Adopted by the Congress to Reconstitute the International Trotskyist Opposition
31 October 2022
World capitalism is failing to deal with five acute and interlocking crises: 1) the Covid-19 pandemic; 2) the roller-coaster economy resulting from the coincidence of the pandemic and the exhaustion of the weak recovery from the 2007-09 recession; 3) climate change and environmental degradation; 4) inter-imperialist rivalry and the new cold war; 5) inequality between and within nations, starkly evidenced by the pandemic.
As a result of the crises, social conditions are worsening: Workers suffering job losses, falling real wages, and declining social services. Peasants impoverished and forced off the land by drought and agribusiness. The urban poor, unable to make a living in the informal sector. Intensified attacks on oppressed ethnic groups and immigrants. Women forced to work under unsafe conditions during the pandemic or pushed out of social labor to care for family. Attacks on LGBTQ+ people. Gang, street and domestic violence, homicides, suicides, opioid and other drug overdoses. War and displacement.
The political situation is increasingly polarized: Center-left and center-right parties are less and less able to channel discontent into their electoral competition. The reformist parties that once led the workers’ and popular movements — social-democratic, Stalinist, and petty-bourgeois nationalist — have collapsed, moved to the right, or become marginalized. Broad left parties rise and fall, promising to end austerity and then capitulating to neoliberalism. Far-right and fascist parties are growing. The revolutionary left is small, fragmented, and generally disconnected from mass struggles.
Despite the unfavorable conditions, sectors of the workers and the oppressed continue to resist. In the past decade — and even in the past few years, despite Covid — there have been strikes and demonstrations for jobs, wages, relief, democracy, abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant rights. And against crackdowns, coups, corruption, inequality, price increases, subsidy eliminations, repressive laws, gendered violence, police repression, racism, xenophobia.
These have occurred in Latin America from Argentina and Chile to Mexico, in the US and Canada, in Africa from Tunisia and Egypt to Sudan to South Africa, in Europe from Ireland and Spain to Poland and Russia, and in Asia from Yemen, Palestine and Turkey to Pakistan and India to China, Myanmar and the Philippines.
The struggles have echoed each other. For example, the Arab Spring, the Indignados Movement, and Occupy Wall Street echoed each other in 2011. But the struggles have not been generalized, sustained, or coordinated. They have sometimes replaced leaders, but never governmental systems, let alone social systems. They are testaments to the courage and yearning for justice of workers and the oppressed, but they have not risen to the level of consciousness, organization, and mobilization needed to win.
Revolutionary Marxists should help build and lead struggles and promote the political clarity and confidence of the working class, but our additional and specific task is to overcome the weakness of our own movement. We must clarify our positions, evaluate our differences, and work to build revolutionary parties and a revolutionary International. A component of this is to overcome the disorientation and fragmentation of the heirs of Trotskyism and refound an International on a consistently revolutionary basis.
Covid-19
The most dramatic failure of world capitalism in the recent period is its failure in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. The disease itself is no surprise. Its origin is an old story: human activity encroaches on nature, giving a pathogen the opportunity to jump to human beings from another species. Global transportation networks mean that an outbreak of a highly contagious disease anywhere is likely to spread everywhere.
Governments had many tools to combat the pandemic, some of them centuries old. Containment: local, regional and countrywide lockdowns, travel bans. Mitigation: masks, social distancing, hygiene, ventilation, testing, contact tracing, quarantine, isolation, cancelling large events, closing restaurants and bars, closing schools and childcare centers. Treatment: hospitalization, intensive care, oxygen, mechanical ventilators. Pharmaceuticals: in the first year monoclonal antibody therapy, in the second year vaccines, in the third year antiviral drugs.
On the economic and social front, workers who could work remotely or safely distanced could have kept working. Essential workers in healthcare, nursing homes, childcare, teaching, agriculture, food processing, logistics, distribution, etc., could have kept working with the staffing levels, distancing, ventilation, personal protective equipment, and protocols they needed to work safely. If they were exposed to Covid or got sick, they could have been given paid time off to isolate or recover. Non-essential workers whose jobs required contact with others (restaurants, bars, entertainment, sports, travel, tourism, etc.) could have been given alternative work or leave with full pay, whenever the disease made their jobs too risky.
This didn’t happen. Instead, most governments, if they did anything at all, alternated between lockdowns that came too late and reopenings that came too soon. Their economies were disrupted, people got sick and died, and an angry minority rejected Covid-related mandates, insisting that they had the right to refuse, whatever the consequences for others.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at the end of 2021 governments had reported about 290 million Covid-19 cases and 5.4 million deaths. The figures are certainly too low, since most Covid-19 cases and deaths are not reported. For example, the Indian government reported about half a million deaths, but analysis of excess deaths — deaths above what would be expected in normal times — suggests that the real number may be as much as ten times higher.
By WHO figures, the hardest-hit regions were Europe, the US and Latin America, with 1.7 million deaths in Europe and 2.4 million deaths in the Americas. 0.72 million died in Southeast Asia, 0.32 million in the Eastern Mediterranean, 0.16 million in the Western Pacific, and 0.16 million in Africa. The countries with the most Covid-19 deaths were, in order, the US, Brazil, India, Russia, Mexico and Peru. The country with the highest mortality rate was Peru, with most of the next twenty from Eastern Europe.
The governments counted on vaccines to end the pandemic. According to WHO 51 percent of the world population was fully vaccinated at the end of 2021. In China 83 percent of the population was fully vaccinated, in Japan 79 percent, Italy and France 74 percent, Germany and Argentina 71 percent, Britain 70 percent, Brazil 66 percent, the US 60 percent, India 45 percent, and Russia 44 percent. With 7 percent fully vaccinated, Africa was the least-vaccinated continent.
China and other countries that enforced strict lockdowns and other “zero-Covid” policies greatly reduced their death tolls, but they are now caught in a bind. The virus continually enters their country from the rest of the world, and their populations lack the immunity they would have acquired if the virus had been allowed to infect more people. The governments can impose new lockdowns, but these further disrupt the economy and build resentment and cynicism.
How soon Covid-19 will run its course remains to be seen. The virus is evolving, and new variants may be able to evade the current vaccines. In any case, more pandemics are coming. Uncontrolled human encroachment on the environment continues, and the public health systems in most of the world, including in the advanced capitalist countries, are too rickety to contain the consequences.
The roller-coaster economy
The world capitalist economy was headed for a downturn before Covid-19 hit. The 2007-09 recession was the worst since the 1930s by some measures, the worst since 1982 by others. China recovered quickly, the advanced capitalist countries recovered slowly, and the countries dependent on exporting primary products recovered very little. Still, by 2020 the world economy had been growing for more than a decade, and another downturn was overdue.
The Covid-19 pandemic sent the world economy into a tailspin, as illness and lockdowns curtailed economic activity. According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Economic Outlook from December 2021, the world’s real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 3.4 percent in 2020, compared with a 1.3 percent fall in 2009 and an average growth of 3.3 percent for 2013-2019. In 2020 real GDP fell 3.4 percent in the US, 6.5 percent in the euro area, 4.6 percent in Japan, 7.3 percent in India, and 4.4 percent in Brazil. Only China grew, at a slow (for it) 2.3 percent.
The pandemic and the downturn caused immense suffering, but recovery began quickly. The March 2022 OECD Economic Outlook reports real GDP growth rates in 2021 of 5.6 percent for the world, 5.6 percent for the US, 5.2 percent for the euro area, 1.8 percent for Japan, 9.4 percent for India, 5.0 percent for Brazil, and 8.1 percent for China. The World Trade Organization (WTO) reports that world trade in goods, having fallen 8 percent in 2020, grew 9.8 percent in 2021.
Much of the reason for the quick reversal was massive Keynesian intervention by governments, both fiscal (deficit spending) and monetary (low interest rates, bond purchases, loan guarantees). The ruling classes feared economic collapse and the breakdown of social order.
The US government allocated $4 trillion to economic rescue in 2020 during the Trump administration — about 15 percent of GDP — and $2 trillion more in 2021 during the Biden administration. The European Union (EU) allocated 4 percent of GDP, and member states added another 5 percent. Britain allocated 11 percent, Japan 21 percent, China 2.5 percent with another 770 billion in loan guarantees, and India 9 percent. Countries with smaller economies allocated less, but recovery in the larger economies helped them too.
While the pandemic hasn’t yet run its course, the world economy is approaching pre-pandemic levels of activity. The most acute immediate problems are shortages and price increases.
The anarchy of capitalism means that production was cut back too far and restarted too slowly and erratically. The restart lag has led to shortages, which in turn have led to price increases. These extend back through the supply chain. Components for manufacturing, such as computer chips, are scarce and expensive, as are materials for construction, such as lumber. Logistics are snarled, because ships and containers were idled and in the wrong places for the restart. A shift in consumption from risky services to safer goods has aggravated the imbalance.
Economists, politicians and the commercial media are warning that the world economy is overheating. They argue that inflation is the most pressing economic problem, not unemployment. The governments have mostly ended the Covid-19 rescues and seek to impose austerity to pay back the debt incurred during their brief flirtation with Keynesianism. Citing the danger of a return to the stagflation (stagnation and inflation) of the 1970s and early 1980s, central banks are raising interest rates.
Their real concern is that the world economy is recovering too quickly and the labor market is too favorable to workers. Labor shortages mean that workers are in the strongest position since the latter 1990s to get wage increases through trade-union struggles or changing or threatening to change jobs.
For now the wage increases are more than offset by the rising prices of food, energy, housing, transportation, and consumer goods. But workers may be emboldened by the tight labor market and angered by its likely collapse. They may turn to collective action, union organizing and strikes.
Overaccumulation
The underlying problem for the capitalists is that they have accumulated too much: too many buildings, too much infrastructure, too much machinery, too much productive capacity. They can no longer invest their capital and get what they regard as an acceptable rate of return.
This has been their main concern since the 1970s, when the productive forces recovered from the destruction of World War I, the Depression and World War II, and the US, Europe, and Japan competed for a too-small world market. The expansion of manufacturing in South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, Eastern Europe, and other developing countries aggravated the problem. The rise of capitalist China has made the situation much worse.
The capitalists have to compete, as they did not during the postwar boom. They compete mainly by introducing new products and new methods of production to increase sales and reduce costs. In the past thirty years the most important new products have been based on computers, sensors, batteries and other electronics, and their linking via the Internet. From smartphones to robotics, consumer and producer goods are being sold that were ideas or prototypes thirty years ago.
The new technology has led to a vast restructuring of production. In manufacturing, robots are replacing workers for many tasks. Factories are smaller and more dispersed, connected by “just in time” logistics. Containerization, automation, and information technology have integrated and systemized logistics, as assembly lines did manufacturing a century ago, further converting workers into appendages of machines. Prefabricated construction using factory-made components is gaining in housing and commercial building.
Computers and the Internet have reshaped services, too. In poorer countries most retail transactions still take place in person, but in the advanced capitalist countries and the corresponding sectors of developing countries that is no longer the case. Most payments are made via electronic transfers. More and more purchases are made online and downloaded or delivered from warehouses, with no physical retail space. The Covid-19 pandemic has added healthcare and education to the list of services not necessarily provided in person.
The so-called “sharing economy” has brought the informal sector to the advanced capitalist countries. Airbnb, Uber, and other companies exploit not just the labor but also the houses and vehicles of their employees, with no commitment to guaranteeing their income and conditions. Google, Facebook, Baidu, Tencent, TikTok, and other Internet companies capture and mine data from their users, transforming communication, advertising and surveillance.
The restructuring means intensified exploitation of workers, the main way the capitalists offset their otherwise falling rate of profit. China’s rapid growth and workers’ struggles have led to large wage increases there, but in most other countries wages have stagnated since 1980. Labor productivity has continued to increase at past rates, but nearly all the gains from that have gone to the upper 10 percent — in rapidly descending share order, to billionaires, millionaires, managers and professionals, and tech and other highly skilled/educated workers.
The capitalists continue to use extra-competitive methods to boost their profits. Excess profits from monopoly control of industries. Rent from ownership of agricultural land and land containing oil, gas, lithium, copper, and other resources, even water. Rent from “intellectual property” secured by patents. As an example, Apple reported profits of $34.6 billion from revenue of $123.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021, a government-enforced rip-off.
In place of productive investment, speculative buying and selling of commodities and commodity futures to take advantage of current or anticipated shortages. Real estate flipping. Ponzi schemes like the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, the real estate bubble of the early 2000s, and the stock market mania of 2020-21.
The capitalists use their control of government to impose neoliberalism: tax cuts for corporations and the rich, cuts in services for workers and the poor, deregulation, privatization, austerity to repay debts. Meanwhile, military and police spending is sky-high.
The capitalists’ ability to automate and shift production as they like, with no government interference, gives them a big advantage. But the main change is the retreat of the workers’ movement. The unions and political parties supposedly representing the working class no longer resist.
But the economic system is vulnerable. The global assembly line is bigger and more decentralized, but it still exists. Strikes in telecommunications, logistics, or manufacturing would stop it. The capitalists have profited from the working-class retreat, but they’re also vulnerable to the resumption of struggle.
Climate change, environmental degradation
Covid-19 is only one way that human encroachment on the environment has brought disaster. Climate change is even more threatening. The starting point is global warming. Industry, agriculture, buildings, and transportation emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses. These trap the heat of solar radiation and warm the planet. Climate change is the result.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that human activity has raised global temperatures 1.2 °C (2 °F) above pre-industrial levels. The warming is uneven, with land temperatures rising twice as fast as ocean temperatures and polar temperatures twice as fast as mid-latitude temperatures. The rise, seemingly modest if it were evenly spread, causes many feedback loops which create tipping points beyond which changes accelerate rapidly.
The IPCC identifies 1.5 °C as a tipping point beyond which the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps — raising sea levels and diminishing earth’s reflection of sunlight — changes in ocean and air currents, melting of permafrost, desertification, and other feedback loops would cause irreparable damage to the biosphere.
Limiting warming to 1.5 °C would require halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, showed once again that the capitalist governments are unwilling to commit to the steps that would be needed to achieve the 1.5 °C goal. They are not even living up to the commitments they have made. Unless the working class intervenes, the world capitalist economy will blow past any goals, and we will all suffer the consequences.
Global warming leads to a general rise in temperature and also to heat waves and stationary heat domes. Paradoxically, it also weakens the northern and southern jet stream and leads to cold waves and extensions of the polar vortex, maintaining cold air over an area for an extended period of time.
Global warming causes more moisture to evaporate and be held and carried in the air. This leads to drought in some places and floods in others. It also leads to more extreme weather: rainstorms, ice storms, wind storms, tornados, hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons. Heat, dryness, wind, and lightning or human carelessness lead to wildfires, even in tundra and other areas that would not have burned until recently.
The ocean absorbs about a quarter of the carbon dioxide released by human activity. As a result, the oceans are not only warming, they are becoming more acidic. The weakening of ocean currents means that oxygen is less circulated, creating dead zones. Ocean levels are rising. This, plus extreme weather, makes coastal living more precarious.
Pollution further degrades the environment. Petrochemicals and plastic pollute land, water, and air. Industrial farming, overuse of fertilizers, and the raising and slaughtering of more and more animals for meat add to the pollution. Forests are cut for agriculture and urbanization. Deserts are spreading. Loss of habitat means loss of biodiversity, the extinction of species.
Climate change and environmental degradation affect everyone, but they affect poorer countries more than richer countries, and poorer people more than affluent ones. The imperialist countries dump their trash in the countries they dominate, and shift their dirtiest production there. The capitalists and the middle classes can work and live away from mining, manufacturing, and industrial farming. Workers can’t. Environmental racism exposes workers of color and immigrants to greater dangers. Women disproportionately have to deal with the consequences of this recklessness.
No capitalist solutions
The capitalist and their governments have no solutions. Those who denied climate change now claim that the market will solve the problem. Relative costs will lead energy companies to shift from coal and oil to natural gas, nuclear power, solar panels, and windmills. Auto and truck companies will shift to battery-powered electric vehicles. Corporations will develop techniques to sequester CO2 underground. Green capitalism will save us. To the extent government has a role, it’s to help communities adapt to the consequences of climate change, not to prevent it.
There are solutions, of course, but not capitalist ones. A government of the workers and the oppressed could democratically plan a transition to an economy whose principles would be 1) meeting human needs, 2) equality, and 3) sustainability, that is, restoring the metabolism between human society and nature.
The transition would require expanding some kinds of production and reducing or eliminating others. The expansion (growth) would be to provide water, food, housing, healthcare, education, recreation, and culture for all the world’s people. To eliminate the burning of hydrocarbons and nuclear fission, and to develop renewable energy. To replace economic activity that destroys the human and natural forces of production with less harmful, less wasteful, more efficient methods. To reduce the hours of work and allow all people to enjoy what life has to offer.
The reduction or elimination (degrowth) would include the military, police and prisons, surveillance, excess consumption of the rich, useless or harmful consumption of all kinds, marketing and advertising, products designed to break or become obsolete, waste of human labor and natural resources, and so on. This could lead to determining that some kinds of supposedly green technology (batteries, hydroelectric dams, perhaps even windmills and solar farms) use too many resources and do too much damage to pursue.
It would be technically possible to achieve the objectives of meeting human needs, equality, and sustainability — democratically balancing them as necessary. But capitalism can’t do it.
New Imperialisms
From a great power standpoint, the confrontation between the US and its allies on one side, and Russia and China on the other, looks much like the Cold War before the Sino-Soviet split in 1961. But then the Soviet Union and China were bureaucratically deformed workers’ states, that is, states in which capitalism had been overthrown but the party and state bureaucracy ruled, not the workers. Now the confrontation is among imperialist powers on all sides.
First a definition. In his 1916 book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin famously defined capitalism as having five basic features:
1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; 4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.
Russia and China are full participants in the imperialist order, with their own monopolies, finance capital, financial oligarchies, capital export, and place in the economic and territorial division of the world.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949 overthrew capitalism and established governments that could direct their countries’ economic development, despite the hostility of the imperialist powers. They succeeded well enough so that the Soviet Union could defeat Germany in World War II, China could fight the US to a standstill in the Korean War, and the two countries together could supply matériel for the Vietnamese to defeat the US in the Vietnam War.
By the 1980s both the Soviet Union and China were at an impasse. They had developed to the point where they could no longer grow by extensive means — doing more of the same thing — sufficiently fast to satisfy the demands of the bureaucracy, the professional and managerial middle class, and the working class. They had to grow by more intensive means, producing higher quality goods and services, using more efficient techniques.
The Soviet bureaucracy, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, turned to perestroika (market restructuring) and glasnost (openness) to try to accelerate growth and engage the population. The attempt failed. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the bureaucracy quickly restored capitalism through a process of “shock therapy.” The process went too far and threatened to make Russia a vassal of US and European imperialism. The new capitalist ruling class turned to Vladimir Putin and the security apparatus to restore authoritarian order.
The post-Soviet Russian Federation was born imperialist. State enterprises were partially or wholly privatized and handed over to oligarchs emerging from the party and state bureaucracy. The Russian Federation is an imperialist structure, with the Russian population dominating the non-Russian population. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) inherited a web of economic and military ties from the Soviet Union. Russia, as the strongest economic and military power in the bloc, has an imperialist relationship to the other CIS members.
The Chinese bureaucracy led by Deng Xiaoping embraced perestroika, but not glasnost. They repressed the 1989 Tiananmen protest, with its demands for democracy and against inequality and corruption, and restored capitalism on their own terms. They managed the transition more smoothly than the Soviet bureaucracy did, essentially offering rising living standards in exchange for acceptance of their rule.
China grew quickly as a capitalist power. The decisive role of the party and state bureaucracy in the economy gives it a big advantage over conventional capitalist countries. India’s population is as large as China’s, and its resources are almost as great, but its economy is much smaller. China’s GDP is now two-thirds that of the US in foreign-exchange terms. It manufactures and exports more than any other country, and is the world’s second-biggest importer.
China has monopolies and billionaires aplenty and massive investments around the world. Its “Belt and Road” initiative evokes patriotic images of the former glory days of the Chinese Empire. Its military spending is second only to the US. By any measure, China is imperialist.
New Cold War
Russian imperialism seeks to reassemble as much as possible of the former Russian Empire, nearly all of which was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Its energy and other resources and military might allow it to project power outside that region, acting together with its allies China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and, more distantly, Cuba and Venezuela. But its immediate territorial ambitions are more limited.
After the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) split off to find their way into the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The other former Soviet Republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. Georgia quit the CIS in 2008, after it lost a brief war with Russia over the secession of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Ukraine quit in 2014, after it lost a brief war with Russia over Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the secession of much of the Donbas region.
Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan have sought and found ways to bypass Russia to export oil and gas, and Uzbekistan hosted a US airbase for missions to Afghanistan until 2005. But all three remained in the CIS and maintained their economic, political and military ties to Russia.
Russia has used both carrot and stick to maintain its hegemony in the region. The carrot is the ties from the Soviet period — not just economic and military ties, but also an intermingling of populations — and Russia’s ability to rescue elites losing their grip on power. The stick is invasion or support for secessionists linked to Russia.
The carrot to the elites was on display in January 2022, when Russia sent troops at the request of Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to quell protests and perhaps an attempt by former President Nursultan Nazarbayev to return to power. At the same moment, the stick was on display with the mobilization of 175,000 Russian troops on three sides of Ukraine, purportedly to block further moves of Ukraine into NATO or of NATO into Ukraine. In February, the threat escalated to war. More on this below.
Chinese imperialism seeks to displace the US as the alpha imperialist power. It is growing much faster than its G7 imperialist rivals in North America, Europe and Japan. Its per capita GDP is still only one-sixth of theirs, which limits the surplus it can devote to research and development, investment and the military, but its government can marshal resources more effectively than its rivals can. In the past thirty years US imperialism stupidly wasted $5 trillion on wars, while China built its economy.
If Chinese imperialism continues on its present course, it will gain on the US enough to challenge it militarily, as well as economically. World War I and World War II show the consequences of past such challenges. World War III would be fought with nuclear weapons, so the consequences would be much worse.
But that’s not the only possible outcome. China has an inadequate resource base and depends on imports of energy and raw materials, which it might not be able to maintain. Its growth has badly damaged its environment, and its people may not continue to tolerate the tradeoff. Its population is aging rapidly, and its reserves of rural labor are drying up. Chinese workers have fought for wages and better conditions far more than workers in the other imperialist countries. They and China’s middle class may refuse to continue sacrificing for growth.
China’s cost advantage in manufacturing may fade. Its competitors may implement industrial policies to replace Chinese imports with domestic production. They may set up trade and investment pacts that cut off China’s sources of energy and raw materials, its markets for manufactures, and its spheres of investment. This could lead to China’s having to turn in on itself and settling down as a “mature” capitalist country. Or it could be another path to war.
On the other side of the capitalist cold war, the US, Europe and Japan want to contain Russia and China, but they are economically entangled with them, and they compete with each other. They have different interests. For example, until Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany was unhappy about Russian threats against Ukraine, but it was more interested in access to Russian gas than in Ukraine’s “right” to join NATO.
Moreover, the cold war lineup may not last. Britain quit the EU. Germany, Japan and Italy fought the US and Britain not so long ago. The US defeat in Afghanistan undercut its ability to manage the other imperialist powers. Other lineups are imaginable, including the dystopian realignment in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a US-Britain-centered Oceania, a Germany-Russia-centered Eurasia, and a China-Japan-centered Eastasia.
Of course, the most positive outcome would be that the various crises affecting all the imperialist countries lead to workers’ revolution before inter-imperialist conflict leads to world war.
The non-imperialist states
Most states are not imperialist, they’re dominated by imperialism. Among imperialist states the level of economic development varies widely, with Russia and China having relatively low levels of per capita output and the rest relatively high levels. Among non-imperialist states the range is even greater, with many variations in internal situations, relationships with the various imperial powers, and relationships with each other.
Eastern Europe
The Eastern European countries formerly in the orbit of the Soviet Union are now mostly capitalist states of an intermediate level of economic development. The countries to the north and west, from Estonia to Slovenia, are more developed and integrated into the European Union than the countries to the south and east. This line runs right through Ukraine, whose north and west orient toward Poland and Western Europe, and whose south and east orient toward Russia. The confrontation along this line has escalated into war.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, US and European imperialism offered the countries of Eastern Europe the prospect of joining the EU and NATO. Most were admitted, but on a very unequal basis. East Germany, reunited with West Germany in 1990, still lags. In 2019 eastern Germany’s per capita GDP was 75 percent that of western Germany, and its unemployment rate was 6.9 percent, compared with 4.8 percent in the west. The rest of Eastern Europe is structurally subordinate, a reserve army of low-wage labor.
Many people in Eastern Europe, including workers, hoped that capitalist restoration would bring freedom from foreign rule, democracy, and entry to the land of milk and honey. The reality of capitalist restoration — economic and social insecurity, inequality, corruption, subordination — has led to anger and resentment, expressed on the left as interest in genuine socialism and on the right as racism, xenophobia, and interest in fascism. On one side, fights for abortion rights in Poland, democracy in Hungary, and labor rights everywhere. On the other, attacks on immigrants and Roma.
Latin America
Latin America is the next most economically developed region of the non-imperialist world. Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico have a per capita output approaching China’s and sectors well-integrated into the world capitalist economy. But they are far behind the US and Canada. Their place in the world division of labor, like most of the rest of Latin America, is still to export primary products and import manufactures. Their industry is mostly light manufacturing of food products, textiles and clothing, and assembly for local markets or parts to supply manufacturing elsewhere.
The combination of relatively advanced economies, large working classes, and domination by imperialism makes Latin America the most politically active region of the world today. This is expressed in strikes and demonstrations, the advances and retreats of the “pink tide,” and the success of the revolutionary left in mobilizations and elections, particularly the Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores — Unidad (FIT-U) in Argentina. But as in the rest of the world, to the extent the left fails to offer a way forward, the right will get a hearing, illustrated starkly by the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Africa
Africa is the poorest continent, a legacy of the European slave trade and colonization. South Africa is at Brazil’s level of economic development, with some very advanced sectors, although most of its people are poor. North Africa has been part of the Mediterranean world for millennia, but its conquest by Europe stunted its economic development. Sub-Saharan Africa is far poorer, despite a large population and immense resources.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, African was at the center of the national liberation struggle. The victory of the liberation movements forced the imperialists to shift from colonial to neocolonial rule, that is, rule through local elites, rather than direct rule. The elites are now junior partners of imperialism in the extraction and export of Africa’s wealth. The national liberation movements are history.
The population of Africa is growing much faster than the population anywhere else in the world. It is projected to exceed Asia’s by the end of the century. At the same time, climate change, environmental degradation, and wars over resources are undermining Africa’s ability to provide food and water for its growing population, let alone economic development beyond that. The possibilities for misery are endless, but not so long ago Africa was a beacon of hope. It could be again.
Asia
Asia is the largest and most diverse continent. We have already discussed capitalist restoration in the former Soviet Union and China, and the place of Russia and China in the imperialist system. The level of economic development of the other Asian countries ranges from extremely poor (Afghanistan, Nepal) to poor with developed sectors (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Philippines) to highly developed (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea).
India contains the whole range in one country. It also shows the danger that, when the left fails — not only the bourgeois-nationalist Congress Party, but also the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — the right has an opening. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) movement behind it combine a conservative government with Hindu nationalism, religious fanaticism, fascist populism and paramilitarism. They face resistance, in recent years most spectacularly the farmers’ protests of 2020-21. The left survives, for now. But the situation is very precarious.
Displacement and migration
A consequence of the poverty and wars over resources described above is displacement of people. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that 84 million people were forcibly displaced in mid-2021. Forty-eight million were internally displaced, that is, displaced in their country of origin. The rest were refugees, some seeking asylum, most not.
Under UNHCR’s mandate were 6.8 million refugees from Syria, 5.7 million from Palestine, 2.6 million from Afghanistan, 2.3 million from South Sudan, and 1.3 million from Myanmar. Many migrants were on the move informally toward Europe and the US. The situation will get far worse.
In most economically advanced countries, the capitalists and their governments complain about immigrants and deport many. But their economies need immigrant labor, especially as their populations age. Their goal is not to expel immigrant workers, but to keep them vulnerable, super-exploitable.
The capitalists and governments attempt to lure foreign students and tech workers, which puts a downward pressure on wages in the advanced capitalist countries and creates a “brain drain” from poorer countries, which badly need the skills of those who emigrate.
The Ukraine war
On February 24, 2022, the Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders crossed into Ukraine. The goal of the invasion was to topple the Ukrainian government, install a government favorable to Russia, and impose terms for settlement of the territorial claims of Russia in Crimea and Russian separatists in the crescent from Kharkiv in the north to Odessa in the south. This as part of Russia’s overall attempt to assert its hegemony over the former Russian Empire.
The Russian government must have thought that the appearance of its troops would cause the historically Russian areas of Ukraine to rise up and the Ukrainian government to fall. Neither happened. The Ukrainian government kept its head, the Ukrainian military fought back, and the Ukrainian people rallied to their country’s defense.
The Russian forces were far too small to take Kyiv and other cities in street-to-street fighting. Their stalled columns made easy targets for mobile attacks. After two weeks of dithering, the Russian command redeployed its forces for its Plan B: to secure the corridor from Russia to Crimea via Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson Oblasts (regions), relying on its superior firepower and flanking movements to dislodge the Ukrainian forces.
The US and NATO denounced the invasion, imposed economic sanctions on Russia, and began sending arms and munitions. More on this below.
The Russian forces slowly gained from March through June, when they took Sievierodonetsk, completing their seizure of Luhansk Oblast. In August and September Ukrainian forces launched counterattacks around Kherson in the south and Kharkiv in the north. The counterattacks gained little ground in the south, at great cost to the Ukrainian side. They succeeded in the north, as the Russian command redeployed its forces to the south to counter an expected Ukrainian assault to cut the land bridge from Russia to Crimea.
At the time of writing, the momentum is with the Ukrainians, the outcome uncertain. Either side could collapse, but a more likely result is that the Russian forces, dug-in and heavily armed, will repel the Ukrainian assault and preserve the land bridge. They may then complete their conquest of western Donetsk. But they’re unlikely to be able to advance further, leaving a military stalemate not far from the current front lines.
The war could continue indefinitely, as the Ukrainian government will want to take back the territory it has lost and the Russian government will want to gain more. Or military stalemate, exhaustion, and popular discontent could force a ceasefire.
The Russian government has avoided a general mobilization because it fears opposition, and even its call-up of reserves has provoked resistance. The Ukrainian government still has immense popular support, but there’s no sign of an uprising behind Russian lines, and the population in the north and west may weary of endless, inconclusive fighting.
That Ukraine could resist the initial Russian attack and now be on the offensive, even if briefly, requires us to consider the fundamentals of the war. Russia has 146 million people and a very powerful military. Ukraine has 41 million people and a much less powerful military. Although it isn’t imperialist, Ukraine’s level of economic development is approximately that of Russia.
Ukraine is defending its homeland, however, which permits a national mobilization, whereas Russia is invading another country, which precludes a national mobilization. Ukraine’s size, its level of economic development, and US/NATO arms means that it can more or less match the military force the Russian government has so far deployed.
Ukraine has its own contradictions, however. For a thousand years it has been a borderland fought over and partitioned by more powerful neighbors. In the early seventeenth century, most of what is now Ukraine was incorporated into the federated Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or into the Ottoman Empire. By the end of the eighteenth century, Prussia, Austria and Russia had divided up the area, with Prussia and Austria taking the west and Russia taking the east, including the north, south and east of what is now Ukraine.
Ukraine reached its post-independence borders only when the Soviet Union transferred the crescent from Kharkiv to Odesa in 1922 and then Crimea in 1954. It became an independent nation-state only with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Many of its major cities were founded by Russia and were until very recently Russian-identified. The division of Ukraine into a European-oriented west and north and a Russian-oriented east and south is rooted in this history.
The Minsk 2 agreement was an attempt to resolve the resulting conflict by confirming Ukraine’s in-between character — a decentralized federation with language equality and regional autonomy, out of NATO, although perhaps in the EU. The attempt failed because neither side really accepted the compromise, a tragedy now costing Ukraine and Russia dearly.
Ukraine also has class and other social conflicts. It has its own capitalists, oligarchs, corrupt government officials, authoritarians, and neo-Nazis. Its rulers have been forced to turn to the working class to help organize national defense. But they’ve also adopted legislation to curtail trade-union rights, discriminate against Russian-speakers, and ban political parties, undermining national unity in the midst of war.
A central element in the internal conflict in Ukraine is the clash within the capitalist oligarchy centered on two groups, mainly composed of former bureaucrats, known as “the Donetsk clique,” predominantly oriented toward economic relations with Russia, and “the Dnipropetrov clique,” oriented toward economic relations with the West. The Donetsk clique was represented politically by the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, and the Dnipropetrov clique by his successor, Petro Poroshenko, and previously by President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The popular movement in Maidan Square, over which far-right elements gained hegemony, and the subsequent Donbas civil war, were also partly expressions of the clash between these two capitalist sectors.
The Russian invasion in every way seems to have strengthened Ukrainian patriotism, even in previously pro-Russian sectors. As an illustration, the mayors of Mariupol, Kharkiv and Odessa were part of the pro-Russian Opposition Bloc, yet they organized resistance to the Russian invasion. The Opposition Bloc is formally disbanded, but it continues to have deputies in parliament who vote in favor of the Zelensky government’s war measures, including the anti-labor ones.
One important reason why we support Ukraine is our assessment of the different outcomes of a victory of the two warring sides, admittedly difficult in general military terms, but possible in partial terms. A Ukrainian victory would provoke a serious political crisis in Russia, the probable fall of Putin, the possible fall of the semi-totalitarian regime, and the possible development of a revolutionary situation. Conversely, a victory for imperialist Russia would, in addition to ending any element of real independence for Ukraine, strengthen the Putin regime and its world influence.
The Ukraine war and the inter-imperialist cold war
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US/NATO response dramatically escalate the inter-imperialist cold war. At base, this is the classic imperialist pattern: the new imperialist powers challenge the old to obtain raw materials, markets, investment opportunities, spheres of influence, and colonies or semicolonies. The old imperialist powers resist.
A complication in the period since the end of the first Cold War is that the new imperialist powers, Russia and China, have been brought into the world market, the world division of labor. The EU and many other countries have become economically entangled with Russia via its exports of oil, gas, food, chemicals, and weapons. The US, Europe, Japan, Australia, and many developing countries have become economically entangled with China.
The Russian invasion challenged the imperial order established after the fall of the Soviet Union, particularly US hegemony within the imperial order. Russian imperialism challenged European and Chinese imperialism to side with it against US imperialism, knowing they had their own reasons for doing so.
The US countered by imposing sanctions on Russia, trying to cut off its trade with the EU and the rest of the world, and arming Ukraine. The Ukraine war is still primarily a war between imperialist Russia and capitalist but not imperialist Ukraine. But the conflict between the US and Russia is an inter-imperialist one, with economic, diplomatic and military components.
So far, the US has managed to get the other established imperialist powers to take its side against Russia. The postwar imperialist alliance has held. NATO is sending arms to Ukraine, and the EU is moving to separate itself economically from Russia, most painfully to replace its gas and oil imports.
The US moves against Russia are also a warning to China. If China didn’t accept US hegemony and distance itself from Russia, the US would sever its economic relationship with China. Beginning with Barack Obama’s 2012 “pivot to Asia,” the US has been looking for ways to replace Chinese imports with domestic production and imports from other, non-competitor areas. The supply chain problems of the pandemic and the Ukraine war have given it a national security rationale for doing so.
Chinese imperialism is also challenging the established imperial order, particularly US hegemony. It understands the implicit US warning. Substituting Taiwan for Ukraine, it gets the message. Without taking on the US directly, the Chinese government has supported Russia diplomatically and expanded its imports of Russian energy and other commodities.
Other countries on the outs with the US, particularly North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, have supported Russia diplomatically and continued to trade with it. North Korea and Iran have supplied arms.
Other countries chafing at imperial rule have refused to join the US campaign to isolate Russia and continued to trade with it, including Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico, and others. The new cold war has created a new non-aligned movement.
It’s too early to know the stability of the new alignment. Will the US-led imperialist bloc hold together? Will the Russia-China bloc hold together? Will Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico and other dependent countries continue to use the inter-imperialist rivalry to expand their room to maneuver? Will the cold war become hot? We can’t know. But International relations have certainly become more polarized.
For revolutionary Marxists, taking a position on the Ukraine war itself is, or should be, relatively easy. Russia is an imperialist power invading capitalist but not imperialist Ukraine, which Russia has historically oppressed. Hence, defeatism on the Russian side and defensism on the Ukrainian side. We want Ukraine to win.
The national questions from Ukraine’s borderland history are more complicated. We can point to Minsk 2 as a missed opportunity, but all the immediate alternatives are bad. Hypothetically, a referendum could let the people of the historically Russian areas of Ukraine decide whether to be part of Ukraine, Russia or a separate state, in each case with language and cultural equality. But the war makes that impossible. No free and fair referendum could be held at the point of a gun.
For revolutionary Marxists, taking a position on the inter-imperialist conflict is also easy. We’re defeatist on both sides. We oppose both blocs.
The complication is the interconnection between the Ukraine war and the inter-imperialist conflict. The Ukraine war has elements of a proxy war between the imperialist blocs, which has led some on the far left to adopt a dual-defeatist position, even in the shooting war between Ukraine and Russia. The ITO’s assessment, however, is that the shooting war is still primarily a war by a non-imperialist oppressed country to defend itself against an imperialist invader. Hence, Ukrainian defensism.
The Ukraine war forces us to return to basics. Capitalism cannot solve the national questions the war raises. The ruling classes of Ukraine, Russia, the US, the EU, China and the other capitalist countries pursue their own interests — against each other and against their own working classes. The only lasting way out is for the workers to act independently, to reach across national lines, to establish their own power, and to impose just solutions.
Class, race, nationality, and gender
Capitalism is based on a fundamental inequality: The capitalists own the means of production (buildings, equipment, raw materials, energy, patents or licenses, money to pay wages, etc.). The workers do not. So the capitalists hire the workers, pay them wages, and sell the goods and services they produce at a profit — the difference between the value the workers add by their labor and their wages. The process is capitalist exploitation.
Workers and capitalists struggle over the rate of exploitation, the share each will get of the value the workers produce by their labor. In national account terms, over the distribution of income between the wages and benefits of the workers — including social services and benefits — and the profits, interest and rent of the owners.
From the 1940s through the 1970s the rate of exploitation remained about the same. But starting in the 1980s the capitalist offensive and working-class retreat allowed the capitalists to grab more. They increased the rate of exploitation and took nearly all the gains of labor productivity for themselves. Labor productivity continued to rise at nearly the previous rate, but real wages were flat.
Workers were further squeezed by cuts in social benefits and services under neoliberalism. Socially provided pensions, healthcare, childcare, education, housing, and so on, were cut. Working families made ends meet, or tried to do so, by having more family members work, having them work longer hours and more years, and substituting unpaid household labor for social services.
Billionaires have done spectacularly, even during the pandemic. But they are too few to control the masses they exploit. According to an early 2022 Oxfam report, the ten richest men in the world own more than the bottom 3.1 billion people. The capitalists need a buffer between themselves and the workers, peasants and urban poor. Small business owners and the managerial and professional middle class provide this buffer, as well as services the capitalists needs. With more contradiction, so do highly skilled and educated workers.
The distribution of income reflects this. According to figures from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-liberal think tank, average annual wages and salaries in the US in 2019 were: for the bottom 90 percent $38,923, for the 90-95th percentile $129,998, for the 95-99th percentile $210,511, for the 99-99.9th percentile $521,794, and for the upper 0.1 percent $2,888,192. The income for the top 1 percent is really much higher, since most of it comes from sources other than wages and salaries. The inequality has grown sharply since 1980, including during the pandemic.
Classes other than the working class have suffered too. Peasants have been impoverished and forced off the land by drought and agribusiness. They can’t afford irrigation, machinery and chemicals, and can’t compete without them. In some places the demand for local and organic food has helped. But food production is increasingly large-scale and capitalist, and small farms can’t survive.
Peasants forced off the land and workers unable to find jobs try to make a living in the informal sector, buying and selling goods — legal or otherwise — and selling their services as day laborers or for longer terms, off the books. Whether they remain in the countryside or are forced into urban slums, they suffer from lack of food, clean water, sanitation, housing and healthcare, from police and gang violence. Many try to migrate to the advanced capitalist countries.
Class oppression is compounded by the special oppression of immigrants, people of darker skin or lower caste, women, and LGBTQ+ people. The special oppression allows the capitalists to pay lower wages and divide the working class along lines of nationality, race, and gender. It deludes the native-born, those of lighter skin or higher caste, men, and straight people to think they are superior because they are better-off. They thus become agents not only of the oppression of others, but of their own oppression too.
As the ITO Congress was discussing and adopting this text, young women in Iran were protesting the killing of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman detained by the Morality Police on September 16, accused of wearing her hijab “improperly.” The killing ignited smoldering anger over the patriarchal domination symbolized by the compulsory hijab and the Morality Police.
Women had made gains after the 1979 Revolution, even under the Islamic regime. A majority of university students are now women, and women have more access to jobs and, for women of the elite, positions in academia, business and government. But they are held down and denied equality in law and in society. The calls of the protesters quickly expanded beyond the hijab and police brutality to the social, economic, and political demands summarized in the slogan “woman, life, freedom.”
The protests resonated with other sections of the population: workers fighting over low wages and unemployment, pensioners fighting the rising cost of living, small farmers fighting for access to water, national minorities fighting their oppression (Azerbaijanis and Kurds in the north, Arabs in the southwest, and Balochs in the southeast), and broad sectors fighting against inequality, corruption and the lack of democratic rights. Many bazaaris, the merchant and shopkeeper base of the Islamic regime, responded to the call for a general strike by shuttering their shops.
Where the protests will lead is uncertain, but Iran has experienced revolution and counterrevolution in living memory, and the flames of the current, women-led rebellion won’t be easy for the regime to extinguish.
Political polarization
The reformist parties that once led the workers’ and popular movements could make gains from the 1940s through the 1960s and into the 1970s. The capitalists had so completely failed in the crises of World War I, the Depression, fascism, and World War II that they had to make major concessions to their working classes to head off revolt or, in some cases, revolution. The postwar boom meant that the capitalists could make the concessions and still profit from rebuilding what they had destroyed.
The concessions took the form of trade unions and the welfare state in the advanced capitalist countries, decolonization and neocolonialism in the colonies and semicolonies, and “peaceful coexistence” with the Stalinist states. The 1940s through the 1970s saw sharp conflict between capitalists and workers, between the imperialist powers and the national liberation movements, and between the US and its allies and the Soviet Union, China and their allies. But the overall dynamic was accommodation on all sides, not a fight to the death.
When growth slowed and overaccumulation began to strangle capitalist profit-making in the 1970s, the capitalists prepared a counteroffensive to change the balance of forces. The reformist leaders of all stripes failed to meet the challenge.
The leaders of the trade unions and the social-democratic parties in the advanced capitalist countries put up an ineffectual resistance and then capitulated. The success, from a capitalist standpoint, of the governments of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US, and the failure, from a working-class standpoint, of the governments of François Mitterrand in France and Andreas Papandreou in Greece marked the shift politically. Since then, the trade unions and the social-democratic parties have spiraled further downward into neoliberalism.
The bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaders of the national liberation movements similarly capitulated. Voted out of office in 1990, the Sandinistas degenerated into a corrupt gang around Daniel Ortega. Syria joined the US-led military coalition to crush Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. In 1994 Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, inaugurating a neocolonial and neoliberal regime led by the African National Congress (ANC) that has moved further and further from its professed ideals. The list could go on and on.
The Stalinist leaderships of the Soviet Union, China, and the other bureaucratically deformed workers’ states — all but Cuba and North Korea — went for capitalist restoration. In Eastern Europe the Communist parties either crumbled or became social-democratic parliamentary parties. In Russia two parties emerged from the rubble of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Putin’s United Russia, dominant, and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, a tame opposition. In China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos the Communist parties became the ruling parties of the new capitalist states.
With a few exceptions, the Stalinist parties in other countries either collapsed or refashioned themselves as social-democratic or even liberal parties. Several have led or participated in capitalist governments. As a component of the ANC, the South African Communist Party participates in the country’s capitalist government. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has led capitalist state governments in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. The Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) — unified from 2018 to 2021 as the Nepal Communist Party — have led minority, coalition and majority governments at the federal level, all capitalist.
The prolonged failure of capitalism to deal with its interlocking crises has increased political polarization. In bourgeois democracies, center-left and center-right parties are less and less able to channel discontent into their electoral competition. This has led to weaker governments of the bourgeois centrist parties, weak coalitions, technocratic compromises, more extreme confrontations between parties, the victory of parties or factions outside the past range, and other unstable outcomes, depending on the balance of forces in the country. In authoritarian countries, the polarization is driven underground.
The shift to the right of the Stalinist, social-democratic and nationalist parties left a vacuum to their left. In several countries broad left parties tried to fill the void, in Europe including the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) in Italy, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the Left Bloc in Portugal, and the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark. They promised to end austerity, formed or joined capitalist governments or supported them from outside, and capitulated to neoliberalism.
In several situations, the capitulation led to a collapse of the broad left party. For example, the Italian PRC has been reduced to a small organization. In itself, this might not be important. Far more serious is that the collapse has reduced or nearly annulled the political representation of the Italian working class.
With the reformists providing no real alternative, far-right and fascist parties have grown, and parties of the traditional right have adapted to their racism and xenophobia. Far rightists have held power in Poland with the governments of the Law and Justice Party, in Hungary with Viktor Orbán, in India with Narendra Modi, in the US with Donald Trump, and in Brazil with Bolsonaro. In many countries, fascist paramilitaries attack immigrants and oppressed racial and ethnic groups and menace the left and the workers’ movement.
Latin America
As noted above, the combination of relatively advanced economies, large working classes, and domination by imperialism makes Latin America the most politically active region of the world today.
In the 1980s, the workers’ and popular movements had been beaten down by dictatorships and neoliberalism. By the end of the decade, they had begun to revive. Political and economic conditions provided plenty to be angry about.
On the other side of the class struggle, US imperialism, confident that it was now the sole superpower in a new world order, reduced its support for authoritarian governments. They weren’t needed to impose neoliberalism, and they were more trouble than they were worth. They were expensive, corrupt, and provoked too much resistance. The Latin American comprador capitalists agreed.
The arc of struggle rose through the early 2000s. Intense anger led to uprisings with elements of dual power in Chiapas in 1994, Argentina in 2001, Venezuela in 2002, Bolivia in 2000 and 2003, and Oaxaca in 2006. Elsewhere, dissatisfaction was expressed in demonstrations and strikes. Women and indigenous people played prominent roles. The global justice movement and the World Social Forum linked the Latin American struggle to the global one.
Latin America has a rich Indigenous history extending back more than 10,000 years. Europeans entered this history in 1492, bringing with them disease, death, and colonial subjugation. They forced the Indigenous peoples — those who survived the incursion — to work as slaves or serfs. Where the survivors were too few, the Europeans supplemented them with enslaved Africans.
Most of Latin America achieved independence in the early 1800s, through a series of revolutions and wars, beginning with the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804. From Argentina to Mexico, Spain’s colonies won independence through the wars of 1808–1833. Brazil declared its independence from Portugal in 1822.
Independence left a relatively small population of European descent ruling a much larger population of Indigenous, African, and mixed descent. Two hundred years later, that situation persists in a hierarchy of color. The ethnic distribution of Latin America today is estimated to be 24.6 percent European, 41.6 percent mixed Indigenous and European, 14.3 percent mixed African and European, 10.4 percent Indigenous, and 5.5 percent African.
Indigenous and Black men and women have been part of every national, class and social struggle from colonial times until now, but mostly not in the top leadership and not in their own name. Indigeneity and Blackness have been submerged in narratives of national identity and national culture.
A distinctive feature of the popular movements starting in the 1990s is the prominent role of the Indigenous struggle as such. This is most visibly true in Mexico, with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in Bolivia, with the Movement for Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS), and in Ecuador, with the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and the Pachakutik political party, but it’s true in many other countries from Chile to Guatemala.
Other racially and ethnically oppressed groups have asserted themselves in recent struggles. Blacks have been prominent in struggles in Brazil, Colombia, Panama, and, of course, the Caribbean. Chávez’s ascent to the presidency of Venezuela was a breakthrough for mestizos throughout Latin America. Class and race are closely linked in Latin America, so Lula’s ascent has widened the space for people not of the traditional elite.
Women have participated in popular struggles in Latin America since colonial times and long before that. They have resisted or openly fought patriarchy in their lives, their communities, and society. In recent years, as in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Latina activism has had a more self-consciously feminist component.
For example, in Mexico, women were central to the Zapatista rebellion and are central in maquiladora organizing and teachers’ strikes. Women protested lack of jobs, low wages, poverty, the neoliberal gutting of health, education and social welfare programs, police and gang violence, the mistreatment of migrants, corruption, the arrogation of power by politicians, and many other problems. They held together not only families and communities, but also trade unions, student unions, social justice organizations, and political parties.
Mexican women also fight for directly feminist demands: for abortion and all reproductive rights, for equal pay and equal access to jobs, for political representation, against domestic violence, against sexual objectification, and against femicide.
At the southern end of Latin America, Argentine women were central to the 2001 Argentinazo, the piqueteros movement, the mobilizations of workers and students, and the many strikes and occupations. They also fight for women’s equality and reproductive rights (“Green Tide”), and against sexual harassment (“MeToo”) and murders of women (“Ni Una Menos”). Even the prominent role of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) expresses, in a distorted way, the intervention of women into the political process.
In Chile, women were central to the student protests of 2018, the uprising of 2019, and the campaign to replace the Pinochet-era constitution, adding demands against gendered violence and for women’s equality. In Brazil, women led demonstrations against Bolsonaro and for democracy, but also against the murder of Black lesbian activist Marielle Franco and for LGBTQ+ rights. In Bolivia, women fought for land, water, the environment, Indigenous rights, and democracy, but also for the place of women in society. Similar observations could be made about Venezuela, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, and many other countries.
Pink tide 1.0 and 2.0
The rising arc of struggle brought to power a “pink tide” of governments elected on the basis of promises to reject neoliberalism and implement corporatist policies to promote economic development and protect people. Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil in 2002. Néstor Kirchner was elected president of Argentina in 2003. Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia in 2005. Rafael Correa was elected president of Ecuador in 2006.
The pink tide governments both expressed the mass struggle and helped to contain it. They coopted the movements, demobilized them, and channeled their energy into elections and governing.
The governments varied in ideological outlook, with Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia on the radical end of the pink tide spectrum, and Argentina, Brazil and Chile on the cautious end. Chávez, the pink tide’s most charismatic leader, denounced US imperialism and at the 2005 World Social Forum proclaimed “21st century socialism.”
For a decade the governments were able to ride the commodities boom caused by the recovery of the world economy from the 2000-01 recession and the rapid growth of China. They used revenue from agricultural, mining and energy exports to redistributed income, but they made no fundamental inroads on domestic or foreign capital. The income redistribution reduced poverty and hunger and improved housing, healthcare and education, but it didn’t alter the balance of class forces.
The 2007-09 recession and the slowing of China’s growth deflated the commodities boom. That and competition from other parts of the world sharply reduced the income available for the pink tide governments to redistribute. Social plans were cut back. The arrogance, complacency or corruption of many officials confirmed the popular view that all politicians are alike.
As their popularity fell, the governments often turned to underhanded methods to try to stay in power. Most ended ignominiously, voted out or forced out by coups they no longer had enough popular support to resist. Particularly significant were the election of Mauricio Macri in Argentina in November 2015, the institutional coup against Dilma Rousseff in August 2016, the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil in October 2018, and the coup that forced Morales to flee Bolivia in November 2019.
The class struggle continued, however, initially depressed by Covid-19 and then accelerated by the inability of the rightist governments to deal with the pandemic and its economic consequences. Protests broke out in Argentina, Bolivia (with the revolutionary response to the 2019 coup), Brazil, and other sites of the first pink tide. They spread to countries not part of or marginal to the first pink tide, including most spectacularly Chile in 2019, Colombia in 2019 and 2021, and Guatemala in 2020. The subjects of the protests included democracy, the pandemic, the economy, the environment, abortion rights, femicides, and police killings.
The pink tide began to rise again, with the elections of AMLO in Mexico in 2018; Alberto Fernández and CFK in Argentina in 2019; Luis Arce in Bolivia in 2020; Pedro Castillo in Peru, Xiomara Castro in Honduras, and Gabriel Boric in Chile in 2021; and Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Lula in Brazil in 2022.
But there is no reason to expect a better outcome this time around. As with the European broad left parties, electoral victories are not enough to secure reforms. Lula’s narrow victory in the Brazilian presidential runoff election (with 50.9 percent of the valid votes, down from 61.3 percent in 2002) and the minority position of his bloc in the Chamber of Deputies (81 out of 513 seats, down from 91 in 2002) are a warning. Lula 2.0 starts from a much weaker position than Lula 1.0 did.
With high rates of inflation and interest and a recession coming on, the governments will be less able to redistribute income than their predecessors were twenty years ago. They won’t encroach on capital, they won’t challenge the imperialist order, and they won’t unite. Without those steps they cannot bring fundamental change or even resist neoliberalism.
Revolutionary perspectives
Analyzing the world is one thing, changing it is another. In a famous passage from his 1915 article The Collapse of the Second International Lenin lists three symptoms of a revolutionary situation, which can be paraphrased as: 1) the upper classes are in crisis and unable to live in the old way, 2) the lower classes are suffering and unwilling to live in the old way, and 3) as a consequence, the masses are drawn into independent historical action. Lenin continues:
Without these objective changes, which are independent of the will, not only of individual groups and parties but even of individual classes, a revolution, as a general rule, is impossible. The totality of all these objective changes is called a revolutionary situation … it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, “falls”, if it is not toppled over.
A key element in the subjective change needed for a successful revolution is the existence of a mass revolutionary party. In another famous passage from his 1920 book “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder Lenin explains the condition of the Bolshevik’s success:
The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and — if you wish — merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people — primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved.
This defines the perspectives of revolutionary Marxists, and from them flow our tasks. The class struggle exists. Workers are fighting their bosses every day. Sectors of the workers and the oppressed are also fighting around the Covid-19 pandemic, the economic collapse, climate change, militarism and war, racism and xenophobia, fascism, and the rights of people of color, immigrants, women and LGBTQ+ people.
Revolutionary Marxists can and should contribute to these struggles, offering our energy, skills, tactical insights, and leadership. We will learn from the struggles and our comrades in the struggle. Our distinctive contribution is to link the ongoing struggles with the perspective of workers’ power, internationally, through a system of transitional demands proposing socialist solutions to the problems of capitalist society.
In order to do this more effectively and to build the leadership the working class needs, revolutionary Marxists need to overcome the weakness of our own movement. We must clarify our positions, evaluate our differences, and work to build revolutionary parties and a revolutionary International. A component of this is to overcome the disorientation and fragmentation of the heirs of Trotskyism and refound an International on a consistently revolutionary basis.
The International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO) offers the documents of our International Congress — this document, “The Programmatic Principles of the ITO,” “The Crisis of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Consistent Trotskyists,” and others — as contributions to the discussions necessary to refound a revolutionary Marxist International and rebuild an international working-class leadership.