Only the World Working Class can Put a Stop to Capitalist “Globalisation”

IBRP Statement on the occasion of the September protests at the IMF/World Bank meeting

This time it’s the turn of the bureaucrats of the World Bank and the IMF to run the gauntlet of “anti-capitalist” protests as they gather in Prague for their 55th annual general meeting. Whilst the rich countries continue with their empty promises to reduce “3rd World” debt, while the yawning chasm between the income of the tiny minority of the world’s rich and the whole of the world’s poor put together continues to grow, and while the ruthless erosion of workers’ working and living conditions remains unchecked, the umbrella movement against the disastrous effects of capitalism’s recent development has not yet run out of steam.

Old Capitalism, New Movement?

Yet even as the organisers of S26 can congratulate themselves on another headline-winning protest, those who saw similar events (Stop the City, London 1999, Seattle and Washington protests earlier this year) as the beginning of a new form of genuine mass struggle against capitalism must be disappointed. The aim of the vast majority of the protesters (ranging from Christians, charities and environmentalists to farmers and trade unionists) has never been to overthrow capitalism. Their goal is the much more utopian one of turning the present rotten, crisis-ridden system to go against its fundamental drive to accumulate capital at whatever cost and turn itself into “a world of justice, equality and peace” (Statement from Prague Initiative Against Economic Globalisation). Predictably the trades unions, social-democrats and the state capitalist leftist groups involved in the demos have put forward reactionary demands such as protectionist measures against the impersonal juggernaut of “globalisation”.

Many would-be revolutionists of a more anarchistic, “libertarian communist” persuasion have recognised these “defects” from the start. However, their argument has been that what we are seeing is the beginning of a new world-wide movement against capitalism, a movement which has discovered new ways of struggling outside of the workplace, which has no need for a political party and from which a new way of living will spontaneously emerge.

But hold on a minute. Before we can understand whether a movement is really against capitalism we have to remind ourselves what capitalism is. Despite all the old top hat, cigar-smoking cartoons, Marx himself was clear that capitalism is more than just individual capitalists and companies. Capitalism is a mode of production which depends on the exploitation of wage labour for the creation of wealth and for the source of its profits. It’s true that world capitalism is historically on the decline and that for the last thirty years or so it has been searching desperately to find ways out of an ever-deepening accumulation crisis. This is the material reason for the collapse of the old Soviet bloc, the worldwide withdrawal of state protection and subsidies, the massive restructuring of industry and the introduction of micro-electronics - all part of the never-ending attacks on wage labour - and the internecine struggle amongst the strongest states to appropriate surplus value from the rest of the globe which goes under the name of “economic liberalisation” and “globalisation”. There is no doubt that the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO are weapons of capitalist imperialism but they are its symptoms, not its cause.

International Working Class Holds the Answer

Today world capitalism is wreaking so much human misery and environmental destruction that more and more social protests are bound to be in the offing. But there is no short cut to overthrowing this rotten system. The fact remains that only the world proletariat - the wage slaves who are forced to labour in return for a tiny fraction of the wealth they produce for capital - has the potential to overthrow capitalism. Over the last two decades the working class has been pummelled by the attacks of capital. This has allowed the capitalist ideologues to easily write off the working class and the whole possibility of class struggle. But the class struggle has not and will not go away. Whether or not the world’s working class will realise its revolutionary potential from out of this struggle will depend on how far the movement is unified with clear revolutionary aims.

Political Organisation: The Only Real Alternative

Here the onus is on those who already aim for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism to organise for the rigorous clarification of how to achieve that aim and for the dissemination and acceptance of those aims inside the working class as a whole. As Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, every class struggle is a political struggle in which the organisation of the proletariat into a class, and consequently in a political party cannot be avoided.

We are not talking about Stalinism or about Trotskyist outfits. (This is what international capital wants every class conscious worker to believe by the term “revolutionary party”.) What we are talking about is the need to create an internationalist organisation of class conscious workers to put forward the only realistic programme that can fight capitalism on a global level: That programme remains the communist one of an end to money and wage labour, the control of production by the producers themselves in a society free of poverty, social classes and national boundaries. It is a programme that cannot be implemented by stealth or without a struggle against the capitalist state.

It is time for all class conscious workers to seriously think about the way ahead. It is time for the ruling classes to once again begin to tremble at the prospect of a communistic revolution. For,

The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions... The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries unite!