfield abandon classic Marxism he arrives back at the distributional analyis of Keynes. Heartfields psychological causes of speculation are exactly the same as Keynes reference to ‘animal spirits’ of capitalists who choose to hoard rather than invest productively. It is the same failure of will on the part of the capitalist who ‘chooses’ to hoard or speculate. The thing about hoarding is that money inevitably loses value, speculation however creates the a fictitious value to disguise the loss of value. All that is needed is another dose of Keynesian state discipline to force the weak minded bosses to invest or else be punished by high taxes that the state will use to invest and reflate the economy. Like making spoiled children behave really. Problem is that the spoiled children do not want their toys taken off them, and rather than lose them they will destroy them.
Is Zionism Fascism?
Polemic
Fascism is an extreme social movement that arose in Europe between the wars in response to the crisis-ridden capitalism of the early 20th century. It emerged under the threat of a workers’ revolution when bourgeois democracy had exhausted its ability to contain the working class. Its function was to smash the revolutionary vanguard before it could mobilise the working class in a revolutionary uprising. It employed an extreme nationalist, racist ideology in order to bind together the middle classes with sections of the working class in the name of defending the nation from communism.
Zionism is the founding ideology of the Israeli state. It is based on several founding myths that declare Jews’ God-given right to be the exclusive occupants of Palestine. It defends that right by constant reference to anti-semitism and the ‘holocaust’.
Zionism as a doctrine fatalistically submitted to anti-semitism. In the Europe of the early 20th century anti-semitic movements called on all Jews to ‘get out’. Zionism took up this call to provide a homeland to escape to. Yet in doing so, Zionism made many deals with the European ruling classes, not least the Nazis, in return for their cooperation in transferring Jews to Palestine. The cost of these agreements to Jews was millions of more deaths than would have been the case had the Zionists not existed.
The Zionists agreements with the Nazis were to concentrate Jews for shipment to labour camps and extermination camps in exchange for the freedom to select and relocate some Jews to Palestine.
Where the Zionists were weak, resistance to Nazi extermination saved the majority of Jews. In some countries active opposition prevented any transportation and killing (Denmark). Where Jews fled Europe into the Ukraine or Russia they survived in their millions.
Thus Zionism is not an antidote to fascism but its junior partner in the death and destruction of Jews.
The sacrifice of Jewish workers can only be explained by a Zionism that is the class ideology of Jewish capital. The Zionists representing the interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie which needed a homeland to defend their capital. Jews as finance capitalists facing the collapse of European capitalism before and after WW1 were both bankrupted by national capitals with which they were associated and forced to flee. Those who could not move their capital to new countries wanted to found a Jewish state to protect their capital. Not only that, they wanted a Jewish working class, selected from the European working class to establish a capitalist economy in Palestine.
The price paid by Jewish workers who were rounded up by Zionist organisations to feed the Nazi’s labour and extermination camps proved that Zionism was motivated by exactly the same class interests as the Fascists in Europe. They wanted to select a racially pure and strong stock out of those ‘concentrated’ in Europe, take them out of the hands of the ‘anti-semites’ who would work them to death, and save them for shipment to Palestine where they would become the core of a Jewish working class.
Just as the European capitalist powers were prepared to sacrifice millions of workers in wars to defend their capital, the millions of weak, old and otherwise defective Jews who would not be of any ‘use-value’ in Palestine were similarly sacrificed.
But if Palestine was already being formed as a racially pure Jewish state in collaboration with the fascists, could it be any less fascist?
First, Zionist reactionary nationalism was the ideology of Jewish capital facing destruction during the capitalist crisis of the interwar years and organised bourgeois, petty bourgeois and working class settlers to found a national homeland for Jewish capital.
Second, the class collaboration with the Nazi’s scapegoating of Jews, betrayed working class Jews into the labour and extermination camps and played into the Nazi’s objective to smash the communist movement. This complicity was critical, since working class Jews were strongly overrepresented in working class struggles and revolutionary organisations and even more so in the leadership of these organisations. Where the Zionists were unable to separate Jewish workers from the rest of the working class their role in the resistance proved that this was the only way to defeat fascism.
Finally, the very act of establishing the state of Israel mimicked the Nazi invasion and seizure of foreign lands. Palestine was already occupied by a large majority of non-Jews. The peasant and working class inhabitants were evicted, relocated in ghettos and concentration camps, and then terrorised by a policy of military genocide.
Nevertheless, despite its history, its complicity with Nazism, and its occupation of Palestine, the Zionists are not fascists. They are extreme racist nationalist colonial settlers who in many ways resemble fascists. But since the Israeli working class is also Zionist there is no need for the Israeli bourgeoisie to impose a fascist reaction to smash any communist movement among Israeli workers. When Israeli workers turn against Zionism and unconditionally support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, then we will see the Zionist regime resort to fascism.
Is Russia Imperialist?
[Update: I recently came across an valuable article written by bourgeois economists perplexed by Russia's sudden emergence as a net capital exporter! Actually their conclusions, written up as a test of various schools of bourgeois economics, fit Lenin's conception of imperialism very well. It turns out that Russia has been able to rapidly transit from so-called 'socialism' to net capital export because it retained the advantages of a monopoly structure of production (state and crony capitalist owned) and its former economic division of labor which has allowed China to profit from the highly integrated economies of the former soviet republics with the Russian economy. That is Russia can take advantage of its state monopoly over a sphere of influence in Central Asia, accumulate capital and export it to take ownership of its 'downstream' energy markets and new sources of energy.]
Is Russia Imperialist? A hot topic raised dramatically by the brief war in the Caucasus the subject of a recent post here. My view expressed in that post was that Russia had indeed become imperialist again, given the export of capital to what are now formally independent states that had belonged to the SU in central Asia. I admit that this judgment was based on a fairly cursory swing through the internet looking for evidence of Russian FDI. It is something that I want to return to here. But before I do that, there is a larger question, and that is the definition of imperialism itself, since today the Left seems very confused as to whether or not Lenin’s definition still applies today, and if it does, is there agreement on what it is? This post is designed to address that larger question before returning to a consideration of what this means in the case of Russia. The first question then, is: what did Lenin mean by Imperialism?
What did Lenin mean by Imperialism?
In his pamphlet written in 1916 titled Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin summarizes the massive amount of research he had undertaken into this question collected in his Notebooks on Imperialism -Volume 39 of the Collected Works. Lenin reads all the material written by bourgeois writers like Hobson and former ‘Marxists’ like Kautsky. They agree that in the late 19th and early 20th century there has been a growing concentration and centralization of capital in the form of big banks, corporations with strong links to states that are pursuing predatory foreign policies designed to gain territory and raw materials from their rivals. The capital of these banks dominates and fuses with corporate capital to form finance capital. These banks and corporations form cartels (a few firms) or trusts (1 or 2 firms) in each of the major industries, railroads, oil, chemicals etc. While they often operate in several homelands (as in the case of oil) and make agreements to share territories and raw materials, the tendency is for these corporations to form monopolies that compete with one another using protectionist trade and military interventions to defeat their rivals. Thus, says Lenin, the bourgeoisie are quite capable of describing the emergence of state monopoly finance capitalism where increasingly market competition is displaced by state monopoly in determining investment and in the distribution of profits.
While Lenin agrees with this description, he disagrees with the bourgeois (and pseudo-Marxist) explanation of the nature of imperialism. The bourgeois view is that imperialism is a policy of the ruling classes in the dominant countries pursued to advance their national interests at the expense of their competitors. The most right-wing nationalists see this as some march of civilisation bringing its virtues to the uncivilised. The liberals see it as a process of enlightened humanitarism. The pseudo-Marxists like Kautsky etc. see it as a wrong policy that can be corrected by the mass intervention of the working class in bourgeois parliament. Kautsky backs up his view with the argument that already this nationalist policy is being supplanted by an ‘ultra-imperialism’ in which the monopolies in the big powers have invested heavily in their rivals monopolies so that war between them is against their profit interest. Lenin demolishes this argument quickly showing that despite the multinational character of monopoly capital, it relies on a national state to advance its interests in competing with other monopolies, and that this competition must inevitably lead to war. In other works when Lenin’s talks of politics as concentrated economics, he is talking about Imperialism.
What Lenin insists on is that state monopoly capital does not lead to a peaceful process of transition from capitalism to socialism. Rather it opens up a succession of trade wars and military wars as each big power seeks to re-partition by force, territory and raw materials claimed by other big powers. Monopoly therefore does not mean the end of competition, rather its shift from the market into the sphere of big power politics where workers would be conscripted to fight to defend national monopolies rather than uniting as an international working class to defeat their own ruling class. Thus the epoch of imperialism is the epoch of crises, counter-revolution and revolution. Imperialism was necessarily the highest stage of capitalism at its extreme limit forced to destroy the forces of production to survive. The alternative facing humanity was barbarism or socialism.
While it was one thing to agree with the bourgeois analysis of state monopoly finance capital, and to prove the pseudo-Marxists wrong -that imperialism would not peacefully evolve into socialism, but necessarily causes wars which must end in counter-revolution or revolution -Lenin did not need the first imperialist war to prove his theory correct. Though “imperialism” is a pamphlet and was therefore written for a mass working class readership, it does contain within it a short theoretical section where Lenin seeks to link his theory back to Marx’s Capital. In this section Lenin popularises Marx’ view of crises and extends his analysis to show how such crises much necessarily give rise to imperialism. And more than that, he proves that imperialism cannot resolve those crises other than by counter-revolution or revolution.
The starting point is Lenin’s understanding of Marx’s method in Capital, that is, the reasoning that led Marx to explain in Capital the laws of motion of Capital that must necessarily express the fundamental contradiction between the relations and forces of production as a tendency for the rate of profit to fall- the TRPF, “the most important law of political economy” as Marx called it. There were a number of means of offsetting or weakening that tendency – called Counter-Tendencies (CTs). Let us see how Lenin takes up and develops Marx’s theory of crisis.
The Marxist/Leninist theory of crisis
Marx calls the TRPF the “most important law” because it explains why capitalism is an historically finite mode of production – a transitional mode between feudalism and socialism – and why that transition could not be peaceful. But first we have to look at the method Marx used to arrive at this law in order to assess its validity. Marx used a method of abstraction which he worked out over decades of critiquing Hegel’s philosophy and the British political economists. In the Introduction to the Grundrisse Marx explains his method as avoiding falsely abstracting from the observable events of the market to insert assumptions about timeless human nature and capitalism as the high point in some evolutionary story. Hegel did this in assuming that God was the universal idea and the society evolved according to his divine plan. The political economists did the same arguing that capitalism arose from an historic struggle to accumulate wealth so that the class structure reflected a natural evolution of the survival of the fittest.
Marx critique of Hegel and political economy rejected these stories as idealist: a set of ideas are taken as universal and projected back into history to explain it. Marx reverses this process. Ideas are the product of social relations -being precedes consciousness – so that capitalist ideas produced by capitalist social relations projects an inverted view of capitalism as a natural state of being. Marx’s method is to reject the surface phenomena and the ideological assumptions that define them and dive deeper into material substance of society, its social relations, so that he can then return to the surface and explain everyday events as the result of the laws arising from the social relations. Capital represents this method self-consciously. The familiar commodity of the market is analysed as the ‘cell’ of capitalist society and is found to have two contradictory aspects, exchange value and use value.
Capital Vol 1 demonstrates that in his intellectual laboratory where capital is reduced to the commodity, that the use value of the commodity is necessary for it to be useful in meeting a need through consumption. The exchange value is the value of the labor-time required to produce it. These two aspects are contradictory because under capitalist social relations commodities are sold to realise an exchange value and thus allow their consumption only if that exchange value contains sufficient surplus value to return a profit over the cost of production. Hence production expropriates surplus labor time for profits. Capital Vol 2 shows that capitalism as a system must try to coordinate its production so that investment is balanced out to ensure production of use values necessary for it to be reproduced in an equilibrium. Thus all commodities and produced and reproduced at their value. Capital Vol 3 shows that this is impossible, because under conditions of competition between capitals insufficient surplus-value is extracted to return a profit over total capital invested – hence the TRPF and crises. Capitalism cannot be in equilibrium and is more like a state of moving anarchy which poses the question of socialising the means of production to stave off anarchy, but in the process creating the conditions for its transformation into socialism.
Lenin goes beyond Marx
Marx did not complete his project of diving into the substance of capital in order to return to the surface to explain the complexity of concrete events. He didnt live long enough. Capital 2 and 3 had to be edited and pasted by Engels after Marx’ death. His projected volumes on world trade, International relations and the state, would have meant coming back to the surface and allowed Marx to finish his project. Some foreshadowing of these volumes can be found in Marx’ journalism, and his later work on the Russian commune. Here Marx links his more abstract concepts with current events. What were the class interests that drove the British in India, or the Paris Commune of 1871. Would the coexistence of the Russian commune and backward capitalism in Russia allow a short-cut to socialism, bypassing mature capitalism? No systematic body of work left by Marx provided the answers. It was to be Lenin who had the task of completing these unwritten volumes. Notably in his book on the Development of Capitalism in Russia, and in his highly condensed pamphlet Imperialism. Let’s see how this happens.
In his book on capitalism in Russia, Lenin applies Marx theory of rent in agriculture to prove that Russian agriculture had made the transition to capitalism. This is an important book because it shows that as soon as production on the land enters into the capitalist market it becomes valued in terms of its productivity of value. The social relations on the land shift from landownership deriving rents in kind to money rents representing exchange value. Rent is now a deduction from surplus value in the sphere capitalist distribution having already been produced and exchanged in the market. This is the analysis of capitalist agriculture that enables Lenin to define Tsarist Russia as imperialist in Imperialism, a point I will come back to.
The small section of Imperialism where Lenin attempts to explain why capitalism had to develop into an imperialist stage he pins the cause onto capitalist agriculture. Again this is based on Marx’s analysis of agriculture. Rent in agriculture is in two forms. First, absolute rent is that part of the surplus deducted by landowners. Ownership of land in limited supply means that landowners can always demand a share of the profits of non-owners – hence monopoly.
Second, differential rent is that amount of surplus-value that can be deducted from non-owners above the price of production of the worst land. Monopoly rent therefore varies depending on the quality of land and distance from market, and takes the form of differential rent. Industrial capitalists who pay rent therefore constantly look for land where the costs of production on the best most productive land means paying less differential rent. This is the basis of Lenin’s development of Marx’ theory of crisis.
Marx’s TRPF means that the rising costs of constant capital – raw materials, plant and machinery that do not add value – call into existence CTs that cut the costs of constant capital. Taking his cue from Marx, Lenin argues that capitalist agriculture in the more developed capitalst powers becomes ‘over-ripe’. Despite its growing productivity its organic composition reduces profitability so that investment in agriculture falls. Moreover, the differential rent set by the worst land imposes a barrier on the reduction of costs of raw materials and wage goods in industry. As production on the land stagnates the price of production on the worst land sets the prices of agricultural commodities.
The land then sets a barrier to the CTs reducing the costs of agricultural inputs as constant capital, so the TRPF begins to bite and overproduction of capital results. This necessary overproduction of capital cannot find an outlet in the ‘home’ countries and looks for new land and productive investments abroad. It is the barrier of capitalist production in the land and the rising organic composition of capital at home that necessitates the export of capital, the search for new land, raw materials and markets. Hence Lenin is able to prove that Marx’ laws of motion arrive necessarily at the highest stage of capitalism where the concentration and centralisation of capitalism takes the form of state monopoly finance capital.
State Monopoly Finance Capital
We have now arrived at Lenin’s concept of Imperialism as a necessarily highest stage of capitalism transitional to socialism. This theory as sketched out in his pamphlet Imperialism is the practical application of Marx method of abstraction used to explain the complex concrete reality of the world economy, international relations and the state in at the time of the first imperialist war. The famous 5 criteria of imperialism are a summary of these results which can be unpacked further to prove this point:
(1)The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;
(2)the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation on the basis of ‘finance capital’, of a financial oligarchy;
(3)The export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;
(4) the formation of international monopolist capital associations which share the world among themselves,
(5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers in completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
These five points are different aspects of the same process. The concentration and centralization of capital in the form of monopoly trusts results from their ability to monopolize rent, i.e. redistribute profits from weak to strong capitals. This sees monopoly capital associated with the states of the biggest capitalist powers whose foreign policies are designed to advance the interests of the monopolies. Moreover, state monopoly finance capital is dependent upon the export of finance capital and the import of ‘super-profits’.
To recap, Marx theory of crisis in Capital 3 explains the root cause. The rising organic composition of capital is the result of competition between capitals for larger shares of the market which causes capitalists to increase labor productivity by introducing new techniques. This requires a rise in investment in constant capital made up of plant and machinery and raw materials as a ratio to variable capital. This causes a tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) when the rate of exploitation of variable capital cannot return sufficient surplus to realize a profit. Marx talks about the role counter-tendencies in cheapening both Constant and Variable capital which act to moderate but not prevent the TRPF. Following Lenin then, It is easy to develop his arguments to show how these CTs become implemented in the epoch of imperialism in the form of state monopoly capitalism.
Lenin encapsulates this argument briefly in Imperialism. As the rate of profit falls capital is overproduced in the home country facing a land barrier to further capital accumulation, the result is capital export to new colonies and markets where new sources of land, raw materials and labor power holds down the value of both CC and VC. The result is super-profits that allow the further accumulation of capital as state monopoly capitalism. Let us see how Lenin arrives at this view.
The counter-tendencies Marx nominates act to reduce the costs of Constant and Variable capital. However they are also part of the same development of capitalism that causes the organic composition to rise. But while they can “weaken” they cannot “annul” the law. These CTs include:
(1) More intense exploitation of labor: the increase in relative and absolute surplus value without increasing the proportion of constant capital.
(2) Reduction of wages below their value: this is the result of competition among workers that drives down the value of labor power below the level necessary for its reproduction.
(3) Cheapening the elements of Constant Capital: this is a CT that shows that Marx was fully aware that rising productivity actually cheapened the elements of constant capital such as raw materials or machines. However, unlike many of his critics who seize on this fact to prove Marx wrong, he was clear that this acted as a CT and could not in itself prevent the TPRF.
(4) The Relative Surplus Population: here Marx is talking about the general tendency of the development of labor productivity expelling living labor from production and creating a surplus population. This increases the competition among workers driving down the value of labor power below the average, driving up profits above the average.
(5) Foreign Trade: Marx states that the “expansion of foreign trade was the basis of capitalist production in its infancy”. It both cheapens the elements of constant capital as well as wage goods so raises the rate of surplus value and hence the rate of profit. Capitalism however introduces a rising organic composition which reduces the rate of profit. He then states:
There is a further question, whose specific analysis lies beyond the limits of our investigation [i.e. in Capital 3 Marx is analyzing ‘many capitals’ but not yet at the level of the market, the state and international relations]: is the general rate of profit raised by the higher profit rate made by capital invested in foreign trade, and colonial trade in particular?”
Marx’s answer to that question is that a surplus profit can be realized on the basis of unequal exchange where labor is cheaper and can be sold above its price of production but below the average price in the home country. This situation however will be equalized as capitalism develops in the colonies “unless monopolies stand in the way.” Marx does not go beyond this since he is theorizing at a level of abstraction that does not take into account the actual colonial trade, not the degree to which monopolies prevent the equalization of profits. It is this shift up in level of analysis that Lenin makes in his application of Marx theory of rent in Imperialism.
While Marx argues that these CTs are contradictory in their application, we can see that he does allow that monopoly in foreign trade can prevent the equalization of profits and maintaining ‘surplus profits’. If we look at Lenin’s theory of Imperialism it is clear that he argues that monopoly is the main feature of Imperialism. Therefore the application of these CTs understood in relation to the highest stage of capitalism must operate on the basis of monopoly rather than competition. Hence the rate of profit is not equalized and surplus profits result. Thus monopoly gives rise to the state form in the imperialist epoch to defend and extend monopoly of territory, markets and raw materials etc.; the ‘international relations’ among states are now oppressor/oppressed relations; and the world market as ‘divided’ among the big capitalist powers and colonies, semi-colonies, and independent countries etc. Hence, the 3 volumes that Marx had planned to write to finish his analysis of capitalism at the level of the concrete, complex world of international relations and world market, had to wait for Lenin to write his pamphlet Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. [page refs that follow are from Imperialism, NB means Lenin's Notebooks on Imperialsm, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 39]
Back to Russia
From this theory flows Lenin’s programmatic position on the national question. Finance capital flows from the imperialist powers to the non-imperialist countries. This means that there are imperialist oppressor countries and oppressed colonial and semi-colonial, and independent capitalist countries. Among the former is Russia. According to Lenin writing in Imperialism, Russia is an imperialist power of a special kind. Lenin speaks of three types of imperialist countries;
“firstly, young capitalist countries (America, Germany, Japan) whose progress has been extraordinary rapid; secondly, countries with an old capitalist development (France and Great Britain), whose progress lately has been much slower than that of the previously mentioned countries, and thirdly, a country most backward economically (Russia), where modern capitalist imperialism is enmeshed, so to speak, in a particularly close network of pre-capitalist relations.” [259]
By 1914 Russia is second only to Britain in the area and population of its Empire [258] which includes a protectorate in Mongolia, and a sphere of influence in Persia and Northern Manchuria. [NB 675] Lenin calculates that 96 million poor peasants and workers are oppressed by Russia. [NB 300]
“Russia’s final aims in Central and South Asia…can be reduced to a single formula. The final aim is to bring the states concerned –Armenia with Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and the adjacent small states – under Russian influence, then under a Russian protectorate and ultimately incorporate them in the Russian Empire.” [NB 676] “
Thus, owing to the formation of capitalist monopolies, the merging of bank and industrial capital has also made enormous strides in Russia.” [232].
And while Britain is using Egypt to produce cotton
“…the Russians are doing the same in their colony, Turkestan, because in this way they will be in a better position to defeat their foreign competitors, to monopolise the sources of raw materials and form a more economical and profitable textile trust in which all the processes of cotton production and manufacturing will be “combined” and concentrated in the hands of one set of owners.” [262]
However, Russia was a relatively minor imperialist power dominated by the finance capital of France, Germany and Britain which in 1913 use “holding banks” to extract around 75% of the surplus value created in Russia, dividing this booty among them (France, 55%, Germany 35%, Britain 10%). [232] By 1910 the bulk of French capital exports to Russia were loans to the government rather than industrial production. German capital export was divided roughly equally between Europe (including Russia) and North America. [243] Russia’s largely foreign owned banks were ‘highly leveraged’ [i.e. loans far in excess of reserves] but were guaranteed by the Russian Finance Ministry and Credit Office. [NB 126-135]
Thus the Russian state acted as the agent of French loans, German extraction of raw materials, by means of a foreign policy of highly centralized expansion beyond its borders. Lenin quotes of Rosa Luxemburg (Junius) on this point.
“In Russia, imperialism is “not” so much “economic expansion” as “the political interest of the state” [NB 309]
While Luxemburg wants to give the priority to politics, Lenin shows that Russian imperialism is politics as concentrated economics. That is, Russian imperialism in 1915 has the general features of imperialism, but the role of the state is central in facilitating the fusion of banking and industrial capital to a degree more pronounced than in any of the other imperialist states because of the relative backwardness of the Russian economy. The state acted to use its power to dominate its capital export to its colonies and extraction of surplus-profits in return, as well as guarantee the interests of its imperialist ‘partners’.
Russia Today
If Russia was imperialist in 1915, notwithstanding its relative backwardness and “network of pre-capitalist social relations”, the dominance of French (and lesser extent German and British) finance capital, and given that the fusion of banking and industrial capital under the political control of the state was ‘developing’, might these same characteristics be found in the Russia of today where capitalism has been restored and where the Russian state plays a central role in organizing the economy? Is Russia a semi-colony, independent capitalist state, or imperialist state?
The critical factor is not gross DFI and extraction of surplus by other imperialists in Russia. Nor is it the monopoly character of the corporations. Nor is it the centrality of the state. Nor is it the extraction of surplus value inside Russia itself. These are characteristics of all capitalist economies in the epoch of imperialism especially weaker semi-colonial countries. The critical factor is the overproduction of capital in Russia that poses a problem of insufficient opportunities for profitable investment, and that requires the export of surplus capital abroad to Russia’s ‘protectorates and semi-colonies as well as in other imperialist powers, in order to return surplus-profits.
The key indicator as to whether Russia is imperialist today is its net export of capital (and the net return of surplus profit).
According to a Deutsche Bank research report Russia’s Outward Investment (April, 2008)
In recent years, emerging market multinationals have increasingly expanded abroad to enhance their competitiveness, i.e. the ability to survive and to grow while maximising profits. This is achieved by saving costs, improving efficiency, applying new technologies as well as gaining access to new markets and resources.
Capital export to the Central Asian CIS states where Russia plays the dominant role in the exploitation of oil and gas has expanded to capital export to Europe, North America and Africa. In the biggest CIS states such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan the oil and gas resources are extracted by multinational joint ventures [JVs] and most are exported via Russia. In other words Russia has been able to maintain its dominant role in the central Asian former soviet Republics despite the independence of these states and the opening up of their economies to foreign investment.
According to Deutsche Bank:
The expansion of Russian corporations started predominantly in the member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the 1990s, moving on to developed markets and continuing in Africa more recently. Russian corporations established a prominent position close to their home market due to linkages already in place in the Soviet Union as well as a lack of foreign investors from elsewhere. Armenia, Belarus and Uzbekistan have accounted for the bulk of the Russian FDI flows to the CIS (see chart 7). Examples of Russian investment in the CIS include state-owned energy supplier RAO UES, which has invested in energy distribution chains in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. In addition, Gazprom controls infrastructure assets in Kazakhstan and Moldova. Furthermore, Russian mobile telecom services providers are competing for the leadership in the CIS, having invested USD 1.38 bn in M&A [mergers and acquistions] since 2001 and accounting for 40% of the CIS cell phone market. However, the proportion of Russian direct investment flows to CIS member states shows a downward trend: it fell to 12% on average in the period 2004-2006 from 59% in 1997-99 (see chart 8). At the same time, the figures should probably be taken with a grain of salt, since they have been quite volatile. In 2004, Uzbekistan received 85% of total investment to the CIS, while Armenia accounted for 78% in 2005. In 2006, FDI flows seem to have been more equally distributed, with Tajikistan accounting for 39%, Kazakhstan for 33% and Ukraine for 26% of total CIS investment. In general, strong economic growth in the CIS should make them an attractive market for Russian direct investment in the future.
Under Putin the Russian state is taking a leading role in virtually all sectors of the economy. In oil and gas the state owns over 60% of the industry and the big players Gazprom and Rosneft are majority state owned. That in itself is not decisive, however most oil and gas projects are JVs where Russian firms have the controlling interest and the lion’s share of surplus value and foreign operators are minority shareholders providing new technology. Also Russian oil majors have swapped shares or merged with foreign firms to gain shares in downstream markets and get access to new resources abroad. Today Russia has a GDP of over $2 trillion and is rates 6th largest economy in the world. Its foreign reserves are around $60 billion, 3rd ranked in the world. But more important its outward DFI is around $200 billion and greater than the $200 inward DFI. However, 2/3rds of inward DFI is ‘round-tripping’ Russian capital returning via Cyprus and Luxembourg, which by definition is returing to Russia to earn higher profits than can be earned abroad. (Kari Hiuhto ‘Russian Tycoons largest DFIs.’ BBC 26/2/08.)
Conclusions
It is important to see that Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism extends Marx analysis of capitalism in Capital. The production of value and surplus value remains the basis of capitalist development. The laws of motion that Marx sketched on in the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation in Capital 1 and argued in Capital 1,2,3, were applied by Lenin to the concrete, complex level of reality that had been Marx’s intention in his unfinished volumes on the state, world market and international relations.
In Capital 3 Marx argued that the expansion of capitalism into the colonies would create opportunities for unequal exchange but would before long give rise to the equalization of capital and see the ‘normal’ operation of the law of value apply, and hence the ‘normal’ development of capitalism. Marx argues this in Capital 3 where the level of analysis is of many capitals, but where there is as yet no application of the role of competition to the actual functioning world market. Thus for Marx colonialism/imperialism cannot bypass the laws of motion and rescue capitalism from its fate as a transient mode of production, that is transitional to socialism. Extending his analysis to the concrete complex reality would not and could not alter these historical laws.
Lenin taking this analysis as his starting point and proves its conclusions at the level of the world market. Imperialism is an empirical test of Marx’s theory and comes up with the finding that it is the highest stage of capitalism transitional to socialism. It is so because the assumption of competition that Marx had made and held constant in Capital, once freed up and observed in concrete reality was now being superseded by monopoly. The market as the mechanism of the allocation of capital was now dominated by the locus of power concentrated in the hands of the institutions of centralized value – state monopoly capitalism. This meant that competition had been shifted from the market to the political sphere of international relations between rival states. What Marx saw as a feature of capitalism’s infancy, and an aberration in its maturity, monopoly, was now the terminal condition of capitalism in its dotage.
The world market then becomes subordinated to international relations among states of varying powers. The big imperialist powers are oppressor states dominating oppressed countries politically and economically. It is the political domination of oppressed countries that determines whether or not the surplus value generated in that country is accumulated internally or exported as “surplus profits”. In most cases the character of a particular country can be readily determined.
In the case of Russia as I have argued above, the answer is more difficult because of its ‘unique’ status prior to the revolution, and complicated due to its isolation from the capitalist world market during the period from the revolution to the restoration of capitalism in 1992. Nevertheless, Russia today has not only restored capitalism but has been able to retain the most resource rich former Socialist Republics within its sphere if interest. In that sense it has carved out a sphere of interest for its renewed imperialist expansion on the basis of its close ties formed within the USSR, without having to compete directly to re-divide the sphere of interests of its rival imperialist powers. It has used this empire on its borders to build an economic base for an aggressive expansion into the spheres of interest of the EU and the US and further into those imperialist heartlands. Russian imperialism is back with a vengeance.
Class Line in the Caucasus
Most of the revolutionary left has responded to the war in the Caucasus with a dual defeatism of the imperialist blocs on both sides. However, Yossi Schwartz of the RCG in Israel has circulated his groups position on the war between Russia and Georgia. He takes the classic Leninist position that Russia is an imperialist oppressor while Georgia is an oppressed semi-colony, therefore it is necessary to defend Georgia and defeat Russia. [See Yossi's post below]. For this position to be correct then not only must Russia must be imperialist and Georgia a semi-colony, but the defeat of Russia should have the purpose of advancing the right to self-determination of the Georgian people from all imperialist oppression. Let us see.
First, is Russia imperialist?
Lenin thought so in 1917 when the Tsar was overthrown even though its ‘imperialism’ didnt really match up to the definition of imperialism as the export of capital he developed. Lenin considered Russia imperialist because it was a “prison house of nations” and extracted tribute if not super-profits from its political protectorates. In that sense, Russia was an awkward imperialism in transition from a feudal empire to capitalist imperialism, though dominated by French and German imperialism. Anyway, it is clear that Lenin thought that the workers’ revolution ended the Tsarist empire.
Is Russia imperialist today?
Yossie thinks that the SU became imperialist in 1939 so therefore it must be so today. At that time Russia’s state capitalist economy which had been ruled by the working class was finally taken over by the bureaucracy as a new Russian bourgeosie. Because the the SU included many republics and and autonomous republics, and becuase it was expansionist into the Ukraine, Poland and Finland, Yossie thinks that the SU was capitalist AND imperialist in 1939.
We do not agree. The SU as a workers state retained elements of the market alongside its economic plan. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were pragmatic about using market techniques of prices to boost the economy, always aware that too much market would bring with it the restoration of capitalism. The Stalinist bureaucracy failing to increase labour productivity by any other means than repression, always looked to find a way to the capitalist market to borrow the more advanced techniques that would allow an increase of labour productivity. But until the 1980s the bureaucracy always failed in this quest. At that point the planned economy was almost defunct with massive waste and inefficiencies leading to huge shortages. Perestroika was a deliberate policy of restoring capitalism as the only way that the bureaucracy could rescue the economy and their own existence as a parasitic caste. They welcomed the opportunity to privatise workers property and turn themselves into a new bourgeoisie. By 1992 the SU was breaking up and the law of value replaced the plan as the means of allocating economic resources.
If capitalism was restored in Russia in 1992 has Russia become imperialist since?
We can ignore the right wing idea that Russia has restored a pre-Bolshevik Great Russian Empire. The law of value dominates in the former SU not feudal tribute. To qualify as an imperialist country today Russia would have to be exporting capital and importing super-profits. It doesnt matter how much of a bastard Putin is, how murderous the Russia army is, or what sort of ‘great Russian’ ideology flowers to spur Russia on to domination of the republics and autonomous regions of the former SU. The only thing that counts is if Russia is extracting super-profits from these countries, in the same way that France, Germany, Britain, US, Japan etc extract superprofits from their colonies and semi-colonies.
I would say that Russia is clearly extracting huge super-profits from its oil interests in what are now the formally independent nations in Central Asia. In that sense Russia today is an imperialist country motivated to increase its imperialist control over the resources of Central Asia in particular of oil and gas. So what motivates Russia today, is the return on its capital investments in the production of oil and gas, not any political or ideological set of interests. Certainly it has no interest in defending the national rights of its semi-colonies other than to retain them as semi-colonies.
How are Russia’s imperialist interests expressed in this war?
Its obvious from what has been said above that Russia is motivated in its war against Georgia to defend and extend its imperial control of the Caucasus against its imperialist rivals. Russia is allied economically with France and to a lesser extent Germany because it supplies these states with gas. It is hostile however, to the US, Britain as imperialist powers that are contesting Russia’s dominance in Central Asia. It regards the US/UK oil pipeline that runs through southern Georgia and Turkey and eventually Israel, as an extension of US intervention in its sphere of interest. It sees the US policy of including promoting ‘color’ revolutions in the Baltic states, and the Ukraine and Georgia as clear evidence of the US creating new protectorates or semi-colonies in the region. Russia opposed the Sheverdnadsi and Saakashvili regimes deals with the US to remove Soviet era bases and establish US bases and to join NATO as direct attacks on the security of its border. It has worked hard to create majorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia to create a buffer zone between Russia and a now US client state in Georgia. So when Georgia invaded South Ossetia Russia took the opportunity to invade Georgia and militarize the buffer zone.
Can we oppose Russia’s invasion without defending Georgia?
Yes. While Russia is an imperialist power motivated in its war to defend and extend its control of resources in the region, and Georgia is a semi-colony of the US and EU, there is no obligation to defend Georgia from Russia. This has nothing to do with the unpopularity of Saakashvili (which is true) or its invasion of South Ossetia. These by themselves would not change the political character of Georgia as a semi-colony.
What is decisive in this situation is the fact that Georgia as a semi-colony is also a client state under the direct control of the US and is acting as a US proxy in its relations with Russia. To defend Georgia against Russia would not demonstrate to the Georgian workers that we are against their national oppression. It would mask the fact that Georgia is already oppressed by the US. It would not make it clear that the people of Georgia are being used by both its client Saakashvili regime and its imperialist masters as pawns in an inter-imperialist war for oil. How could we defend Georgia from Russia without also defending it from the US/Israel specialists, advisors, military, and those who were clearly acting behind Saakashvili in the bombardment of South Ossetia? Not to do so would fail to show how Georgia’s national sovereignty is already sacrificed to the interests of the US in its rivalry with the EU and Russia.
To be more specific. Georgians have been ethnically cleansed from South Ossetia and Abkhazia. While Russia is also responsible for this and gains a buffer zone in which Russian nationals dominate, the US is the main beneficiary. The US will now extend its military base near Tbilisi and militarise the south of Georgia to defend the oil pipeline. So the US has intervened in Georgia to split the country and its national sovereignty to further its oil interests. Further, the US is working on the other former members of the Soviet bloc, Poland and Ukraine, to expand NATO and to ring Russia with forward missile sites. Poland has agreed to do so, and the membership of NATO by Ukraine is being fast forwarded.
To conclude, by defending Georgia against Russia we would not be defending the national rights of Georgia. Rather we would be providing cover for the US (and NATO) to present its opposition of Russia as a defence of the national rights not only of Georgia but also the Ukraine and all the other former members of the Soviet bloc that are now US and EU semi-colonies as part of the “new Europe”.
The correct position is defeat on both sides and defence of the national rights of the oppressed countries in the region
The only way then to show to workers in all of these former Soviet bloc countries that their fate rests with breaking from both Russian and also US and EU imperialism, is mutual defeat in wars between the imperialist blocs, along with defence of the rights of all the nationalities to self-determination. While Yossi argues that Lenin’s position is consistent with his own position, I would argue that Lenin’s method was to prove to workers in oppressed countries that the workers of oppressor countries would side with them to gain independence from the imperialist ruling class. In the current case, this purpose would be defeated if we opposed only Russian oppression and ignored US oppression in Georgia. Therefore, I consider dual defeatism to be more consistent with Lenin’s method than Yossi’s.
Thus, we are for the right of Georgians to self-determination against all regional powers including US military occupation. We are for the right of South Ossetians for independence from Georgia and voluntary association with the Russian Federation. The same goes for Abkhazia. However, since all of these countries must break from imperialism to win their independence this can only result from socialist revolution based on workers councils and militias, and led by revolutionary Marxist parties, the forming of workers governments, and voluntary membership of a federation of socialist republics in Eurasia!
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yossi schwartz said, on August 16th, 2008 at 1:58 pm (Edit)
Many years have passed since Lenin raised his revolutionary slogan:” the less evil is the defeat for imperialist Russia. He did so because even though other countries on the other side were imperialists, he lived in Russia and the enemy first of all in an imperialist country at home.
The war of Russia against Georgia is a clear indication of an end of a period when the US was the only super power of the world. Many supporters of the US “new order” are now in tears.
Those who fail to see that imperialism is a stage of the advanced capitalist states that include Russia, Japan , Australia –New Zealand Europe and Israel in addition to the US and not simply the US, must well come the victory of Russian imperialism as a step in the right direction. For those of us who are Leninists the defeat of Russia in this conflict with the non imperialist state- Georgia is the only correct line.
Most of the left groups correctly do not side with Russian imperialism in the war. However, wrongly they do not side military with Georgia because of its right wing regime in alliance with the US. Confusion between regime and a state leads to reformism . For example siding with Western imperialism against Nazi Germany rather than struggling for a defeat for both as imperialists was already during WWII a symptom of reformist pressures.
To have the correct position from a Marxist perspective: siding military with Georgia against Russian imperialism without any political support for Georgia, Marxists have to differentiate between military and political support.
Lenin in 1917 did differentiate between the two when he defended Kerensky’s government military but not politically.
Would US and NATO step in and fight Russia our position will change to revolutionary defeat for all imperialist sides. This in essence will be the beginning of WWIII.
However mean time the US and NATO are not involved directly and for this reason most people who support US imperialism are in shock.
It is a reformist mistake not to take the position of Revolutionary defeat for Russia and Revolutionary defense for Georgia.
To understand this question even in a more clear way is to remember Iraq. Sadam was the instrument of US for many many years including in his war against Iran. He tried to occupy Kuwait with the assumption the US gave him green light. He was wrong. Now in the war of the US against Iraq the revolutionary position was and is Revolutionary defeat for the US Revolutionary defense of Iraq.
Georgia has been acting for many years as US instrument against Russia, yet in this war the US deserted Georgia and so is Israel.
There are many implication for the desertion of the US its weak ally-Georgia. It means among other things that If the Israeli ruling class want to attack Iran they are not likely to get the US actively on their side.
RCG
YOSSI
Is China the new US?
For many China is the new USA. They think that it will be the next economic powerhouse, if it is not already, replacing the US as the leader in the world economy. Others doubt this, but there is no denying that today China is rapidly growing – but what sort of society is it? There are still those who think that China is a socialist country or some transitional type of ‘market socialism’ somewhere between socialism and capitalism. Then there are the classic liberals who think that in China the Manchu dynasty and the Chinese Communist regime are different versions of ‘oriental despotism’ all engaged in human rights abuses. Rather than attempt to navigate between these contending viewpoints on the surface of events, we prefer to approach China by looking for the underlying revolutionary changes in its modern history which allows us to understand its development and its current role in the global economy today. Using Trotsky’s concept of the law of uneven and combined development, and Marx’s concept of permanent revolution which was later taken up by Lenin and Trotsky we can uncover and reveal this historic dynamic.
China’s pre-capitalist history
China before the entry of the European powers had been a highly developed pre-capitalist society for centuries. Marx famous and controversial concept of an Asiatic Mode of Production was an attempt to describe the typical hierarchical society typical of Asia of which European feudalism was a local variant. Despite being criticized as a Eurocentric version of ‘oriental despotism’ Marx seems to have identified the key elements of this mode in the communal modes at its base and centralized state at its center.
Eric Wolf defines this mode in Europe and the People Without History as a tributary mode of production which incorporated and dominated kinship modes of production Peasant families organized as kinship modes of production had their tribute or rent expropriated by a class of landlord families which in turn paid the standing army and bureaucracy to administer society. Yet for all its advanced technology and trade relations the tributary mode of production tends towards stagnation and could not embark on the capitalist road. The ruling class was able to extract sufficient rents to maintain society and did not need to allow the formation of a middle class of merchants to bring wealth from unequal exchange overseas back to China. Rather, those traders who sought to expand their wealth through trade and become merchant capitalists had to exile themselves and look for opportunities in other parts of the world in particular South East Asia. This merchant diaspora is the basis of overseas Chinese capitalism today.
China was highly successful in producing and exporting tea, running a trade surplus until the British ‘opium wars’ in the mid 19th century forced it to import opium in exchange for its exports. The tributary mode was thus subordinated to British imperialism which exploited China’s raw materials and surplus labor force as migrant workers in its other colonies. So long as China remained a form of British colony and had its resources and wealth expropriated it would not be able to create its own internal market and develop the capitalist mode of production. It would remain a tributary mode mined and plundered by imperialism. Karl Marx, however, anticipated that the sleeping giant would awaken as an independent capitalist nation. Marx wrote of the impact of the capitalist mode of production in dissolving the Asiatic mode, though he noted that this was very slow. Nevertheless in a famous newspaper article he wrote in 1850 Marx was not joking when he said: “When our European reactionaries in their immediately coming flight across Asia finally come up against the Great Wall of China, who knows whether they will not find on the gates which lead to the home of ancient reaction and ancient conservatism the inscription, ‘Chinese Republic – liberty, equality, fraternity’.”
The Bourgeois revolution
Here Marx is anticipating the uneven and combined development that would see capitalism progressively free China from the Asiatic Mode so that it would replace Europe as the dominant force in the world economy. For this to happen, however, a national bourgeoisie would have to rise up to overthrow the tributary ruling class which was subservient to imperialist powers. This national democratic revolution began in 1911 when the weak bourgeoisie struggled to force the old landlord ruling class to break from its subservience on British imperialism and free up the opportunities or the emergence of a national bourgeoisie. However, the Chinese would-be bourgeoisie proved to be too weak to united the country and win complete independence from the imperialist powers. Power shifted from the imperial center to a host of tributary warlords. As an expression of the tragicomic adventures of the would-be bourgeoisie, the united Chambers of Commerce declared their own national government in 1923, supported by Mao Zedong who said “The merchants of Shanghai…have adopted revolutionary methods; they have overwhelming courage to take charge of national affairs’. (Cambridge History of China, p 782). To unite China and win independence the national bourgeoisie would have to harness the class power of the peasantry and the workers and complete the bourgeois revolution. But it ran the risk of the peasants led by the workers taking over the national revolution and going straight to socialism.
The Kuomingtang (KMT), the party of the bourgeoisie the under Sun Yat-sen sought to complete the national revolution against Japan and Britain and liberate the nation from semi-colonial oppression. To achieve this, the KMT formed a patriotic alliance between a bloc of workers, peasants and middle class under its leadership. This bloc was unstable because it contained a contradiction between the producing classes and exploiting classes. In order to ensure that the bourgeoisie would retain its class rule, the KMT could not allow the workers and poor peasants to lead the revolution for fear that they would not stop at throwing out the Japanese, but would throw out the KMT as well.
Russia’s permanent revolution
This class contradiction was recognized by the Bolsheviks because it had occurred in Russia as well. In Russia the weak bourgeoisie preferred to stay in power with the backing of the imperialists rather than cede power to the worker and poor peasant majority. Why? Because the imperialists would allow them a share of the super-profits expropriated from workers and peasants, while a workers revolution would eliminate the bourgeoisie as a class. Because of this treacherous role of the bourgeoisie only the workers leading the poor peasants could complete the national revolution against imperialism. The Bolsheviks rapidly dropped their alliance with the bourgeoisie and led a revolution in which the worker and poor peasant majority took power. The Bolsheviks had an ‘uninterrupted’ revolution (or ‘permanent’ revolution in Trotsky’s terms) in which the national revolution was completed by a socialist revolution.
Facing a similar situation in China in 1924, the Comintern (the 3rd International) that arose out of the Russian Revolution, was divided over how the national revolution should be completed. The majority around Stalin abandoned the lessons of October and reverted to the Menshevik idea that the bourgeoisie would lead a ‘united front’ [the ‘bloc of 4 classes’] to complete the national revolution and so prepare the conditions for the socialist revolution. The minority around Trotsky, (the Left Opposition) applied the lessons of the Russian revolution to China. Only the working class leading the poor peasants could complete the national revolution as a socialist revolution – the permanent revolution! The bourgeois KMT could not be trusted to lead a national revolution because it would side with the imperialists as a comprador bourgeoisie rather than allow the workers and peasants to take power. This division in the Comintern was reproduced in the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CCP).
The second revolution betrayed
Trotsky’s warnings that the workers and poor peasants must not subordinate themselves to Chiang Kai-shek’s military leadership were ignored. KMT were made honorary section of Comintern. The Comintern overruled the CCP leadership and suppressed the Left Opposition (LO). The KMT led the bloc of 4 classes to fight the imperialists but fearing the power of the exploited classes then turned on the CCP leadership and destroyed it. Stalin blamed the CPP leadership. Some of the CPP leadership opposed this and were expelled. Others were won to LO in China and four LO currents were formed which later formed a United Opposition.
Meanwhile in the face of this betrayal the Maoist leadership of the CCP continued the failed Stalinist popular front tactic of the bloc of 4 classes and began to suppress the LO. The KMT regime under Chiang was a form of Bonapartist bourgeois regime balanced between the Chinese peasants and workers on the one side and the imperialists on the other. Because of the weakness of the national bourgeoisie the KMT regime encouraged the formation of a state bourgeoisie. The national war of liberation became a peasant ar and it took many years to drive out the Japanese the KMT and its backer, the US. Mao finally took power in 1949 still committed to a bourgeois China and attempted to hand power over to the bourgeoisie. Again the popular front theory was proven wrong but only because by this time the peasants and workers were mobilized to take power, and not to hand it back to the bourgeoisie. The leading sectors of the Chinese bourgeoisie abandoned the revolution since it would not allow them to profit from a comprador relationship with imperialism. Some other sectors made an alliance with the CCP. Mao was then forced to expropriate bourgeois property but at the same time refuse to allow the workers and peasant base to administer the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The third revolution
Thus despite the Stalinist Maoists the revolution succeeded in removing the imperialists and the national bourgeoisie, but failed to create the conditions for the transition to socialism. The nationalization of bourgeois property created workers property and a bureaucratic plan, but the working class and poor peasantry were never able to democratically control the state. This transitional form of society contained a contradiction between workers property and the parasitic Bonapartist bureaucracy. In that sense it was structurally a workers’ state degenerate at birth, the same as the states formed in Eastern Europe that were occupied by the Red Army, or like Yugoslavia, balanced between the Soviet Union (SU) and imperialism.
We characterize this transitional form of state in China as a Degenerate Workers State (DWS) at birth following Trotsky’s method in explaining the role of the Red Army in occupying the Ukraine, Poland and Finland in 1939. Against those who took the position that the Red Army could not substitute for the working class to create workers states in these countries, Trotsky said that the state forms that resulted were an extension of the DWS in the SU. Despite everything the bureaucracy did, including suppressing national workers and poor peasants’ movements, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie created post-capitalist property.
But does the analysis of the DWS occupied by the Red Army as an extension of the Soviet Union also apply to those countries that were not occupied by the Red Army – Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam, Cuba? In each of these countries, the nationalist forces that led the revolution were not under the direct control of the SU. But the same phenomenon that Trotsky observed in Poland happened. The support of the SU encouraged the workers and peasants to join in not only the expulsion of the imperialists, but in forcing the bureaucratic or petty bourgeois leaderships to go further than forming a government with the national capitalists, and rather to expropriate them.
In China the expropriation of big bourgeois property was possible only with support from the Soviet Union –a fact that the bureaucracy was forced to use to legitimate its rule. This is why when the CCP nationalized property it took the form of workers property, even under a bureaucratic dictatorship. The bourgeoisie as a class are removed, and all that remains for workers to claim their property is the removal of the bureaucracy. That is why, against those who thought that the Stalinists could create healthy workers’ states, substituting for the historic revolutionary role of the working class, Trotsky said that the only sure defence of workers property was the overthrow of the bureaucracy in a political revolution as part of an international socialist revolution.
Thus in China in 1949, as in Poland as Trotsky had argued in 1939, it was not the Chinese Red Army in itself that was progressive but the fact that the SU backed it against Japan and the US, expelling the comprador bourgeoisie, and forcing the Bonapartist CCP leadership to expropriate capitalist property.
Forward to socialism, or back to capitalism
China, as a new DWS could go in two directions. Forward to socialism by political revolution that removes the bureaucracy, or back to capitalism by a counter-revolution where the bureaucracy privatized workers property and turned itself into a new national bourgeoisie. The contradiction between workers property moving forwards to socialism and the bureaucratic caste moving backward to capitalism was expressed in the class contradiction which the Bonapartist regime attempted to reconcile. It was also represented in two factions in the CCP leadership. The Maoists fought to keep workers property and the planned economy as the basis of their bureaucratic privilege, while the ‘capitalist roaders’ fought to privatise collective property, restore capitalism and convert themselves into a new bourgeoisie. These big internal fights then represented both sides of the class contradiction striving for victory over the other.
The capitalist roaders won and began by replacing the rural collectives with the TVE (Town Village Enterprises) cooperatives in the 1980s, and then began transforming the SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) into privatized corporations in the 1990s. The shift to TVE cooperatives was decisive as it allowed a shift to personal shareholding. These became the basis of the conversion of the TVEs into privatized industries in the 1980s. This created a huge movement of displaced workers into the cities as a rural reserve army of formal wage labour who would then become a free wage labor force.
By the early 1990s the Chinese economy had been gradually opened to the influence of the Law of Value (LOV). State owned land was increasingly commodified with the development of a rental market, the SOEs were freed of any responsibility to meet the health, education and welfare needs of wage workers, and the state surplus increasingly became accumulated as private capital in pockets of TVE shareholders, SOE managers as well as private bosses. Thus at this point workers property relations were being replaced by capitalist property relations. The bureaucracy had converted the TVEs and SOEs into capitalist corporations in which a new bourgeoisie become the private owners.
Capitalist Restoration completed
The question of when workers property is replaced by capitalist property determines the change in the class character of the state. Here again, we apply Trotsky’s analysis of the counter-revolution in the SU. Up to the time of his death in 1940 Trotsky argued that the SU remained a DWS, and as we have argued the just as the occupied countries were DWs by extension of the SU. The counter-revolution in all of the DWS that emerged after WW2 would follow the same pattern as the SU. In the SU, the economy was characterized as workers property, or nationalized property, that was nevertheless coexisting with some elements of the market to allow demand to guide prices. But as long as the market was subordinated to the plan, no matter how bureaucratic, the allocation of resources would follow the plan rather than the law of value. That is why the SU was plagued by waste and shortages of basic necessities. Capitalism is restored when the LOV takes over from the plan in determining prices in allocating resources. Today when workers have little money the shortages of necessities result from lack of effective demand not lack of commodities.
In the EE states, attempts to remove the Red Army included elements that were for the defence of state property and those that wanted to restore capitalism. The bureaucratic suppression of both had the effect of subordinating the independence struggle to the restorationists. Thus by the 1980s the struggle for political revolution was weakened and the forces for counter-revolution strengthened. In the SU and EE this counter-revolution was completed between 1989 and 1992. At this point it was clear that the bureaucracy, despite competing factions, was committed to destroying the plan and re-imposing the LOV as the basis of production. Thus the SU and its buffer states ceased to be DWSs and became capitalist states. The first phase of the operation of the LOV was to destroy the existing industry and allow asset stripping by a new capitalist class to set its value on the world market. Trotsky anticipated this transition back to capitalism as a state capitalist phase.
Applying the same method to China it is clear that the turning point was around 1992 when the CCP abandoned and defence of the plan and passed laws to privatize the SEOs as the property of their managers. The CCP did this more deliberately than the CPSU and this phase of state capitalism was dressed up as market socialism. Massive devaluation and asset stripping was spread over decades instead of a few years. As opposed to those who point to the concessions to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in China as a major force for restoration, we point to the fact that FDI is still relatively small, and that the major moves towards privatization originated in the state sector where the bureaucracy made a smooth transition to capitalism and to their re-invention as a national bourgeoisie.
Is China imperialist?
Today by the measure of the LOV China is capitalist. In that sense a rapidly growing powerful capitalist China could be considered imperialist. But what do we mean by imperialist? According to Lenin and imperialist country has a surplus of finance capital which must be exported to counter falling profits at home. That is, the possibilities of growth at home can only be sustained by the export of capital to earn super-profits in other countries, and be imported to the home country to maintain the rate of profit. Less important was the need to find new markets in which to sell the commodities produced in the home market. Historically, the powers that clearly meet this definition are the USA, Japan and the main European powers like Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Others are not imperialist, or may be former imperialist, and are more like semi-colonies, such as Portugal, Greece, Poland, etc. Others may be small imperialist powers such as Sweden, Austria etc.
Does China today meet these criteria? As yet it doesn’t appear so. China has a big trading surplus from its commodity exports but this is mainly invested in US bonds. It is a peculiar sort of finance capital that must accept US petrodollars to fund the massive US external deficit. Most of China’s growth is driven by its internal market which is huge and expanding rapidly. In that sense China’s internal market is sufficient to maintain its profitability, while its exports are more re-exports of foreign mainly overseas Chinese companies (mainly Hong Kong and Taiwan) that have invested in China. So far from being evidence of the export of China’s surplus finance capital, China is the source of imperialist (Japanese, overseas Chinese, EU, US etc) FDI which reaps massive super-profits from China’s cheap resources and labor power.
While the organic composition of capital in China is growing it doesn’t seem yet to have reached the point of an overproduction of capital necessitating an export of productive capital. China today, then, is still developing its internal market, making huge infrastructural investment and is only beginning to establish DFI overseas in Africa, Latin America, and the rest of Asia to create its own so-called ‘empire’. Nevertheless, China is being driven by the rapid growth in demand for cheap raw materials and markets to become a major competitor to the existing imperialist powers, a fact that is clearly behind the growing alarm with which the EU and US views its aggressive role in Africa.
For some China’s capitalist growth has many of the features of industrialization in Europe in the 19th century. However, the form of combined and uneven development that Trotsky and Lenin spoke of in the case of the Soviet Union, and which Marx foreshadowed in China, is today manifest in a pace and scale that would have been beyond even their imaginations. Not only has China become the key driver of the world economy at a time of US dominance and relative decline, it is now at the center of the world historic contradiction between labor and capital. Emerging out of a bourgeois national revolution and the aborted socialist revolution China has within the space of two decades created a powerful capitalist economy. Whether it is contained as a semi-colony exploited by the other capitalists, or succeeds in re-dividing the world economy at the expense of the other capitalist powers, remains to be seen. China may be on the road to displacing the US but will it be as an imperialist China or a socialist China?
Nepal under the Maoists
The election victory of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has created an acid test for socialists who claim to represent the interests of workers and the oppressed. There are many who welcome the victory as a progressive step forward to socialism. Some support the CPN (M) position that a period of capitalist development is necessary before a socialist revolution is possible in Nepal. Revolutionaries around the world have rejected this policy as the revival of the classic Stalinist theory of stages. They say that history proves that unless the workers and peasants reject a bloc with the national bourgeoisie and socialize the economy under a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, then the national democratic revolution will be driven back by counter-revolution. This is the situation that faces us in Nepal today.
Stalinism and Bolshevism
I’m reprinting here a classic article by Trotsky from August 1937 that defends Bolshevism from those accusing it of preparing the way for Stalinism. For those of us who see Trotskyism as the continuation of Bolshevism, but in need of refounding on the basis of the 1938 program, this article is as important today as it was in 1937.
. . .
Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and isolate its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through. In these conditions the task of the vanguard is, above all, not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against the current. If an unfavourable relation of forces prevents it from holding political positions it has won, it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them is expressed the dearly paid experience of the past. Fools will consider this policy “sectarian”. Actually it is the only means of preparing for a new tremendous surge forward with the coming historical tide.
