Ours Is An Age of Barbarism — Why?

Submitted by Anon on 20 August, 2007 - 2:31

“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement” — Vladimir Lenin

According to the classic account by Lewis H Morgan, “barbarism” is in human history the stage between savagery and civilisation; between the stage of “savage” peoples who are hunters and casual gatherers on one side, and on the other “civilised” people who have developed cities.

In barbarism, human beings have become settled, regular producers; agriculturalists, herdsmen, handicraftsmen. Over thousands of years, these “barbarians” create all the prerequisites of civilisation. In barbarism, human beings had already developed most of the agricultural technique that would underscore human life for ensuing thousands of years, up to recent times. In barbarism the productivity of labour developed from the “savage” stage in which one human being would, like a beast eternally browsing in search of food, “produce” barely enough to stay alive and reproduce, to the stage in which it “paid” to keep war captives alive as slaves able to produce for their masters a surplus over what was needed to keep the producers alive. Classes of exploiters and exploited developed.

Barbarism was one of the great moves forward in human history. It was unavoidable; there was no progressive alternative to it. Over long ages it created the preconditions for a higher stage.

The Age of Barbarism in which we live is not unavoidable. Our neo-barbarism is not a step forward, though it contains immense steps forward. It is no necessary stage of development though in it human society continues to develop. It is characterised by being a stage in human society that has too long outlived the time in which it created the preconditions for a higher, successor system: there is a progressive alternative to it.

It is the stage in which humankind, over a period of two centuries and more, has made tremendous strides in developing its power to control nature and, physically, in terms of medicine and surgery in all their aspects, over itself, but is as yet unable to break through into the higher stage of civilisation whose preconditions now exist, and have long existed.

That stage will be characterised by rational, human, as distinct from exploitative class, control over our society; and therefore and thereby, by rational human control over nature — by a harmonious relationship with the eco-system on which everything depends.

The progressive ruination of the environment is the terrible ultimate price humankind will pay and is paying for its prolonged incapacity to put its own society under rational democratic control.

Barbarism was characterised by progressive human control over nature, by accumulating awareness of how things worked, how natural processes could be understood, manipulated, modified, controlled and reproduced — that is, by human growth and developments in harmonious integration with nature.

Our neo-barbarism is characterised by the enormous and awesome but increasingly ruinous power over nature of a humankind that has not yet mastered its own social processes. We are still at the mercy of irrational social and political forces, even while our power to tame the irrational forces of nature, at whose mercy humankind has been throughout its existence, reaches an amazing and still increasing capacity.

Where social relations are concerned, humankind is kept in a condition of possibly suicidal macro-irrationality by the internal conflicts, contradictions and bestialities of a class society that has outlived itself: by the fact that we still live in a society controlled by an exploitative ruling class in its own interests.

In barbarism, human beings led short, brutal, insecure lives imprisoned in recurring hunger and the ever-present possibility of uncontrollable natural catastrophe — crop failure, floods, mysterious disease — and the predatory attentions of other human groups. They developed imaginative superstitions and religions that at bottom expressed a helpless incomprehension of nature and of themselves.

In neo-barbarism, uncontrolled social forces, and social forces controlled by the predators, create devastation in communities and countries such as natural calamities created in barbarism. Many, many millions of human beings, even those living in the richest countries, live lives imprisoned in want, insecurity and ever-threatening, socially-determined, avoidable catastrophe, side by side with people — close by or in countries that with modern transport systems are also “close by” — living rich lives and some of them extravagant lives.

We, too, develop superstitions that at bottom express helpless incomprehension. We send rockets into space, but immense numbers of people consult their star sign for insight into their daily lives. The dominant religion in our society is the awestruck worship of market forces and the human groups and individuals who personify their depredations. We take it for granted that tens of millions of human lives each year should be sacrificed to propitiate the forces of social chaos.

Enormous areas of rot and social decadence coexist in this society, alongside tremendous, escalating, technical and economic progress.

The contrasts have for socialists become weary, heart-breaking commonplaces: millions of Third World children starve to death every year while enormous “food moutains” in Europe are destoryed every year.

Millions of people, including millions of children, condemned to live below the official poverty lines in enormously rich countries like Britain and the US, where there is vast consumption of luxury goods and gross and obscene “conspicuous consumption” by the seriously rich.

A magically expanding magic-working clinical drugs industry whose best products are priced beyond the reach of millions who need them most — not only in spectacular and dramatic crises like that created by the HIV-AIDS plague in Africa, but in the daily life of millions of the poor in rich countries like Britain and the US.

Tremendously sophisticated means of communication mainly disseminating the modern equivalent of bear-baiting, lunatic-tormenting and gladiatorial sport spectacles in a commerce-regulated and profit-driven, lowest-common-denominator culture.

The list could be endlessly extended.

Karl Marx, generalising from the experience of history, said that no society gives way to something else until it has exhausted all the potential inherent in its system of production. Karl Marx also approvingly quoted the dictum of the English political economist William Petty: “Labour is its father, the earth its mother.” In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels outlined the alternative in the history of human society to the victory of the representative of historical progress: “The mutual ruination of the contending classes” takes on a new and terrible meaning in our time, in a society that progressively destroys the natural preconditions of production and is destroying the conditions of its own social existence.

The capitalist neo-barbarism in which we live is simultaneously civilisation of a very high order and yet the darkest barbarism — an inchoate and ultimately untenable hybrid. In barbarism, humankind was at the mercy of nature; in neo-barbarism, very large aspects of nature are at the mercy of the masters of human kind.

This age of neo-barbarism is not determined by an inadequate development of humankind’s power over nature and low levels of labour productivity, or by a too slow building up of the potential for humankind to raise itself to a higher stage: it is superimposed on an economy and technology that make it unnecessary and therefore, because something better is possible, a tragic abomination.

Our neo-barbarism is defined by our incapacity to raise ourselves to a higher stage for which the economic and many of the social preconditions already exist. That is defined by the belatedness of the working class socialist revolution.

Today powerful labour movements exist all across the world. The idea that they exist to replace capitalism with a higher system, to take humankind from neo-barbarism to socialism, is not their guiding principle.

Earlier generations of socialists thought of the transition from capitalism to socialism as a much more simple business than it has proved to be, as something covering a shorter time span than it is taking.

They thought of the self-preparation of the working class to lead humankind out of capitalist neo-barbarism as a much more straightforward thing than it is. Labour movements experience not only phases of growth and political development, but also phases of destruction and defeat — such as that experienced by the revolutionary labour movement before World War Two — and of decay, decline and political regression — and then, again, periods of new growth and political refocusing.

Side by side with the long political regression of labour movements in a country like Britain, there has been tremendous growth of working class movements all across the world.

AS barbarism led to civilisation, feudalism led to the higher stage, capitalism. The bourgeoisie too spent ages as a class that needed to remake society in its own image. It took the bourgeoisie, living within feudalism and monarchist absolutist systems, hundreds of years to make itself fit to be the ruling class.

It went through many phases, experienced false starts, defeats, was led into “historical compromises” with its class-antagonists.

As a revolutionary class it had immense advantages compared to the proletariat in capitalist society. Its wealth, power, self-rule and historical self-awareness grew even within the old system; the growth of markets, the increasing role of money in the old society, cleared its way and made it socially a subordinate segment of the exploiters even before it ruled. By contrast, the working class in capitalism remains the basic exploited class: it can progress only by independent organisation and by way of its social and political awareness.

Leon Trotsky situated the labour movement of his time in the historical perspective of how the bourgeoisie had developed into a ruling class: “The Social Democracy — from whom we broke by breaking with the Second International — marked a certain epoch in the development of the working class. This was not the epoch of revolution but the epoch of reform. Future historians, comparing the bourgeoisie’s course of evolution with that of the proletariat, may say that the working class, too, had a Reformation of its own.

“What was the gist of the bourgeois Reformation? At the dawn of its independent historical action, the bourgeoisie did not immediately set itself the task of conquering power but sought instead to secure for itself, within the framework of the feudal state, to alter its forms and to transform it into a bureaucratic monarchy. It transfigured religion, personalising the latter, that is, adapting religion to bourgeois conformities. In these tendencies we find expressed the relative historical weakness of the bourgeoisie. After securing these positions for itself, the bourgeoisie went on to the struggle for power.

“Social Democracy proved incapable of translating Marxism into social-revolutionary action. The role of the Social Democracy dwindled to an attempt to utilise bourgeois society and the bourgeois state in the interests of the working masses. The goal of the conquest of power, although formally set forth, exercised virtually no effect upon the actual practice. Activities were not directed toward the revolutionary utilisation of parliamentarianism, but toward adapting the working class to bourgeois democracy. This adaptation of a proletariat not yet fully conscious of its own strength to the social, state and ideological forms of bourgeois society was apparently a historically inevitable process, but it was just that and nothing more, that is a historical process delimited by the given conditions of a given epoch.

“This epoch of proletarian reformation gave birth to a special apparatus of labour bureaucracy with special mental habits of its own, with its own routine, pinch-penny ideas, chameleon-like capacity for adaptation, and predisposition to myopia.”

In fact, there was a second epoch of working class reformism after World War Two. It came because of the defeat of the revolutionary movement, whose spokesman Trotsky had been, and it was made possible by the expansion of capitalism. It was in the 1940s and after, that the British labour movement experienced its reformist high point.

The threat posed by the demagogic Stalinist propaganda against capitalism on one side, and on the other the strength of the labour movement, forced the ruling class to concede welfare states to the working people. The reform labour movements bided their time within capitalism, losing drive and even reformist coherence, falling more and more under the control of college education professionals who, even in many trade unions, replaced the old leading layers rooted in day to day working class experience and, after their self-serving fashion, loyal to the working class.

The mass Communist Parities outside the Third World were distinguished from the Social Democrats not by revolutionary anti-capitalist politics — in their domestic policies they shared the political assumptions and parliamentarian modus operandi of the reformists — but by adherence to the USSR, the great "Socialist Fatherland" beyond the mountains that would, somehow, by its prosperity and ultimate triumph in competition with capitalism, bring about world socialism (whatever that was). The history of the CPs in the last half of the 20th century is the story of their progressive disillusionment with the USSR.

The admission by Stalin's successor Kruschev that Stalin was a mass murderer, Kruschev’s bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the relapse to hard-faced neo-Stalinism in the mid-60s after the brief rule of the reforming Stalinist Tsar, Kruschev — all of these things eroded and progressively destroyed the faith of the CPers in the USSR. In their disillusionment they — in the first place, layers of intellectuals — rediscovered the virtues of bourgeois democracy. If Stalinism was the only alternative, then they were not mistaken that the bourgeois-democratic system was not only preferable but also the one that was historically progressive.

By the time, a decade ago, that Stalinism collapsed in the USSR, the Stalinist parties, even where they were still large and largely working class-based organisations, were typically on the right wing of the reform "socialist" spectrum.

For more than 100 years things other than working class defeat and the continuation of capitalism to this stage have been possible. Working class victory and the beginning of a rational socialist system was possible; but we have had defeat. As a result, we have neo-barbarism super-imposed by an outmoded bourgeois ruling class on an economically dynamic society.

Trotsky, who had helped the Russian workers in October 1917 demonstrate that the working class suffers from no inbuilt organic political incapacity, understood the crux of the crisis of human civilisation in the mid-20th century as a crisis of the labour movement. Great labour movements had been created on the perspective of preparing the working class to suppress wage labour and capitalism — a working class that would make itself the ruling class, and freeing itself from capitalism, begin to free humankind from class society. The leaderships, bureaucracies and upper working class layers of the old socialist movement had, when the first imperialist World War broke out, delivered the labour movements into the hands of their bourgeois enemy as cannon fodder and butchers of the workers of other nations.

The Communist International had been created to restore independent working class politics after the collapse of 1914. The Stalinist counter-revolution in the USSR in the 1920s tied the Communist International to the new bureaucratic ruling class in the USSR.

When, after 1929, capitalism reached the stage of convulsive semi-collapse, powerful labour movements existed that were strong enough to kick it into its historical grave. But they were everywhere tied to either the bourgeoisie, through the reform-socialist "labour movements", or to the Russian ruling class, through its Communist Parties. Trotsky wrote of their “perfidy” and “betrayal”.

In the confusion created by the existence of big socialist parties that weren't socialist and big Communist Parties that weren't communist, the working class suffered murderous accumulating defeat. Trotsky organised the tiny forces that could be organised to compete, with desperate urgency, for the leadership of the working class against the perfidious incumbent leaderships. But Trotsky and everything he represented was defeated and — as we have to recognise in retrospect — defeated for a whole historical period. Capitalism renewed itself on the mass graves, on the destroyed means of production and the ruined cities of the Second World War and began a long period of expansion. Stalinism survived, expanded and then slowly asphyxiated in its own bureaucratic caul, for half a century, until, in Europe, it collapsed.

IT is impossible to tell how long it will take the working class to make itself ready to suppress capitalist neo-barbarism and take humankind forward. It is more easily definable in terms of things that must be accomplished.

The labour movements again need to learn by way of their own experience and by the enlightening work of socialists:

l that capitalism is neither natural nor eternal;

l that it is a historically finite system whose inner processes — the creation and recreation of a proletariat and the relentless socialisation of the means of production, of which “globalisation” is the latest manifestation — prepare its own end;

l that capitalism digs its own grave;

l that the working class, which finds no class in society “lower” than itself and which can only organise the economy collectively, that is, democratically, is the representative within capitalism of the post-capitalism future, and the only force that can suppress this neo-barbarism and replace it with something better.

Quick, seemingly miraculous, transformations in the thinking of labour movements have occurred and will occur. That workers who accept capitalism is in a condition in which her objective interests as both worker and human being are at odds with the ideas about society and the world she has been taught to accept. Once that begins to change, everything can change.

Marxism is a necessary part of this process.

Labour movements can arrive at vaguely “socialist” hopes and aspirations, just as young people can arrive at angry rebellion against capitalism. Scientific understanding of capitalism, of society, of the centrality of the working class and the politics of working class self-liberation — in short, understanding of how we can map the way from capitalism neo-barbarism to human liberation — does not arise “spontaneously”. That is what Marxist theory is for — that is Marxism’s irreplaceable contribution.

Writing about Russia 100 years ago, Lenin put it like this: “Social-Democracy [the revolutionary Marxist movement] is a combination of the labour movement with socialism. Its task is not passively to serve the labour movement at each of its separate stages, but to represent the interests of the movement as a whole, to point out to this movement its ultimate aims and its political tasks, and to protect its political and ideological independence.

“Isolated from Social-Democracy, the labour movement becomes petty and inevitably becomes bourgeois: in conducting only the economic struggle, the working class loses its political independence; it becomes the tail of other parties and runs counter to the great slogan: ‘The emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves.’

“In every country there has been a period in which the labour movement existed separately from the socialist movement, each going its own road; and in every country this state of isolation weakened both the socialist movement and the labour movement. Only the combination of socialism with the labour movement in each country created a durable basis for both the one and the other. But in each country this combination of socialism with the labour movement took place historically, was brought about in a special way, in accordance with the conditions prevailing at the time in each country… The process of combining the two movements is an extremely difficult one, and there is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that it is accompanied by vacillations and doubts.”.

And again: “The strikes of the 1890s [in Russia] revealed far greater flashes of consciousness: definite demands were put forward, the time to strike was carefully chosen, known cases and examples in other places were discussed, etc. While the earlier riots were simply uprisings of the oppressed, the systematic strikes represented the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo. Taken by themselves, these strikes were simply trade union struggles, but not yet Social-Democratic struggles. They testified to the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers, but the workers were not and could not be conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system, i.e., it was not yet Social-Democratic consciousness. In this sense, the strikes of the 1890s, in spite of the enormous progress they represented as compared with the ‘riots’, represented a purely spontaneous movement.

“We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realise the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.

The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. According to their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. Similarly, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose quite independently of the spontaneous growth of the labour movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of ideas among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.”

Today, Marxism, scientific socialism — what in Lenin’s time was called Social Democracy — is everywhere separate from the labour movement, greatly more so than when Lenin was writing. To unite Marxism with the labour movement is the task of revolutionary socialists and consistent democrats everywhere. The collapse of Stalinism gives us a better chance of doing that then we have had in 75 years.

But Marxism itself — the consciousness of the unconscious processes of society — Marxism as a guide to revolutionary action, has suffered tremendous blows in the last historical period. The supreme irony is that the collapse of Russian Stalinism, which had through much of the 20th century turned “Marxism” into the pidgin religion of a totalitarian state, should have as its first consequence the discrediting of “Marxism”. That is only the first consequence. The collapse of the Russian state-fostered pidgin Marxism clears the way for the development of unfalsified Marxism. We have a considerable way to go yet to achieve that. One of the articles in this issue of Workers’ Liberty — “The Degradations of Apparatus Marxism” — presents a detailed analysis of how decrepit what passes for Marxism can become.

The revolutionary Marxist tradition is “given” but Marxism is not. Marxism as a living force in socialist organisations and in the labour movement is not something given — it has to be fought for and won and then again fought for and won over again, and then yet again.

It has to be clarified and refined and augmented, again and again in a never-ending process. That process is, in a word, “the class struggle on the ideological front”.

Lenin said it plainly and truly: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” He also said: “Practice without theory is blind: theory without practice is sterile.” In a declaration of the Editorial Board of the revolutionary newspaper Iskra, Lenin wrote:

“The intellectual unity of Russian Social-Democrats has still be to established, and in order to achieve this it is necessary, in our opinion, to have an open and thorough discussion of the fundamental principles and tactical questions… Before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all firmly and definitely draw the lines of demarcation. Otherwise, our unity will be merely a fictitious unity, which will conceal the prevailing confusion and prevent its complete elimination.

“Naturally, therefore, we do not intend to utilise our publication merely as a storehouse for various views. On the contrary, we shall conduct it along the lines of a strictly defined tendency. This tendency can be expressed by the word Marxism, and there is hardly need to add that we stand for the consistent development of the ideas of Marx and Engels, and utterly reject the half-way, vague and opportunistic emendations which have now become so fashionable… [Having rejected eclecticism and indifferentism, he went on:]

“But while discussing all questions from our own definite point of view, we shall not rule out of our columns polemics between comrades. Open polemics within the sight and hearing of all Russian Social-Democrats and class conscious workers are necessary and desirable, in order to explain the profound differences that exist, to obtain a comprehensive discussion of disputed questions, and to combat the extremes into which the representatives, not only of various views, but also of various localities or various ‘crafts’ in the revolutionary movement inevitably fall. As has already been stated, we also consider one of the drawbacks of the present-day movement to be the absence of open polemics among those holding avowedly differing views, an effort to conceal the differences that exist over extremely serious questions.”

These words offer a guide to revolutionary Marxists now. They will guide the way we conduct the relaunched Workers’ Liberty.

The fight for Marxism and for a Marxist labour movement is the fight to prepare the only force capable of taking humanity out of our age of neo-barbarism, the working class, for that task.

[Editorial from Workers' Liberty Vol2/1, Sept 2001]

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