Why is it neither possible nor desirable to avoid revolution ?

Why is it neither possible nor desirable to avoid revolution ?

“At a certain stage in the evolution of the productive forces, we see the emergence of forces of production and means of commerce which, under existing conditions, only cause disasters. They are no longer forces of production, but forces of destruction… This is why every revolutionary struggle is directed against a class which has hitherto dominated… A transformation is needed that affects the mass of humanity, which can only be effected through a revolution. Consequently, revolution is necessary not only because there is no other way to overthrow the ruling class, but also because it is only through revolution that the class which takes the lead in the overthrow will succeed in ridding itself of all the old filth and making itself capable of giving society new foundations… The proletariat can only exist as a historical and world force, just as communism, that is, the product of the action of the proletariat, is conceivable only as a historical and world reality…”

Karl Marx, "The German Ideology"

“At a certain stage,” said Karl Marx, “the forces of production become forces that destroy society.” What is this stage ? It is the moment when the economic and social system reaches its limits and when the increase in wealth of the owning classes exceeds the employment capacity that capitalism offers through productive investments.

Of course, big capital has never been fully committed to the production of wealth, as a large portion of surplus value is given over to speculation and finance. But when there is less and less productive capital and more and more speculative capital, the latter then generates its own fictitious profitability, stemming primarily from the simple fact that the demand for speculative investments guarantees its profits.

One might think that capitalism has no problem with capital accumulation since it is reaching record levels in this accumulation, with large corporations and the wealthiest individuals amassing unprecedented fortunes, but… the opposite is true ! The system is in the midst of a crisis of capital overaccumulation, not that this crisis means it has less capital, but that it is more incapable than ever of finding new investments for its new capital that offer a sufficient degree of profitability.

One might think that if big capital has too much money and doesn’t know what to do with it, it therefore has the means to improve the lot of the majority of the working population without effort, and... it’s the opposite !

Since the early 2000s, global capitalism has seen a steady decline in private productive investment, whether in periods of so-called growth or recession. This is therefore not a cyclical but a structural, or fundamental, trend.

One might think that the collapse of 2007-2008 would clear the atmosphere, except that we actually managed to prevent the cloud from bursting and the lightning from discharging the cloud, that is to say, we managed to prevent capital from destroying failing, bankrupt companies, dragging the system towards the abyss.

If big capital has acted this way in all corners of the world, from the USA to China and from Russia to Europe via Japan, it is because it was obvious to all those holding capitalist power that, if capitalist companies were allowed to fail, the whole system would disappear forever, to the point that in a few years we would no longer even remember that it had existed, if history books did not exist…

At great expense, states and central banks bought up bankrupt trusts, toxic securities, failing banks and insurance companies, and collapsing financiers, financed them at a loss, invested against the grain in production, and, by acting in this way, they did not save the system but only delayed its collapse and definitively crippled it !!!

In 2008, the entire private sector was heavily indebted, from individuals to trusts and banks. By the end of 2008, all public institutions, including governments and central banks, had joined the ranks of those indebted !

The public imagined that all this could last forever, but big business was astonished that it had already lasted ten years !

They could reform and use this respite to find solutions, you might say ?

This would require that the causes of the crisis can be resolved within capitalism and therefore not originate from the very roots of the capitalist system.

However, the root cause of the crisis that the global system has been experiencing since the early 2000s lies in the very foundations of capitalism. As Marx said : “At a certain stage in the evolution of the forces of production, forces of production and means of commerce appear which, under existing conditions, only cause disasters. They are no longer forces of production, but forces of destruction…”

Indeed, while big capital may no longer, or increasingly less, want to invest in the production of real wealth, it also does not want to survive without receiving the income from its money, its surplus value. Even though it is impossible to extract surplus value without basing this increase in wealth on something other than the exploitation of human beings, on unpaid labor time, big capital demands, even when it is not investing in production, to receive the income from its capital !

As a result, not only does the amount of speculative capital or capital invested in debt, whether from companies, banks, individuals or states, constantly increase, and speculative income increases proportionally, but the demand for speculative investments also increases, with debt further increasing borrowing rates and therefore the profits of private lenders.

Far from reforming, big capital is increasing its predatory character on the capitalist world and diminishing more and more its wealth-producing character which had nevertheless made it successful in all periods between two economic crises.

One might think that state intervention would have consequences, by imposing conditions on subsidized capital, but this is not possible. At this stage of public financial aid, the only "solution" would be the nationalization of companies, but states serve private capital and therefore guard against any infringement on private property rights !

It is the pursuit of maximum profit that has led capitalism into this impasse. The more speculation grows, the more maximum profit becomes exclusively speculative and unproductive, and the more speculative profit increases at the expense of profit in the realm of production, regardless of the degree of exploitation of workers.

The anti-social and austerity policies, the undermining of social rights, wages and working conditions that accompany the current situation everywhere in the world are not even there to give more room for productive investment because they cannot be enough to make investing in production more profitable than speculating on public and private debts.

As for nationalizing productions that big capital turns away from, states are incapable of doing so, being first and foremost the defenders of private ownership of capitalist production.

Consequently, the merely delayed collapse situation has no way out. State and central bank interventions have only exacerbated the problem and made any intervention like the one in 2008, which aimed to save the system by depleting public funds, impossible. By temporarily halting their interventions, central banks are trying to prepare for the coming tsunami, but they are far from being able to cope.

The measures they are taking are only intended to last a few days : banks taking control of private accounts and savings, trusts taking control of wages through tax collection, etc.

The only ones who have not prepared for the economic and social tsunami that cannot be delayed indefinitely are the workers.

This is not at all surprising. Revolutionary struggle cannot anticipate the economic and social situation. Decades of reformist struggles, led by political and trade union apparatuses that accommodate themselves to capitalism, and which claim that the only prospect is to reform it, are not the sole cause of this situation.

The revolutionary consciousness of the workers cannot anticipate the situation. Workers, considered minors without rights in the entire social functioning of society, even though they theoretically have a voice through the right to vote, lack any form of organization or expression that would allow them to form their opinions, make them known, discuss them, let alone make them public or give them political weight. With the stranglehold of the union apparatus, workers’ struggles themselves do not provide an opportunity for workers to express themselves, discuss, organize, or develop their own social perspectives.

Throughout the entire economic, political, and social system, workers never decide, never lead, and never have the capacity of their class to offer solutions to society as a whole. Choosing representatives of the bourgeoisie through elections cannot possibly compensate for this absence of any worker intervention in the political sphere.

Therefore, a genuine political and social uprising will be necessary for workers to regain direct participation of the working class in all decisions concerning them and also concerning the whole of society.

What characterizes a social revolution is the fact that an economic, political, and social shock jolts the exploited and oppressed out of their social, political, and organizational passivity, forcing them to act for themselves, to organize themselves, and to decide for themselves. We have seen this type of situation in all the great social revolutions throughout history.

In social revolutions, all at once, the exploited and oppressed go from a situation where they were merely working machines, beasts of burden, to situations where they collectively become a real counter-power that the owning classes mortally fear to the point of throwing themselves into the arms of violent dictatorships, fascist gangs, local, regional and world wars.

In normal times, the proletariat is the last to believe that their exploiters will no longer rule society tomorrow, being the first to suffer this capitalist direction every day and knowing that they have never managed to shake off its yoke. The petty bourgeoisie or young people sometimes have more illusions about their ability to influence the course of events, but, in fact, they don’t influence it any more, and indeed the only real force that poses a threat to the capitalist class and its state power is that of the workers, even if they only become aware of it after having put it into action.

The historical crisis of capitalism has changed nothing about this long-standing state of affairs. While the bourgeois press is overflowing with articles preparing for an economic collapse, the workers’ press, curiously, makes no mention of it, confining itself to demands, recriminations, and accusations against the government or the bosses, without explaining anything about the entirely new situation of the capitalist world, hanging by a thread at the edge of the abyss. No reformist organization, whether associative, political, or trade union, no organization that practices opportunism in relation to its predecessors, including all the far-left groups, all the official extreme left, is preparing the proletariat for this situation, informing them of it, or enabling workers to prepare to play their historical role in overthrowing the owning class of its economic, political, and social power, including by overthrowing state power and also by attacking the sacrosanct right of capital over the entire economy.

Some of these "left-wing" or "radical" opponents pretend to vehemently denounce capitalism, yet they refrain from giving workers the means to understand the state of the old system of exploitation, whose functioning has now been definitively reversed, transformed from the greatest productive machine in history into its most gigantic tool of destruction…

Everything that society has built up over decades is being destroyed : public health, public research, public education, all public services, from transport to energy, and this at a time when big capital is acting only as a predator, as a necrophilic force that feeds first and foremost on the fall of companies, bankruptcies, debts, economic or monetary collapses…

It is this reversal of the situation that will inevitably provoke, sooner or later, a reversal in the attitude of the workers, from a passive class to an active class, from an attribute of the system of exploitation to its destroyer. The owning classes know this and are doing everything to ensure that no class consciousness emerges from the situation for the time being. They are encouraging every possible diversion, every kind of hatred—interracial, interreligious, interethnic, inter-corporate, intersexual, and so on. And, initially, they will succeed, taking advantage of their control over political power, administrative power, media power, all the petty-bourgeois strata, and the whole of public opinion, including that of the workers.

If class consciousness is at its lowest point, if communist class consciousness seems further from emerging than ever, the owning classes know that this will not be enough to prevent the emergence of revolutionary situations. It is always at times when class consciousness was at its lowest, often in the midst of fratricidal wars where proletarians killed each other with weapons in hand instead of attacking their exploiters, that the situation has reversed and transformed from the most counter-revolutionary, warlike, dictatorial, fascist situation into the most revolutionary through a radical dialectical process that astonishes all those who are unaware that it is dialectical contradictions, and not gradual evolutions, that determine great historical changes.

Some claim that the working class can no longer change society because, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Stalinism, no one among the workers believes in their capacity to lead society—what has been called the dictatorship of the proletariat. This ignores, whether consciously or not, the fact that the revolutionary consciousness of workers is a product of revolutionary situations. Before the Paris Commune of 1871, as before the Russian, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, and German soviets of 1917–1923, or before the workers’ and peasants’ committees of Spain in 1936, to name but a few, workers were by no means aware of being a class of the future capable of governing and offering an alternative to capitalist society. The same is true today : it is the revolutionary situation, the one in which the capitalist class has lost its prospects, that brings the exploited class to an awareness of its strength and its role.

That is why the future belongs to the proletariat and to social revolution.

And all attempts, whether by reformists or fascist counter-revolutionaries of every stripe, to eradicate social revolution lead only to catastrophic bloodshed. Avoiding revolution, preventing workers from overthrowing the bourgeoisie, does not mean avoiding confrontations, death, and misery. We have just seen this in the "Arab Spring," where the exploited did not go all the way, not even challenging the power of the owning classes, their stranglehold on the army and on businesses in particular. If the workers’ struggle develops tomorrow, in the face of capitalist economic collapse, but does not go all the way, not even to social revolution, all the horrors that the capitalist world is capable of unleashing will fall upon our heads.

That is why we must not prepare for the reform of capitalism, demand its improvement, or wish for its "sustainable" character, but, on the contrary, facilitate its fall and prepare the society of the future, one freed from private property over the whole of society by a tiny minority of less than one percent of large capitalists.

Socialism in Russia or the failure of the "new man" ?
Messages

1. Why is it neither possible nor desirable to avoid revolution ?, November 4, 2018, 6:54 AM

The threats to the collapse of capitalism are becoming clearer.

The chosen economy is declining despite government intervention. Foreign investment is falling.

German and Italian banks are revealing massive financial holes and are no longer responding favorably to stress tests. Those most at risk are : Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

The insolvency of states and central banks continues to increase.

No structural measures have been taken to reform it since the 2007-2008 crisis. It is less possible than ever to take any without causing everything to collapse.

The weakest areas of the planet are already experiencing violent horrors and bloody dictatorships.

With each bad signal, stock markets fall, forcing states and central banks to intervene, increasing debt and speculation.

The countries that were called "emerging" are already falling...

Brazil, Türkiye, and Argentina are severely weakened and are sliding into poverty and violent dictatorship.

The IMF cautiously states : "Vulnerabilities continue to accumulate and the new financial system has never been tested. Further measures are needed to strengthen its resilience."

A gentle way of saying that the system is not capable of withstanding a crisis !