This piece is excerpted from a speech by Sam Marcy, Chairperson of Workers World Party, to a meeting of the party's National Committee held in New York over the Labor Day weekend.Comrades, I'm truly gratified to be able to address the branch and the National Committee at this particular time. It's a historic turning point in every sense of the word.
The 20th century has been the century of revolutions and unfortunately also of counter-revolutions. Without a clear analysis of the nature and direction of this phenomenon, our party would be only one group among many. What distinguishes our party above everything else is the clarity of its perspective and direction.
Over and over again, we have come back to the question, what is the Soviet Union and where is it going. It's not only a question in America. Not only a Chinese question. It's being discussed in the jungles of Peru and in the hideouts of the NPA in the Philippines. It's discussed in the northern part of Alaska among the Native people there.
Again and again, wherever a struggle happens, this question inevitably comes up. It cannot be avoided. We cannot let the bourgeoisie dominate the discussion and say to the world that communism is dead. They have been saying that since 1848. Communism has always risen and will rise again all over the globe.
Soviet economy still exists
As we have said in our paper so frequently, the Soviet Union still exists as a workers' state economically, and to some extent sociologically. No matter how much Boris Yeltsin and his cohorts of the counter-revolution try to appeal to and serve U.S. imperialism, it never satisfies the U.S. capitalist class, or the German capitalist class, or the Japanese or the others. The U.S. still has to vilify the USSR, even when the leadership there is in their own image. Why? Because it is still somewhat a symbol, even though it has been crushed.In the minds of millions it still nostalgically represents what the working class and the oppressed people throughout the world want. We look forward to revival in the USSR. But we are not cheerful idiots who see in every little thing an opportunity for the overthrow of the Yeltsin regime. We see it as a more or less protracted effort.
It also may be overtaken by a revolutionary process elsewhere in the world. And from that the sparks could reverberate to the USSR, or what is called the former USSR.
Unemployment in U.S.
I don't think our audience needs any graphs or new statistics to understand the depth of unemployment or that the cost of living is going up. Of late the bourgeoisie has been pretty frank about what's happening. They show almost every day how unemployment is really rising.Bush the other day said unemployment had gone down one-tenth of 1 percent. But the capitalist press pointed out that it's not true and that the income of the ordinary working class family has sunk. Since the collapse of the USSR, they're not so fearful that Radio Moscow will point out to the rest of the world what's going on in the United States. The new Radio Moscow speaks a language that I would call crypto-imperialism. They represent world issues as would an ally of imperialism.
We want to bring out some events that seem removed from the economic situation of the workers and the oppressed people but nevertheless exercise a profound influence upon us politically as well as theoretically. I will take only one example to begin with: what's happening in Japan.
Perot and Japan
This is a domestic question in the U.S. Some weeks ago when he was still a candidate, Ross Perot attacked Bush and Clinton and said to them, "We can't hold a candle to the Japanese. They're moving ahead. Their economy is strong. They haven't got a trade deficit to worry about like we have. We've got to put our house in order so we can compete with them."How many times have we heard this? That Japan is our rival. That workers here are lazy. Not as productive. Not as efficient. They're anti-boss, unlike in Japan. So we should emulate the Japanese ruling class and agitate the workers in this country in this spirit. We've got 10 million unemployed and they haven't.
The Japanese bourgeoisie say the difference is either because of their culture, or their racial makeup, their moral values and so on. They contend they don't have a national problem. That makes the right wing in this country, especially among the lower bourgeoisie, very envious.
The truth is that Japan does have a national question. Not just Koreans and other nationalities living there, but a home-grown nationality problem which is smothered.
Let us delve a little deeper. Why has there been no capitalist recession in Japan for so long? Is it because their capitalist economy does not lend itself to the laws of capitalist development as explained by Marx and Engels? Is Japan immune from capitalist crisis?
Japanese gov't move confirms Marxism
Last week the answer came, and it confirmed Marxism. It confirmed the existence of a deep-going capitalist crisis in Japan. It was long hidden but has finally come to the surface. And the capitalist press has played it in low gear. But for us it has significance beyond the unemployment figures. It confirms Marxist theory: that capitalist development, decline and collapse apply to Japan and to every other bourgeois country that is based on capitalist exploitation and oppression.The answer came in unusual form: a government statement. It not only said that the stock market has been declining for weeks and months. Not only that there has been bankruptcy after bankruptcy in Japan. It said they have been losing in the trade war as well, and that the plant and equipment structure of the Japanese economy is in decadence. Slow erosion instead of sudden collapse has been in progress in Japan. Unemployment has risen, notwithstanding the attempt to hide it.
All this came out into the open last week when the ruling Conservative Party announced that the economy is in disarray and stagnation. That's not the way Perot depicted it, or Bush or Clinton. It needs to be stimulated artificially, just like in the U.S.
So Japan is in the same position as any capitalist country in crisis. The only difference they will admit to is that they have more money to revive the capitalist economy and will sink in $87 billion in order to bolster up their crumbling capitalist economy by artificial means.
Bourgeois scholars of Marxism should remember this when they teach in their classes that Marxism does not apply to certain countries and that the capitalist crisis Marx predicted is not inevitable. The magnitude of funds the capitalist class is forced to use to bolster it--$87 billion--shows that the Japanese crisis is a serious one.
They will try to overcome the crisis on the backs of the Japanese workers, and even more on the backs of the Asian workers in the so-called five tigers--South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. They will double the exploitation in order to pull surplus value out of them and bolster the capitalist economy.
So this one exception to Marxism is not an exception. It should encourage us to reaffirm our own convictions with respect to the laws of the capitalist economy. We can't allow the bourgeois economists to push us into conclusions based upon their own self-interest.
The fate of American exceptionalism
In the early 1920s in this country, after the first world war, there was a period of capitalist prosperity. The bourgeois economists, some of the liberal professors and also some who considered themselves Marxists said that the U.S. was exceptional. It was not like the European capitalist countries which experienced one capitalist crisis after another. The U.S. economy was stronger.Among the reasons they gave was that the basic industries in the U.S. like steel, rubber and auto were not organized. The workers had freedom to choose their jobs, were not nailed down to union bureaucracies, and therefore the labor force was stronger here. They said that was why a capitalist crisis had been successfully avoided.
Then came 1929. Many had accepted the theory of American exceptionalism, but Marx proved them wrong. Their theory collapsed, it crashed into ruins along with the Wall Street speculators.
No, Marxism is the doctrine which analyzes social development. It analyzes the condition of the working class and at the same time is wise to the rule of the bourgeoisie and how it exploits the working class.
I think that this lesson of Japan in relation to Marxist doctrine is very important for us and should be lined up with the theory that was prominent in the early 1920s about the exceptionalism of the U.S. capitalist economy.
Renegades from Marxism
At this particular time Marxism is under attack all over the world. Some of it is from former Marxists and renegades, those who run away from difficult times and right into the camp of the enemy. They run away from Marxism and denounce it because of a historical conjuncture that they haven't the stamina to wait out. It must be waited out, as an army does when it is forced to hold its fire despite taking casualties. Such is the situation.The times we face require that we refortify our affirmation of revolutionary Marxism and be on guard not to run with the renegades--all those who have found the new gods of Wall Street and Lombard Street, who have found themselves more comfortable because Marxism at the present time has lost a citadel as wide as half the world.
We are going to study and analyze more what is happening there. We won't flippantly shove it aside and say it is all over. No, it requires deep study. It requires that we go over again and again what has happened throughout the whole world.
There's nothing so important to a revolutionary working class party as its doctrine and approach. It cannot look at phenomena from the point of view of the immediate practical tasks alone. Nor should we get drowned in the bourgeois elections, that throw sand in the eyes of the workers and make them close their eyes to what is really going on in the world. We must not fall victim to what Marx called parliamentary cretinism, to see everything through the prism of what is going on in bourgeois elections.
Plunge of the dollar
There is one more aspect I should deal with in respect to the economic situation. It seems like a foreign issue to the workers, but they are not to blame. I'm talking about the collapse of the dollar. Two weeks ago it exploded like a thermonuclear bomb. But it was like an underground explosion that you don't hear, even though it's just as devastating and will reverberate. It has already affected millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people. And it is more difficult to explain than what happened in Japan.The dollar is so familiar to us that everybody should understand it. But the capitalist class doesn't give the working class the tools to know what's happening. They always go into great detail when it's to show you that welfare has to be cut, or social security is too high, or unemployment compensation is eating up what is produced by the economy. But on the dollar, they figure why bother to explain it.
It is complicated. But they have TV, they could make everything vivid and explain it if they wanted to. But they want to hide it.
The collapse of the dollar meant that it's not worth as much abroad as it was two weeks ago. It's gone down in value and that can be seen everywhere. Anybody who wants to buy or sell dollars knows.
Years ago every country had to keep gold reserves in its treasury. If you came with a million francs and said to the French treasury, we want gold instead, you got the gold. If you came with a million dollars to the U.S. Treasury and said, well, I'm worried about the way you're dealing with the deficit and with taxes, I want gold instead, the Treasury would have to give you gold.
It was that way in the United States, Britain, France, Germany and all the other capitalist countries that had gold. But that ended with the first capitalist crisis of worldwide dimensions, when the capitalist class seemed to be breaking down all together. Franklin Delano Roosevelt took over after the big crash and said, we can't give out gold any more because we're losing it. There was a run on the banks and the banks gave out paper money because they were running out of gold. And the Treasury was going to have to pay in gold. So the U.S. went off the gold standard and said, no more paying out debts in gold. From now on you take the dollar or you take nothing.
That was during the Roosevelt administration. At the same time they cut the value of the dollar by 50 percent. Those measures were not very widely understood. But they threw the burden of the crisis first on the other capitalist classes, and then on the oppressed people in the United States. It raised the possibility for the capitalist class to get out of the crisis. It saved the gold and set the standard for the world.
The U.S. was able to put across an end to payment in gold, and Britain, France and Germany went along with it. No matter how much gold there is all over the world, it can be a drain on the treasury. Having less gold makes a capitalist government weak. Those of us who had the opportunity to study this question in earlier years knew that each capitalist government had to state how much gold it had in its treasury. Every trader in gold could see in the morning paper how much gold was left. It was getting to the point in the 1930s when a run on the treasury of any of the bourgeois countries threatened the government with collapse. The only thing that saved them was the second world war.
This drop in the dollar has not yet fully affected the U.S. domestic market. But it has affected the world market. It has worldwide repercussions. When the U.S. and the other capitalist countries went off the gold standard, and said no more payment in gold except when one government deals with another, countries asked, what do we do? And the answer was use the dollar. The dollar would be used as the reserve instead of gold.
And so all of the capitalist countries and all the oppressed countries began to use the dollar as a reserve instead of gold. That raised the political prestige of the U.S. as well as its economic and financial standing. The dollar's stability was greater than the franc, better than the deutschmark, better than the British pound.
Expropriation through devaluation
So what does this drop of the dollar mean? It means that every country with dollar reserves in its treasury, especially the oppressed countries, now find that the value of those dollars has declined by at least 8 to 10 percent. There has been an expropriation of the reserve funds, especially of the oppressed countries, without military intervention, without the IMF, without the banks.So if Venezuela or Nicaragua or even Belgium has dollars in reserve, and the dollar collapses by a certain percentage, the money loses that much value. That is what the capitalist press didn't explain. It's a wholesale expropriation.
This collapse was not a voluntary act on the part of the U.S. government. It came as a result of the weakness of the capitalist economy as shown by unemployment, plant closures, restructuring and so on. It came in spite of them. It was the financial expression of what is going on all over this country. Also involuntarily, it throws a substantial part of the burden of the capitalist crisis in this country onto the shoulders of the rest of the world, most importantly the oppressed countries. It's an enormous factor and will surely have revolutionary significance, just as immediately after World War II when Britain had to revalue its currency.
We need to know this in addition to what we know about the economic situation in areas like unemployment, the cost of living, the restructuring of capitalist industry, the layoffs and the cutbacks in city administrations. All this has an enormous foreign policy effect and is bound to reverberate here and weaken the capitalist economy further.
We don't see any of the capitalist economists being exceptionally optimistic. They are hedging their bets. Not one is willing to say, we are facing a period of great prosperity. At most they talk about a capitalist recovery, which they have been predicting for almost a year now.
It would be foolish, however, for us to bank everything on the blind forces of the capitalist economy doing for the working class what we ourselves must do. The ravages of the capitalist crisis can go on for many years.
Unexpected fallout from collapse of USSR
It is possible that there may be a brief recovery here and there. But the one thing the ruling class cannot do is recover the ground they have lost since the Soviet Union collapsed.They cannot because they cannot remilitarize on the same basis. It is impossible. What happened to all the equipment they have, the missiles, tanks, carriers and all that, with the collapse of the USSR? Their value has diminished and therefore their price is false. A Patriot missile was worth several million dollars during the war with Iraq, when the USSR was still in existence. Now the value of that Patriot missile, under the laws of capitalist economy as predicted by Marx, must go down.
You cannot maintain an artificial price on a commodity whose value has diminished. For a while it may be kept up by government order, but not for long. The price will collapse. That is what they are facing.
It's not just the Patriot missile. It's the F-16s or F-19s--each one costs millions of dollars. But there is no possibility of utilizing them in mass raids on a target like the USSR. So the price must go down, it must collapse to what could be 1/20th of what the Pentagon paid for it.
So when they talk about military reductions, they're serious about it. But only up to a point.
The last general capitalist crisis was overcome only because of the second world war. After the war, they went into Korea, and that helped the militarization. After Korea they had Vietnam. After Vietnam they heated up the cold war tremendously. And now that is gone.
There is no big basis for military spending as before. Not because of moral grounds, not because they're against militarism. They're for it. It's that the economic forces of the capitalist system have asserted themselves. The greatest force is that of price. Price is a monetary expression for value. Value is the amount of labor in a commodity. The bourgeoisie can't escape that.
No honor among thieves, just self-interest
The collapse of the dollar should have made all the imperialists abroad happy because they hate U.S. imperialism and they hate each other. There is no love among thieves and no honor, to say the least. But when the dollar began to plummet, they got worried it would end up in a complete collapse. And that it would also take down the deutschmark, the franc and the pound. So they started purchasing dollars. That saved the U.S. from complete collapse. It was in the interests of the other imperialists because they feared they would go down, too. That's why the seven big ones are going to meet next week and study what to do next.This is where we come in. Our problem is what to do next. First we have to take the measure of where we are historically. What kind of an epoch are we facing since the collapse of the USSR?
There has been the growth of political reaction worldwide, notwithstanding the resistance on a broad front by working class and oppressed people. For this very reason we are having a plenary session of our National Committee to go over and study the question. We will study the effects of the collapse of the USSR on the very nature of the epoch in which we are living. This is an opportunity for a serious party to say to itself: Look, we are faced with extraordinary problems we have never encountered before. We have a capitalist crisis and we have the collapse of the USSR. We have the growth of reaction and we still have the slowly emerging resistance of the working class. We have to appraise it so as to know what to do next.
If we submit to and become submerged in the bourgeois electoral propaganda, then our party isn't worth a red cent. When Eugene Debs was running for president and there was a wide-awake working class at the time--unfortunately mostly white as Black people were still in servitude despite the abolition--the greatest frustration was with the more advanced elements in the petty bourgeoisie and the intellectuals. They thought that Woodrow Wilson could be moved, just as some in the movement today think Clinton can be moved.
They agreed with Debs that there were two capitalist parties and you've got to fight both of them. But the eminent writer John Reed, who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World about the Russian Revolution, told Debs, you have a good program but Woodrow Wilson is going to reform the banks. You with your million votes of the workers are second-best.
Notwithstanding the petty bourgeois intellectuals, the workers were for Debs. What was needed was a resolute denunciation of all those capitulators from the Socialist Party at that time who ran in droves to Woodrow Wilson because they thought he'd be for peace and would reform the banks.
You can see his handiwork today in the robbery of the people by the S&Ls.
So we have to rearm ourselves ideologically. Only a serious party can move in the direction dictated by objective historic circumstance and not be fearful of the mob rule of the bourgeoisie. It is driving the workers and the masses into a blind alley. We have to know when to open up an offensive and when the time is not there. We're learning that.
Long live Marxism! Long live Leninism! Long live proletarian internationalism! We will win.