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“Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else”

— Peter Arshinov, ‘The History of the Makhnovist Movement’

On this edition of Conversations with History, UC Berkeley’s Harry Kreisler is joined by linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky to discuss activism, anarchism and the role the United States plays in the world today. Series: “Conversations with History” [6/2002] [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 6568]

A Brazillian revolutionary who led the National Liberation Action (ALN). His tactics inspired the Italian Red Brigades, the German Red Army Faction. Expelled from the Brazilian Communist Party for “pro-Cuban” sympathy. Executed by police.

The urban guerrilla is a person who fights the military dictatorship with weapons, using unconventional methods. A revolutionary and an ardent patriot, he is a fighter for his country’s liberation, a friend of the people and of freedom. The area in which the urban guerrilla operates is in the large Brazilian cities. There are also criminals or outlaws who work in the big cities. Many times, actions by criminals are taken to be actions by urban guerrillas.

The urban guerrilla, however, differs radically from the criminal. The criminal benefits personally from his actions, and attacks indiscrimminately without distinguishing between the exploiters and the exploited, which is why there are so many ordinary people among his victims. The urban guerrilla follows a political goal, and only attacks the government, the big businesses and the foreign imperialists.

Another element just as harmful to the guerrillas as the criminal, and also operating in the urban area, is the counterrevolutionary, who creates confusion, robs banks, throws bombs, kidnaps, assassinates, and commits the worst crimes imaginable against urban guerrillas, revolutionary priests, students, and citizens who oppose tyranny and seek liberty.

The urban guerrilla is an implacable enemy of the regime, and systematically inflicts damage on the authorities and on the people who dominate the country and exercise power. The primary task of the urban guerrilla is to distract, to wear down, to demoralize the military regime and its repressive forces, and also to attack and destroy the wealth and property of the foreign managers and the Brazilian upper class.

The urban guerrilla is not afraid to dismantle and destroy the present Brazilian economic, political and social system, for his aim is to aid the rural guerrillas and to help in the creation of a totally new and revolutionary social and political structure, with the armed population in power.

South African workers are back on the move, with a two-day general strike in October following the mass protest at the UN world summit and an important municipal workers’ union strike. But how can the struggle against the neo-liberal ANC government be taken forward? WEIZMANN HAMILTON of the Democratic Socialist Movement, the South African section of the CWI, writes.

THE THREE-WEEK strike by the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU); the 20,000-strong march by the coalition of anti-privatisation protestors under the banner of the Social Movement Indaba; and October’s two-day general strike by the Congress of South African Unions (COSATU), individually and collectively represent developments of enormous political significance in the struggle of the South African working class. With leaderships having different and even contrary understandings of the aims, nature, tasks, strategies and tactics of the working class struggle, a common thread nevertheless ran through all of them – opposition to the African National Congress (ANC) government’s neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy.

The three-week SAMWU strike was the longest since the ANC came to power. The August 31 march (A31) on the Joburg UN World Summit on Sustainable Development was the largest anti-government protest since 1994. And the COSATU general strike – the third in so many years – was the first two-day general strike since the ANC came to power. Each drew venomous attacks by the ANC government and president Thabo Mbeki in particular. But together, within a space of three months, they have reinforced the growing awareness that the ANC government, despite its protestations to the contrary, is an anti-working class government and the conscious political representative of capitalism in South Africa. These events have also revealed the vacuum that exists on the left of the political spectrum in South Africa and the need for a political voice for the working class based on a programme that uncompromisingly represents their interests.

Collectively, these events brought into sharp relief the political differentiation that has begun to occur on the South African landscape as a consequence of the class conflict engendered by the ANC government’s neo-liberal capitalist policies. The convulsions on the white right are also a reflection of the same process, with the disintegration of the Democratic Alliance, the atrophy gripping the Democratic Party, and the death agony of the New National Party (NNP). Its demise has merely been postponed by the life support machine offered to it by the ANC through the floor-crossing manoeuvre (a recent ruling that representatives can jump from one party to another without losing their seats).

The black parliamentary and semi-parliamentary right are similarly wracked by political tensions. The contradictions choking the Pan-African Congress (most recently on Zimbabwe), the haemorrhaging of the Azanian Peoples’ Organisation (AZAPO), and the United Democratic Movement’s failure to prevent councillors from crossing the floor to the ANC despite its desperate attempt reinvent itself as a social democratic party – all of these represent the damning verdict of a working class that does not see them as an alternative.

The role of COSATU

DESPITE THE POSITION of the COSATU leaders, of the three events cited above, without detracting from the importance of each on its own, the internecine strife that has broken out in the Tripartite Alliance in the wake of COSATU’s general strike is undoubtedly the most significant. The Tripartite Alliance between COSATU, the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the ANC has served as a political detention centre for the working class, with the COSATU and SACP leadership cast in the role of prison guards employed by the political management of capitalism – the ANC government – to prevent a mass breakout.

The pressures exerting themselves on the Tripartite Alliance are rooted in the crisis of capitalism, with its inability to solve even the most basic problems of society now expressing itself with extreme sharpness even in the citadels of the world economy. Twenty years of neo-liberalism has provoked growing international working class resistance in every corner of the planet.

Like their counterparts internationally, however, the ANC government is pressing ahead with its neo-liberal programme. Its determination is reinforced by the fact that privatisation offers the quickest way for the fulfilment of its historical mission, the creation of a prosperous non-European bourgeoisie – described by Nelson Mandela as long ago as 1956 as the aim of the Freedom Charter. The open contempt of the ANC towards its ‘tripartite partner’ COSATU is rooted in this reality.

As a demonstration of this contempt, the day after the general strike the ANC government announced its plans for the listing of the state telecoms company, Telkom, for next March. This may satisfy the ANC and its capitalist masters that it will not be forced to retreat on its privatisation agenda. But it will merely aggravate the social problems and accelerate the pace of political differentiation, compelling the working class to look for an alternative vehicle to carry its class and political interests. Although the COSATU leadership still clings pathetically to an abusive marriage the fact is that, as the Business Day editorial pointed out the day after the strike, ‘the Tripartite Alliance has run its course’ (3 October).

The protestations of the COSATU and SACP leadership that what occurred in the first days of October was not a political strike against the ANC, will make absolutely no impression on the ANC leadership or its capitalist backers. So far as the ANC is concerned, the role of COSATU in the Alliance is to police the working class, not to organise strikes. But if such pleadings fool neither the ANC nor the working class, it causes confusion amongst the latter, complicates the process of political differentiation, and delays the emergence of an alternative. Whilst the COSATU leadership insists that remaining in the Tripartite Alliance is necessary to maintain the unity of the working class, it will in fact become a source of disunity.

COSATU has historically played a central role in the struggle of the working class, providing the spinal column of the mass working class movement that smashed apartheid. But even COSATU has no divine right to exist. The continued refusal of the COSATU leadership to accept the challenge of Mbeki and the ANC is not simply due to misplaced political loyalty. It is based on the fact that the majority of COSATU leaders accept the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism. Many have a direct interest in capitalism, with possibilities for self-enrichment provided by union investment companies involved in the same privatisation the general strike was called to protest against. Many are merely serving a political apprenticeship in the unions while waiting for the right offers to come along in government or the corporate world, hoping to follow those such as former COSATU leaders Jay Naidoo and Sam Shilowa into the cigar-smoking and champagne-sipping world of self-enrichment amongst the new black elite.

THE CUBAN REVOLUTION, which triumphed over the hated Batista regime 46 years ago in January 1959, has endured many predictions of its imminent demise. These two timely books go a long way to explain the durability of the revolution but, at the same time, the dangers which are still posed by the implacable hostility of US imperialism – underlined by the posture adopted by George Bush in his second term.

The achievements of the revolution, particularly in the field of health, housing and education, contrast favourably in the minds of the oppressed masses of the neo-colonial world (particularly in Latin America) with the dismal economic prospects open to them on the basis of rotted landlordism and capitalism. The havoc wreaked by the Asian tsunami could be compounded in the next period by an ‘economic tsunami’ much greater in its impact on the economies, and therefore on the lives of the masses, of the poorest areas of the world.

The two authors come from politically polar opposites. Richard Gott is a longstanding left-wing ‘Cuba watcher’, while Leycester Coltman was the British ambassador to Cuba. Coltman died shortly after he delivered the book to the publishers and did not have the opportunity to sufficiently annotate his manuscript. But it is no less valuable than Gott’s excellent summation of the history of Cuba and the revolution, and his penetrating analysis of the current situation there. Both are largely objective accounts, which have many common features. Gott provides valuable insights into historical events in Cuba, particularly the role of slavery, race and the black population, while Coltman highlights the political evolution of the dominant figures of the revolution.

For socialists the value of these books is that they underline the analysis which Marxism has made of the revolution and its progress. What is involved is not hair-splitting arguments over ‘phraseology’ but the very character of the Cuban revolution, the class forces involved, and whether the state which arose from this is a ‘model’ of the government socialists should be aiming for in the transition from capitalism to socialism. Many, not just non-Marxists but those who contest that they argue from a Marxist or even a Trotskyist standpoint, insist that Cuba from the outset has been ‘socialist’ and leave it at that. This is to accept that a social revolution – which undoubtedly took place in Cuba with the elimination of international and indigenous capitalism and landlordism – in itself, guarantees the socialist character and evolution of a regime. Yet the discrediting of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, with the bureaucratic elite that dominated these societies switching over to capitalism with as little difficulty as a man passing from a smoking to a non-smoking compartment on a train, indicates the weakness of such an approach. They were also described as socialist by their apologists.

The votes have been counted, but it’s the bankers and big business who are ruling Britain.

Whoever you voted for, all the politicians are agreed that workers everywhere must now accept wage curbs, job losses and public service cuts in order to keep the rich happy.

The talks about a government coalition in Britain have seen arguments about everything—except the need to impose cuts.

As the BBC’s economics editor Robert Peston put it, “Investors want a stable government perceived to be tackling the record public sector deficit in a serious, substantial way.

“Only in those conditions will they continue to lend cheap money to the state.”

Giving in to this disgusting blackmail will only encourage more demands.

When politician after politician speaks about “the national interest”, they mean the interests of those who own and control industry and those who move trillions around the money markets.

While the bosses and their tame MPs want a coalition for cuts, we need a coalition of resistance.

Workers need to support each other and coordinate their strikes. Trade unionists, students, the unemployed and pensioners need to stand together.

We can’t let racism and anti-immigrant feeling divide us.

That means backing every fightback—especially high profile strikes like the ones at British Airways.

And it means organising networks of resistance and solidarity.

Notes from a speech by Mike Kidron to an International Socialists political economy day school, Leeds, June 2000,

(This is my summary of what Mike said. He has not checked the text, and is not responsible for any errors and omissions I may have made.)

I’ll start with a number of fundamental propositions in Marxism which have recently come under severe and systematic attack from within the Left -and which, as revolutionaries, we hove to defend to the last drop… of ink, at least.

Notice for example on article by Geoff Hodgson in a recent issue of New Left Review. He concludes that it’s quite respectable for a revolutionary to be agnostic about one of the basic tenets of Marxism, namely the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,
It’s significant that the thesis of falling rate of profit has been attacked, by Hodgson and others, on technical and empirical grounds – but not assessed in terms of its fundamental position within the Marxist analysis Yet it’s here that we must start.
The history of human society has been one of increasing control over the physical world – a control expressed, for example, in rising productivity. Class society was both a consequence of growth in productive capacity, and a premise of further expansion in productivity.

One implication is that a growing proportion of the productive effort of society is devoted to the creation of means of production rather than production itself. That is, a rising organic composition of capital,

Within capitalism, productivity rises dramatically. But the forms of social organisation are imposed and inflexible. And therefore do. not change to match the extension of control over nature.
Thus – increasingly – the springs of creativity embedded in society are choked – a result which you can call a decreasing return to investment, or decline in the rate of profit.

I put the point in these broad and analytically impure terms to stress that when a Marxist talks about the organic composition of capital, what is being talked about is something of more than technical significance. But an essential element in the dialectical materialist view of history. If you reject the thesis of the declining rate of profit, then you reject the entire Marxist analysis,
Hodgson, once an IS member, is fairly openly making his quietus with IS, Others undermine the falling rate of profit thesis more surreptitiously. As for instance Glyn and Sutcliffe. Their recent Penguin* (British capitalism, workers and the profit Squeeze) should be read. It’s an interesting example of reformism at its most militant. They argue that the rate of profit has been in decline – but for accidental reasons. They locate the source of that decline in a chance combination of increasing international competition and an increase in the militancy of workers. So their argument implies that if, for a period, workers were less militant, or international competition became less sharp, then the rate of profit would go up.

There are of course technical and empirical issues involved in all this, but I’m not going to try and settle them here. A full discussion would take more time than we’ve got. But there is one point of great importance There is a common feature in the literature attacking the falling rate of profit whether old style Stalinist work like Gillman’s or the voluntarist revolutionaries round the New Left Review. Most of them base their conclusions on figures and definitions which exclude from the reckoning a large part of what we would call capitalism. Most of them talk about industry in the private sector.

Our reply must therefore start with the question – “what is the basic unit of capital?”

The writers I am discussing generally exclude the state sector, and also usually the household sector where women do their work. They say these sectors are distinct from, and subordinate to the central structure of capitalism.

Politically therefore they stand opposed to the ‘state capitalism’ of IS. And IS in turn can tag them as reformist. Because they try to soften the confrontation with capitalism where it is. If you exclude the state sector from your definition of capital, then the door is wide open to reformism, through the use of that state sector which is not your enemy as implacably as the rest of capitalism.

This unclarity about what the basic unit of capitalism is, has consequences. Eg. it encourages exaggeration of the differences between the ‘state and private sectors as employers.
It leads to exaggeration of the importance of the multinational corporations, as if they are the central institutions of contemporary capitalism, separate from and not controlled by the rest of capitalism (eg, the state). Even in IS literature this exaggeration sometimes appears.

But – to take the obvious example – when the oil crisis blew up in the Middle East, what independent role was played by the biggest multinationals in the world, the oil companies? Suddenly these all-powerful bodies appeared as in fact they are- part only of a much bigger structure, state and private capital combined.
Most of the attacks on the falling rate of profit start from a distorted definition of what the basic unit of capital is. I won’t here attempt a final definition. But, for us, the state is emphatically part of the basic unit of capital — given its role as an organiser of productive activity.

I want now to take up another point of cardinal importance in the defence of Marxism. Many of the critics do not appreciate the distinction between capitalism as an abstract model and capitalism as a historical system.

It is inherent, built into, the model that it will run down, ie. expand at a slower rate. But the model is not the same as the historical system, and the two must not be blurred.

Where the distinction becomes crucial is in the matter of surplus value. In the pure, abstract model, all surplus value extracted is used for the extension of the system in further productive activity.
of surplus

But in the historical system there have always been source value which have not been generated within capitalist, Marx described the primitive accumulation of capital – eg. the peasant robbed of loot used to build factories etc.

Also not all of the surplus generated within capitalism is used for productive purposes, ie. for the extension of capitalism. On the contrary, a lot of it is eaten by the capitalists. Or used to keep the state going. Or spent on arms.

So there is a quantitative distinction between the surplus that is extracted by capitalism and the surplus used productively by capitalism.
In the early days of capitalism, the quantity of surplus available to capitalism for growth was very much larger than the quantity generated within the system.

But now, in the period of the decline of the system, the quantity of surplus used for its extension is very much less than the quantity available, ie that has been extracted from within. Thus we’re increasingly in a period of waste economy, in which the necessary cost of unproductive activities is growing as a proportion of the surplus that is available to society.

Which takes us the fourth major point which we have to defend. Namely, that within a waste economy, there are certain kinds of waste which are as determining of the system as accumulation itself.

I can only mention the two ways in which current forms of waste in capitalism help determine the fate of the system,
(1)Effect of waste on the organic composition of capital
(2)Over time – every productive investment of capital requires larger initial sizes both of the productive apparatus and of the basic unit of capital (eg. every ten years, say, the minimum productive size of a steel works rises by an output measure of 1m tons,., or 2m… etc etc)

So – in the same way, every generation, the minimum necessary size of arms waste grows. So there comes a time when the minima both in the productive and the non-productive sectors are so huge as to compete for resources in a way which I’ll discuss in a moment.

To some up so far. I’ve been arguing that we must fight in defence of the following:

1.Thesis of tendency of rate of profit to decline
2.A concept of the basic unit of capital which includes the productive activities of the state.
3.The distinction between the abstract model and the historical system
4.The proposition that in a period of capitalist decline, unproductive expenditure (esp. military) is as determinative of the system as productive expenditure.

On these points we should take the offensive – eg. we should not let the Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists get off with a long series of garbage articles on multinationals, Bukharin made mincemeat of Kautsky when latter hailed multinational corporations as the great up and coming centre of capitalism. We should use Bukharin to disintegrate Robin Murray.
I want to apply this theoretical perspective to talk about the two issues of major importance which confront us.

STAGNATION

We know that arms expenditure is a primary form of waste, and a very important one because of its domino effect, (Though one should add that there is a counter-domino effect now, since the minimum effective size of that expenditure is becoming so large that more and more it becomes the monopoly of the superpowers)
An important result of this is that there is a secondary waste effect which works as follows. If the minimum size for productive investment is now huge…. if the minimum size for the military defence of a capital from its competitors is also huge…. then it’s clear that many concentrations of capital cannot afford both or either one of them. In China making of fissile material for warheads might absorb something like half of the electricity production. In India, maybe half the energy of top scientists plus special steels, chemicals etc. Leaving not much left for achieving minimum productive size necessary for entry into the productive system of world capitalism. The hugeness of these minimum sizes make nonsense of the productive investments they are making.

The ruling classes in the backward countries force the workers and peasants of these countries to make inhuman efforts. Yet all these sacrifices are useless. They cannot achieve a big enough scale of production to ensure survival in a competitive capitalist world. And this is what we mean by stagnation.

Note how little of their wealth is being invested domestically by the Sheiks. They recycle it into the advanced world. They do not extend the capitalist system, merely claim a larger chunk of the existing system.

Indian and Chinese industry will soon be overrun with weeds. In Bombay already grass is spreading in the streets and, over the whole of India, life expectancy is on the increase.

INFLATION + DEPRESSION

Underlying inflation there are two factors;
(a)Waste expenditure is inflationary
(b)There has been a loss of control over the money supply – eg. the growth of Eurocurrencies, now $130 billion, much larger than gold and foreign reserves of all countries. Also in individual countries the unit size of production is now so large that Governments cannot any longer allow major firms to go bust.
In the old days it was relatively simple for capital to solve problems like inflation. The source of the problem was fairly straightforward. Waste built into production, increasing because of the inflexibility of the social forms. Increased power of workers because of full employment etc. plus monopoly situations enabling higher prices to be passed on by firms.

The capitalist solution to inflation – bankruptcies and unemployment, which helped rationalise the system by getting rid of inefficient firms. Wow, life is not so simple. Previously they could close one centre of production and open others. But now if they lose one major firm they may have lost the ability to compete worldwide because it was the only firm of its type in the country – like Rolls Royce. Or like British Leyland, on which rests not just British car production, but large parts of the glass, rubber, steel etc industries as well. So in the present period, the ruling class must rely on nationalisation and internal rationalisation.

On this basis, our economic forecast would point to continued inflation rather than depression.

Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez, (September 28, 1932 September 15, 1973) was a Chilean teacher, theatre director, poet, singer-songwriter, and political activist. A distinguished theatre director, he devoted himself to the development of Chilean theatre, directing a broad array of works from locally produced Chilean plays, to the classics of the world stage, to the experimental work of Ann Jellicoe. Simultaneously he developed in the field of music and played a pivotal role among neo-folkloric artists who established the Nueva Canción Chilena (New Chilean Song) movement which led to a revolution in the popular music of his country under the Salvador Allende government. Shortly after the U.S.-backed September 11, 1973 Chilean coup he was arrested, tortured and ultimately shot to death by machine gun fire—his body was later thrown out into the street of a shanty town in Santiago. The contrast between the themes of his songs, on love, peace and social justice and the brutal way in which he was murdered transformed Jara into a symbol of struggle for human rights and justice across Latin America.