If capitalism is ‘natural,’ why was so much force used to build it?

If capitalism is such a natural outcome of human nature, why were systematic violence and draconian laws necessary to establish it? And if greed is the primary motivation for human beings, how could the vast majority of human existence have been in hunter-gatherer societies in which cooperation was the most valuable behavior?

Cheerleaders for capitalism — who generate endless arguments that greed is not only good but the dominant human motivation — tend to not dwell on the origination of the system, either implying it has always been with us or that it is the “natural” result of development. Critics of capitalism, interestingly, seem much more interested in the system’s origins than are its boosters. Perhaps the bloody history of how capitalism slowly supplanted feudalism in northwest Europe, and then spread through slavery, conquest, colonialism and routine inflictions of brute force makes for a less than appealing picture. It is not for nothing that Marx wrote, “If money … ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

A correlation of this violence applied by the elites of those times and the governments that, then as now, served their society’s elites, was that peasants and the earliest wage workers must have resisted. Indeed they did. There is a long history of resistance to capitalist offensives, and although movements, those organized and the many more that were spontaneous, were not able to bring about a more humane and equitable world, these are histories well worth knowing. A new book from Monthly Review Press, The War Against the Commons, Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism by Ian Angus*, brings much of this history to vivid life.

Concentrating on the birthplace of capitalism, England, Mr. Angus is forthright about the violent details as they unfolded from the 15th century through to the Industrial Revolution, “focus[ing] on the first and most complete case, the centuries-long war against the agricultural commons, known as the enclosure in England and the clearances in Scotland.” At the dawn of capitalism (most commonly seen as arising in the 16th century although not firmly established until later), England and Scotland were overwhelmingly populated by farmers, much as the rest of the world. Although there was wage work, very few were dependent on it and only under capitalism did mass reliance on wage work occur.

Thus forced removal from the land, elimination of access to common lands and putting an end to the ability to live without working for others was essential for capitalism to develop, and that is the topic of War Against the Commons. In his introduction, Mr. Angus puts this forth in characteristically clear, unambiguous language:

“For wage labor to triumph, there had to be large numbers of people for whom self-provisioning was no longer an option. The transition, which began in England in the 1400s, involved the elimination not only of shared use of land, but of the common rights that allowed even the poorest people access to essential means of subsistence. The right to hunt or fish for food, to gather wood and edible plants, to glean leftover grain in the fields after harvest, to pasture a cow or two on undeveloped land — those and more common rights were erased, replaced by the exclusive right of property owners to use Earth’s wealth.”

Capitalism has only existed for a few centuries, while humans have roamed the Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. This of course is not an argument that we should go back to a hunter-gatherer existence — quite impossible given the size of the human population even if it were desirable — but simply an acknowledgment that capitalism is not “natural”; it has existed for a blink of an eye in human history.

Flipping the tragedy of the commons onto its feet

Naturally, Mr. Angus has to first clear out well-propagated misconceptions. He first shoots down the “tragedy of the commons,” a much-traveled piece of neoliberal nonsense. The originator of the concept of the “tragedy of the commons,” an ideological argument for privatization of everything, is a biology professor whose textbook argued for “control of breeding” for “genetically defective” people. Mr. Angus notes this professor “had no training in or particular knowledge of social or agricultural history” when writing his article, published in 1968. But the “thesis” was politically useful, being used to justify stealing the land of Indigenous peoples, privatizing health care and social services, and much else. What the “tragedy of the commons” “thesis” asserts is that land held and used in common will inevitably be overused and destroyed because everybody will want to use more of the common resource, such as introducing more animals on a pasture, until “common ruin” is the result.

War Against the Commons points out that no evidence was presented in this article; its thesis was simply asserted. But commons-based agriculture lasted for centuries; this success on its own disproves the thesis. Those who have actually studied how commons were used and provide actual evidence for their works demonstrate that peasants had sophisticated systems for managing commons and regulating animals.

In the early 16th century, 80 percent of English farmers grew for themselves while only the remaining 20 percent sent some of their production to markets but few of these employed labor. Differentiations were beginning to be seen, however, as complaints about enclosures began to be heard in the 1480s and the process accelerated in the 1500s. King Henry VIII’s adviser condemned enclosures, Mr. Angus writes, and a series of laws against the practice were passed, none with any effect. (The king would not seem to have taken any such advice; tens of thousands were hung during his reign as “vagabonds” or “thieves” during a time of repeated peasant uprisings.)

Mr. Angus argues that the failure of Tudor anti-enclosure legislation was due to their targeting consequences rather than causes and that judicators were local gentry who consistently sided with their colleagues. Regardless, Henry VIII conducted a massive confiscation of church lands and then sold most of it to lords, needing to raise revenue for his wars. The consolidation of large farms means there would be space for fewer small farms. Opposition to private ownership of land and greed in 16th century England was often religious, but Protestant preachers would condemn greed in one breath and in the next condemn all rebellion.

Rebellion there was, nonetheless. The dispossessed fought wage labor, which was commonly seen as “little better than slavery” and the “last resort” when all other options had been precluded. In the late 15th and into the 16th centuries, most enclosures were physical evictions, often entire villages; after 1550, landlords often negotiated with their largest tenant farmers, by now inserted into capitalist markets, to divide the commons and undeveloped lands between them. The landless and smallholders got nothing; the number of agricultural laborers with no land quadrupled from 1560 to 1620. Economic pressures were supplemented by state coercion to force the dispossessed into wage labor. A series of brutal measures were passed into law. Although there were not enough jobs for those forced into wage work, those without unemployment were classified as “vagrants” and “vagabonds” and subject to draconian punishments.

A 1547 law, for example, ordered any “vagrant” who refused an offer of work to be branded with a red-hot iron and be “literally enslaved for two years.” The new slave was subject to having iron rings put around their neck and legs and to suffer beatings. A 1563 law mandated that any man or woman up to the age of 60 could be compelled to work on any farm that would hire them, anyone who offered or accepted wages higher than those set by local employers acting as judges could be thrown in jail, and written permission was needed to leave a job on pain of whipping and imprisonment. Other laws mandated “whippings through the streets until bloody” with repeat offenders put to death. Many of those convicted were increasingly sent to the colonies as indentured servants, completely at the mercy of their New World masters.

Such were the tender mercies shown by nascent capitalists and the state increasingly oriented toward capitalists’ interests.

Might makes right as a foundation

With the simultaneous rise of the coal and textile industries, workers were needed — the draconian laws were the route to forcing people into jobs with low pay, long hours and sometimes dangerous conditions. Coal mining itself triggered more enclosures in the 16th century. Some landlords found that coal mining was more profitable for them than renting farmland, requiring dispossession of tenants, and remaining smallholders could be robbed of their land because they were prohibited from refusing access to minerals under their land. Early manifestations of current-day “property rights” where if you are big enough, might makes right.

Although much resistance consisted of spontaneous uprisings, there were organized campaigns. Two movements were the Diggers and the Levellers. The Levellers’ moniker comes from their “leveling” the hedges and stone fences landlords used to demarcate the lands they had enclosed; these organized groups repeatedly removed these demarcations. The Diggers were a collective movement founded by Gerrard Winstanley that sought to put theory into better practice. The Diggers created communes on common land, first on a hill near London. All members would receive a share of the produce in exchange for helping work the land. 

Winstanley produced a program that criticized the inhumanity of the wealthy and stated that the road to freedom was through common ownership of the land. Wage labor, private ownership of land, and buying and selling land were all prohibited in Digger communities. Everyone was to contribute to the common stock and take only what was necessary; any penalties for free riders were designed to rehabilitate rather than punish. Winstanley and the Diggers saw private ownership of land as the cause of poverty and exploitation, and one of their demands was that all land should be given to those who would work it, including land confiscated from the church. They, after all, were living through the early days of agricultural capitalism with so many around them experiencing poverty and exploitation.

^{Richard II meeting with the rebels of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons)}

Remarkably, Winstanley’s concept, devised two centuries before Marx’s concept of communism as “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs,” bore significant resemblances to the latter’s ideas, although Marx could not have known of Winstanley as the Diggers’ ideas were ruthlessly stamped out and were only re-discovered late in the 19th century. State-directed violence against Digger communes was not long in coming. Landlords were determined to eliminate the Diggers. Local magistrates, themselves landowners, indicted Diggers for trespass and unlawful assembly, and imposed fines too large to pay; mobs organized by landowners destroyed crops and homes until the communes had to be abandoned.

By the latter half of the 17th century, “large landowners and merchants won decisive control of the English state,” Mr. Angus writes. “In the 1700s, they would use that power to continue the dispossession of commoners and consolidate their absolute ownership of the land.” And as the Industrial Revolution began to develop, new rounds of enclosures were initiated, this time through laws enacted by Parliament, to strip people of their remaining abilities to be self-sufficient and not be forced into wage work with low pay and long hours of drudgery.

A class state promotes class interests

From the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1689 to the 1832 Great Reform Act, Britain was controlled by agrarian magnates and merchant capitalists; the state existed to benefit the wealthy. The author writes:

“The very rich ruled Parliament through their unchallenged domination of the House of Lords, their effective control of the executive, and their strong influence on the slightly less-rich members of the House of Commons. The lower House was elected, but only about 3 percent of the population (all male) could vote, and high property qualifications ensured that only the wealthy could be candidates. In E.P. Thompson’s words, ‘The British state, all eighteenth-century legislators agreed, existed to preserve the property and, incidentally, the lives and liberties, of the propertied.’ ”

More than 4,000 enclosure acts were passed by Parliament from 1730 to 1840, laws that affected a quarter of all cultivated land. Laws were heavily skewed in favor of big estates and the aristocracy. Peasants resisted, but had too much force arrayed against them. The displaced, unless they emigrated, became wage workers in the new factories. Development in England had been built on slavery, with the huge profits from slave-grown agricultural products and the slave trade itself providing capital for industrial takeoff. And many of the big estate owners were in a position to buy up land because of the profits they directly accrued from slave labor. Abolishing the slave trade was simply another move of economic beneficiary. Mr. Angus writes:

“Defenders of British imperialism like to brag that Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, but that’s like praising a serial killer because he eventually retired. The ban came after centuries in which British investors had grown rich as human traffickers, and it did nothing for the 700,000 Africans who remained enslaved in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Britain’s vaunted humanitarianism is belied by the British army’s slaughter of rebellious slaves in Guyana — seventeen years after the slave trade was declared illegal.”

British parliamentarians, carrying out their class interests, were no less inclined to draconian legislation than had been their predecessors. From 1703 to 1830, 45 statutes were passed relating to banning all but elite landowners from hunting; these laws should be seen in the context of their time when small farmers and the landless needed to hunt to ensure they and their families had enough food to survive. The Black Act of 1723 saw 350 offenses made eligible for the death penalty; already, hanging, whipping and expulsion to Australia for hard labor were on the books for minor offenses. Even cutting down a tree could result in hanging.

That such draconian laws were repeatedly passed over long periods of time demonstrate that capitalism is not “natural” and indeed could only be imposed by force, War Against the Commons persuasively demonstrates. This is a book that is most useful for those already acquainted with this bloody history and wish to obtain more knowledge, including of the still largely unknown Winstanley and the Diggers movement, but also for those without this knowledge who wish to learn about the history of capitalism. The author writes in clear, understandable language without jargon, producing a work that requires no prior knowledge yet is useful for those who do have familiarity with the subject. Anyone who is interested in understanding the dynamics of capitalism, and cares to approach the subject with an open mind, will benefit.

* Ian Angus, The War Against the Commons, Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism [Monthly Review Press, New York 2023]

When does a formal democracy degenerate into fascism?

It can happen here. “Here” being any country in which capitalism rules. When does a bourgeois formal democracy tip over into fascism? That is a question that needs an answer in many places, certainly not excepting the United States, which has already experienced a self-coup attempt with unmistakable fascist overtones.

We’re referencing Donald Trump’s attempt at a self-coup, to use the Latin American phrase, in January 2021. Many people, even on the Left, laugh at that day’s events, pointing out that the would-be putsch had no chance of success. It did have no chance of success. That does not mean it should be cavalierly dismissed; on the contrary, it should be taken with utmost seriousness. Hitler’s beer hall putsch of 1923 had no chance of success, either, and his violent movement remained on the lunatic fringe for several more years. But we know how German history would turn out.

There will be no facile comparison of the contemporary United States with Weimar Germany here. We are not living in Weimar times. There are no organized brown shirts running amuck, a military deeply hostile to democracy and ready to act on that hostility nor a significant number of industrialists bankrolling storm troops. History does not repeat itself, as tragedy or farce, neatly and certainly not precisely. We nonetheless might take a lesson from history before we take stock of contemporary political conditions.

^{Anarchist feminist and Spanish Republican anti-fascist protest at #25NFeminista event in Madrid (photo by Jack From Hell)}

One myth to be dispelled is that Hitler was elected. He wasn’t. He was handed power by the German president, Paul von Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler chancellor. Unfortunately, that was completely legal under the Weimar constitution, and enough for the biggest opposition party, the Social Democrats, to hold their powder — they refused to unleash their militia and confined themselves to a legal order that was imminently going to be destroyed. The other major opposition party, the Communists, declared “After Hitler, our turn,” a public sentiment quite a contrast with their membership forced to go into hiding or exile as the newly empowered Nazis began rounding up party members and destroying their offices.

Union leaders meekly rolled over for Hitler after he was handed power, agreeing to participate in what would now be a Nazi-led May Day celebration. Within two days of that May Day, the Nazis began arresting union leaders and banning existing unions; social democrats would soon meet the same fate. It took Hitler only three months to sweep away all opposition and assume dictatorial power. With all political opposition swept away, persecutions of Jews, Roma and LGBT communities began with results the world should never forget or minimize.

Why did von Hindenburg appoint Hitler chancellor? In the last election before the January 1933 appointment, the Nazi vote had actually declined from the previous ballot; the combined Communist and Social Democrat vote was 1.5 million votes higher than the Nazi vote, which totaled 33 percent, although the combined Left vote was a million shy of the combined vote of the Nazis and the National Party, the remaining vehicle of the traditional Right. Most of the 1920s support for Germany’s traditional right-wing parties had been transferred to the Nazis, who made a gigantic leap from 2.6 percent in May 1928 to 18 percent (second among 10 parties) in September 1930. The leaders of those traditional right-wing parties had thought they could control Hitler by having him appointed chancellor (the equivalent of prime minister) but giving the Nazis only two of 10 cabinet positions. Unfortunately, one of those positions was the Interior Ministry that controlled the police, allowing the Nazis to flood the police with their brown shirt thugs. That Interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, was a participant in the beer hall putsch but was given no more punishment than a suspended sentence.

Violence in the service of corporate profits

The stories in Italy and other countries that fell to fascism aren’t much different. Mussolini, too, was handed power. Mussolini was a socialist until he began receiving money from arms manufacturers and other business interests. Although now far to the right, he carefully allowed a variety of propaganda to be put forth and even denied having a program, allowing fascism to appear to be whatever one wished it to be. But his benefactors knew what he and they wanted. Fascists were receiving regular subsidies from shopkeepers’ associations and the Confederation of Industry. Socialists came in first in November 1919 elections but conservatives began buying the support of fascist squads and police allowed them to attack unimpeded and even provided support. Mussolini’s March on Rome could not have happened without Italian business leaders financing the fascist squads. Soon King Vittorio Emmanuel appointed him prime minister. Bans on unions and strikes swiftly followed. In Spain, a fascist-minded military overthrew the Republican government; military coups brought fascist generals to power in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s with the support of fascist squads using violent tactics. Violent suppression of working people and their organizations, and reduced wages and working conditions, followed in each case.

In none of the historical cases was a fascist takeover a sudden burst from nowhere. There was much violence by the Right amply funded by corporate leaders and backed by the military and police. The tipping point came before the takeovers — there was, and is, no easily definable point where the rubicon is crossed. Thus vigilance and pushback is always necessary. If it looks like fascism and acts like fascism, then it should be taken seriously as a fascist movement. The 2024 presidential election season has already begun in the U.S., which does not yet have industrialists and bankers bankrolling street thugs and maneuvering to overthrow formal democracy. Those corporate titans certainly appreciated all that the Trump administration, staffed by some of the most virulent ideologues from among the bourgeoisie and comprador, did for them and would do for them again if they get the chance, but that is different from backing an outright fascist movement. Given how much control industrialists and bankers have over the U.S. political process, it is hardly necessary for them to overthrow a system that works so well for them. 

^{July 2018 Stand Up To Racism rally in London (photo by Alisdare Hickson from Canterbury, U.K.)}

Nonetheless, times and conditions can change, and the very fact that a fascist movement exists — one that Trump currently heads but Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wishes to assume the leadership of — should be taken with utmost seriousness, especially as it is a movement that shows no sign of dispersing.

There is not a parliamentary system in the United States but rather a two-party system that is seemingly impregnable, and possesses a military that to all appearances, for all its use as a battering ram overseas for corporate plunder, is nonetheless a strictly constitutional body with no hint of domestic unrest. True, but we should disabuse ourselves of elevating form over function. The classical image of fascism is of storm troopers marauding in the streets, violently suppressing any opposition. But 1970s South America was different than 1920s and 1930s Europe. There were fascist gangs running loose in Chile and Argentina, but fascism was imposed through undisguised military coups.

Fascism in the United States, were it to happen, would come in forms different from all of those, with Christian fundamentalists forming a key portion of any base. But what is crucial is that a significant percentage of a country’s industrialists and financiers — its capitalist ruling class — backs the imposition of a dictatorship with money and other support. This is the crucial commonality overriding the different forms of fascist takeovers.

Empty rhetoric versus class interests

Why is this so crucial? Because fascism is a dictatorship imposed for the benefit of large industrialists and financiers. At its most basic level, fascism is a dictatorship established through and maintained with terror on behalf of big business. It has a social base, which provides the support and the terror squads, but which is badly misled since the fascist dictatorship operates decisively against the interest of its social base. Militarism, extreme nationalism, the creation of enemies and scapegoats, and, perhaps the most critical component, a rabid propaganda that intentionally raises panic and hate while disguising its true nature and intentions under the cover of a phony populism, are among the necessary elements.

Despite national differences that result in major differences in the appearances of fascism, the class nature is consistent. Big business is invariably the supporter of fascism, no matter what a fascist movement’s rhetoric contains, and is invariably the beneficiary. Instituting a fascist dictatorship is no easy decision even for the biggest industrialists and bankers who might salivate over the potential profits. For even if it is intended to benefit them, these big businessmen are giving up some of their own freedom since they will not directly control the dictatorship; it is a dictatorship for them, not by them.

It is only under certain conditions that business elites resort to fascism — some form of democratic government, under which citizens “consent” to the ruling structure, is the preferred form and much easier to maintain. Working people beginning to withdraw their consent — beginning to seriously challenge the economic status quo — is one “crisis” that can bring on fascism. An inability to maintain or expand profits, as can occur during a steep decline in the “business cycle,” or a structural crisis, is another such “crisis.”

^{Fascism is a global phenomenon, not limited to any one country. (Photo by The All-Nite Images from New York)}

No fascist movement can succeed without a sizable base convinced that those on the Left must be stopped at any cost, that the only way the mystical far Right return to the past that is dangled in front of them can be brought about is for it to be forcibly imposed and those in opposition must be suppressed with violence. This portion of the equation, unfortunately, very much exists in the United States as the unshakable following of Trump sadly demonstrates. Trump’s desire to be a fascist dictator is obvious — this should be unmistakable for anyone on the Left, but sadly isn’t as all too many either still don’t take Trump and his base seriously or, worse, are seduced by Trump’s siren songs.

I was once a guest on a respected environmental radio program discussing the Trump administration’s plans for revising the North American Free Trade Agreement when I was quite rudely interrupted and addressed in a most condescending manner by another guest, the prominent head of a Washington non-governmental organization (NGO) who purported to “correct” me by claiming that Trump’s trade advisers say they want to do away with the secret tribunals that corporations use to overturn government laws and regulations. Trump had been in power more than a year at this point, and his administration’s all-out war on working people and its strenuous efforts to allow corporations to plunder and pollute unencumbered by regulations was in full swing. Moreover, the administration’s trade policy paper had been released — this was the topic I was addressing — and there was nothing ambiguous about its intention of dismantling labor, safety, health or environmental standards upheld by other countries.

Trump’s vaguely left-sounding rhetoric was merely for show, a transparently obvious ploy to attract voters who had very good reasons for deploring so-called “free trade” agreements and the many other policies that have screwed over working people while allowing jobs to be moved overseas. Germans in the Weimar Republic had plenty of reasons to be fed up, too, but those obvious Nazi lies became unmistakably lies when Hitler wiped out those storm troops who believed the left-sounding rhetoric in the “Night of the Long Knives.” Mussolini used such tactics as well.

The records of Trump and DeSantis should be unmistakable

Four years of Trump in the White House — four years of all-out assaults on working people and the environment, incompetent bumbling and lying about the Covid-19 pandemic and giving permission to every misanthrope to act out their most obnoxious anti-social fantasies — could not be clearer. Trump remains an embodiment of the threat of fascism. And what of his main rival for the Republican Party presidential nomination? DeSantis — or DeSatan as he has been dubbed — clearly also has aspirations of becoming a fascist dictator. The governor does not have a rabid popular backing like Trump does but he seems more likely to acquire strong backing from industrialists and financiers than Trump, giving his success in reducing the Florida Legislature to his rubber-stamp. DeSantis might as well be ruling by decree considering how legislators hand him whatever he wants.

The record here needs no introduction for those paying attention. But let us “highlight” some of his doings. He’s waging a scorched-earth war against LGBT communities, denying their humanity and banning to the extent possible even discussing those communities’ interests, imposing draconian abortion bans (women always stripped of rights and reduced to baby machines under fascism), unilaterally removing from office elected officials who dare to disagree with him, banning books, whitewashing history, using immigrants as disposable props in the service of nationalism and nativism, and offering bonuses to police officers to relocate to Florida, many of whom have been accused of criminal acts including domestic battery, kidnapping and murder. So vicious is the police state DeSantis is moving to create and so hostile is the attempt to erase slavery and racism from history that the NAACP has issued a travel advisory for African-Americans to avoid the state.

Although it is inarguably true that an independent fascist party is not going to take power in the United States in the foreseeable future, it is not necessary for one to arise. The two leading candidates for one of the two parties that alternate in power, the Republicans, both have aspirations of being fascist dictators and there is a sizable base of Republicans ready for just that. Little help from the other party, the Democrats, is forthcoming as the “center-left” opposition (in actuality the “center-right” opposition to the far right) is steam-rolled time after time, their inability to stand up to the right or mount any effective opposition is not only the product of being beholden to corporate money and “American exceptionalism” ideology but the intellectual dead end of liberalism. (I’m using North American terminology here; readers in the rest of the world can substitute “social democratic” for “liberal.”)

North American liberalism and European social democracy are trapped by a fervent desire to stabilize an unstable capitalist system. They are hamstrung by their belief in the capitalist system, which means, today, a belief in austerity for working people and subsidies for corporate and financial plunder, no matter what nice speeches they may make. When Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Jean Chrétien, Justin Trudeau, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, François Hollande, Gerhard Schröder, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Romano Prodi all fall to their knees in front of industrialists and financiers, when each speedily implements neoliberal austerity policies despite leading the supposed “center-left” opposition to the conservative parties that openly stand for corporate domination, there is something other than personal weakness at work. And this sorry record — Bill Clinton was the most effective Republican president the U.S. ever had — provides an opening for far right demagogues to offer left-sounding siren songs that fool too many.

Nonetheless, I can readily understand why so many United Statesians, not only liberals but even those who are on the Left, vote for Democrats as a tactical move, arguing that a Democrat in power, particularly in the White House, provides more space to maneuver. Although I personally don’t have the stomach to vote for Democrats, I certainly understand this tactical voting as a matter of survival, especially as each Republican administration is worse than the last. But it would be helpful if Democratic voters would put some pressure on their office holders to actually try to implement some of what they want rather than giving them a free pass. And a different strategy from the usual Democratic Party cringing and cowering shouldn’t mean cowering first and then cringing.

Voting aside — and voting should be the least of the things we do — fascism can only be stopped by a mass movement, by confronting it directly. And that means taking seriously the danger, rather than laughing at the ignorance of Trump and his blinkered followers. Fascism is never a laughing matter as its body count ought to make clear.

Grasping dependency and under-development as structural, not simply a product of force

That some regions have to remain undeveloped so that others can develop has long been one of the obvious realities of capitalism. This is another way of pointing out that massive poverty across the Global South is not the result of some local insufficiency but rather due to the functioning of imperialism, the ongoing effects of colonialism and financial might.

This dynamic has been discussed in detail many times, most notably, in the case of Africa, in Walter Rodney’s classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Latin American authors have tackled this structural inequality in works such as Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. Other authors, such as Samir Amin in his many works, have looked at this from a broader global perspective. There is no shortage of books that detail, in grisly detail, how capitalism has immiserated much of the world. But what are the structural reasons for this state of affairs?

We are accustomed to thinking in terms of military conquest, invasions and coups. There is a long history here; the United States alone has invaded Latin American countries 96 times, and that total doesn’t include the coups it has sponsored and the governments it has decisively undermined. In more recent times, financial power through the control of the world economic system and the unrelenting leverage of the dominant position of the U.S. dollar, supplemented through multilateral institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that pitilessly impose austerity through their one-size-fits-all “structural adjustment programs” on behalf of multinational capital, are deployed more frequently and systematically than raw military power.

Both financial muscle and military muscle are copiously used to elevate Global North capitalist core countries at the expense of the Global South, with the U.S. doing everything it can to maintain its place — more specifically, its multinational corporations’ place — at the apex of the pyramid. Yet it is not only these levers. Capitalism is also kept in place by structural forces. We can’t fully comprehend how the world capitalist system functions without studying its structure, which operates even when financial or military muscle is not at a given moment being directly applied. This is where the Brazilian Marxist Ruy Mauro Marini has stepped in, persuasively arguing that the roles of local bourgeoisies, and not only Northern imperialism (as important as that is), as well as unequal exchange resulting from a subordinate position within a global division of labor, are indispensable to understanding the fate of Global South workers and in particular Latin American underdevelopment.

His essay The Dialectics of Dependency is not a new work, but has been newly translated into English for an audience to whom he is largely unknown. I confess I was unfamiliar with Professor Marini prior to reading a description of the book containing the eponymous essay, published by Monthly Review Press, but was immediately intrigued. I can now say I am pleased to have been introduced to his work and add him to the list of understudied Latin American theorists who should be better known. The Dialectics of Dependency* contains not only his important essay, but an introduction to the concept, a lengthy essay discussing Professor Marini’s life and extensive work as an activist, writer and professor, and a concluding essay further discussing the concept and situating it as a tool to help guide movements. The two framing essays were written by Jaime Osorio, a close comrade of Professor Marini, and the essay documenting the author’s life and work was written by the translator, Amanda Latimer. (Although Professor Marini is Brazilian, the essay was developed and written in Spanish during his two decades of exile in Mexico, Chile and Europe.)

Development and underdevelopment go together

That The Dialectics of Dependency was first published in 1973 does not lessen its impact. Dependency is understood as “a relation of subordination between formally independent nations, in the framework of which the relations of production of the subordinate nations are modified or re-created to ensure the expanded reproduction of dependency,” the outcome of which “cannot be anything other than than more dependency.” This can not be liquidated other than through “eliminating the relations of production it involves.” To be less tautological, dependency can be defined as the subordination of economies and countries to other economies and countries.

Latin America was plundered throughout the colonial period, with Christopher Columbus inaugurating slavery, forcible precious-metal extraction and the genocide of native peoples. Formal independence for Latin American countries coincided with the Industrial Revolution, during which they “came to gravitate toward England” rather than each other. “Ignoring one another, the new countries would link themselves directly to the English metropole,” Professor Marini wrote, becoming suppliers of foodstuffs and raw materials while importing manufactured products. “Latin America developed in close consonance with the dynamics of international capital.” Colonial metals and “exotic goods” contributed to increased commodity flows and “paved the way” for large-scale industry in core capitalist countries.

^{Iguazú Falls on the Brazil-Argentina border (photo by Giovita70)}

English technological advances enabled significant increases in production and the ability to flood markets with commodities. With the displacement of farmers into cities and the creation of a modern proletariat, the incorporation of this new working class into consumption was “an essential step.” In turn, the supply of food from Latin America made it increasingly possible for English capitalism to reduce the value of labor power and thus “achieve a balance between increasing surplus value and, at the same time, increasing wages.” In contrast, “super-exploitation” — a drastic lowering of wages — was the means for Latin American capital to be competitive. Because Latin American production was largely for export, local capitalists did not have to create a local market and could keep wages at extraordinarily low levels because they did not need their workers to be able to buy the products they produce.

Unequal exchange gathered momentum and super-exploitation became the route for Latin American capitalists to maintain their profitability and their places in the global capitalist system. Rather than increase productivity or invest in new machinery, Latin American capitalists have relied on intensifying exploitation, that is through suppressed wages, work speed-ups and increased working hours. While not discounting the very real role of imperialist capital, a key political conclusion of the Marxist theory of dependency is recognizing the “dominant classes’ [of Latin America] responsibility in reproducing dependency.” Local bourgeoisies earn substantial profits from this arrangement and have no incentive to change it.

Corporations from the Global North have a ferocious need to grab the resources of dependent countries, and local capitalists are happy to help them. This is not to discount other forms of plunder, such as unequal exchange, the extraction of profits through investment, interest on foreign debt and the draining of capital and knowledge by monopolies based in the capitalist core.

Global division of labor fuels unequal exchange

As industry continues to develop in the capitalist core, it becomes more productive and requires greater raw materials, further enforcing a global division of labor. Professor Marini argues that the large quantities of food exported by Latin America to industrialized countries reduced the real value of labor power in the latter, causing higher rates of surplus value and enabling Global North bourgeoisies to capture productivity increases. This aspect is somewhat counter-intuitive, so let us allow the author to explicate it.

“[W]hat determines the rate of surplus value is not the productivity of labor in and of itself, but the degree of exploitation of labor; in other words, the relation between surplus labor time (in which the worker produces surplus labor) and necessary labor time (in which the worker reproduces the equivalent of his wage). Only by altering this proposition, in a manner favorable to the capitalist (that is, by increasing surplus labor at the expense of necessary labor) can one modify the rate of surplus value.”

To make clear what the author is discussing here, surplus value is the amount (or value) produced by an employee beyond the amount that equals the amount that he or she is paid. In other words, if an employee is paid $100 for a day’s work but produces products or services worth $200, then the $100 differential represents the surplus value produced by the employee and which is taken by the capitalist. From that surplus value, once the capitalist takes care of other expenses (such as rent, mortgage, equipment, interest on loans, etc.), comes the capitalist’s profit. A capitalist can introduce a new production technique or new machinery that makes workers more productive and thus temporarily boost profits, but because the capitalist’s competitors will quickly move to introduce the same techniques or machinery, the amount of products will have increased but the surplus value extracted won’t because the price of the product or service will become uniform across the industry with the common adoption of what was originally a breakthrough for the organization that first adopted it. Because more is being produced in the same period of time, the capitalist can reduce the prices of the products or services for competitive reasons, thereby lowering the value of what is produced. To counteract that reduction in value, capitalists squeeze more out of their workforces to increase the surplus value extracted.

^{Entre Rios province, Argentina (photo by Felipe Gonzalez)}

Professor Marini, in his discussion of how Latin American food exports led to Global North bourgeoisies reaping the benefits of productivity increases, continues:

“[O]ne task assigned to Latin America, within the framework of the international division of labor, was providing the industrial countries with the food required for the growth of the working class, in particular, and of the urban population, more generally, that was taking place there. … The effect of this supply … would be to reduce the real value of labor power in the industrial countries, which allowed increases in productivity there to be translated into increasingly higher rates of surplus value. In other words, through its incorporation into the world market for wage-goods, Latin America played a significant role in increasing relative surplus value in industrial countries.”

The food exported to industrial centers by Latin America enabled more people to leave farms and migrate to the cities, and the increasing industrialization required more workers to move to where the factories are located. This migration results in more competition for jobs, putting downward pressure on wages.

Visible force, yes, but economics underlies that

Behind the use of military and diplomatic pressure, Professor Marini argues, “is an economic base that makes it possible” and failure to understand that is to obscure “the real nature of international capitalist exploitation.” He writes that rather than believe that equitable trade relations are possible in global capitalism, what is needed is the abolishment of international economic relations based on exchange value.

“Indeed, as the world market attains a more developed form, the use of political and military violence to exploit weak nations becomes superfluous, and international exploitation can rely increasingly on the reproduction of economic relations that perpetuate and amplify the backwardness and weakness of those nations. We see the same phenomenon here that is observed internally in the industrial economies: the use of force to subject the working masses to the rule of capital diminishes as economic mechanisms that enshrine that subordination come into play.”

Countries that are disadvantaged by this unequal exchange seek to compensate by greater exploitation of workforces rather than increasing productivity. In other words, doubling down on being a “low cost” producer — the Global South capitalist can only remain competitive by increasing exploitation to make their products cheap through increasing the intensity of work, lengthening working hours and/or reducing wages. Resource extraction and agricultural products, Latin America’s major contributions to the world economy, require less investment than manufacture. Thus, labor in extraction and agriculture can be intensified with little or no capital. That exploitation can be maximized because the Latin American capitalist is producing for export, and does not need a sizable domestic buying power to reap profits or maintain a market, and all the more can this be done because of ongoing high unemployment and underemployment.

This dynamic does not mean there is no industrialization in dependent countries. Industry does slowly develop, but there is insufficient funds to buy the equipment and machinery needed to produce manufactured products. Importing capital — taking out loans from the North or North-controlled supranational lending organizations — becomes a necessity. In turn, as capitalism stabilized after recovering from World War II, capital flowed preferentially to industry in the Global South, which offered attractive profits due to the low cost and super-exploitation of labor there. And as the pace of technological advancement quickens, machinery becomes outdated quicker and manufacturers in the core capitalist countries can recoup some of their costs by selling outdated equipment to manufacturers in the South.

“Latin American industrialization thus corresponds to a new international division of labor,” Professor Marini wrote. “In this framework, the lower stages of industrial production are transferred to the dependent countries … while the most advanced stages are reserved for the imperialist centers … along with a monopoly over the corresponding technology.” With wages remaining low and unequal exchange maintained through the foregoing processes, new industrialization in dependent countries remains dependent on upper class consumption and exports. Workers’ incomes are too low to buy the products they produce at the same time their productivity rises due to the machinery that is imported, even if that machinery is outdated by the standards of the capitalist core countries. Further investment will be in luxury goods while basic consumer items stagnate. Wages also stagnate, increasing inequality. And dependency on core countries is recreated.

“[T]he structure of production adapts to the structure of circulation inherent in dependent capitalism,” Professor Marini concluded. The trap of dependency can only be ended by putting an end to the global system of capitalism.

Knowledge needed, not fairy tales

The Dialectics of Dependency explicates the above arguments with much technical detail. Although putting forth a persuasive discussion, the book is not necessarily accessible to a reader not already conversant in economics and Marxist terminology. The titular essay is written in a quite abstract manner, which will likely lessen the potential audience. That would be a loss as the book is a valuable, and needed, addition to theory to help our collective understanding of unequal exchange and the roots of deep inequality among the countries of the world capitalist system. Anyone wishing to grasp this enduring international phenomenon would benefit from reading The Dialectics of Dependency. It is not always easy reading but working your way through sometimes difficult and abstract passages will be enriching for any activist seeking to understand how capitalism works.

It also explains why such stratification exists without falling back on under-developed explanations that see only military force without the very structures of capitalism and the system’s perpetual and relentless need for expansion and intensified exploitation. The concluding essay by Jamie Osorio helps explain the implications of Professor Marini’s theory. 

His analysis, Professor Osorio wrote, “has shown the naïveté and fallacies of international bodies and academic groups that make extensive descriptive studies and then conclude — like children writing letters to Santa Claus — that it would be good to have a bourgeoisie that is dynamic, autonomous, committed to technological knowledge … willing to create internal markets by paying better wages to most of the working population.”

Rather than believe in Santa Claus or fairy tales, far better that the dynamics of capitalism be grasped in their full dimensions. Only by understanding how and why, and drawing appropriate conclusions, rather than simply observing, can the world’s exploited — the vast majority of humanity — hope to see a better world come into being, a world that will have put capitalism into the history books.

* Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency [Monthly Review Press, New York, 2022]

Yes, Gorbachev was a failure but other hands helped bring down the Soviet Union

The reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union are myriad and can’t be laid solely at the feet of one person. Mikhail Gorbachev is widely despised by Russians as well as by activists and partisans of the Left. There are good reasons for that. It is impossible to imagine the collapse of a superpower and the catastrophic effects of imposing capitalism via “shock therapy” that immiserated a vast country without him. 

But if we are serious about analyzing history, and the ongoing effects that history has on the present day, we must take a dialectic approach, and examine this history in all its complexities. Amid the triumphalist accolades heaped upon Gorbachev upon his death from Western capitalists and the opprobrium heaped on upon him by his many critics — continuing a pattern of three decades since the Soviet Union’s dissolution at the end of 1991 — we might take a more nuanced view.

The preceding is not to deny that Gorbachev was, ultimately, a failure who disorganized an economy and set in motion one of the greatest economic collapses ever recorded. But to pin all blame on him ignores not only other personalities but the stultifying effects of an economy badly in need of modernization and democratization, a sclerotic political system and the social forces and corruption set in motion during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev. Nor would it be fair to exclude the unrelenting pressure put on the Soviet Union and other countries calling themselves “socialist” that did much to distort and undermine those societies. 

Nonetheless, a serious examination must concentrate on internal factors, those the responsibility of Gorbachev, and those where responsibility lies elsewhere. That was the approach taken in my book It’s Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment, and it is that book’s fifth chapter, The Dissolution of the Soviet Union — that forms the basis of this article. Indeed, the mounting problems of the Soviet Union were not unnoticed within its borders — from the 1960s, academic institutions published reports detailing the bottlenecks built into the system and reform plans were drawn up within the government, but mostly were ignored.

^{Mikhail Gorbachev was praised by Western leaders who were happy to see shock therapy imposed on Russia (Credit: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum)}

The edifice of the Soviet Union was something akin to a statue undermined by water freezing inside it; it appears strong on the outside until the tipping point when the ice suddenly breaks it apart from within. The “ice” here were black marketeers; networks of people who used connections to obtain supplies for official and illegal operations; and the managers of enterprises who grabbed their operations for themselves. Soviet bureaucrats eventually began to privatize the economy for their own benefit; party officials, for all their desire to find a way out of a deep crisis, lacked firm ideas and direction; and Soviet working people, discouraged by experiencing the reforms as coming at their expense and exhausted by perpetual struggle, were unable to intervene.

Five years of reform with meager positive results in essence caused Gorbachev to throw in the towel and begin to introduce elements of capitalism. Gorbachev intended neither to institute capitalism nor bring down the Soviet system, but by introducing those elements of capitalism, the dense network of ties that had bound it together unraveled, hastening the end. To say this, however, is not at all to agree with some simplistic and unrealistic ideas out there that Gorbachev was a trojan horse intent on destruction. Every so often, over a period of many years, an article circulates online purporting to quote Gorbachev that he was intent on destroying the Soviet Union from the beginning of his career and worked patiently until he was in a position to do so. But this “confession” has allegedly appeared in many different publications in several different countries. The last time I saw this peddled it was an alleged article published in a Turkish newspaper. One might ask: Why would he make a spectacular confession such as this to an obscure publication in Turkey?

People who circulate such nonsense are simply seeking a scapegoat, and either can’t be bothered to study the actual conditions of the Soviet Union or are so blinded by a rigid ideology that they have ceased thinking. Again, this in no way suggests Gorbachev doesn’t have a huge responsibility to history. One can be a firm critic of the Soviet Union and still lament what happened. 

Changes needed, but what changes?

Serious reforms were necessary; that is why the members of the Politburo, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s highest body, finally named Gorbachev general secretary. There was also strong support for his elevation among the party’s regional and provincial first secretaries, who formed the backbone of the Central Committee. When Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister for a quarter-century and stalwart of the party’s old guard, endorsed Gorbachev’s ascension, that essentially clinched the promotion. Reforms had been attempted since 1965, when Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin first proposed reforms that went nowhere. But by 1985, even the most doctrinaire party leader knew changes were necessary. The political and economic systems were out of date. A Soviet book published 20 years earlier declared that “a system which is so harnessed from top to bottom will fetter technological and social development; and it will break down sooner or later under the pressure of the real processes of economic life.”

Gorbachev started by stressing the “strengthening of discipline,” cracked down on alcohol, readily discussed the need for improvements in consumer products and consolidated several ministries to retool industry. He also pushed out several high-ranking officials opposed to any reforms, demanded “collectivity of work” in all organizations and declared that collective work is a “reliable guarantee against the adoption of volitional, subjective decisions, manifestations of the cult of personality, and infringements of Leninist norms of party life.”

Even before he became general secretary, Gorbachev had begun meeting with intellectuals working in Soviet institutions, later recalling that his safe was “clogged” with proposals. “People were clamoring that everything needed to be changed, but from different angles; some were for scientific and technical progress, others for reforming the structure of politics, and others still for new organizational forms in industry and agriculture. In short, from all angles there were cries from the heart that affairs could no longer be allowed to go on in the old way.”

First major reform more stick than carrot

Yet when it came to making concrete changes, there was a lack of imagination. To put it bluntly, Gorbachev had no plan and little idea of what to do. So when concrete structural changes began being implemented in 1987, they mostly were on the backs of working people. Eventually, the early enthusiasm for a new course gave way to anger and disillusionment. The first major reform, the Law on State Enterprises, approved in June 1987 by the party Central Committee, was more stick than carrot. The basic concept of the enterprise law was to liberate enterprises from some of the more rigid controls of the ministries, put them on profit-and-loss accounting, reduce the amount of product required to be produced for the state plan, reduce subsidies in order to make enterprises more efficient, and to bring a measure of democracy into the workplace with the creation of “labor-collective councils” and workforce elections of enterprise directors. 

State planning remained in force, but would become less of a hard numerical total and more of a guide, although the requirement of fulfilling the (reduced) plan requirements would continue. Production sold to the state under the plan would still constitute most sales and would continue to be paid at rates specified by the state, but production beyond plan fulfillment could be sold at any price, subject to volume limitations to prevent unnecessary production beyond any reasonable social need. 

In conjunction with these reforms, measures were implemented aimed at putting pressure on wages. Basic wage rates were increased, but individual output quotas (or “norms”) were also raised, to make it much more difficult to earn bonuses. Bonuses would no longer be essentially automatic; they could only be earned through more effort — and the new wage levels made up only part of the differences between the new basic wage and the old basic wage plus bonus. Put plainly, workers would have to work harder to earn the same amount of money. The basic idea behind these sets of reforms was to introduce a mechanism that would provide a better understanding of demand while retaining central planning. In turn, more efficiency would be wrung out of the system through the use of shop-floor and enterprise-wide incentives and the introduction of some workplace democracy, thereby alleviating both some of the alienation on the part of the workforce and the incentive of management to avoid introducing technological or other improvements. 

The de facto wage cuts, and accompanying ability of factory managers to force workers into lower skill grades (thereby forcing reductions in wages), was implemented immediately, but the rest was to be phased in. “Labor-collective councils” were supposed to be formed to give workers a say in managing their workplace since they were asked to shoulder some of the profit-and-loss responsibility. These were stillborn. In most factories, either there was no council, it did nothing or the enterprise director headed it, neutralizing its potential. The trade unions, as before, did nothing to intervene, remaining silent or backing management.

The enterprise law text was ambiguous — it made references to “one-man management,” the foundation of the existing top-down command structure; did not specify the powers of labor-collective councils and the workforce; and stated that, although directors are elected, those elections must be confirmed by a ministry, a veto power supposedly needed to avoid cases of unspecified excesses. Not only did managements remain unanswerable to workforces, government ministries refused to relinquish their grips. Government bureaucrats owed their privileges and power to the ability to command, and naturally most of them did not relish losing such positions. Ministry officials continued to issue detailed orders to enterprise managements that left no room for enterprises to make their own decisions and continued to require enterprises to buy from a specific supplier, acting as a crucial brake on democratization; they also continued to impose management personnel. The traditional top-down economic structure remained largely untouched. 

Workers announce their response by striking

During these years, serious reforms to the structure of the Communist Party were made, with Gorbachev maintaining his hold on power and steadily placing his followers into high-level positions. There may have been a quickening pace of events in the political sphere during 1988 and 1989, but everyday matters such as the economy and living standards stagnated. Failing to see sufficient improvement from the promises of perestroika, working people began to take a more direct approach — by striking. 

The first mass strike was conducted by the country’s miners in 1989. More than 400,000 miners ultimately walked out across the country. The fastest advancing strikers were in Ukraine’s Donetsk province. Strikers there occupied the square in front of the regional party headquarters, and all 21 area mines sent representatives to occupation meetings. Abandoned by their union and all other institutions, the miners set up their own strike committee, and began making contact with the striking miners in other regions, who then also set up committees. The strike committees became the effective local governments, setting up patrols, acting as arbitrators for problems citizens brought to them and closing all sources of alcohol. Strikers this time refused to negotiate with the coal industry minister, and would only end the strike when Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov signed a detailed agreement and Gorbachev announced his personal approval.

Further strikes in other industries broke out. These were often strictly local affairs, however, and there was little attempt at national coordination, rendering them politically ineffective. Nor was there coordination with the miners. The Soviet trade union central umbrella was widely seen as irrelevant, but new unions that began to form by 1990 were very small and unorganized, and even the very few unions that did work well had no links with other unions. A lack of a coherent plan and a lack of grassroots pressure meant that perestroika, as the restructuring was called in Russian, was failing.

^{A Russian coal mine (credit: Institute of Economics and Management in Industry)}

All social groups seemed to lose faith in perestroika. By 1990, polling found that 85 percent believed that economic reform had achieved nothing or made the situation worse. As the miners’ strike, the failure of the labor-collective councils and mounting disillusionment demonstrated, efforts by the reformers to gain the support of working people had failed. Two important reasons for this failure were the ongoing shortages of consumer goods, which, if anything, were becoming worse, and the realization that the economic reforms were, in large part, going to come on their backs. The timid effort at workplace democratization through the labor-collective councils was intended to compensate people on the shop floors for the harsher work conditions and lower basic pay, and when the councils proved a farce the reformers were empty-handed.

The 1987 enterprise law, in addition to the profit-and-loss accounting and its other reforms, also legalized “cooperative” retail and service enterprises. These cooperatives, although not altogether new, helped exacerbate shortages and trigger inflation. Farmers’ markets, which sold produce at higher prices than charged in state markets while offering greater variety, were long a part of Soviet retail, as was street trading and peddling. But the new cooperatives quickly took advantage of the differential between what the new market would bear and the level of prices set in state shops. For example, when a shipment of meat would arrive at a state store, where it was intended to be sold at the low, state-controlled price, more than half of the shipment would be illicitly resold to a cooperative, which would then sell it at a far higher price, and leaving a shortage in the state store. 

Another report found that, although the Soviet Union enjoyed an excellent harvest in 1990, only 58 percent of produce that was supposed to be delivered to state stores actually made it; the remainder was siphoned off by black marketeers or rotted due to a distribution system that was breaking down. Consumers feared future shortages, which became self-fulfilling prophecies when wide-spread hoarding helped empty store shelves.

Why manage factories when you can own?

By now, black marketeering and corruption, which blossomed during the Brezhnev “era of stagnation,” were worse than ever. Now adding to the picture was that the government and industrial bureaucracy (known as the “nomenklatura”) had begun thinking bigger. Their privileges were based on their management of the Soviet Union’s industry and commerce, and this control rested completely on the state ownership of that property because they did not own the means of production themselves.

Some among the nomenklatura began to dream of capitalism — then they would be able to dramatically upgrade their lifestyle. Economic malaise was becoming more pervasive as the dense web of threads that held the Soviet system together were starting to be snipped through corruption, local protectionism and supply disruptions, the last of which was exacerbated because many component parts were produced in only one factory. The move to profit-and-loss accounting helped to bring about an “all against all” mentality: Instead of simply continuing to manage state property, why not grab it for yourself?

It was against these backdrops that in 1990 Gorbachev began to abandon his efforts to renew the system he inherited. On the political level, the general secretary began eliminating the party’s monopoly on power and, through creating a new freely elected legislature, built himself a power base outside the party. His power was soon used to begin to introduce elements of capitalism. To bring about these “market reforms,” the limited ability of working people to defend themselves had to be eliminated. A series of laws designed to do this began with a new enterprise law stealthily passed by the Supreme Soviet in June 1990. Gorbachev continued to insist that market reforms were to remain within the boundaries of a socialist system (and there was a widespread belief in the country that the conditions for an outright restoration of capitalism didn’t exist), but in reality from this time the debate within Gorbachev’s government and among his closest advisers was about how far and how fast the transition to a capitalist-type system should go. 

^{Red Square, Moscow}

The new law eliminated what little opportunity workers had to influence their management in addition to legalizing private ownership of enterprises. More would quickly come in the following months. Subsequent laws completely freed wages of any central control, reducing wage labor to a commodity as it is in capitalist countries; granted guarantees to investors, including compensation in the event that future legislation affects an investment; created unemployment insurance but failed to authorize any money to pay for it, in expectation of mass unemployment; and legalized the privatization of state enterprises.

Simultaneous with the passages of the above legislation, two competing economic plans were floated. One called for a phase-in of some market mechanisms over five years while retaining state control over pricing, the other called for a sweeping transition to a capitalist economy in 500 days with no working plan on how to accomplish that. Gorbachev, increasingly unable to make a decision, asked the backers of the competing plans to reach a compromise between them. But Boris Yeltsin, having maneuvered himself into the newly created presidency of the Russian Republic, undercut Gorbachev by unilaterally declaring the 500-day plan adopted.

The Russian Republic constituted about 80 percent of the area of the Soviet Union and was by far the dominant republic among the Soviet Union’s 15 republics. The other, much smaller 14 republics had their own party apparatus, albeit completely subordinate to Moscow, and a Russian republic party would have been almost redundant. But as nationalism rapidly gripped peoples across the country, a Russian party body was created. Yeltsin gained control of it, using it to accelerate and deepen a path toward capitalism, undermine Gorbachev, dismantle the Soviet Union and ultimately impose brutal shock therapy on Russians after the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

In essence, Yeltsin set up a dual government in competition with the Soviet government headed by Gorbachev. But unlike 1917, when a brief period of dual government would end with the taking of power by the Bolsheviks, this time the capitalist restorationists led by Yeltsin would win.

The period of a dual government must always be brief

As 1990 drew to a close, many reformers became convinced that Gorbachev had gotten cold feet, and would call a halt to reform or even turn back. His appointment of hard-liners as prime minister (Valentin Pavlov), interior minister (Boris Pugo) and vice president (Gennadii Yanayev) fueled this fear; enough so that Gorbachev’s long-time ally and foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, resigned in December with a warning that “dictatorship is coming.” Ironically, hard-liners — those who had been opposed to any reforms and wanted a return to the Brezhnev era — were needed so that capitalism could be imposed on a country that didn’t want it.

Gorbachev, until the end, maintained that he was committed to a long-term strengthening of socialism through the introduction of market mechanisms, although the concrete results of the decisions that he and the Supreme Soviet took from June 1990 formed a reality of a phased transition to capitalism. Yeltsin, in contrast to his populist image and public proclamations in favor of democracy, stood firmly for a much more rapid transition to capitalism — when the time came, the change would be so sudden and so cruel it would become known as “shock therapy.” Yeltsin was already assembling a team of young technocrats itching to upend the entire economy, and there would be absolutely no popular consultation nor any consideration of the social cost. Yeltsin was also a skilled political tactician; he turned back an attempt by the Russian parliament to remove him as parliament chair by calling for demonstrations in his support and gathering enough support so that a referendum to create a new post of Russian president be put to voters. Voters approved, and in June 1991 Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic. The dual government was more firmly in place. 

^{The military attack on the Russian parliament in 1993, which killed 500, was praised as “democracy” by the U.S. government and World Bank officials.}

Separate from all the political maneuvering, no true popular mass movement developed. If the creation of a better society, with popular control over all aspects of life, including the workplace, was in a position to happen, it was now, before widespread privatization. The workers of Czechoslovakia, during the Prague Spring, had begun working out a national system of workers’ control and self-management; they could attempt to create an economic democracy because the economy was in the hands of the state, and therefore could be placed in collective hands under popular control. But once the means of production become private property, the task of wresting control becomes vastly more difficult. The owners of that privatized production dominate a capitalist economy, enabling the accumulation of wealth and wielding that wealth to decisively influence government policy; the state becomes an agent of the dominant bourgeois class and the force available to the state is used to reinforce that dominance.

Although it probably is impossible to overstate the exhaustion of Soviet society as a factor in the failure to develop national grassroots organizations, perhaps the people of the Soviet Union didn’t believe that they had nothing left to lose as their ancestors had in 1917. Back then, Russians lived in miserable material conditions and under the constant threat of government violence. By no means were material conditions satisfactory during perestroika, but they were not comparable to the wretchedness endured under tsarist absolutism nor did the urgency of having to remove a violent dictatorship exist. A social safety net, tattered and weakened, still existed, and most Russians believed that, despite whatever dramatic economic and political changes still lay ahead, they would be able to retain the social safety net they were used to under Communist Party rule. 

Pushing back against economic and political changes, hard-liners thought they would be able to turn the clock back and reinstitute some variation of the orthodox Soviet system. They, too, did not understand the social forces that were gathering. The Soviet Union could not stand still — if it could not find a path forward to a pluralistic, democratic socialist society that would be defended from across the country, then capitalism was poised to burst in as if a dam holding back a sea burst. 

The Soviet Union could not find such a path — working people were unable to create a society-wide movement, perestroika was unable to solve the massive economic problems that had only become worse, and introducing capitalistic reforms had severed the supply and distribution links among enterprises without putting anything in their place. The Soviet command system did not function well and had been long overdue for radical changes to convert it into a more modern system — but it did function. What had begun to replace it, elements of capitalism, disorganized the country’s economy into disaster.

Yeltsin grabs power and imposes shock therapy

The August 1991 putsch brought an end to communist rule. Although the coup was badly executed and failed within three days, with Gorbachev reinstalled as Soviet president, the failure of the party to condemn the coup and Yeltsin’s opportunistic speeches loudly condemning the coup, despite his antipathy toward Gorbachev, meant that Yeltsin emerged as the winner. The party was swiftly banned, its publications suspended, and the brief period of the dual government effectively ended. Yeltsin quickly assembled a team of young technocrats itching to dismantle all institutions of planning and began doing so despite having no legal authority to alter Soviet agencies. That no longer mattered; Gorbachev was now irrelevant. He resigned at the end of the year, having no country to lead.

The three leaders of the Slavic republics — Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus  — met in a forest to sign an accord declaring that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. One week after Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation, the shock therapy would begin on January 2, 1992, with complete liberation of prices (except for energy), the concomitant ending of all subsidies of consumer products and for industry, and allowing the ruble to float against international currencies instead of having a fixed exchange rate. The strategy was to radically reduce demand, a devastating hardship considering that most products were in short supply already. The freeing of prices meant that the cost of consumer items, including food, would skyrocket, and the ruble’s value would collapse because the fixed value given it by the Soviet government was judged as artificially high by international currency traders. This combination would mean instant hyper-inflation.

^{Belavezhskaya forest, Belarus (photo by Szeder László)}

Yeltsin was already ruling by decree at the end of 1991, and his team of reformers used the president’s authority to force through their plans. Inflation for 1992 was 2,600 percent and for 1993 was nearly 1,000 percent — that alone wiped out all savings held in banks. The excess cash that had accumulated in banks, instead of being put back into circulation by stimulating demand or used toward productive investment, was simply made worthless. A large surplus of personal savings parked in banks had built up during the previous three years because there had not been enough production for consumers to buy. Yeltsin’s economic aide, Yegor Gaidar, considered liquidation of the money in savings accounts part of the effort to reduce Russia’s “monetary hangover.” In other words, Russians possessed too much money — another “technical” issue because too large a supply of money causes inflation, Chicago School economists believe, a problem cured here through hyper-inflation.

In the first days of January, what little food was available in state stores completely disappeared, as state-store managers diverted their supplies to private operators for a cut of their profits. State enterprises were also crippled by new high taxes levied only against them. Reduced to penury, Russians took to the streets to begin peddling their personal possessions to survive. At the same time, a handful of speculators, mostly arising out of black-market networks, made fortunes through smuggling consumer items and exporting oil, the latter particularly lucrative because the oil was bought at extremely low subsidized Soviet prices and sold abroad at international market prices. Organized crime networks blossomed, demanding “protection” money from all merchants and street peddlers.

Yeltsin would, in 1993, maintain power by launching a military assault on parliament that killed about 500 people and wounded another 1,000. Yeltsin ordered the parliament disbanded and, for good measure, also disbanded the Moscow city council. He was loudly applauded by the U.S. government and financial institutions for preserving democracy for that. Yeltsin would go on to give away Russia’s natural resources to oligarchs who had him re-elected in 1996 despite an approval rating of 3 percent.

Further economic disasters would come. By the end of 1998, on the heels of another crash that again wiped out savings, Russia’s economy had contracted 45 percent from 1990, when capitalism began to be introduced. Investment in industry declined by almost 80 percent in the same period and the murder rate skyrocketed to become one of the world’s highest. Two million children were orphaned with more than half of them homeless. The World Bank estimated that 74 million Russians lived in poverty; two million had been in poverty in 1989. In the Ural Mountains, competing organized-crime groups fought armed battles for control of factory complexes, backed by different police forces, with the winners then proceeding to strip the assets.

The stagnation of Gorbachev gave way to collapse under Yeltsin. Capitalism de-developed Russia. The weakness of Russian institutions, both cause and effect of the oligarchs, had the perverse effect of enabling a vigorous proponent of nationalism, Vladimir Putin, to arise. How much of Russian history can we assign to Mikhail Gorbachev? A lot. But not all. History is always far more complicated than the career of one human being. What if the Soviet peoples had rallied to their cause and built a system of economic democracy? History would be far different. Gorbachev must be assigned much responsibility for the inability of Soviet peoples to organize, but the long history of Soviet-style communism that atomized and alienated people while shutting them out of political participation can’t be overlooked, nor can the Soviet bureaucracy’s willingness to adopt capitalism for personal enrichment be over-estimated.

There was a poverty of imagination: In a mirror of the West, Soviet officials could not see beyond an impoverished and unimaginative choice of either Soviet-style centralism or Chicago School runaway capitalism. No one leader could, or can, be responsible for all that. 

As long as capitalism exists, the threat of fascism exists

Six years is an eternity in politics. Consider what was common opinion at the start of 2016: That changing demographics in the United States favored the Democratic Party; it would soon be impossible for Republicans to win a national election unless they sharply changed from their primary strategy of sending dog whistles to their base of conservative white people, a dwindling percentage of the U.S. population.

Six short years later, there is not only much hand-wringing that Republicans are using bare-knuckle tactics that are poised to give themselves a permanent grip on power despite their minority status but there is open worry of a possible coup by fascistic elements in the Republican Party that would put an end to formal democracy. No longer, it seems, is demographics destiny; the Democratic Party, ever haughtily giving the back of the hand to its base, had believed it merely need show up to win elections.

One year on from Donald Trump’s attempt at a fascist coup — that the attack on the Capitol by his deluded but fanatical followers had no chance to succeed does not mitigate the severity of that day — the Orange Menace’s grip on the worst of the two parties of capital has further tightened. And perhaps Republicans won’t have to resort to widespread cheating and voter suppression to win back the White House — not that the possibility will in any way give them second thoughts about blocking access to the ballot box — given the pathetic performance of Democrats since winning the 2020 elections, a lack of results dismal even by Democrats’ standards of ineptitude.

^{Fascism is a global phenomenon, not limited to any one country. (Photo by The All-Nite Images from New York)}

Many reading these lines will wonder why we should care which party wins since neither of the two parties of capital will work for working people, who constitute the vast majority of United Statesians as they do in any advanced capitalist country. Even the minuscule number of genuine progressives among Democratic members of Congress are constrained by their party’s dominant corporate wing and, due to the material realities of elite politics, inevitably find themselves politically supporting that wing. Nor is the corporate wing reluctant to undercut its electoral base and its progressive colleagues. Witness House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doing an end-run around the Squad’s refusal to back the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the larger Build Back Better bill passed the Senate by gathering sufficient Republican votes to win passage of the infrastructure bill and thus torpedo the only leverage the party had over its two Senate holdouts, fossil-fuel mouthpiece Joe Manchin and perfidious Kyrsten Sinema. It is impossible to avoid thinking there are other Democrats secretly glad the focus is on those two holdouts, allowing them to avoid the pressure to vote for Build Back Better.

There are others who argue that people should hold their noses and vote for Democrats anyway, given that when Democrats are in office there is more room to maneuver and some possibility of some small reforms. The all-out assault by Republicans, when Trump occupied the White House, on seemingly every front does provide support to lesser-evilism voting. So those who do hold their noses and vote for Democrats won’t get any criticism from me although I can’t bring myself to do it. Whether voting for lesser evils or for socialist or Green candidates, the important thing is to be involved in organizing; taking a half-hour to vote once a year need not detract from activist work.

Nonetheless, there are anti-capitalists, including Marxists, who argue forcefully that Trump and his minions are a unique threat, a threat that rises to the threat of fascism. Fascism is far worse than capitalist formal democracy, sham as the latter is. There is no question, or shouldn’t be, that Trump has aspirations of being a fascist dictator. That alone should be enough to see him and his followers as a mortal threat. Trump does not have sufficient support of industrialists and financiers (however much they applaud what he did for them while in office) to actually become a fascist dictator, and his base, although depressingly large and immune to reason and reality, is not big enough for a successful putsch.

Trump does have the blind support of the Republican Party, after Republican leaders momentarily wavered during the immediate aftermath of the 2021 insurrection, so he does have an institutional base he originally lacked — an institution that has become singularly focused on voter suppression and using all means available to put themselves in a position to overturn election results that don’t go their way. There is indeed here an existential threat to the formal democracy of the United States. History provides no shortage of warnings of what could happen, from Weimar Germany and post-World War 1 Italy to Chile and Argentina in the 1970s.

Fascism is a specific form of dictatorship

First, let’s clarify what the political term fascism means. It does not mean any right-wing movement or politician we don’t like, and shouldn’t be thrown around as such. What it does reference is a specific political phenomenon.

At its most basic level, fascism is a dictatorship established through and maintained with terror on behalf of big business. It has a social base, which provides the support and the terror squads, but which is badly misled since the fascist dictatorship operates decisively against the interest of its social base. Militarism, extreme nationalism, the creation of enemies and scapegoats, and, perhaps the most critical component, a rabid propaganda that intentionally raises panic and hate while disguising its true nature and intentions under the cover of a phony populism, are among the necessary elements.

Despite national differences that result in major differences in the appearances of fascism, the class nature is consistent. Big business is invariably the supporter of fascism, no matter the content of a fascist movement’s rhetoric, and is invariably the beneficiary. Instituting a fascist dictatorship is no easy decision even for the biggest industrialists, bankers and landowners who might salivate over the potential profits. For even if it is intended to benefit them, these big businessmen are giving up some of their own freedom since they will not directly control the dictatorship; it is a dictatorship for them, not by them. It is only under certain conditions that business elites resort to fascism — some form of democratic government, under which citizens “consent” to the ruling structure, is the preferred form and much easier to maintain.

^{Boston Free Speech rally counter-protesters on August 19, 2017 (photo by GorillaWarfare)}

Fascism is instituted when it is no longer possible for capitalists to enjoy the profits they believe they are entitled to, or to put a forceful end to large and rising left-wing movements threatening the power of industrialists and financiers. Neither of these conditions are in place in the United States, and with one party dedicated to using existing legal power to repress working people and giving capitalists all they want, and the other party giving them much of what they want while absorbing and smothering nascent movements, formal democracy works just fine for them. What immediate need do they have of going to the trouble of instituting a dictatorship? (Although some of course would love to have one no matter the circumstances.)

The foregoing does not give us license to be complacent. The economy is fragile, environmental destruction steadily mounts, and the numbers of people willing to oppose capitalism has grown tremendously over the past couple of decades, particularly since the 2008 economic crash. And industrialists and financiers — the bourgeoisie to use the classical term — believe themselves entitled to rule. The most important lesson from studying the fascism of the past is the overwhelming violence they will use to keep themselves in power. (No surprise there, given that violence, slavery, colonialism and plunder established capitalism and has kept it in place ever since.) U.S. capitalists are quite content to have police and the world’s biggest and most well-equipped military at their service, and there has never been much hesitation to use it.

If conditions continue to deteriorate, then Trump (or, more likely, someone with more intelligence and self-control) could be tapped on the shoulder. Trump is hardly the only demagogue out there. It could have happened in the 1930s. In Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first year as president, a group of bankers and industrialists, backed by financing from DuPont, General Motors and Morgan Bank, hatched a scheme to institute fascism. Wall Street bond salesman Gerald McGuire approached retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler with an offer for him to be the fascist leader and deliver an ultimatum to Roosevelt to either take orders from businessmen or be forced from office by an army of 500,000 veterans. Their arms were to be supplied by Remington, a DuPont subsidiary.

Butler declined, informed Roosevelt and the plan was defused by leaking it to the press. No one was punished and the coup threat was treated as a joke. Perhaps the coup plotters didn’t do their homework — Butler, in 1929, became the first general officer since the Civil War to be placed under arrest. His crime? Criticizing Benito Mussolini! Butler, summing up his highly decorated career in 1935, said in an interview, “I spent thirty three years and four months [in] the Marine Corps. … [D]uring that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

Don’t confuse form with content

What we shouldn’t get hung up on is appearances. Chilean fascism under Pinochet and the Argentine “Process” took different forms than did the classical German and Italian varieties, and any fascism in the U.S. would have further divergences and would be wrapped in Christian fundamentalism and phony right-wing “populism.” Political culture in North America is such that brownshirts goose-stepping down the street wouldn’t have much appeal, and we need not have that. There were fascist street gangs in Chile and Argentina who did much marauding and received funding, but in those cases the military was the decisive organization. The military and police would almost certainly be decisive in any fascist takeover in the U.S., with crucial support from the right-wing militias that already exist and Trump’s middle-class base that we saw in action at the Capitol during the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

Comparisons of present-day United States to Weimar Germany are easily overstated, but the years leading up to Hitler being handed power (it is a myth that he was elected) are instructive. Consider the full name of the Nazi party — the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Yet workers were whom the Nazis intended to suppress on behalf of their corporate benefactors. At the same time that Nazi rhetoric claimed to uphold the right to strike and other worker interests, Hitler was assuring Germany’s industrialists that such policies were merely an attempt to gain popular support and would not be implemented.

^{Mural paintings in honor of Jecar Neghme of Chile’s MIR in the place where he was killed by the Pinochet government. (Credit: Ciberprofe)}

What Hitler’s corporate bankrollers wanted was clear enough: the destruction of their workers’ ability to defend themselves and higher profits in a stable atmosphere. This Hitler promised in meetings of Nazi leaders and industrialists. But no matter how powerful they are, numerically these big businessmen are a minuscule portion of the population. How to create popular support for a movement that would destroy unions, strip working people of all protections, regiment all spheres of life, mercilessly destroy several groups of society, reduce the standard of living of those who still had jobs and inevitably lead to war? This is not an appealing program.

Germany’s blue-collar workforce mostly didn’t buy into fascist siren songs, and continued to support the Communists and the Social Democrats, although it was sharply divided between the two. Most of the middle class, however, was a different story. The desperate economic crisis of the Weimar Republic devastated the shopkeeper, the professional, the white-collar worker on the lower rungs of management. The middle class was losing or threatened with losing what it had, and its sons and daughters were unemployed with little or no prospects. From here the Nazis were able to draw their votes, and these sons, along with unpoliticized people at the bottom of society, swelled the ranks of the storm troops.

The Nazis skillfully appealed to German middle class fears of economic dislocation, the increasing numbers of unemployed blue-collar workers, the threat of being swallowed by big business, and political instability (although the Nazis were the most responsible for the last of those four), creating the social base needed by the economic elite to bring its movement to power. A movement that was as anathema to the middle class as it was to the lower economic ranks, although its middle-class supporters were blind to that reality as the Nazis simultaneously appealed to its grudges against societal elites.

In the last election before President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, the Nazi vote was 2 million less than the combined vote for Communists and Social Democrats. Although there were many Communists who bravely battled Nazis in the streets, there was no attempt at a united defense of the two parties or their armed followers. The Communists, the Social Democrats and the unions all failed to mount any effective challenge, and the leaders of what remained of Germany’s centrist and nationalist right-wing parties thought they could control Hitler. Had the Communists, Social Democrats and the unions made a common fight against the Nazis, that would have been enough to stop Hitler’s accession to power.

Once in power, Hitler quickly arrested the political opposition, putting Communists, Social Democrats, union leaders and others into concentration camps. Within weeks, the right to strike was abolished, union contracts were canceled and an employer-aligned fascist “union” began to replace the existing unions. With opposition silenced by terror, severe oppression of Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, artists and others began. Once Hitler had destroyed all political opposition, there was no need to maintain his corps of street thugs, some of whom began demanding that the populist promises begin to be fulfilled. The storm troops, too, found out those promises were fantasy and this potential internal Nazi opposition was crushed in the murderous 1934 “Night of the Long Knives.”

From German shopkeepers to U.S. small business owners

Yes, history never repeats exactly. But what is noteworthy here is the class composition of Nazi support beyond big capitalists, who provided huge sums of money. It was shopkeepers, professionals and the white-collar workers on the lower rungs of management. This is consistently the case with fascist movements. It was the middle classes who supported a military overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, as did the parties they voted for. (Both parties of the opposition to President Allende’s Popular Unity government were banned after the takeover; Pinochet’s blood-soaked dictatorship was a régime for Chilean big business and U.S.-based multinational capital, not a régime for shopkeepers or white-collar professionals, nor even big business’ political representatives, as they would soon find out.)

Although the middle classes in a capitalist country, particularly in advanced capitalist countries, are highly heterogeneous, including a wide mix of people with varying interests and thus unable to constitute an organized bloc, the weight of their demographic size can make them decisive if large numbers go one way or another. Large numbers in the U.S. are anti-fascist and/or Democratic Party partisans, and many of their sons and daughters are describing themselves as socialists, even if an ill-defined socialism that is more oriented toward strong reforms of capitalism unable to be accommodated by Democrats. Nonetheless, it is from middle class ranks that support for Trump comes. That has been seen clearly as hundreds of Trump’s insurgents are prosecuted (albeit treated with kid gloves in contrast to the harsh treatment of Black Lives Matter and other left-wing protest movements).

^{Raleigh-Durham IWW stands with clergy at the stairs to Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia (photo by Anthony Crider)}

The “Tea Party” that arose during the Obama administration was a classic “astroturf” operation, a “movement” that was begun, organized and funded by corporate interests such as the organizations of the Koch Brothers and Republican Party leaders like Dick Armey. It is a straight line from the Tea Party to Trump; they have similar social bases and many of the same financial benefactors.

A study by two University of Chicago researchers, for example, found that more than half of the January 6 insurrectionists held white-collar positions such as small business owners, architects, doctors and lawyers. The two researchers, political-science professor Robert A. Pape and senior research associate Keven Ruby, also found that a large number of the insurrectionists live in counties that have seen declines in their White, non-Hispanic population, also not a surprise given the “great replacement” canard Trump-style fascists are fond of peddling. That of course was a prominent theme in the 2017 fascist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Whatever capitalist country you live in, it can happen there. Fascism is capitalism stripped of all democratic veneers. In every fascist state, wages drastically decline accompanied by draconian laws stripping working people of all protections at the same time that corporate profits rise dramatically, all in an atmosphere of state-organized terror. The only safeguard against this happening in any capitalist country, including the United States, is for working people to organize in their own defense. Given the sorry record of social democracy, no help from there will come to the rescue in Europe. In the U.S., it would be laughable to believe the Democrats would save us from potential Republican dictatorship, whether a conventional authoritarianism or an outright fascist régime.

The long history of Democrats falling to their knees

Democratic Party ineptitude and weak-kneed acquiescence has been on display long before the Biden administration and current congressional majority’s yearlong lack of resolve. From Jimmy Carter’s austerity setting up the start of the neoliberal era for Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton ramming through regressive legislation that Republicans could only dreamed of having done to Democrats’ meek “me too” in response to Newt Gingrich’s Contract On America and the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress to Barack Obama’s serial capitulations to Democrats’ present inability (unwillingness?) to implement the programs they were elected to fulfill, and instead give the Pentagon another raise, liberals are persistently run over by conservatives. But however weak-willed Democrats are, that is only one side of the picture.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Democrats believe in so-called “American exceptionalism,” imperialism and corporate control of society just as fervently as do Republicans.

Liberalism has reached an intellectual dead end, however much individual liberals may yearn for alternatives. There are various reasons that can be assigned as to the cause of the Democratic Party’s — and, thus, North American liberalism’s — steady march rightward: Dependence on corporate money, corruption, domination of the mass media by the Right, philosophical and economic myopia, cowardliness. Although these factors form a significant portion of the answer to the puzzle, an underlying cause has to be found in the exhaustion of North American liberalism. Similar to European social democracy, it is trapped by its core desire to stabilize an unstable capitalist system.

In contrast to the Right, which loudly advocates what it stands for and uses all means possible to get it, liberals are caught in the contradiction of knowing changes are needed but unable to put forth anything beyond the most tepid reforms, a bit of tinkering around the edges. The Democratic Party is not only reliant on corporate money, but in thrall to ideologies that promote corporate domination, propaganda blasted across the corporate media and propagated through a thick web of “think tanks” and other well-funded institutions. With no clear ideas to fall back on, they meekly fall to their knees when the world’s industrialists and financiers, acting through their corporations, think tanks and the “market,” pronounce their verdict on what is to be done.

There is no secret formula waiting to be discovered. The only way to prevent a fascist takeover is through the same methodology that is the route to a better world: A mass movement of movements linking together struggles, organizing with people who don’t look like us and uniting across borders. As long as capitalism exists, the threat of fascism exists.

China’s winding road toward capitalism

There is perhaps no bigger controversy among partisans of the Left than the nature of China and its economy. Is it socialist? Capitalist? State capitalist? A hybrid? That so much debate swirls around this issue is its own proof that the question doesn’t have a definitive answer, at least not yet.

What can be agreed upon is that China has experienced decades of extraordinary economic growth. But the nature of that growth, and the base upon which it has been created, are also subject to intense debate, arguments that necessarily rest on how a debater classifies the Chinese economy. An additional debate is whether China’s growth is replicable or is the product of particular conditions that can’t be duplicated elsewhere. And what should be at the forefront of any debate is how China’s working people, in the cities and in the countryside, fare under a tightly controlled system that promises to bring about a “moderately prosperous society.”

Setting out to examine China from that last perspective is a new book, The Communist Road to Capitalism: How Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)evolution since 1949. As you might guess from the pungent title, Communist Road, authored by activist Ralf Ruckus, is not only critical of the Chinese Communist Party, but comes squarely down on the proposition that China has become a capitalist society. Despite China’s increasing integration into the world capitalist system, the increasing emphasis placed on markets and widening inequalities, the proposition that China has moved to capitalism is quite controversial for many people on the Left.

Mr. Ruckus begins his argument by suggesting that a more gradated approach to Chinese history since the 1949 revolution better captures the stages of China’s development. He presents four different ideas commonly put forth that attempt to define the nature of China’s economy. These four concepts are capitalist from 1949 to now; socialist from 1949 to now; socialist and then capitalist; and a four-stage approach of transition to socialism, socialism, transition to capitalism and capitalism. There is a fifth conception not mentioned by Mr. Ruckus — that China is not classifiable as capitalist or socialist, a perspective put forth by the Marxist economist Samir Amin. Dr. Amin, in his The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism, argued that asking if China is socialist or capitalist “is badly posed” because it is “too general and abstract.” Dr. Amin wrote that although “the Chinese project is not capitalist does not mean that it is socialist, only that it makes it possible to advance on the long road to socialism” but added that China could also “end up with a return, pure and simple, to capitalism.”

Thus there is more than one nuanced perspective. The last of Mr. Ruckus’ four offered ideas (the four-stage approach) and Dr. Amin’s hybrid approach appear the most viable among the five theories in our struggle to understand the contours of Chinese development. It is the four-stage approach that provides the spine for Communist Road. Whether or not we are in agreement that China has become capitalist (on its own terms) or is moving toward capitalism, that China is in danger of a long-term, or even permanent, turn to full-on capitalism shouldn’t be a source of heated dispute. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its Central European satellites, and their return to capitalism on disadvantageous terms, provides proof, even for those who believe China remains a socialist country, that capitalism could be its future. Nor should it be expected that deepening entanglement with the world capitalist system doesn’t present its own dangers.

Social confrontation across four periods

Early on, in the opening pages, Mr. Ruckus states that his “main focus lies on social confrontation and the ruptures and continuities they produced in the PRC since 1949,” and he does not waver from that focus in discussing his four periods (transition to socialism, socialism, transition to capitalism and capitalism) of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. The coming tale of urban and rural unrest is set early when the author writes, “[T]he actually existing socialism constructed [in the first two periods] was very different from both the preceding and the following economic, political, and social systems. Furthermore, actually existing socialism was largely distinct from the socialism desired by proletarians, peasants, and women* who had been involved in revolutionary organizing since the 1920s.” [page 7]

Continuing to set out his thesis in the opening pages, Mr. Ruckus argues that “the overall character of the system qualified as capitalist from the mid- to late-1990s onward, because the main driving force of the economy was capital accumulation and the generation of profit, and because the CCP leadership and other sections of the ‘elite’ formed a reconfigured capitalist ruling class that appropriated a large part of the wealth produced through the exploitation of workers and peasants.” These reforms were successful because “they could build on the foundations socialism had created and, second, because so-called globalization, with new industrial production clusters and supply chains … offered a historical opportunity for attracting foreign capital and for developing the PRC economy the CCP regime made use of.” [page 9]

The reference to CCP cadres as a “ruling class,” and a capitalist ruling class no less, is bound to set off significant controversy. That is perhaps a technical side issue we can sidestep here. A larger issue for the reader of Communist Road is whether the author makes his overall case effectively. The four core chapters of the book cover the four defined periods, starting with the transition to socialism. In these first years after the 1949 revolution, substantial improvements were achieved in social conditions, including life expectancy, child mortality, health care, income equality and literacy.

^{Shanghai (photo by dawvon)}

At first, the CCP followed the model of the Soviet Union with an accumulation and industrialization strategy with similarities to “authoritarian capitalist late comers” using Taylorist and Fordist production techniques; the form of technology and work organization was seen as neutral. As with the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, the capital and labor power for industrialization could only come from internal sources. In the countryside, the peasant economy was left intact until the mid-1950s, with land reforms benefiting poor and middle peasants. There were benefits for women, too — a 1950 marriage law granted them equal rights with men, although full equality did not come as women workers tended to be relegated to “softer” work with lower pay and fewer work points.

With the onset of nationalizations in the mid-1950s, a brief political opening up, the “Hundred Flowers Campaign,” widened the spaces for criticism, but the window was soon shut when criticism was deeper than the CCP had anticipated. Nonetheless, the party retained significant sources of support as it launched the Great Leap Forward, a collectivization and industrial drive. The Leap failed, leading to acute shortages of food as a decline in the size of the rural workforce as urban industries rapidly expanded, mismanagement, poor weather and false reports filed by local authorities combined to create a disaster. Millions would die.

Conflicting currents in the Chinese Communist Party

Communist Road places the blame squarely on Mao Zedong. But perhaps the situation was not so clear-cut. Minqi Li, for example, in his book The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, flatly states “it was Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi who were responsible for the Great Leap Forward,” and quotes Liu as praising officials who reported implausible, wildly inflated crop yields as “having overthrown science.” At the same time, Mao cautioned against the “exaggeration wind” but party leaders, following the leads of Deng and Liu, who were in charge of party propaganda, continued to agitate for ideas to be “liberated.” (As an aside, Dr. Li’s research found that the peak of the death rate during the Great Leap Forward was lower than the normal death rate during the 1930s; by the 1970s, the death rate was about one-fourth what it had been in the 1930s.)

Dr. Li concludes his analysis of the Great Leap Forward by stating “a privileged bureaucratic group” had taken control of the party; now no longer a party committed to revolutionary ideals and willing to self-sacrifice but rather “one that included many careerists who were primarily concerned with personal power and enrichment.”

That is not different from Mr. Ruckus’ overall conclusion, although he asserts that Mao “was held responsible” for the Great Leap Forward and “pragmatic leaders” like Deng and Liu “instituted reforms that were supposed to deal with the fallout of the GLF.” [page 56] During the next period of upheaval, the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s, is, consistent with the book’s perspective, examined from the standpoint of workers and peasants by Mr. Ruckus. Separate from the struggles within the party hierarchy, he writes that the Cultural Revolution was a series of mass outbreaks for better working conditions and permanent jobs as part of a struggle against the “red bourgeoisie” (a term used by some Cultural Revolution participants) and the CCP that was “exploiting workers.”

^{Forbidden City, Beijing (photo by Adamantios)}

Unrest continued across the 1970s, with workers demanding more egalitarian wages and bonuses, a say in decision-making and work conditions, and fewer privileges for party cadres; the experiences gained during the Cultural Revolution were put to use by grassroots organizers. This was also a period where investments in education and health care paid off — literacy, life expectancy and child mortality all continued to improve. Unrest was met with a mix of responses, including repression, concessions, co-optation and reforms.

China, as can now be seen in hindsight, was on the brink of dramatic changes as Mao and much of the revolutionary generation were approaching their deaths. Separate from that, China had opened relations with the United States in an effort to ease its isolation and gain access to technology; the split with the Soviet Union also played a role in this development. The Deng faction would win the power struggle following Mao’s death, and then use the democracy movements to defeat their party opponents before suppressing the movements, Mr. Ruckus writes. The commune system was dismantled, farmland was leased, collective structures disappeared and local governments began to rely on taxes, fees and enclosures. Wages were increased, but the “iron rice bowl” of benefits was attacked and associated with the ousted Mao-aligned Gang of Four. The right to strike was abolished, more workers became temporary hires and rules restricting migration were eased to encourage an exodus into the new special economic zones where foreign capital could set up.

Here, Mr. Ruckus is on firm ground in characterizing the period from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s as a transition to capitalism. He writes that hopes that the Deng reforms would lead to improvements were disappointed. Changing labor relations and less job security led to continuing worker unrest and student mobilizations. The death of a prominent party reformer, Hu Yaobang, sparked mass demonstrations and the Tiananmen Square occupation of 1989, by any standard a crucial turning point.

Tiananmen Square as a turning point in Chinese history

Here, perhaps more than at any other point, is where Communist Road must make its case. The Tiananmen Square occupation “ended in failure,” Mr. Ruckus writes, because “CCP leaders were determined to keep their grip on power” and because of the movement’s weaknesses, “above all, the division between students and workers. Student leaders did not want to involve the working class.” That was, in part, because of a fear that “working class involvement would necessarily lead to a harsh response from CCP leaders.” [page 109]

One of the leaders of Tiananmen, Wang Chaohua, who wrote a series of essays on the event after escaping China, said the more important mistake was to not develop a political agenda and thus “failed to propose a political agenda that could have reflected the scale of popular engagement — and thus missed the opportunity to transform the protest into a constructive political movement,” in the words of J.X. Zhang, who reviewed in New Left Review Dr. Wang’s Chinese-language collection of Tiananmen essays. Dr. Wang laments a “lack of independent political consciousness among Chinese workers” who “as a whole still partly identified their collective interests with those of the ruling party, which claimed to be ‘the vanguard of the working class.’ ”

Activist workers who did participate nonetheless would bear a heavy share of the crackdown that followed the military attack that put an end to the occupation. It is possible that thousands were killed in the military crushing of the occupation and a certainty that thousands more landed in prison. What was to come next?

“At this point,” Mr. Ruckus writes, “the PRC was just a final step away from its transition from socialism to capitalism. This step might not have happened if not for the global transformation of the Cold War confrontation between the capitalist West and the socialist East and the dialectic of economic crisis, investment relocation, and industrial development that had shifted the global manufacturing center to East Asia over the course of the 1980s and 1990s.” [page 110]

^{Tiananmen Square (photo by そらみみ (Soramimi))}

Similarly, Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, argued that as the Tiananmen Square protests were getting underway, the Chinese government “was pushing hard to deregulate wages and prices and expand the reach of the market.” She even reported that Milton Friedman, the notorious godfather of Chicago School economics, was invited to China in 1980 and again in 1988 to provide advice! Ms. Klein quotes another Tiananmen leader, Wang Hui, who said popular discontent against Deng’s economic changes that included lower wages, rising prices and “a crisis of layoffs and unemployment … were the catalyst for the 1989 social mobilization.” The violent end to the occupation, according to Professor Wang, “served to check the social upheaval brought about by this process, and the new pricing system finally took shape.”

What were the results once the Deng-led CCP was able to resume its restructuring? Mr. Ruckus doesn’t hold back from a catalog of negative changes: The use of special economic zones to draw in foreign direct investment (FDI), job security guarantees replaced with contracts, welfare provisions scrapped, privatizations, state-run companies converted to state-owned enterprises expected to maximize profits, 50 million laid off and an intensification of work. “Growing job insecurity, unemployment, low wages, the loss of welfare protection, and higher work pressure led to discontent,” he wrote. “[State-owned enterprise] workers started organizing a wave of protests against the restructuring of the state sector that would last into the 2000s. Moreover, the deterioration of living conditions in the countryside triggered peasant unrest in the mid- and late-1990s. These two cycles of struggle marked the beginning of the capitalist period in the PRC,” which the author dates from the mid-1990s. [page 114]

“Crossing the river by feeling the stones”

This transition need not be seen as either inevitable or the result of a plot by some party leaders, according to Communist Road. “This transition was not the result of a detailed master plan or blueprint but of a series of — often experimental — reform steps taken to improve the country’s economic performance, save the socialist system, and stabilize CCP rule. This is the meaning of the phrase ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’ that Deng Xiaoping allegedly used to describe his understanding of the course of reform.” [page 115]

Restructuring of state-owned enterprises would further develop as the 1990s drew to a close and China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Another crucial milestone in China’s path toward capitalism Mr. Ruckus could have explored further is Jiang Zemin’s “theory of the three represents.” Only a passing reference to then-President Jiang’s allowing private capitalists to become party members in 2001 hints at this development. But this development went beyond a mere widening of party intake. The “Three Represents” reference is an official line announced in 2001 the party should represent the most advanced productive forces, the most advanced culture and the broadest layers of the people. Promulgated by President Jiang, it is a declaration that the interests of different classes are not in conflict and that the party can harmoniously represent all classes simultaneously. One can of course enunciate such a program if one wishes, but such a theory has nothing in common with Marxism.

Another piece of evidence that the book could have cited but didn’t is the party’s increasing stress on the use of markets. The Communist Party leadership switched the role of the market from “basic” to “decisive” in 2013 at a key Central Committee plenum, and continuity with this course was laid down by the party at the October 2017 party congress that again stressed the “decisive role” of the market. Communist Road focuses on social movements and grassroots activities, and spends little time on party developments, and although not discussing these party declarations is perhaps consistent with the intent of the book, more reportage of party debates would have enriched the text and provided further underpinning for its central thesis.

The book does document continuing unrest across the 2000s; much of the strikes during this period were wildcat actions as organized actions were prohibited. Since Xi Jinping became party general secretary and president in 2012, the party has tightened control and increased surveillance, and although unrest and wildcat actions have not ceased, there is support for the government from the middle class, which has seen benefits from the reforms, and wages have increased.

Conceptualizing socialism beyond a narrow definition

In trying to unravel the complexities of how the Chinese economy might best be conceptualized, a basic question that should be asked is: What is socialism? Is socialism merely the absence of capitalism? Or is it something more? A definition frequently put forth by socialists (and not only them) is that state ownership of the means of production constitutes socialism, understood as a transitional stage toward communism, to use the classical formulation of Karl Marx. This was the foundation on which the Soviet Union, from the 1930s on, could proclaim itself a socialist society, updating that to referring to itself as a “developed socialist society” in the Brezhnev years as an additional developmental step.

But is that all there is? I would argue that the elimination of a bourgeois social class as the owners of the means of production and the replacement of that social relation with common or state ownership is a pre-condition of socialism, not the actual content. Nor does it have to mean state ownership of all enterprises, although it is inconceivable for a socialism to exist that doesn’t place in state hands banking and a few, large key industries. If socialism means political and economic democracy in a society where everybody has a voice in the decisions that affect them, their communities and/or the enterprises in which they work; wages and other compensation reflect contributions to the work performed; and there are no centers of power built on the accumulation of capital, then neither China nor any other country can be classified as achieving socialism.

In his writings on the Soviet Union, the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher developed the term “post-capitalist” for the Soviet Union and its Central European satellites. This provides a neutral term that acknowledges that capitalist economic relations had been abolished without suggesting a transition to a higher state had been completed. That has long seemed to me to be a highly useful way to conceptualize the Soviet economy. It certainly wasn’t capitalist, or the United States and other Western capitalist powers wouldn’t have poured so much time, energy and money into attempting to defeat the Soviet bloc with such sustained intensity.

^{People’s Grand Hall in Chongqing (photo by Chen Hualin)}

It is reasonable to draw some parallels with Dr. Amin’s conceptualization of China as neither capitalist nor socialist. He pointed to the communal nature of land in rural China, which is not a commodity that farmers can sell, as “absolutely prevent[ing] us from characterizing contemporary China (even today) as ‘capitalist,’ because the capitalist road is based on the transformation of land into a commodity.” Other commentators point to the fact that banking and finance remain firmly in state hands to buttress their arguments that China is not capitalist. Dr. Amin in his analysis noted that transnational capital can’t pillage China’s natural resources and China’s integration into the world system is “partial and controlled.” Land, however, is frequently taken by city or other local governments and sold to commercial interests; one estimate made in 2017 is that 4 million farmers were losing land annually. Moreover, that China is one of two countries large enough to enter the world capitalist system on its own terms (India being the other although neither the Hindu fundamentalist neoliberal BJP nor the ever rightward-moving Congress chooses to do so) doesn’t mean capitalist relations are absent from the workplace.

The analogy with the Soviet Union is not a snug fit, given that Soviet Union retained a post-capitalist, or at any rate, a non-capitalist, form of government through the early years of Mikhail Gorbachev, not beginning to introduce elements of capitalism until a series of reforms rammed through the parliament in 1990.

On balance, then, although Dr. Amin presented a learned and serious interpretation (and who was clear about the danger of a return to capitalism even while believing market openings were justified), Mr. Ruckus’ four-stage conception gives us the best understanding of the Chinese economy and where it, at least for now, is going. One more opinion popularly floated that we haven’t discussed is that China has indeed moved to capitalism, but only as a temporary expedient to develop faster, and will one day expropriate private capital and become a socialist power strong enough to fend off the capitalist powers. Given the opaqueness of the CCP, none of us outside the party are in any position to know with authority its leadership’s long-term intentions.

What we can do is analyze the actions and words of CCP leadership, which has carried out a slow progression toward capitalism. President Xi has recently begun taking steps to reign in certain Chinese capitalists and has more frequently talked about Marxism, but whether these are the opening moves of a reversal of policies or simply an assertion of party rule will not be known for some time. And even if it were true that the moves toward capitalism are intended to be a temporary expedient, becoming more deeply entangled in markets and the capitalist world system carries its own momentum, a drift not at all easy to check. There are industrial and party interests that favor the path China has been on since the 1990s, and those interests represent another social force that would resist structural moves toward socialism.

An ambivalent and contradictory path

In its summation, Communist Road acknowledges that the four-stage conception “has its limitations.” There are not clear borders between the stages nor is there a straight historical direction. “The long transition from socialism to capitalism in particular was not only gradual and intermittent but also ambivalent and contradictory,” Mr. Ruckus writes. “[M]any of those subperiods [within the stages] overlapped, as unrest from below was often vibrant and erratic and took years to develop and grow, while containment measures and reforms from above were also staggered and long-lasting.” [page 166]

A corollary is a rejection of the idea that “so-called capitalist roaders in the CCP leadership” executed a master plan. “There is no evidence for such a master plan, and blaming the transition mostly on deviant CCP leaders ignores structural factors, both domestic and global. … [I]t was the result of structural features of the form the CCP regime took in the 1950s and 1960s and of social, political, and economic dynamics that made the transition to capitalism in the following decades possible and likely (though not inevitable).” [page 173]

The book concludes with “lessons for the left” that offers “elements of a left-wing strategy.” Two necessities, the author writes, are analysis of the process of class recomposition from the perspectives of proletarians and other oppressed peoples, and forms of organizing that break down divisions among proletarians, activists and intellectuals. Open discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of movements, resistance and organization, and of socialist governments, are vital as well as that movements should be in the hands of those struggling and should represent themselves. Finally, movements must organize globally; the social struggles around the world of recent years occurred simultaneously but were “divided along North-South lines and by national markets, sexism, racism, and migration regimes. These divisions can be overcome, and it is one of the tasks of left-wing organizing to provide resources and create bridges that connect struggles.”

We must base analyses on material reality, not on what our hopes or dreams wish nor on the name of the organization presiding over a country. No single book can be the last word, and some of the conclusions of Communist Road are sure to draw some strong disagreements. Regardless of where you stand on the central questions under discussion, Ralf Ruckus has provided a strong argument, backed by ample evidence, for the thesis that China has become capitalist, as well as a useful, brisk history from below of China since 1949. Both are welcome contributions.

We don’t need to wait for centuries to build a better world

A crucial argument for the incessantly promoted idea that capitalism will be with us for a long time to come is the idea of inertia in human understanding. Ideas are stubbornly persistent and can only be changed over long periods of time. Slow evolutionary change is the best we can hope for, and the prospects even for that are uncertain and fragile.

If the above were true, then there would have been no revolutions in history. That is quite obviously not the case. Consciousness can change rapidly. It does so exceptionally and under rare circumstances during periods of social upheaval. Yes, not everyday occurrences. But they do happen. “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” Lenin famously said.

We need not lean on Lenin. A survey of history need not be comprehensive to find examples of dramatic changes in consciousness, even if we exclude, for purposes of this discussion, national movements of liberation from colonialism, which generally didn’t meaningfully change social relations.

France alone offers us two examples: The French Revolution and the Paris Commune. That working people didn’t obtain what they wanted, the bourgeoisie were in a position to gain an upper hand due to material conditions and that a monarchal restoration would later occur doesn’t require us to deem the events of 1789 to 1793 a failure. The dramatic insertion into history of the popular masses is what we can center here, and it can’t be argued there wasn’t an overturning of a rotten ancien régime. Louis XIV’s boast that he was the state (“L’état, c’est moi”) was reality given his absolute powers. Peasants were subject to starvation during poor harvests, and were subject to being strapped to a plow like an ox to pull a cart or forced to spend nights swishing a stick in a pond to keep the frogs from croaking so the local lord wouldn’t have his sleep disturbed. Town laborers worked 16-hour days and wages were codified as “not exceed[ing] the very lowest level necessary for his maintenance and reproduction.” The church provided the ideology to cement feudal relations in place, telling them all this was God’s will.

These conditions were endured, until they weren’t. Rebellions were hardly unknown across feudal Europe, but had tended to be isolated affairs. French peasants and laborers had been acquiescent to their miserable conditions, or so it seemed. As discontent among social classes mounted, the first demonstrations broke out in 1787. Organization and the education movements provide put people in motion. In only two years, the movement went from issuing petitions asking for reforms to overthrowing the monarchy. 

^{The throne of king Louis Philippe is burned in the place de la Bastille, at the foot of the July Column, during the French revolution of 1848. (painting by Nathaniel Currier)}

There are also the revolutions of 1848 across Europe. It is true these would falter one after another as traditional authorities, mostly monarchal and military, would reassert themselves. But these upheavals could never have occurred without peasants and proletarians ceasing to continue total deference to elites and institutions. Masses were in motion, but the ideas, although temporarily crushed, survived and began to be implemented within decades. 

Societies across Europe were rigid class dictatorships, with the elites of their countries horrified at the very idea that common people might be given some say in how they were ruled. Incontestable violence was the frequent response to any stepping out of line. And while demands like a constitution wouldn’t seem at all radical today, they were in 1848 — granting them would have meant at least some rights for common people codified in law. The revolutions were failures in terms of immediate results, but the ideas raised would become common sense not long into the future. 

When implemented, these changes were not revolutionary, it is true, as national elites found they could accommodate such demands and not have their rule challenged. But millions previously resigned to bowing their heads and accepting their bitter lot learned to speak up, to organize, to struggle and to imagine that a better world could be brought into being. As Priscilla Robertson wrote in her marvelous account, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History, “Most of what the men of 1848 fought for was brought about within a quarter of a century, and the men who accomplished it were most of them specific enemies of the 1848 movement.”

An early demonstration in the Paris Commune

No account of 19th century uprisings could possibly omit the Paris Commune, the first socialist revolution in history. Consciousness wasn’t simply profoundly changed in 1871; the ideas of that new consciousness were put in action. The Paris Commune enacted several progressive laws — banning exploitative night work for bakers, suspending the collection of debts incurred during the siege, separating church from state, providing free education for all children, handing over abandoned workshops to cooperatives of workers who would restart production, and abolishing conscription into the army. Commune officials were subject to instant recall by voters and were paid the average wage of a worker.

The Commune would be drowned in blood. But we can readily see the difference between the vision of a better world and the ruthless violence used to suppress any attempt at putting such a vision into practice. A National Guard commander freed captured French army officers in a spirit of “comradeship,” to the point where a top army commander was let go in exchange for a promise that the commander would henceforth be neutral — a promise that was swiftly broken. The Communards’ magnanimity was repaid with a horrific bloodbath. An estimated 30,000 Parisians were massacred by the marauding French army in one week. Another 40,000 were held in prisons, and many of these were exiled to a remote South Pacific island where they became forced laborers on starvation diets, eventually barred from fishing in the sea or to forage for food, and routinely subjected to torture. The restored government exerted itself to deny any political or moral content to the Communards’ actions, instead treating them as the worst common criminals as part of what developed into a de facto “social cleansing” of Paris; the French official overseeing the deportations, in his public statements, directly linked socialist politics with chronic petty crime.

^{The past is not forgotten. Chileans demonstrate in Plaza Baquedano, Santiago in 2019 (photo by Carlos Figueroa)}

The very peacefulness of the Communards was a sharp divergence from ordinary governing practices. Only a people who had rapidly gained new and radical understandings of how society might be organized could have created such a government. Those ideas aren’t extinguished when bloodily suppressed, but remain alive for the next generations.

There are no shortages of examples to be drawn from the 20th century. Start with perhaps the most obvious example, Russia in 1917. Russia was a vast sea of illiterate peasants yoked to the land and held in bondage through superstition and backward social institutions; ruled by a tsar whose every word was incontestable law and backed by exiles, whippings and executions. Agitation by organizers in social democratic parties had made some headway, exemplified in the soviets of 1905, but even that was cut off when Russians accepted their country’s participation in World War I the same as the peoples of other countries. Yet three years later, all of Russia was in motion. Russians refused to accept any longer the brutality and backwardness forced upon them. More than 300,000 Petrograd workers took part in strikes during the seven weeks immediately preceding the February Revolution and mutinies spread throughout the army.

And it is not often remembered that women workers touched off the February Revolution — yet another overturning of social relations that required new consciousness. Women textile workers in Petrograd walked out on International Women’s Day, walked to nearby metal factories, told the men there to join them on strike, and both groups inspired workers in other factories to walk out. In two days, a general strike was underway in Petrograd, with demonstrators shouting anti-war and anti-monarchy slogans. And what could the October Revolution be other than a mass demonstration of changed thinking? Soldiers and sailors disarmed their officers and turned the military’s orientation 180 degrees, and that enabled civilians to disarm the police. The October Revolution took place in the capital city with the city’s residents filling the streets, occupying strategic buildings and electrifying the world with their cascade of motion and unity of purpose, backed across the country by workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors asserting their collective will. That was no “secret coup” as pro-capitalist historians consistently but falsely assert.

From object to subject in Nicaragua and Chile

And there is Nicaragua, the pre-revolutionary history of which was a history of exploitation. There would not have been a Sandinista Revolution coming to power in 1979 if it weren’t for the willingness of activists to adapt ideas developed elsewhere to Nicaraguan conditions and to draw upon local conditions and realities, blending them with the writings of 1930s liberator Augusto Sandino. In just a handful of years, a country at the mercy of the gigantic neighbor to the north accustomed to treating everything south of the Rio Grande as its “backyard” and under the whip of a brutal local family dictatorship maintained through copious amounts of torture and violence overturned both. A mass change in consciousness was created, without which Nicaraguans in huge numbers wouldn’t have had the fortitude to overthrow the Somoza family, defy the United States and create a dramatically different society and governing structure.

The Sandinistas also provided an important lesson, one equally applicable to advanced capitalist countries as underdeveloped ones. Although no theory can be transplanted whole to another place or time, there was an explicit acknowledgement, which was acted upon, that workers are not only blue-collar factory employees, but are also white-collar and other types of employees in a variety of settings, in offices and service positions, among others. Any revolution that seriously attempts to transcend capitalism, which means eliminating the immense power of the capitalist elite, has to include all these varieties of working people if it is to succeed in the 21st century. Mass consciousness would change so thoroughly that the Sandinistas had to go ahead with an insurrection sooner than they had planned because everyday people were moving forward so fast.

A different type of transformation was attempted in Chile, where the movement toward socialism was voted in but soon had profound effects. So profound was the beginnings of that transformation that frightened capitalists used fascistic levels of violence to turn back the clock. But, given the past couple of years of movement work in Chile, culminating in a Left-led writing of a new constitution to replace the Pinochet constitution, the ideas of the early 1970s have not been buried forever. Following the election of Salvador Allende, Chilean workers rapidly learned to manage their enterprises and take control of their lives. 

^{Marchers for Salvador Allende.}

A representative example would be the Yarur textile factory, the enterprise focused on by Peter Winn in his indispensable study of the Allende years, Weavers of Revolution. Those workers had to overcome fear and memories of past repressions before they could band together to improve their conditions. Dr. Winn painted a vivid picture of the Yarur facility at the time of President Allende’s victory: “A passive and isolated work force, carefully selected and socialized, purged of suspected elements, disciplined by the Taylor System, and represented by a moribund company union; a paternalistic patrón who dispensed favors and largesse at his pleasure in return for unconditional loyalty, but who punished disloyalty with righteous anger; a network of informers that covered both the work sections and the company housing; and a structure of scaled punishments for transgressions against the patrón or his social politics that ranged from a verbal warning to summary dismissal and blacklisting.”

Yet in a matter of months, this once-cowed workforce went from clandestine work to create an independent union seeking merely better wages and working conditions to openly making demands such as firing hated foremen and moving to “free the factory.” Dr. Winn wrote, “The roots of revolution might be present, along with the justification for rebellion, but a precondition for this revolution from below was a dramatic change in the workers’ view of themselves, their capacity and power, as well as their perception that for once the state would support them in any showdown between capital and labor.” This leap in consciousness was replicated across the country. 

President Allende’s Popular Unity government achieved strong results in its first year. Unemployment was halved, inflation was reduced, the labor share of income increased from 55 percent to 66 percent and not only did the country see strong industrial growth, the growth came from production of basic goods such as food and clothing in contrast to prior years when growth was based on durable goods such as appliances and automobiles. Perhaps the most basic measure of the improvement was that the poor could now afford to eat meat and buy clothes. What might have been created if the U.S. government and Chile’s capitalists hadn’t crushed it?

What might have been created without interference?

Not all the revolutions discussed were successful, and you might disagree with the direction that some of those that were successful took. There can be no guarantees for the future. The point here isn’t that a change in thinking among enough people that a revolutionary situation arises, and is acted upon, guarantees success. Overwhelming power was brought to bear on the revolutions that failed, and overwhelming power was brought to bear on those that did succeed, distorting the results. We can not know what might have been accomplished had revolutionary governments had the space and time to develop peacefully, including in many other examples that could have been cited in this brief survey.

We might also consider non-revolutionary changes on a national level. To cite just one example, consider Germany. Having unified across the 19th century mostly due to the expansionary tendencies of Prussia, and finally achieving unification through Prussia’s lightning victories over Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, Prussian militarism was a dominant ideology in the young country with the military holding strong sway. Although the rise of Hitler had multiple causes, the militaristic ultra-nationalism that was in large part a holdover from Prussia accommodated itself well to Nazi government; indeed, supported it before the taking of power. 

^{Memorial of the 1848-49 revolution in Hungary. (photo by Globetrotter19)}

But after World War II, those tendencies rapidly receded. Would anybody today see Germans as a nation of Prussian militarists bent on expansion? German national culture is very different today. Ideas changed sharply and rapidly. Yes, under the impact of a second devastating defeat in a continent-wide war. But the potentiality of such a change had to have been there, and we can point to the wide interwar support of the Social Democratic and Communist parties, and the rise of social democracy before the first world war. The treachery of the Social Democrats and sectarianism of the Communists, and their destruction during the Nazi régime, undermined the chances of more profound change (while acknowledging Allied and particularly U.S. impositions from 1945 that limited change in West Germany to capitalism under U.S. suzerainty and Soviet compulsion that molded East Germany). 

Changes in consciousness and belief systems don’t need decades, much less centuries, to change. Such changes don’t, and won’t, happen without enormous organizing, which includes gaining the ability to disseminate materials exposing and contradicting standard ideology and presenting alternatives that speak to people’s lives and goals, most importantly conceivable ideas and concepts that lead to a better world. A better world will come about through the everyday work of organizing and campaigning, not through blueprints. Some of the bricks of today will inevitably be used in building the institutions of tomorrow but those bricks can be arranged differently.

What is radical one day is everyday common sense another day, and the time span between those two days is not necessarily distant. The idea that one family was granted the right to rule in perpetuity, the idea that a human being could own another human being, the idea that everyone was born into a particular class and could never leave it, have passed into history. Why shouldn’t the idea that only a minuscule number of people have the ability to manage enterprises and should therefore be paid hundreds of times more than those whose work produces the profits also pass into history?

The idea that capitalism doesn’t work for most people, that a better world is possible, has animated millions and some of those millions have tried to put those ideas into practice. The ability to see through capitalist propaganda arose quickly — the peoples mentioned throughout this article didn’t need centuries. Popular opinion changed dramatically and rapidly.

That shifts in mass consciousness with revolutionary potential have rarely taken place in the world’s advanced capitalist countries does not mean they can’t happen in the future. What forms any such uprisings might take can’t be known, and could take different forms than previously seen. Repressive rule, whether through monarchs, armed force or economics, is not forever. Nothing of human creation is forever. Capitalism isn’t an exception and will be history when enough people decide to make it so. Organize!