Posts Tagged ‘Karl Kautsky’

Foundations of Christianity

December 24, 2009
Written by John Pickard, In Defence of Marxism,  Wednesday, 23 December 2009

Many of us know that the origins of Christianity have nothing to do with silent nights or wise men. So what are its true origins? John Pickard looks at the reality of how this religion came about – from the standpoint of class forces and the material developments of society, rather than by the pious fictions fed from church pulpits.

Foundations of Christianity

My late father had a very wry sense of humour. At Christmas, whenever there was a reference to church services on the television, he would tut and shake his head. “Look at that”, he would say, “They try to bring religion into everything!”

I imagine much the same complaint may have been made by ancient celts, annoyed that the Christian priests were taking over their traditional Yule festival, celebrating the winter solstice. Or perhaps by Roman citizens, peeved at the Christians taking over their annual ‘Saturnalia’ festival in the last weeks of December.

Continues >>

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Tony Cliff: Rosa Luxemburg – Imperialism and War

February 25, 2009

The fight against imperialism and war

Marxists.org

During the two decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War support for imperialism grew steadily, within the Socialist International.

The Stuttgart Congress of the International in 1907 showed this clearly. The colonial question was placed on the agenda because at this time the jostling of imperialist powers in Africa and Asia was becoming fierce. The socialist parties did indeed speak out against the rapacity of their own governments, but as the discussion at the Stuttgart Congress showed, a consistent anti-colonialist position was far from the thoughts of many leaders of the International. The Congress appointed a Colonial Commission, the majority of which drafted a report stating that colonialism had some positive aspects. Its draft resolution stated, “[The Congress] does not reject on principle and for all time every colonial policy.” Socialists should condemn the excesses of colonialism, but should not renounce it altogether. Instead:

… they are to advocate reforms, to improve the lot of the natives … and they are to educate them for independence by all possible means.

To this purpose the representatives of the socialist parties should propose to their governments to conclude an international treaty, to create a Colonial Law, which shall protect the rights of the natives and which would be guaranteed by all the signatory States.

This draft resolution was in fact defeated, but by a rather slim majority – 127 against 108. Thus practically half the Congress sided openly with imperialism.

When the First World War, which was essentially a fight between the imperialist powers for the division of the colonies, broke out in 1914, its support by the majority leaders of the Socialist International did not come out of the blue.

At the Stuttgart Congress Rosa Luxemburg came out clearly against imperialism, proposing a resolution which outlined the policy necessary to meet the threat of imperialist war:

In the event of a threat of war it is the duty of the workers and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved to do everything possible to prevent the outbreak of war by taking suitable measures, which can of course change or be intensified in accordance with the intensification of the class struggle and the general political situation.

In the event of war breaking out nevertheless, it is their duty to take measures to bring it to an end as quickly as possible, and to utilise the economic and political crisis brought about by the war to arouse the masses of the people and accelerate the overthrow of capitalist class rule.

This resolution made it clear that socialists should oppose imperialism and its war, and that the only way to put an end to both is through the overthrow of capitalism, of which both are the outgrowth.

This resolution was passed, but even so it was becoming more and more evident that, of those leaders who were not openly supporting colonialism, many did not conceive of the fight against imperialism in revolutionary terms.

These leaders, whose main spokesman was Kautsky, adopted the view that imperialism was not a necessary outgrowth of capitalism, but an abscess which the capitalist class as a whole would more and more wish to get rid of. Kautsky’s theory was that imperialism was a method of expansion supported by certain small but powerful capitalist groups (the banks and the armament kings), which was contrary to the needs of the capitalist class as a whole, as expenditure on armaments reduced available capital for investment in the country and abroad, and therefore affected the majority of the capitalist class which would progressively increase its opposition to the policy of armed imperialist expansion. Echoing the same ideas, Bernstein, as late as 1911, argued confidently that the desire for peace was becoming universal and that it was out of the question that war should break out. The armaments race, according to the Kautsky-led “Marxist Centre”, was an anomaly that could be overcome by general disarmament agreements, international arbitration courts, peace alliances, and the formation of the United States of Europe. In short, the “Marxist Centre” relied on the powers-that-be to bring peace on earth.

Rosa Luxemburg brilliantly tore to shreds this capitalist pacifism:

… the belief that capitalism is possible without expansion, is the theoretical formula for a certain definite tactical tendency. This conception tends to regard the phase of imperialism not as a historical necessity, not as the final bout between capitalism and socialism, but rather as the malicious invention of a group of interested parties. It tries to persuade the bourgeoisie that imperialism and militarism are deleterious even from the standpoint of bourgeois interests, in the hope that it will then be able to isolate the alleged handful of interested parties and so form a block between the proletariat and the majority of the bourgeoisie with a view to “curbing” imperialism, starving it out by “partial disarmament”, and “removing its sting”. Just as a bourgeois Liberalism in its period of decay appealed from the “ignorant” monarchs to the “enlightened” monarchs, now the “Marxist Centre” proposes to appeal from the “unreasonable” bourgeoisie to the “reasonable” bourgeoisie with a view to dissuading it from a policy of imperialism with all its catastrophic results to a policy of international disarmament treaties; from an armed struggle for world dominance to a peaceable federation of democratic national States. The general settling of accounts between the proletariat and capitalism, the solution of the great contradiction between them, resolves itself into an idyllic compromise for the “mitigation of imperialist contradictions between the capitalist States”. [29]

How apt these words are, not only for the bourgeois pacifism of Kautsky and Bernstein, but for all those who adhered to the League of Nations, the United Nations, “collective security”, or Summit talks!

Rosa Luxemburg showed that imperialism and imperialist war could not be overcome within the framework of capitalism, as they grow out of the vital interests of capitalist society.

The Guiding Principles of the Spartakus League drawn up by Rosa Luxemburg stated:

Imperialism, the last phase and highest development of the political rule of capitalism, is the deadly enemy of the workers of all countries … The struggle against imperialism is at the same time the struggle of the proletariat for political power, the decisive conflict between Capitalism and Socialism. The final aim of Socialism can be achieved only if the international proletariat fights uncompromisingly against imperialism as a whole, and takes the slogan “war against war” as a practical guide to action, summoning up all its strength and all its capacity for self-sacrifice. [30]

Thus the central theme of Rosa Luxemburg’s anti-imperialist policy was that the fight against war is inseparable from the fight for socialism.

With great passion Rosa Luxemburg ends her most important anti-war pamphlet, The Crisis of Social Democracy (better known as the Junius Brochure, as she wrote under the pseudonym Junius):

Imperialist bestiality has been let loose to devastate the fields of Europe, and there is one incidental accompaniment for which the “cultured world” has neither the heart nor conscience – the mass slaughter of the European proletariat … It is our hope, our flesh and blood, which is falling in swathes like corn under the sickle. The finest, the most intelligent, the best-trained forces of international Socialism, the bearers of the heroic traditions of the modern working-class movement, the advanced guard of the world proletariat, the workers of Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia, are being slaughtered in masses. That is a greater crime by far than the brutish sack of Louvain or the destruction of Rheims Cathedral. It is a deadly blow against the power which holds the whole future of humanity, the only power which can save the values of the past and carry them on into a newer and better human society. Capitalism has revealed its true features; it betrays to the world that it has lost its historical justification, that its continued existence can no longer be reconciled with the progress of mankind …

Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles! Long live Democracy! Long live the Tsar and Slavdom! Ten thousand blankets, guaranteed in perfect condition! A hundred thousand kilos of bacon, coffee substitutes – immediate delivery! Dividends rise and proletarians fall. And with each one sinks a fighter for the future, a soldier of the Revolution, a liberator of humanity from the yoke of capitalism, and finds a nameless grave.

The madness will cease and the bloody product of hell come to an end only when the workers of Germany and France, of Great Britain and Russia, awaken from their frenzy, extend to each other the hand of friendship, and drown the bestial chorus of imperialist hyenas with the thunderous battle cry of the modern working-class movement: “Workers of the World Unite!” [31]

With visionary power Rosa Luxemburg states:

Bourgeois society faces a dilemma; either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism … we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome – annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism – the victory of the international working class consciously assaulting imperialism and its method: war. This is the dilemma of world history, either – or; the die will be cast by the class-conscious proletariat. [32]

And we who live in the shadow of the H-bomb …

Notes

29. R. Luxemburg, Gesammelte, vol.III, p.481.

30. Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin, 1957), vol.I, pp.280-281.

31. R. Luxemburg, Ausgewählte, vol.I, pp.391-394.

32. R. Luxemburg, Ausgewählte, vol.I, p.270

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Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

December 13, 2008

Phil Gasper introduces a classic pamphlet that explains how capitalism was transformed by spreading international conflicts.

Socialist Worker, December 2, 2008 | Issue 686

LENIN WROTE Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916 in the middle of the carnage of the First World War.

Series: Ten socialist classics

Socialist Worker writers introduce ten of the most important writings by leading thinkers in the revolutionary socialist tradition.

The pamphlet was an intervention in the sharp political debate that had torn apart the international socialist movement at the start of the war, with nearly every socialist party in Europe backing its own government in the conflict.

When war was declared in 1914, socialists in the German parliament voted unanimously to fund it, arguing that they had to defend civilization against the despotism of the Russian Tsar. Meanwhile, French socialists said they had to defend revolutionary France against Prussian militarism, and so on, across the board.

Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in Russia was one of the few socialist organizations that maintained principled opposition to its own government. Lenin argued that the war was an imperialist conflict in which all sides were trying to grab more territory and extend their power and influence–or at the very least hang on to territories to which they had no right in the first place.

Lenin’s main goal in Imperialism was to show how the colonial expansion and imperialist rivalry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were rooted in profound changes in the nature of capitalism during the same period. That’s why he called imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century a stage of capitalism.

What else to read

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LENIN DID not claim that there was no imperialism before the late 19th century. As he explicitly noted, “Colonial policy and imperialism existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practiced imperialism.” But, Lenin added:

“general” arguments about imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background the fundamental difference of social-economic systems, inevitably degenerate into absolutely empty banalities, or into grandiloquent comparisons like “Greater Rome and Greater Britain.”

Even the colonial policy of capitalism in its previous stages is essentially different from the colonial policy of finance capital.

What Lenin was attempting to explain was the extremely virulent form of imperialism that began to emerge in the late 19th century, resulting in the scramble for Africa from the 1880s, and the increasing tensions between the major powers that eventually led to world war.

In calling it a stage of capitalism, Lenin was saying that the new imperialism was fundamentally an economic phenomenon.

According to Lenin, an adequate definition of modern imperialism needs to embrace “five essential features”:

1) The concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it 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 this “finance capital,” of a “financial oligarchy.”

3) The export of capital, which has become extremely important, as distinguished from the export of commodities.

4) The formation of international capitalist monopolies, which share the world among themselves.

5) The territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers is completed.

Lenin’s list has to be treated with a little care, since in retrospect some of the features are more fundamental than others. For example, the integration of industrial and banking capital was certainly an important aspect of German capitalism in the early 20th century, but far less developed in countries such as Britain.

Nor was it true that all the major capitalist powers had become net exporters of capital–more investment was still flowing into the U.S. and Japan, when Lenin was writing, for example, than was going out.

But Lenin himself was clear that the most important feature of imperialism was the first one that he listed. “If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism,” he wrote, “we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”

Lenin’s argument was that the rivalries and wars between capitalist powers were inherent in one of capitalism’s basic features: the tendency for capital to become more centralized and concentrated–in other words, for the dominant capitalist firms to acquire monopoly or near monopoly status in particular sectors of their national economy.

Lenin wrote Imperialism, which he described as a “popular outline,” after reading–and writing an introduction to–Nikolai Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy, and it is clear that he had Bukharin’s account of the underlying dynamic of imperialism in mind while writing his own pamphlet.

According to Bukharin, imperialism is the result of two conflicting tendencies in modern capitalism.

Competition tends to give rise to the concentration and centralization of capital, and as this process develops, the state comes to play an increasingly active role in managing the economy. Bukharin argued that there is, in fact, a tendency for capital and the state to merge together on the national level to form what he called “state capitalist trusts.”

But at the same time, there is a tendency for production, trade and investment to break out of national boundaries and to become organized on a global scale.

Bukharin argued that as a consequence of these two contradictory processes, economic competition between capitals increasingly tends to take on the form of geopolitical competition. In other words, economic competition comes to be expressed in terms of political and military rivalries between states for territory, influence and power.

In a candid private comment, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson confirmed the Lenin-Bukharin analysis:

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down.

Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

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ONE OF Lenin’s main targets was the German Marxist Karl Kautsky, who argued that because the world economy was becoming internationally integrated, war had become irrational from the point of view of the capitalist class.

According to Kautsky, “the World War between the great imperialist powers may result in a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.” Kautsky called this anticipated phase “ultra-imperialism,” and he saw the formation of the League of Nations at the end of the war as part of the shift to ultra-imperialism and a more peaceful world order.

But the League of Nations–which Lenin called a “thieves’ kitchen”–was never able to paper over the sharp differences between the major imperialist powers. Within a generation, the world was engulfed an even more barbaric war, and Kautsky’s vision of a relatively peaceful capitalism was revealed to be an illusion.

By contrast, Lenin’s theory does a remarkably good job of explaining the development of capitalism in the first half of the 20th century, and why the major capitalist powers plunged the globe into two catastrophic and barbaric world wars.

After the Second World War, the structure of global politics changed dramatically. Before the war, the world was economically and politically multi-polar. After the war, it remained economically multi-polar, but became politically bipolar–with the formation of two rival global military alliances, one dominated by the U.S., the other by the USSR.

Wars continued on the periphery, and the superpowers engaged in a massive arms race, but there was no war between the major powers, because the threat of nuclear escalation made them more cautious.

But with the collapse of the Soviet bloc at the end of the 1980s, the structure of the global system changed again. The U.S. emerged as the world’s only superpower, increasingly prepared to use its massive military superiority to maintain its position of global dominance and to prevent the emergence of serious rivals anywhere in the world.

But in the wake of the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, intelligence analysts are now concerned that U.S. hegemony is in decline.

A report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council last month warns that the U.S. faces growing economic competition from rising powers such as China, India and Brazil, and that the next 20 years will be “fraught with risks,” including heightened potential for conflict over scarce resources in a more multi-polar world.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the international capitalist system is increasingly operating in accordance with the logic of imperialist rivalry that Lenin first described nearly a hundred years ago.

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