PDF-Version: Kommunistische Politik – Against the Decadence of Revolutionary Theory

Or: How the ICC “enriches” and falsifies Marxism

In the following, we will demonstrate how the ICC [“International Communist Current”] plays fast and loose with Marxism and, as the expression of an ideological sect, undermines, distorts – and leads ad absurdum scientific socialism, the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, with innovations and “enrichments” typical of the petty bourgeoisie. This undertaking turns out to be difficult for less trained comrades, since the ICC entrenches itself between truly masterfully chiselled text passages from the works of Marx and Engels, in order to then, with the same intention, make a “valuable contribution” to the enrichment of Marxism through intermediate texts of its own provenance: through conceptual confusion.

In its brochure “Die Dekadenz des Kapitalismus”[1], a standard booklet of the German ICC section, it will soon be explained from where the ICC takes the energy for the incessant and cranky falsification of the revolutionary theory of the proletariat. Accordingly, on page 11 of that brochure, it says:

“It can indeed be said that all our positions, such as the rejection of trade unions, reformism, national liberation wars etc., would have no material basis and would be of a purely moral nature if we did not set out from the decadence of capitalism.”

In plain English, this means nothing else than that “decadence theory” represents the raison d’être of the ICC and any doubt about the “decadence” concept becomes an existential threat to the ICC. On the other hand, this of course means that the ICC is forced to distortion and eclecticism in order to defend its ideology – at all costs. There one stops at nothing, neither at stupid attempts to discriminate against revolutionary communists nor at buttering up by the pound those who willingly let themselves be captivated by it. Once the poison of the “decadence” ideology has been inoculated, one lives dazzlingly – and dazzled – from the ignorance of the actual relations. The hairy scheme of “decadence” is imposed on everything, and what contradicts it, what refutes it, is pushed aside, pushed away, punished with disregard. Only the critical elements, purified by independent theoretical work, succeed in freeing themselves from the spell of the “decadence” ideology, which although simple is so dangerous for the proletariat. Even if the ICC must be regarded as standing outside the historical party of the emancipation and liberation of the proletariat, this does not mean that some of its sympathisers or even members have been lost to the revolutionary cause or are forever barred from access to revolutionary Marxism. Our refutation of the ICC ideology and the disclosure of its catastrophic, arbitrary and distorting interpretation – a word that already hits the unambiguousness and clarity of Marx’s gigantic work in the face – of Marx above all is directed at them.

Here we will not deal with the entire complex of the so-called “decadence” theory, but will concentrate on one of the argumentative pivotal points of the ICC, the question of the growth of productive forces on the one hand, but mainly on the question of productive labour. The whole ideological mess of the ICC is easy to see through once one has grasped its manner of argumentation and unscientific way of working.

The Growth of the Productive Forces

On page 18 of the mentioned brochure, the ICC launches its first attack on Marxist theory under the title “The Development of Productive Forces”. As always, it cuts up quotations in order to attach its own interpretation scheme. First, the ICC quotes Marx:

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or, what is merely a legal expression for this, with the property relations within which they have moved hitherto. […] Then begins an era of social revolution.”[2]

The ICC then notes that the occurrence of the conflict, but not the standstill of productive forces, would open the period of the “decadence of the old society“. Marx would have stressed this “yardstick” himself, with his sentence:

“From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.”[3]

The attentive reader wonders why the ICC omits the latter sentence in the above-mentioned quotation by “[…]” only to list it further below. However, the reason for this becomes clear in the interpretation instructions which the ICC gives immediately afterwards (“Marx’s statement must be understood as follows:“). According to the Marxist conception, the decadence of a society would be characterised by the final slowing down of the growth of the productive forces. The ICC here interprets as follows:

FETTERING OF PRODUCTIVE FORCES = SLOWING DOWN OF THE GROWTH OF PRODUCTIVE FORCES

This equation is – of course – not mentioned by Marx. This becomes immediately apparent as soon as we quote Marx coherently:

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or, what is merely a legal expression for this, with the property relations within which they have moved hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”[4]

The mentioned conflict between productive forces and relations of production is thus by no means a question of the speed of development of the productive forces, but of the social barriers to their development. These social barriers, the property relations, prevent the further development of productive forces in forms that correspond to social needs. However, it can by no means be derived from this fact that the productive forces only develop at a slower pace anymore. On the contrary. Capitalism is completely and utterly dependent on the development of the productive forces in its sense, namely the valorisation of labour-power, and it does so. But this one-sided kind of interest causes at the same time a one-sided kind of development of the productive forces. The fetter that Marx is talking about here is the social fetter: the interest in valorisation of capital versus the interest in life of the proletariat and the other exploited and tormented strata. That is why Marx writes only a few lines later:

“The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism.”[5]

Clear and simple: not because the development of the productive forces would slow down, but because an immense mass of wealth faces an immense mass of misery, social revolution occurs. The fetter of productive force, of which Marx speaks here, is the fetter of its social determinacy, is the fetter of private appropriation which contradicts the social character of production and the social need for consumption. A characteristic of capitalism, which, by the way, has not only existed since 1914, but which Engels already described very well in his book “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, and which is today more and more transferable to the new conditions emerging there. Marx writes about this elsewhere:

“The contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, however, lies precisely in its tendency towards an absolute development of the productive forces, which continually come into conflict with the specific conditions of production in which capital moves, and alone can move. There are not too many means of life produced, in proportion to the existing population. Quite the reverse. Too little is produced to decently and humanely satisfy the mass of population.”[6]

As we can see without much ado from all this, the equation:

FETTER = SLOWDOWN

is an interpretation of the above-mentioned text by Marx that is completely taken out of thin air and distorts it. But if capital can “manipulate certain mechanisms of the law of value” (same ICC article, page 19), why should the ICC be deprived of this pleasure in the classic texts. In the end, the ICC is caught up in a false analogy that could easily be classified under the heading of vulgar Marxism. The simple but misleading thought: if I am fettered by my hands and feet, I can only move very slowly. Fettered therefore necessarily means slow, what a limited horizon! In order to nevertheless broaden the horizon somewhat, speculation is drawn upon. We are told that the “decadence of a social form from the economic standpoint” is characterised by “a factual slowing down of the growth of productive forces” compared to the completely non-factual “rates that would have been technically and objectively possible if they had not been subject to the fetters of the old, persistent relations of production“. The gap between the factual and potential development of the productive forces “is widening more and more, and this is becoming increasingly clear to the social classes“.

Let’s start at the end of this gibberish. So, the discrepancy between the hypothetical and actual development of the productive forces becomes apparent to “the social classes”. Sure. The social class of the capitalists constantly whines to us about how vital it is for them to raise the productivity of the individual factories, to increase that of the transport routes, and where one could already be if the workers were not here and there and sometimes more, sometimes less, to resist such a development. It is different for class-conscious workers and communists, because in their conception the existing productive forces can be used and developed with a different social purpose. But not much remains of these hypothetical growth rates, because for the ICC these “hypothetical rates” are not perhaps the result of a bold calculation of how and under what conditions the productive forces could have unfolded and developed after a victorious revolution and the introduction of communist relations of production, for example, since the Paris Commune or the October Revolution, had it spread to the West, for the ICC this hypothetical growth is limited to the cheap extrapolation of capitalist growth curves, which the ICC arbitrarily picks out and determines. With such unscientific sleight of hand tricks, the ICC puts the wind up its followers! It is not exactly a serious method to compare a factual number with an invented and purely arbitrary one. We will come back to these hypotheses of the ICC later. However, the spirit that speaks from this is completely sufficient to complete the formula of the ICC:

FETTERED = SLOW GROWTH

UNFETTERED = MUCH GROWTH

Following the criterion of velocity, we now also have that of quantity. The true criterion is completely ignored by the ICC, the quality and social determinacy of the application of the productive forces.

The Crisis at the ICC

According to the ICC, the second “economic characteristic” of “decadence” is the occurrence of ever more deep and extensive crises. For Marx, who had foreseen neither the ICC nor “decadence”, this characteristic of capitalism already applied before the Year Zero of “decadence” in 1914, and he described and explained this in detail. But let us disregard the peculiarities and laws of the crises under capitalism and see what the ICC expects from crises and how these crises have a positive impact on the ICC. It writes, without blushing, that

“in the course of these crises […] the power of the ruling class is considerably weakened and through the objectively increasing necessity the revolutionary class finds the first foundations for its strength and unity“.

If this is to be an economic criterion of “decadence”, then capitalism has been “decadent” since Marx. After all, everyone has to admit that the “first foundations of strength and unity” of the proletariat already existed in the last century. The criteria to characterise “decadence” “from an economic standpoint” are therefore wind eggs. The gap between hypothetical (let us presuppose a communist standpoint here) and factual development of the productive forces has been widening since the time when the contradiction between private appropriation and social production could already be established – how else could the analysis of the capital relation have been theoretically conceived? The gulf between wealth and poverty, the concrete side of the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production in capitalism, has existed from the very beginning. And that is precisely why from the beginning there have been the unification efforts of the workers to achieve strength and unity. From this period, all communists actually, factually, still benefit today, while from the “hypothetical enrichment” of Marxism by the ICC only the trace of a sect will remain, which will have delayed the reappropriation of the revolutionary proletarian theory by the striving for justification of its ideology.

Now the ICC asks in its article whether the growth of productive forces has slowed down since 1914. But instead of examining this question systematically, the reader is deliberately confronted with disconnected numbers. As the first evidence of the “dwindling growth” of the productive forces, Sternberg gets a word in, with an utterance about world trade. However, world trade, for example, cannot be equated with world industrial production (although there are of course connections). It then immediately moves on to a period between 1914 and 1929. Here we summarise briefly and clearly the data listed by the ICC:

10% drop in production in European countries during the 1st World War Phase of prosperity in post-war period until 1929 In 1929 England has not yet reached the trading volume of 1914 Germany “collapsed or stagnated”. Phase of relative prosperity in US and Japan US emerged as a creditor from World War I and increased production by 15%. US balance of trade surplus between 1919 and 1929 less than the amount invested in expanding the rail network by 1919 While the industrial production index climbs by 60% in 1919-1929, the number of employees falls from 8.4 to 8.3 million (Where?) From 1910-1914, 13 million acres of farmland became prairie, steppe or pasture. (1. Where? 2. Probably USA. 3. Is pasture land not cultivated land?) Competition from industrialised countries in third countries. Argentina as an example. Between 1919-29, US exports to Argentina doubled, England’s exports dropped by half. Same with US expansion into Latin America. Japan gains import shares in British India: from 2.6% to 9.8%, England loses shares from 64.2% to 42.8% between 1913 and 1929.

With this pieced-together data, enriched by two small tables on points 4 and 10, the period according to the ICC is probably sufficiently described. The period from 1929-1939 is summarised in a shorter form:

Depression in 1929 causes decline of world industrial production by one third. Afterwards, the recovery is not as fast as after World War I. Production of the leading world power collapsed. Only countries with arms production had some increase in production.

And all this is then the proof that between 1914 and 1940 the growth of the productive forces would have been enormously retarded.

If we compare this grocery store of the ICC with orderly figures, we certainly get a slightly different picture:

World industrial production Year/Period Index 1913 = 100 1870 12 1881 – 1885 25 1896 – 1900 50 1906 – 1910 78 1913 100 1926 – 1929 146 1936 – 1938 182 1947 – 1950 248 1956 446 1967 909 1982 1811 1989 2452

Source: “Il corso del capitalismo mondiale”, Prospetto IV B, p. 84 and Pr.I,3 p. 33

Now one can of course argue and say that industrial production doubled between 1885 (25) and 1900 (50) in a period of 15 years, then between 1900 and 1913 again in a period of 13 years. The next doubling of industrial production, in 1947 (216), would already take 34 years, and thus a “slowdown” in the growth of productive forces would have occurred. But already in 1956 the index value is 446, i.e. a doubling within 8 years, in 1967 it is 909, doubling after 11 years, in 1982 it is 1811, doubling after 14 years. Thus indeed values that can be compared with the time before the First World War. According to our projection, world industrial production will again have doubled by the year 2000 at the latest (index figures all refer to 1913=100). It should also be noted that such statistics reflect the value side (in the form of prices), but not the physical side. If one assumes with good conscience a constant cheapening of the products, due to the permanently increasing productive force of social labour, one must therefore assume that the doubling of industrial production takes place in much shorter periods of time in physical terms than on the value/price side. We’ll come back to this later. But this is only one side of the growth of productive forces. The qualitative side of the growth of productive forces does not seem to be accessible to the ICC at all, although it provides some figures for this itself – as proof of the slowdown in growth. In its example no. 8, where the ICC could not decide to disclose where it occurred, it is shown that, according to the index (1935-39 = 100), production in country X increased by 60%, while the number of workers in this country even decreased. This is a good example of the qualitative growth of productive forces. If approximately the same number of workers increases production by 60% in a period of 10 years, then certainly there has been a tremendous boost in technologies, organisation of labour, infrastructure etc. in the country concerned, i.e. a qualitative growth of the productive force.

Incidentally, only a few basic data on the technical changes and upheavals in the production process in the interwar period are sufficient to illustrate the enormous qualitative growth of productive forces, which thus forced the tendency towards war and exerted a pressure aimed at revising the world economic order and border regulations that had existed until then. In spite of the sales problems and the world economic crisis, between the wars the technical production apparatus of capital was revolutionised, thus providing the starting point for the prosperity of the industrialised countries of the post-war period. Just the conversion of industrial production from the system of energy transmission by means of belts and rods, which had its origins in the age of steam engines, to the use of individually operated electric drives for the machines allowed a complete reorganisation of the production process. It was also during this time that the provision of sufficient electrical energy became possible through the development of new turbine types and drives. In the 1930s, the turbines achieved 200 times the output of a steam turbine as was in use until the First World War: the latter merely produced the output – with much higher energy consumption – of a small medium-sized vehicle of today, approx. 75 hp (55kW). Similarly, the full development of large-scale chemical industry only began between the wars. It is the time when the first plastics such as polymers and synthetic fibres like nylon and polycaprolactam, to name just a few keywords, were developed and produced. Finally, there is the development of the transport system, the extension of road networks and other means of communication. An expression for this is, for example, the so-called “world horsepower balance”. While in 1920 the applied propulsion engines together achieved just 600 million hp, this figure swells to 2.5 billion hp by 1939. This figure alone illustrates how enormous the qualitative growth of the productive forces was during this period.

It is altogether difficult, even if we have initially formally accepted the idea, to measure the productive force solely in quantitative terms, for example by the output of industrial goods alone, because the Marxist concept of the productive forces of course includes much more than just the immediate industrial production. It is therefore better to speak of productivity in relation to industrial production. How absurd the ICC argument becomes in principle, if one takes the scientific Marxist concept of productive force as a basis, quickly becomes obvious:

“The relation grows still more complicated and apparently more mysterious because, with the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production, it is not only these immediately material things […] that get up on their hind legs vis–à–vis the labourer and confront him as ‘capital’, but [also] the forms of socially developed labour—co-operation, manufacture (as a form of division of labour), the factory (as a form of social labour organised on machinery as its material basis)—all these appear as forms of the development of capital, and therefore the productive forces of labour built up on these forms of social labour—consequently also science and the forces of nature—appear as productive forces of capital.”[7]

Thus, we can see that it will be difficult to speak of a “slowdown” in the area of productive force in any sense at all. The ICC, however, does not care about concepts, it chatters cheerfully about slowing down the growth of the productive force when it talks about productivity, the measure for the concrete application of the productive forces. Enrichment of Marxism through simplification:

FETTER = SLOWDOWN OF PRODUCTIVE FORCE = PRODUCTIVITY

For this reason, the ICC closes its chapter on the period of 1914-1939 with a beautiful chart on the “slowdown in growth”. But it leaves one completely in the dark as to what growth slowed down there between 1922 and 1938. The growth of industrial production (i.e. the combination of quantitative and qualitative growth of productive forces) or of productivity (concrete application of productive forces in production or productive force of labour) or of the working population? It doesn’t matter. The main thing is that the curve makes a noticeable curtsey – before “decadence” theory.

Capitalist Expansion and Extension of Markets

According to the ICC, World War I is a “final turning point” in capitalist expansion, at least in two respects: on the one hand, it would mark the end of imperialist expansion, and on the other hand, the end of “percental growth of the working class in society as a whole”.

Both theses are to be dealt with briefly. First of all, as regards the “end of imperialist expansion”. Here too, the ICC operates with a shortened conceptual framework. For the ICC, imperialist expansion is reduced to the purely geographical area. But not only the division but also the redivision is element of imperialist expansion, and not only that. The colonial policy until about 1900, the time when the division of the world must be regarded as completed, divided most of the world spatially, politically and formally subordinated to the imperialist powers, but huge territories in the colonies had nevertheless hardly ever seen a white man. The economic penetration of the colonies with capitalist structures was only just beginning, despite the enormous profits that had been flowing into the metropolises since the end of the last century. The expansion of capitalism as an economic system does not correspond to the spatial expansion of the imperialist powers in the same way. Formal political subordination of the colonies cannot be equated with real economic subsumption of the controlled lands. The latter process had to take place unintentionally in the form of the competition of the imperialist powers, in the form of the expansion of one imperialist country at the expense of others, and moreover in the form of the emancipation of these countries into formally equal bourgeois nation-states, that is, into mediators and relativisers of this redivision struggle, a process that basically continues until today. Furthermore, it must be taken into account that until shortly after the Second World War, the conquered colonial territories always functioned as a kind of appendage to the corresponding nation states dominating them. This too was a fetter of the productive forces, because the technical-scientific improvement of production methods and the expansion of the production apparatus in general were prevented from unfolding by the restrictive conditions of world trade, a fetter, however, which the system itself was capable of breaking. This is one of the main reasons for the two world wars, apart from the struggle for raw materials, and for the relative stagnation of industrial production in the classic colonialist countries between the two wars, and consequently, for the stagnation of trade between these countries.

Let us now come to the “end of the percental growth of the working class in society as a whole”, which for the ICC is also a sign of “decadence”. As so often, the ICC follows Sternberg’s argumentation and numerical examples. We are confronted with the following figures:

Estimate from 1850: 10% of the world population works according to capitalist methods By 1914 this share rises to almost 30% The number of workers in Germany increased from 8 million in 1882 to 14 million in 1925, but their share of the active population fell to 45% in 1925 after reaching 50% in 1895. Number of 50% stabilises, in England slightly above that, in Germany and France slightly below. According to INSEE, the French statistical office, the working population in 1968 was around 45% in the EC and 35% in the US, Japan and USSR. In the underdeveloped countries, the flattening of the curve would be even stronger. The “share of new wage dependents”, whatever that is supposed to be, would be 9 times lower per 100 inhabitants in Asia, Africa and Latin America than in the developed countries. Until 1914, the proportion of the population that was actually integrated into the capitalist economy would have grown faster than the world population.

As can be seen, here too the ICC fluctuates between individual data without providing a coherent and consistent series of figures. First of all, it should be noted that the relative decrease of the working population applied by capital in relation to the world population is not an achievement of the so-called “decadence”, but a law of capitalist development.

“The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productive force of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potencies of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its labour torture. The more extensive, finally, the Lazarus layer of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute, general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws, in its actualisation it is modified by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.” [8]

“On a capitalist basis, where the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labour, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productive force of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorisation of capital. The fact that the means of production and the productivity of labour increase more rapidly than the productive population expresses itself, therefore, under capitalism, in the inverse form that the working population always increases more rapidly than the valorisation requirements of capital.”[9]

It is immediately apparent that the relative decline in the number of people employed in commodity production is not an innovation of the system since “decadence”, but an old hat of capitalist relations. Marx analysed this law of capital on the basis of the situation in England around 1850. Now one could argue that since 1850 the situation in England has changed, but one has to take into account that since 1850 the global expansion of capitalism has progressed far beyond England and that it has been possible for England, due to colonialism and the current global structure of the capitalist world system, to pass on the real misery to other countries for the time being. But a look at some English cities suffices to see that this was not for all times.

It is astonishing how the ICC, which otherwise feels so committed to the global view, restricts its field of vision to the “industrialised countries” at this very point and resorts to restrictions such as “percentage of the population that has factually been integrated into the capitalist economy”, without giving any indication as to whom it ultimately includes. It should also be noted that the relative decline in the share of the productive population in relation to the total population does not mean that this productive worker population is declining in absolute terms, but rather that it continues to increase in global terms, while in the industrialised countries it is declining in absolute terms due to high productivity of labour. On the other hand, and here lies another major error of the ICC, it must be taken into account that not only workers in industry, transport, agriculture and fisheries are to be included in the circle of producers of surplus value, but also the employed taxi driver, the hired musician, the hired computer specialist or physician. Capitalist production is not first and foremost the production of tangible goods, but is first and foremost the production of surplus value. Marx often refers to this fact, for example by explaining that it is irrelevant whether one is hammering away at shoes or children’s heads. The employed private teacher creates surplus value just as much as the employed cobbler. All these subtleties remain hidden, of course, if one starts out from a wrong concept of productive labour, as well as exclusively from bourgeois statistics, which are not interested in such a distinction and generally sort according to other criteria.

Provisionally, however, if one is aware of the limitations, such statistics can be used. So we have seen that the ICC claims that in the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the number of “new wage dependents” would decrease in relation to the total population. How undifferentiated this statement is has already been said. But let’s look at the numbers of the “7 Tigers” (without Taiwan) out of interest:

Country Percentage of population employed in industry and services 1965 Percentage of population employed in industry and services 1980 Growth rate of the working population between 15 and 64 years between 1965 and 1980 Growth rate of employees in industry and services between 1965 and 1984 Indonesia 29 33 5.6 13.7 Philippines 42 59 7.7 40.5 Thailand 18 30 18 66.7 Malaysia 41 58 16 41.5 Singapore 95 99 26.5 4.2 Burma 36 47 -3.5 30.5 Switzerland 91 94 3 3.3 West Germany 90 94 6.1 4.4

Source: Banque mondial, “Rapport sur le développement dans le monde 1986”, Tableau 30, p. 256.

On the basis of these figures it is easy to see that even if one were to halve the growth rate “D%” in order to exclude the self-employed with certainty, the percentual growth of producers of surplus value is increasing in the Asian countries listed in relation to the total population. The situation is different only in Singapore, whose population growth is not purely “home-grown” but is due to the high rate of immigration – of labour-power – and which even today complains about a shortage of labour-power and as a result of which industry is moving to neighbouring Indonesia. If one compares the columns A and B with those of the FRG or Switzerland (that were listed here for comparison), one sees on which high level production is already carried out in Singapore. In any case, these figures show that neither the indifference typical of the ICC nor the “fixation” on the mystical turning point of 1914 brings light into the matter, but rather only a deep understanding of the laws of capitalism (which thus also apply before 1914!) and concrete investigation.

Said text of the ICC becomes completely confused when one arrives (arduously) at the chapter on the pseudo-growth since the Second World War. For example, according to the ICC, “since 1914 and especially since 1929 a profound change in capitalism has taken place”. This change would essentially be “the end of the imperialist expansion”. As if there had been no expansion of American or Russian imperialism after the Second World War! Furthermore, it is said that “imperialist expansion” had been the “main foreign trade sales market” during this so-called ascending phase of capitalism. Apart from the grammatical rubbish that turns expansion into a market, it is clear what is meant (this misconception is well known): in the period up to 1914, capitalism would not have reached its limits because the non-capitalist areas would have realised the excess surplus value on which capital would otherwise have been sitting. In the end, such a theory amounts to concealing the exploitation and plundering of the colonial countries, from which the imperialist states always got more than they exported to them. For example, US imports from Cuba increased from 34 million to 359 million dollars between 1902 and 1923, while exports to Cuba rose from 25 million to 193 million dollars during the same period. According to the ICC, this was a suicidal attitude on the part of the US bourgeoisie, who instead of saddling Cuba with unsaleable products, scourged itself with the realisation of a further 359 million dollars. Or let’s take a statistic that can be found in every communist household, cited in Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, concerning Germany’s foreign trade:

Export to 1889 1908 Great Britain 651.8 997.4 France 210.2 437.9 Belgium 137.2 322.8 Switzerland 177.4 401.1 Together 1176.6 2159.2 Romania 48.2 70.8 Argentina 60.7 147 Portugal 19 32.8 Brazil 48.7 84.5 Chile 28.3 52.4 Turkey 29.9 64 Australia 21.2 64.5 Dutch East Indies 8.8 40.7 Together 264.8 556.7

Source: “Lansburgh statistic”, in: Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. All numbers in million Reichsmark.

Not much more remains to be said, therefore, about where the “main foreign trade sales markets” of the German Reich, for example, were located. Foreign trade looks the same for all industrialised countries at this time. The main sales market for foreign trade has always been and still is the most developed areas, this applies to both industrialised and less developed countries. In order to verify this, it is enough for people who are not entirely obtuse to take a closer look at foreign trade statistics. But wait! This “main foreign trade sales market” (which, as we have seen, is not one), the ICC further lectures us, “absorbs this relatively small part of capitalist production, which is so indispensable for the realisation of capital accumulation”. This small part would be “the surplus value designated for reinvestment”. Okay. Let’s try to understand:

“Main foreign trade sales market” is not a trait (as we have seen), but an economic title awarded by the ICC. This title is assigned by the ICC to the areas untouched by other imperialists where imperialism has invaded because these areas allow the “main thing” on their territory, namely to realise the surplus value intended for reinvestment.

Ergo: if imperialist expansion is dead, then the title is revoked. The world without this title: “Two world wars and a world economic crisis in less than 30 years” – this is the full extent of the ICC illustrating its preceding thesis. However, it remains a mystery how the capitalists manage to export to these regions of all things precisely that part which contains the surplus value intended for reinvestment, but to England, Switzerland, France, etc. only those parts which are free of this earmarked quantum of surplus value? Nothing about this could be found with Marx, except that the capitalist could not care less where he realises the surplus value, so all that matters to him is that the surplus value is realised at all. To this end, he cultivates all markets and he will probably be most successful where there is the greatest solvent demand. And he is more likely to find this demand in a developed than in a less developed country. And if he found it in the latter, he had to find out that most of the solvent demand in these countries consisted of surplus value realised in developed countries, which was put into a banana plantation, for example, in search of new valorisation, because the poor subsistence farmer neither disposed of a power outlet to plug in the household mixer, nor of a sufficiently large piece of land to negotiate a tractor from our capitalist. The surplus value produced on this plantation and realised in the developed countries may have benefited our capitalist in the form of a loan, with which he in turn increased the profitability of his own sweatshop in idyllic Switzerland… If the capitalist ever found a native in those countries who was able to buy commodities from him, it was on the presupposition that he was already integrated into the capitalist market in some form – as a wage worker, capitalist or small producer.

Be that as it may, we now come to “higher mathematics” or “biomathematics”, a discipline that the ICC introduces into Marxism and which operates with waterlilies and market masses as elementary categories.

First the waterlilies: these gradually grow over a lake. It takes “a long time” until half of the lake’s surface is covered, but then only “a single day” to cover the entire lake. However, since the surface area of a lake is limited, the waterlilies cannot expand further. The part open to the waterlilies is reduced to the same extent as the need for expansion of the waterlilies increases. So much for the ICC on waterlilies. Applied to capitalism, the waterlily law discovered by the ICC means the following:

“At the beginning of the century, the mass of markets that capitalism needed to ensure a year of growth was more than six times less than that needed for a year of production today“.

Unfortunately, we did not succeed in finding a formula for calculating “market masses” in Marx, and the ICC has not provided us with a closer explanation of this. Also, no biologist could confirm that waterlilies have a gradualist need for expansion in accordance with ICC regulations, otherwise Lake Balaton, for example, would have been overgrown with waterlilies long ago – but one can still swim in it! Just as this gradualism does not apply to waterlilies, it also does not apply to the development of capitalism, and this “enrichment” of biology and Marxism must be rejected. What is certain is that capital requires growth, a permanent expansion of its base of operation and valorisation. But this expansion is not primarily territorial, and territorial expansion is only one form of appearance of the expansion of capital, which is a social relation. Marx declared that markets are unlimited, the ICC declares markets to be a limited lake surface. It suffices to merely point out that a market saturated with underpants can still be receptive to televisions, even if underpants existed already in the “ascending phase” of capitalism, televisions, mass cars, computers, ballpoint pens, wood-free paper, CNC machines, frozen pizzas etc. only in the “decadence phase”. And just like the underpants, the car has to be changed from time to time or a new frozen pizza has to be put in the oven. But instead of seeing all these new things (and the markets for these new things), the ICC sees in the prosperity of the post-war period after 1945 only tanks and grenades, along with the effects of reconstruction, as being responsible for the upswing that took place.

Finally, the ICC sees the development since the Second World War as

“the greatest slowdown in the growth of productive forces that has occurred in the history of mankind. Never before has the gap between what is possible and what has factually been actualised reached such a great extent“.

To illustrate this thesis, however, the ICC does not show, as would perhaps still be reasonable, that a communistically organised society could already satisfy the needs of humanity with the same means of production, but it refers to false representations of possible capitalist growth, to stupid and feeble-minded number games: One has to have a lot of presumption and hope to come across idiots when such number games are played. The unscientific and arbitrary nature of such pseudo-mathematical acrobatics is obvious. Why, of all things, is exactly the growth in world industrial production from 1880-1890 the yardstick of all things? And why does this picture “complete” itself precisely with the industrial production growth of the US from 1939-1949? The ICC recipe for producing beautiful charts is as clear as it is primitive. Take the highest known growth rates and compare them with the actual growth rate, and there seems to be enough space between the two curves to sell the rest of the “decadence theory” crap. Of course, the whole thing is veiled enormously with flimsy justifications. For example, according to the ICC, the growth in industrial production in the US are growth rates that “were made possible by the development of technology during the Second World War”. So the war, completely against the thesis of the ICC, has released not only destructive forces but also productive forces to an enormous extent? In fact, however, it is precisely in these years that the development of new technologies has been limited to sectors vital to the war effort, and the increase in industrial production in the US is not so much due to the qualitative growth of the productive forces, but above all to the utilisation of the accumulated idle productive forces as a result of the disappearance of European competition in many sectors of the world market and the quantitative expansion of production. It must not be forgotten that the qualitative development of the productive forces in the US was far ahead of its European competitors even before the war began, since the North American bourgeoisie at that time already disposed of an enormous domestic market and still had industrial overcapacities en masse, one of the main causes of the economic crisis.

The figures with which the ICC operates also lack an indication of sources. It itself states that the increase in industrial production from 1939 with the index number 109 had climbed to the number 235 by 1944, with an index of 1938 = 100. It calculates an increase of 110% within 5 years from this.

Of course, it is nonsense to square to now even take this 110% as a growth rate, instead one could at most take the average growth rate, which would then be about 22%, based on our own source material. We will now try to present the illustrations provided by the ICC in a somewhat cleaner and mathematically more precise manner. As data material we again use “Il corso del capitalismo mondiale 1750-1990”, published by “Il partito comunista” and our own calculations. The index numbers are based on 1913=100:

In its numbers game, the ICC uses Sternberg’s figure, which he gives as the growth rate of industrial production in the years 1880-1890. According to Sternberg, the industrial production index would have multiplied by 1.6 during this period. This figure of Sternberg is of course based on an estimate, since in most countries at this time there is a lack of data that would provide sufficient indications for it. The figures we have compared assume an average increase in the production index of the 4 largest industrial nations of the period, England, France, Germany and the USA, and for the periods 1880-1890, 1890-1900 and 1900-1910 in the same order the multiplication factor is 1.519 / 1.515 and 1.513. The solid black line shows the real development of the industrial production index. It is astonishing what linearity there is between actual development and the continuation of growth rates – despite the deviations – since 1913, if one ignores the ICC/Sternberg statement for a moment. Up until 1963, the real curve lagged behind the extrapolated curves, only to overgrow them in 1973 and approach the ICC curve. But this was only a compensatory movement in order, still slightly higher than the projected growth rates, to reach in 1993 just above the point at which the index would have ended up if it had stubbornly followed the growth rates of 1880-1890 since 1913. It can therefore be said with certainty that, if one takes the average increase in the industrial production index of 1880-1890 of the then 4 largest industrial countries as a starting point, then capitalism, despite all its ups and downs and crises and wars, describes a parabola that is quite uniform in the long term. The deviation of the real line from the ICC/Sternberg curve (although we do not want to accuse Sternberg of such number shifting) is explained by the difference of originally 0.081 in the multiplication factor, which naturally potentiates over the long term. We have already pointed out above that this index reflects the price-value side of industrial production. So, if one starts out from prices of the years 1880-1890, it must be considered certain that, given the cheapening of most commodities by much more rational production methods, the real course of the index would have already overshadowed the ICC curve. We have completely refrained from presenting the second hypothesis of the ICC, because it is all too stupid and simplistic: to pick out exceptional growth rates, isolate them from their context and then claim that they could be made the yardstick of the true economic potential of capitalism, that is just pure demagogy. According to this, capitalism should have reached already in 1960 where it would only arrive in 2015 if the rate of 1880-1890 continued to develop undisturbed, in 1970 the index would have reached 45289, this year, in 1994, the index would have climbed to no less than 5353450, i.e. 1858 times last year’s index number: the inhabitants of the earth would have to dig each other out of the mountains of commodities and would suffocate from all the garbage. In any case, we are glad that it hasn’t come to this point yet and that sometimes it is simply enough to calculate moronic theses in order to prove their absurdity. However, we have less understanding for the laziness of some comrades not to do this while being eager to spread such nonsense without verification.

Contradiction of the Capitalist Mode of Production

As could thus be seen, one cannot speak so readily of a so-called “slowdown” in the growth of productive forces without further ado. The limits of the capitalist mode of production emerge precisely through the development of the social productive force of labour and thus cause the crises of the system, crises which are only overcome in a revolutionary way when the proletariat forms into a political party and when the political conditions allow to call for the last fight against the tenaciously defending world bourgeoisie. In volume three of Capital, Marx emphasises the fundamental contradiction of capital:

“The contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, however, lies precisely in its tendency towards an absolute development of the productive forces, which continually come into conflict with the specific conditions of production in which capital moves, and alone can move. […] Not too much wealth is produced. But at times too much wealth is produced in its capitalistic, contradictory forms. The limit of the capitalist mode of production comes forth:

1) In that the development of the productive force of labour in the fall of the rate of profit creates a law which in its own development at a certain point faces it hostilely and thus must constantly be overcome through crises.

2) In that the appropriation of unpaid labour, and the relation of this unpaid labour to objectified labour as such, or, expressed capitalistically, that the profit and the relation of this profit to the employed capital, so a certain level of the rate of profit, decides on the expansion and limitation of production, instead of the relation of production to social needs, the needs of socially developed humans. This is why limits occur for it on a degree of expansion of production, which under other circumstances would appear altogether insufficient. It comes to a standstill not where the satisfaction of needs, but where the production and realisation of profit mandates this standstill.” [10]

“A development of productive forces which would diminish the absolute number of labourers, i.e., enable the entire nation to accomplish its total production in a shorter time span, would cause revolution, because it would put the bulk of the population out of the running. Herein again appears the specific limit of capitalist production, and that it is not at all an absolute form for the development of the productive forces and for the creation of wealth, but rather that at a certain point it comes into collision with it. Partially this collision appears in periodical crises, which arise from the circumstance that now this and now that portion of the labouring population becomes redundant under its old mode of employment. Its limit is the surplus time of the labourers. The absolute surplus time that society gains does not concern it. The development of the productive force concerns it only in so far as it increases the surplus labour-time of the working-class, not because it decreases the labour-time for material production as such; it moves thus in a contradiction.”[11]

Thus, if one grasps the contradictions inherent in capitalism, one clearly sees that not some “slowdown” in the growth of the productive forces drives capitalism to its final crisis, but, on the contrary, the permanence of the growth of the productive forces, and the tendency of capital to develop the latter absolutely. The capitalist mode of production cannot be captured with primitive analogies, like the “aging man” who at some point lapses into agony and dies, or like the waterlily pond that grows over. The capitalist mode of production is a necessary transitory stage of man’s development, it does not die, it is overcome and replaced by a new, communist mode of production. It does not stop growing because it overgrows the surface of the earth with its commodities, but because it has perspectively undermined the “climatic conditions” for its existence: the competition among the workers. It fails not because it produces less than the hypothetical curves of the ICC require of it, but because it produces too much: too much wealth on the one hand, too much misery on the other. The development of the capitalist mode of production, like every mode of production based on classes, is a processioning contradiction.

These contradictions act until one moment of this contradiction has detached itself from the concatenation: the proletariat. The presupposition for this is created by the capitalist system itself by forcing workers to the sublation of competition among themselves. But the actualisation of this perspective requires the development of the revolutionary workers’ party, the international communist party, which has insight into the actual development of conditions and relations and the general marching route of the working class. This, in turn, presupposes that the communists do not indulge in fantasies and illusions, that they do not arbitrarily tinker with their “theoretical heritage” until it becomes justifications for theoretical deviations, which, although, because they came about empirically, could perhaps claim a certain tolerance until the 40s of this century, are today absolutely out of place and only contribute to the confusion of the proletariat (in so far as it lends them an ear). Defence of Marxism and thus of the revolutionary scientific theory of the proletariat today also means vehemently opposing the decay in content of revolutionary theory, as cultivated by the ICC and whose saddled steed is this splendid “decadence theory”.

In contrast to the ICC, today revolutionary theory can do without all the so-called “enrichments” of Marxism, because the analyses of the capitalist mode of production made by Marx coincide with the development of the same. And before as after the Year Zero of “decadence theory” (1914) the same laws are still in effect, only on a higher scale than in Marx’s time (who also foresaw this):

“Simultaneously with the drives to an actual increase of the labourer population, which spring from the increase of the part of the total social product being effective as capital, there are agencies which create a merely relative over-population. Simultaneously with the fall in the rate of profit, the mass of capitals grows, and hand in hand with this there occurs a devalorisation of present capital which impedes this fall and gives an accelerating drive to the accumulation of capital-value.

Simultaneously with the development of the productive force there develops a higher composition of capital, the relative decrease of the variable part vis-à-vis the constant. These different influences at one time assert themselves more side by side in space, at another assert themselves after each other in time; periodically the conflict of antagonistic agencies finds vent in crises. The crises are always merely momentary and violent solutions of the present contradictions, violent eruptions, which for a moment restore the disturbed equilibrium.

The contradiction, expressed very generally, consists in that the capitalist mode of production involves a tendency towards absolute development of the productive forces, […] while, on the other hand, its aim is to preserve the value of the existing capital and promote its valorisation to the highest measure (i.e., to promote an ever more rapid growth of this value).” [12]

“Capitalist production continually strives to overcome these immanent limits, but overcomes them only by means which again counterpose these limits to it in a more enormous measure.

The true limit of capitalist production is capital itself, is that: capital and its self-valorisation appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not that vice versa the means of production are mere means for a constant expansion of the life process of the society of producers. The limits within which the preservation and valorisation of the value of capital, which rests on the expropriation and impoverishment of the great mass of producers, can alone move, these limits therefore come continually into conflict with the methods of production that capital must employ for its purpose and which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productive forces of labour. The means — unconditional development of social productive forces — comes into continual conflict with the limited purpose, the valorisation of the existing capital. If the capitalist mode of production is for this reason a historical means to develop the material productive force and to create the world-market corresponding to it, it is simultaneously the constant contradiction between this its historical task and the relations of social production corresponding to it.”[13]

It is therefore fundamentally not at all about trying to prove that capitalism is outdated because it cannot do as the ICC calculates that it could. We have seen what strange effects this approach produces. It is about keeping apart in the real, actual development of the capitalist mode of production the preserving moments of this mode of production and those aiming at its sublation, sounding out their reciprocally changing balance, analysing the development and dynamics of this constantly disturbed equilibrium, and in this movement to support, promote and form the sublating tendencies into a uniform material force. As already said, the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production are of permanent nature, but this permanence of contradictions, and even their constant strengthening, does not mean that the sublation of these contradictions is constantly actually (that is, not only posited by the communists) on the agenda, but only their actual sublation is also actually revolutionary. That is why the history of capitalism is constantly pervaded by uprisings, revolts and revolutions, not only since 1914! The October Revolution and the related proletarian revolutionary dynamics in many other countries only showed how deeply the social contradictions had developed at that time. But the course of the following counterrevolution showed equally well that this depth was not yet sufficient for the actual overcoming of the capitalist mode of production – that is, that capitalism had not yet exhausted its potential. It has withstood this first more extended proletarian onslaught and has further extended and consolidated its power – however barbaric it may seem. The final crisis of the system will only occur when capitalism has actually penetrated the world completely and has “levelled” the non-simultaneity of development between the individual nations to a good extent by the worldwide dispersion of the production and distribution relations possible to it, when, therefore, more or less uniform conditions have roughly emerged again for the world proletariat, which really burn into the consciousness of the world working class not only theoretically, but also quite practically, actually the sameness of living conditions and interests and materialise them in a uniform movement of the class.

As long as this is not the case, the conflict between material development of production and its social form only appears distorted, more or less embedded in the capitalist mode of production itself. Almost every consistent movement based on the masses (i.e. when it does not only fight for the preservation of particular privileges), no matter how thoroughly bourgeois its official ideology, bears at its core the characteristic feature of a revolt against the existing relations of production. Not in the sense of a fundamental communist critique, of course, but purely practically. The development and outcome of these movements depend on the extent to which a change in the existing relations of production can be achieved without sublating the relations of production themselves, and are naturally limited in their ability to develop from the outset because they do not represent proletarian or only limited proletarian interests. But the anti-colonial movements, for example, and those who try to continue with this, rebel against existing relations of production and distribution, because they feel excluded or consider their share in it too small. They therefore move, of necessity, within the framework of the system. However, they succeed in transforming the currently more instinctive rebellious nature of the respective working class into energies that strive for system-immanent changes, because the ideological subsumption of the workers under capital is predominant in the economic centres, because world capital is thus still able to maintain such conditions in its centres that allow a far-reaching integration of the workers into bourgeois society. This vicious circle of capitalist dominance can only actually be broken when the expansion of capitalist production has reached such a degree that the majority of the privileges of the metropolitan proletariat must disappear, because this is the effect of the (unmanipulated) law of value mediated by the competition of capitals. This process has started long ago, with the development of the world market, it is an expression of the “historical mission” of capital, but what is decisive is when the point is reached where this development is reflected in the working class in such a way that an actual movement develops there, which can only find its end point in a victorious proletarian revolution. In this revolutionary fighting perspective, a “decadence theory” is only a superfluous goitre that binds useless tissue. So let’s go back to this splendid “theory” and see what “enrichments” it offers us in the field of the concept of productive labour and crises.

The ICC and the Question of Crises since 1939

In its decadence booklet, the ICC kindly refers to articles on crisis theory which must remain inaccessible to those not familiar with the French language. We, too, will not undertake the work of the ICC here to even partially translate these machinations and will limit ourselves to what the ICC expects of the ordinary average worker in the German-speaking world. It is said that the more recent crises “in contrast to the crises during the ascending phase of capitalism” would bring to light a general and accelerated “movement of decay”. “In this fact”, it continues, “lies the proof of the different essence of the crises”.

The ICC therefore presupposes that one shares the “decadence concept”, recognises the accelerated “systematic decline” as a fact and thus has proof of the difference between the crises before and after Year Zero of “decadence theory”. For the reasons already mentioned, we cannot make use of this “proof”. It could already be read in Marx that crises are reproducing moments in the development of capitalism, which break out at ever higher levels, for the simple reason that the phase between the crises has led to a reproduction of capitalism on a higher level. The crisis may subjectively and for the worker appear devastating, as well as for one or another capitalist, as well as for the personified capital par excellence at the moment. However, it must not be forgotten that the crisis also acts as a “health bath” for capitalism, which serves to drive out the capital that has become superfluous, to repel the assets and workers that have become obsolete from the standpoint of valorisation and average profit. Only this again creates the prerequisites for an increased level of accumulation. This is still the cause and course of all world crises, which are always overproduction crises, which from the capitalist standpoint exhibit a surplus of labour-power, capital and products.

“Just like the economic depression of 1929”, writes the ICC, “the world wars expressed in the most brutal way the inability of capitalist relations of production to renew themselves in a normal way”. One can only arrive at this conception if one wrongly equates wars with crises. Of course, wars are also economically determined in the final analysis, but they do not reflect crises mechanically, but first and foremost the political-economic projects of the bourgeoisie, in order to evade the negative effects of crises caused by the intensification of competition, i.e. to defeat the economic opponent, because one sees in him the primary obstacle to one’s own expansion. As mentioned earlier, the political system of world capitalism had become too narrow for the needs of accumulation at the level now reached precisely in the interwar period itself; the narrow national barriers hindered the “undisturbed” accumulation of capital.

But these obstacles could be swept away by capital itself, by means of war and thus the sublation of the crusted political structures (and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc shows that this can also happen without immediate war). Nevertheless, the First World War and the Second have little in common except their barbarity. The First World War still bore the marks of the history of the emergence of capital as a national bloc. On the one hand, the war aims were aimed at the pure expansion of national territory as well as fixed zones of influence in the various regions of the world. Ideologically, this was expressed in the irredentist movements that later coined the slogan of the “Greater German Reich” in Germany, for example, even though the Nazis’ economic projects reached far beyond this. But the First World War was not consummated because of the proletarian interventions; it showed capital that even its barbarism will not save it from ruin. Thus, the First World War in actuality ultimately did not bring about a break-up of the previous world political structures, but only consolidated them.

The accelerated development of the productive forces in the interwar period only increased the pressure on the bourgeoisie to achieve a reorganisation of the world political structures and the world economic crisis of 1929 clearly showed the inevitability of a new world war, because this was the only form for the bourgeoisie to achieve such a change. The Nazis, as political representatives of the German bourgeoisie, paradoxical as it may seem, played a far more progressive role – from the standpoint of capital – in this than, for example, the ossified English bourgeoisie, which was busy laboriously holding the Empire together. For behind all Greater German fantasy, which was only an ideological means, lay a concept of the European economic area, i.e. a political-economic structure that was supposed to be able to stand up to the USA (and the Soviet Union, which was envied and feared because of its enormous growth rates) and to exploit the existing possibilities of the productive forces that had been developed but were hindered in their concrete application. It was hoped that this would also give them an edge over those nations that were increasingly penetrating the established domains of the traditional industrialised countries. The chapter of the European economic area has not yet been closed. But what was then an economic concept that should be enforced by military means is more or less established today. These large economic units, necessary for capital, today shape the whole political appearance of world capital: ASEAN, EU, NAFTA, CIS are proof enough. They are, so to speak, the political concession of the bourgeoisie to the enormously grown productive forces and the resulting requirements for their valorisation: expansion of the internal markets to at least 250-300 million “souls” (internal markets which, with the exception of the USA, were completely undeveloped from today’s point of view in the interwar period). The only bourgeoisie that doesn’t need to ally itself for this is the Chinese one…

To equate crises and wars, it is not enough to point out that in both values are annihilated. After all, and this is easy to see, the causes are different. In one case, the annihilation of values follows the effects of economic laws, which almost inescapably have the same validity for all capitals and do not distinguish between “good” and “evil”. In war, the devaluation of capital is one-sided, and the ICC itself calculates how great the growth of US industry was during the war – and in all other countries not directly involved in the fighting.

This alone shows that the ICC thesis

WORLD WAR = WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS

is such a superficial approach that even waterlilies would go pale with envy. But the ICC is completely above this:

“The crises that shook capitalism between 1914-1946 are superfluous to any commentary: two world wars and one depression […] speak for themselves“.

But what if they tell us something else after all? A commentary whose inner logic is of known ICC calibre is supposed to help here:

“The crisis of 1929 caused a drop in production that was greater than that of the First World War, the Second World War” (which did thus not cause this drop in production) “was even more destructive than the First World War” (but how destructive was the crisis of 1929?) “and it was such a disaster that cannot be compared with that of 1929“.

But this is exactly what the ICC does with its formula war = crisis.

Reconstruction and Armaments Economy

In any case, because the destruction in the Second World War was so enormous, the reconstruction period would also have taken longer, and because of the “constantly maintained local wars, war became a permanent phenomenon and arms production reached higher levels in these ‘times of peace’ than during the two world wars”. Both statements are initially correct. But upon closer examination they become false. For example, the ICC considers the reconstruction period to have lasted until 1965, which is certainly too broad a definition, when reconstruction is understood as the compensation of war damages. But if by reconstruction period one understands the further development of capitalism after the war, this chapter would not be closed yet. So in the word “reconstruction” the ICC has found a relatively flexible and malleable concept, without explaining why this period should be completed in 1965 – and what then follows! Be that as it may, according to the ICC, the economic expansion of capitalism after the Second World War depended on the “mechanisms of ‘reconstruction’ and production for military purposes”. Thus, finally, capital would have entered “a new stage of its decay, in which it had developed a number of particularly effective remedies, but there was nothing to disguise the essence of these means as remedies”.

It is a characteristic of all hidden and overt “decadence theorists” that, according to their conviction, capital at some point resorts to means that meanly destroy the statements made by the “decadence theorists” about the final arrival of the crisis of decay. And thus a finely woven dialectic develops between the means ascribed to capital (which, let it be noted, are merely remedies, or even “embellishments”) and the disappointed theory. These means must, of course, be “highly effective” on the one hand, but on the other hand have a limited operational capability. Here, in the case of the ICC, “the limits of these embellishments” are said to have been apparent since the second half of the 1960s, thus marking, as it were, the end of the reconstruction period. The whole limitedness of “decadence theory” becomes equally clear in this. Because the absolute decay of capitalism did not occur as hoped, capital itself must be granted magical means, because otherwise capitalism would have had to collapse already. But these manipulations of capital, on the course of world history as well as on the law of value, are nothing else than the manipulations of the “decadence theorists” on Marxist theory projected onto capital. They are signs of the decadence of “decadence theory”. Instead of examining the fundamental starting points of the theory, when the assertions and predictions made do not come true, one is content with discovering in the treasure chest of bourgeois power little magical remedies that make the curse cast on it by the “decadence theorists” ineffective for a while – postponed is not cancelled. In other words: one knows that capitalism is doomed to fall, but one does not know how and does not know when.

It would be better and clearer to speak not of the end of the reconstruction period but of the end of the post-war period. It has probably become clear that, as shown in the course of this article, the expansion of capitalism after the Second World War was due to many more factors than arms production and reconstruction. Firstly, the expansion of capitalism also moved markedly in areas that were only touched by the world war, or that were even only really dragged into the cheerful game of accumulation by the war. Secondly, after the Second World War, not only were enormously more weapons produced, but also many times more refrigerators, washing machines, cars, clothing, etc., and many more means of production, etc. etc. Generally, more of everything was produced after the Second World War, a phenomenon that is therefore not limited to arms production. In addition, as is customary under capitalism because it is necessary, production technology has been constantly revolutionised and improved. Now for numbers: In 1947, England already reached the production level of 1938, in 1964 it was already doubled. France also reaches the pre-war level of 1938 in 1947, and by 1957 industrial production is twice as high. West Germany caught up with the pre-war level of the German Reich as early as 1952, and by 1960 it had doubled. The US reached their peak of 1943 already in 1952 and doubled it again by 1968. Japan reaches the pre-war level in 1953 and by 1959 has already achieved significantly more than double the industrial production. The USSR reaches the level of 1939 in 1948, it is doubled in 1954. Worldwide the pre-war level was exceeded in 1946, doubled in ‘53, quadrupled in 1964, increased eightfold in 1975 and increased sixteenfold in 1993. So when, please, is reconstruction completed when the pre-war level is reached, when the pre-war level is doubled, when the pre-war level is quadrupled? A post-war period, on the other hand, ends when the first massive stagnations in the global accumulation of capital reappear and openly expose capital to its own limits. The end of the post-war period also means at the same time the opening of a new phase that will sooner or later prepare the ground for another clash of enormous capitalist federations of nations, regardless of the will of those involved – or proletarian revolution. But the long phase of more or less unimpeded growth up to the 1960s was not due to magical means of the bourgeoisie, but was in some respects due on the one hand to the immediate result of war policy, and on the other hand to the dissolution of the corset-like colonial structures. But to see this cannot be demanded of a current that wants to see nothing but local proxy wars in the past anti-colonial wars. How does the ICC see the end of this so-called reconstruction period? By a “mess” in the economic relationships existing up to that point, caused by the fact that “the former buyer countries of the US bourgeoisie suddenly began to show a strong commercial activity. In 1967 the US had to record its first negative balance of trade since 1893. The means, which the system had employed for decades, were exhausted and no possible solution was in sight”. How “sudden” this aggressiveness of the former buyer countries of the US was, can be seen by looking at the graph, which shows the shifts in world industrial production. So there is no trace of suddenness:

As can be clearly seen, the world production share of the USA, like that of all the other major industrialised countries listed here individually, has been falling steadily, and not just since 1967. The post-war period of expansion of capital is virtually continuously marked by this tendency, which incidentally begins even before the Second World War. The increase in 1947 is due to languishing production in other countries, thus reflecting a factual reconstruction effect. In a further graph (see below) we show the distribution of these industrial products, which also shows that the central sales markets for industrial products have always been and – in contrast to the theses of the “decadence theorists” – have always been in the developed, above all the large industrial countries.

It is easy to see from both graphs that the shifts within both capital and the dominant capital itself are considerable, do not occur “suddenly”, but are the result of an ever-long struggle. Why the ICC does not mention the Vietnam War, or the changes in the world currency system, the oil question, etc., with the trade deficit which began in 1967, remains a mystery. Instead, for a change, the ICC now goes into theoretical depth and tries to explain to us why arms production would represent a “pure loss to global capital”.

The Intricate Essence of Arms Production

After the ICC tried to prove that “reconstruction” and arms production were two pillars of the expansion of capital (which allegedly did not actually expand), but they have been exposed as theoretical crutches of the ICC, it now tells us that “the limits of this type of sales markets” must be examined if one wants to “understand the foundations of the inevitability of the next major crises of the system”. To understand these foundations, if we may, merely require a cursory study of Capital volume 1. In any case, they will not be found in the “sales market limits” for armaments, including in the sense in which the ICC intends to deal with the issue, and not even if it raises false hopes and explains: “The general confusion regarding the essence of arms production forces us to clarify this problem”. As noble as the intent, as pitiful is its success. The treatises of the ICC, to explain the so-called “essence of arms production”, only contribute more to the confusion than they serve to clarify anything, and in order to unravel this confusion, we are forced here, so to speak, to ruminate on the 101s of Marxist theory on productive labour – that is how appalling the level is.

In the conception of the ICC, the particularity of weapons consists in that they have a use-value that cannot re-enter the production process in any form. In contrast to this would be, for example, a washing machine, which could be used to reproduce labour-power and thus, because of its “use-value essence”, be returned to the production process in the form of variable capital. Computers etc., if they were used as objects of labour, “can act as constant capital. But weapons can only destroy or rust”. First to the qualification: for the hunter, no matter if bounty hunter or deer hunter, the weapon is first of all a means of production, like for the shoemaker the hammer and for the screw maker the lathe. Does the value of the sport rifle of the recreational shooters re-enter into variable capital, like the value of the football that the proletarian leisure kicker has bought? Probably yes, so a weapon resembling the ICC washing machine. For the guard and lock company and for the private army, weapons are also means of production – without a gun there is no production of “security”, a commodity like any other. Obviously, the “use-value essence” of weapons can be quite different. The ICC talks about weapons in general, but, to be taken seriously, it can only talk about the weapons that are consumed by the state, i.e. by the administrative agencies of total capital. So it cannot be a question of a “use-value of weapons as such”, but we already have an additional determination here, that of the consumer, without which this thesis of the ICC would be pure nonsense from the outset.

So we have seen that products of arms production – to reduce them to weapons is proof of ignorance of army organisation anyway – have to be consumed by the state, so that they do not have to immediately re-enter the valorisation process of capital. Only, before the state can consume these weapons, it must, as a rule, pay for these commodities like any other consumer. It issues a payment order, the cash register rings, and the armourer or uniform maker leaves satisfied, because at that moment he has received the replacement for the value of the commodities, has realised the surplus value, and possibly an extra profit minus the bribe for the official concerned. Incidentally, the state pays with money and not with capital, as the ICC assumes! This money, now that the M-C-M’ cycle is complete, must first be transformed back into capital. The surplus value thus realised is divided into three unequal parts, rent and profit, which is divided into the private consumption fund of the capitalist and new capital to be invested. Thus a part of the profit, probably the greater part, is transformed back into capital and invested in variable (labour-power) and constant (means of labour) capital. Here the volume of the constant capital will, if possible, exceed the volume of the same from the previous process, so that at the next turnover of the capital M’ has become M”.

But the ICC knows better, it was there:

“The arms buyer pays with capital, and in return he receives a commodity that can never become capital. What global capital gains in the person of the arms buyer is lost in the person of the arms seller. The overall result of the operation is zero.”

Capital, as the ICC correctly states, is “above all a social relation”. But now the ICC turns capital into a means of payment, hence probably the qualification “above all”. Let’s leave aside for a moment the concept of “global capital” (we will take it apart further down the line) and transfer the whole circus to the national level. We have seen that the state has bought pants from the uniform maker and weapons from the armourer, through money. But the money of the state is certainly not capital from the outset. To become this, it would have to be invested productively, in state enterprises for example. The money of the state is the result of the taxation of the various revenues, wages, rents and profits, apart from all other revenues, such as highway robbery, customs duties, fines, etc. Government revenue is monetary revenue, so it is anything but capital. Therefore the state can either spend money for consumption or convert it into capital itself, either directly, by acting as an entrepreneur, or indirectly, as a monetary subsidy to the capitalists, who in turn must first make this money blessing into capital. Although the state is the central political committee of the national total capital, that is, the capital that strives for constant valorisation within its borders, it is not itself capital as such, nor is its money:

“Capital, however, becomes commodity or money by being exchanged directly for labour capacity and is only exchanged to be replaced by more labour than is contained in it.”[14]

The consumption of weapons and other equipment suitable for war is therefore nothing more for the state and the economy as a whole than the consumption of pencils for government offices, cars for ministers, lollipops for state kindergartens, etc. The mystical “use-value essence” of weapons thus increasingly vanishes into thin air. The operation of buying weapons would at most be nil if the state were to produce the weapons as an entrepreneur and then consume them itself. In this situation an external customer would have to be found urgently. The particularity of the use-value of armaments (as long as they are not identical with civilian goods) is that they are usually not consumed as a means of production for the above-mentioned private army, but by state organisations, which thereby provide their respective capital with a service that is of course not entirely free of charge, but a service that the respective capital does not want to do without in view of the threatening external competition.

Social Total Capital or “Global Capital”?

With the fall of the thesis that arms production is “bought with capital”, the whole construct of the ICC, regardless of so-called “global capital”, falls to pieces. However, it will be examined here how the ICC constructs the concept of “global capital” and what methods it uses to do so. First we are again confronted with a story from actual life, this time not of the waterlilies, but almost of the pirates, the actual life of the big city thieves:

“The fact that capital as globality ‘lives’ only in fragmented form does not mean that it does not exist. The thieves of a city live in constant competition with each other, and the law of their milieu is that of the strongest. But nevertheless this milieu exists as such, and it also has its own interests (e.g. towards the police). The fact that this milieu cannot exist on its own, i.e. that it cannot have a collective and uniform consciousness of its interests, does not change the problem. Global capital is always a sum of antagonistic capitals. It is governed by general laws that only work at the level of global capital. It has particular properties (world wars, world crises) from which none of the parts escape, and which none of the parts can control decisively.”

It is of course very straightforward to compare thieves with capital, but this makes things neither clearer nor more correct. Firstly, it is hard to see why capital is allowed to be global, but the thieves are not and only form “the milieu” in a city. In any case, thieves are not an actual unity, even if one can conceptually grasp them as a unity. Every revolutionary knows that the criminal milieu is to be avoided precisely because, despite all the equality of interests against the police, on the one hand it cooperates with them if there is a benefit to be gained from it (and this equality of interests is more of a romantic glorification), and on the other hand because all thieves are also in competition with each other and, if necessary, also steal from, kill and cheat each other. But as capital is global, so is crime. But let us leave the sphere of the lame comparison and consider “global capital”. Global capital also has common interests, for example vis-à-vis the working class, which Marx explicitly emphasised on the occasion of the crushing of the Paris Commune. And after all, it is a global social relation. But this global relation precisely for capital implies the competition against each other, which in the crises elicits the winners of this competition and in the wars first of all questions the winners. Capital appears as a unified and cohesive power towards the oppressed and exploited part of humanity, but it acts as such only in exceptional cases, and then politically. Economically, the form of existence of capital is its fragmentation. In it, and only in it, can it continue to develop. Here exactly we again have the antagonism between social production, capital as a global social production relation, and private appropriation, i.e. national, monopolistic and even smaller appropriation of surplus value. The ICC has not understood a bit of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, but it pretends to have eaten wisdom with spoons and Marxism from golden plates. But let us see how the ICC is cobbling together its hollow concept (but it is hardly possible to speak of “conceptualising” here). It has the audacity to claim that Marx “did not hesitate to place himself at that level”.

We shall see that this is an outright lie. In order to get its entourage and readership in the right mood at once, to “not hesitate” to defect to “decadence theory” and its emanations, as Marx would have done, it threateningly prophesies beforehand: “If one wanted to understand the essence of the production of weapons without the concept of global capital, one could immediately do without an analysis”, in plain language: now do it like Marx, do not hesitate and accept the “concept of global capital”.

Now, a quotation shows the boldness with which Marx used this concept:

“In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world of trade as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is established everywhere and has taken possession of every branch of industry”[15].

As always when reading texts by eclecticists, it is worthwhile to look up the quoted passages. And here the only thing that remains to be done is to take one’s hat off to so much falsifying impudence. What is quoted is a remark made by Marx, which comrade Karl made only to prevent false conclusions. Let’s look at the whole side note 21a:

“Here we take no account of the export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles of luxury either into means of production or means of subsistence, and vice versa…”[16]

Marx not only hesitated, he abstracted from export trade, the worldwide interweaving of individual capitals, i.e. in plain English: let us disregard the interweaving of individual capitals in order to clearly explain the object of labour, regardless of the particular influences that world trade brings with it. Expressed positively, this means that world trade simply brings in other moments, but these are not to be dealt with here. The ICC, however, goes so far in its lack of understanding that it resorts to the most primitive forms of vulgarisation and tries to portray capital as living off a single pool, raking in capital and paying with capital, in short, they fall not only behind all categories of Marxism, but even far behind bourgeois economics. Capital as a global social relation, as even global social total capital, is not a uniform magnitude, but rather an expression of a continuous process of valorisation, which functions according to determinate laws and includes a distribution relation. But a totality of equal conditions is not automatically a unity, and Marx underlines this regarding capitalism by constantly emphasising the anarchy of capitalist production. An example of this is car traffic. It can also be conceived of globally, and is subject to the same influences worldwide, for example through a reduction in the price of crude oil and thus of fuel it will increase (provided this is reflected in the price), through an increase in crude oil prices it will decrease, etc. But no one would seriously come up with the idea of ascribing a “being as a unity” to transport, although conceptually conceived as a unity. Car traffic is subject to the same conditions worldwide, functions according to more or less the same rules, and yet it is only connected anarchically. It is the same with capitalist production. Moreover, the problem of the ICC is to stand completely bewildered before the dialectic of the contradictory movement within the valorisation process of capital. It does not see, because of its wrong conception of the causes of the crises, that the “disharmonious” development is guided by the crises again into “harmonious” paths, that the crises are not only chaos and confusion (which they are only on the level of appearance), but that they are the corrective for a developing disorder, in which the different capitals and the different departments of capital are brought back into a more or less reasonable connection, not intentionally, of course, but as a result of the economic laws of this mode of production that work in the background of all operations.

“Whereas, on the basis of capitalist production, the mass of immediate producers is confronted by the social character of their production in the form of strictly regulating authority and a social mechanism of the labour-process organised as a complete hierarchy — this authority reaching its bearers, however, only as the personification of the conditions of labour in contrast to labour, and not as political or theocratic rulers as under earlier modes of production — among the bearers of this authority, the capitalists themselves, who confront one another only as commodity-owners, there reigns complete anarchy within which the social interrelations of production assert themselves only as an overwhelming natural law in relation to individual free will.”[17]

“Since these latter confront one another only as commodity-owners, and everyone seeks to sell his commodity as dearly as possible (apparently even guided in the regulation of production itself solely by his own free will), the inner law enforces itself only through their competition, their mutual pressure upon each other, whereby the deviations are mutually cancelled. Only as an inner law, vis-à-vis the individual agents, as a blind law of Nature, does the law of value exert its influence here and maintain the social equilibrium of production amidst its accidental fluctuations.”[18]

The so-called “concept of global capital”, whose author is certainly not Marx, but the ICC that is obstinately searching for a new interpretation of relations, turns out on closer inspection to be another addition to the cabinet of horrors of the distortions of Marxism, a metaphysical construct of convulsive “innovators”.

Productive Labour and Unproductive Labour

Now the ICC wants to explain why “and how the state, the representative of national capital, keeps the armament capitalist alive while his production is ‘unproductive’ for national capital”. To be able to explain this, the ICC wants to “define in a precise manner the Marxist criterion of the ‘productive and unproductive’ essence of an industry”.

So we not only have productive and unproductive labour, but we are dealing with an entirely “unproductive industry”. What a shame! But the beginning is promising. Comrade Karl is quoted correctly at first:

“The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-valorisation of capital.”[19]

This is followed, adorned with Marx quotations, by a brief digression on the question of what productive labour was before capitalism, and comes to the correct conclusion that before capitalism, to a certain extent, any labour that produces a product in any form is productive. But Marx was not so much interested in this question as in the question of when labour is productive for capital. Be that as it may, the ICC now declares that the above quote is “insufficient, almost tautological” and there would be two reasons for this. Reason 1: surplus value must be created, reason 2: the capitalist must and wants to squeeze out surplus value. As if this was not expressed in the formula above, and as if this was a tautology. But one can already hear which way the wind is blowing:

“this thus eliminates the first determining ground of productive labour, as long as the capitalist produces commodities, and thus use-values […] Thus, for the individual capitalist, it is not sufficient that the labour he buys is objectified in some use-value: it must increase the value of his capital.”

Two deficiencies are to be noted here straight away: on the one hand, if the capitalist produces commodities, then he does not produce use-values as such, but first and foremost exchange values, which must, however, appear in the form of use-values. In the wording of the second sentence, this use-value as well reappears in a somewhat strange form. The capitalist is only interested in the use-value to the extent that through it he can realise the exchange value hidden in the commodity, i.e. he is not interested in it; not only is it not sufficient for him whether the labour is objectified in a use-value, but for the interests of capital this is only of secondary importance. This has to be said here, because the purpose of the long ICC preface is, as will be seen, to bring in use-value through the back door in places where it has no use to be.

For a better introduction to the problem, first of all the concepts are tangled up properly. The statement that “the determination” of productive labour under capitalism differs from the “general foundations of determination that were valid in the past” is followed by a description of this thesis. Before we come to these: it is not the “determination” or even the “foundations of determination” of productive labour that have changed under capitalism, but productive labour itself. Since for capital only the labour producing surplus value is productive, productive labour has thus shed its concrete form in capitalism and taken on the abstract form of being a producer of exchange value. For the ICC, however, the difference to the previous modes of production is “not in the squeezing out of surplus value itself”!!! The reason given for this is that the feudal lord of the manor and the slave owner also received their “profit” from the surplus labour of the serfs and slaves. Do we really have to go back to the Marxist 101? All that happens here is the blurring of the difference between surplus value, the production of which is characteristic of capitalism, and the appropriated surplus product of the feudals and the slaveholders. The surplus product squeezed from the serfs and slaves was only interesting from its use side, not from its exchange side, the exchange value. It is only under capitalism that the surplus product also takes on the form of surplus value, and this is precisely one of the most elementary distinctions between the capitalist mode of production and the preceding ones, and therefore only capitalist production can be called “production of surplus value”.

This conceptual shuffling was important for the ICC because it not only correctly notes that the surplus product was largely unproductively consumed in antiquity or feudal times, because it was suitable for “reinvestment” only to a limited extent (apart from the peasants’ compulsory labour for building castles or the use of slaves, for example for the purposes of war etc. in antiquity, a “form of production” at the time), and because under capitalism the surplus product must again be transformed into capital in the form of surplus value, so that the accumulation carousel turns. But then it explains that “the problem of the possibility of this transformation is a fundamental question in the definition of productive labour in the capitalist system”. To make this a “problem” at all, the ICC explains a little later:

“From the point of view of global capital, the process of the general accumulation of capital […] that labour is productive which creates surplus value and which is crystallised in use-values which can themselves be consumed in the process of the accumulation of capital. This is why we believe that the labour – dead or alive – used for the production of weapons (as well as luxury goods etc.) is unproductive labour“.

So this is where the use-value, which was previously talked about so awkwardly, appears. All the confusion that the ICC brings in here to polish up its “concept of global capital” and ultimately its “decadence theory” can best be refuted by starting from scratch, so to speak, with Marx and going back to school:

“Only labour which produces capital is productive labour. Commodities or money become capital, however, through being exchanged directly for labour-power, and exchanged only in order to be replaced by more labour than they themselves contain. For the use-value of labour-power to the capitalist as a capitalist does not consist in its actual use-value, in the usefulness of this particular concrete labour—that it is spinning labour, weaving labour, and so on. He is as little concerned with this as with the use-value of the product of this labour as such, since for the capitalist the product is a commodity (even before its first metamorphosis), not an article of consumption. What interests him in the commodity is that it has more exchange