THE DEATH AGONY OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM, PART 1
1. On that side, the tub thumpers for the
late Ghadafi and the not yet late Assad, once again and forever defending
current and future ayatollahs, Perons, Hezbollahs, ANCs, Mugabes from
“imperialist attack.”
On the other side, those who have just as ardently defended
“democratic revolution,” “national
self-determination,” the “popular
struggle” as chinks in the armor of imperialism, even if it that defense
requires tacit or explicit assent to the military intervention of a NATO, a UN.
It’s not a pretty thing, this death agony of
anti-imperialism. Of course, at its peak, anti-imperialism wasn’t a pretty
thing—the making of anti-imperialism, like the making of sausage, or money in
the stock market, requiring massive amounts, and in the proper proportions, of
belligerence, stupidity, arrogance, and blindness.
Once so inseparable, the anti-imperialist/democratic
revolution/national liberation front has been broken by events in Libya and
Syria.
The apparent, and manifest, opposition of these two poles of
anti-imperialism is the expression of the bankruptcy at the core of
anti-imperialism. That core is the
separation, extraction, derivation of the, or a, “nation” from the property
relations of capital, simultaneous with the separation, extraction derivation
of the, or a, nation apart from the
limitations to capital accumulation embodied in those exact same property
relations. Thus the “nation” appears as
a being, oppressor or oppressed,
dominant or subservient.
The conflict between “dominant” and “dominated” nation does
not appear as developing from the condition critical for proletarian
revolution, which is the inability capitalist domination of private property
forms to sustain capitalist accumulation. The “state
of being” masks the condition of
class struggle.
We get, and in the neck, the “national revolution,” “national self-determination,” “national liberation,” “popular unity,” all presented as intermediations of social revolution; as
interpositions, when in fact each is an obstacle and in opposition to the
proletarian revolution.
There are no “economics” to the national, the anti-imperial,
the “democratic” revolutions, and thus there can be no reckoning of class, by
class, for class, against another class, of classes bound and opposed to each
other by the conditions of labor.
The struggle in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Iran, is
detached, extracted, isolated from the global condition of capitalist
accumulation. It’s a “battle for
democracy.” It’s an “imperialist
coup.” It’s everything, except what it
is.
2. Every once in awhile, the question comes up: “Why, how, has capitalism survived all these
years? How after all the years of
overproduction and enforced scarcity, after all the massacres, exploitation,
the feasting on blood, gristle and bones, after all the banquets of ashes, does
this system survive?”
And every once in awhile, the answer is offered up: “Because capitalism’s opponents, particularly
those proclaiming to have apprehended Marx’s work, are so inept. Because those who proclaim their deeper grasp
of the principles of capitalist reproduction, have nothing in their hands.”
No sooner does that answer appear than it is rejected. It must
be rejected. It is not, after all, a
materialist analysis. The answer, like
the question, presupposes knowledge,
or a particular type of knowledge, as the maker of history, in lieu of history. “They
think (incorrectly). Therefore
capitalism is (still).”
Worse, this mis-formulation is another iteration of the
ancient catechism:
Q: “What does the
crisis of humanity amount to?”
A: “The crisis of
humanity reduces itself to a crisis of the proletarian leadership.”
Short version? “If only……”
3. Capitalism has distinguished itself by
configuring the state apparatus as a vector for accumulation. The bourgeoisie have done this not simply as
lenders to the “new” “revolutionary” state; nor simply as merchants
provisioning army and parliament with costumes, grapeshot, rations, or
telephones. They have utilized the state
as an enterprise for maintaining, disciplining, enforcing the specific
organization of labor as wage-labor, and for “clawing back” portions of the
variable capital paid out in wages, thus augmenting the mass of surplus value.
Private property, private bourgeois property, that is to say private ownership of the means
of social production for the
expansion of value is at one and the same time the origin and the limit to
capitalist accumulation. And it’s
expensive; it’s expensive in terms of cost, and in terms of the proportion of
revenues that must be rededicated to the process of accumulation.
In addition, the expense, the costs of doing business, include the organization of collective social
labor… of abstract labor. What is value, after all, if not abstract
labor, or rather, labor abstracted? It’s a costly business, requiring the
permanent dispossession of labor, its detachment from everything save the
demands of accumulation. It’s a costly
business, that in this abstraction of labor from everything save the demands of
accumulation, accumulation of capital is itself identified concretely as the
limit to the emancipation of labor.
Whereas labor must become abstract, be abstracted, capital
cannot. Its realization depends on its
exchanges of its appropriated, abstracted labor with, among, the “others” of
its identity. The uneven, by necessity,
unbalanced, disparate nature of capitalist production, of production entombed
within private ownership which is so essential to the distribution,
apportionment of the total available surplus value, means every such exchange
embodies a conflict between means and relations of production.
Capital has no resolution for this conflict, offering only
its reproduction, but the bourgeoisie can “bequeath,” delegate that conflict,
and the social costs of marshaling labor as abstract labor, to the state, the “national
state.”
The “modern state” in the less than modern sectors of
capitalism becomes the administrator of accumulation, the brokerage for the
supply of labor as labor-power, and the nursery, the crèche for the bourgeoisie itself.
4. In the 20th century, the state
as nursery, broker, crèche, makes its entrance with the Mexican
Revolution. With Obregon raising the red
battalions from the Casa del Obrero Mundial to battle the agrarian revolt, with
the incorporation of the CROM; later
with the CTM replacing the CROM, with Cardenas following Obregon and
supplanting Calles, with Lombardo-Toledano replacing Morones, the Mexican state
conducts the counterrevolution within the revolution, enshrining “labor” in the
expansion of bourgeois property.
In its own offices, appropriating and allocating wealth to
its own officers, the state suckles an always emerging bourgeoisie.
An analogous [different origin, similar function] process is
given life in Russia after the workers’ revolution expels the bourgeoisie. There, what the bourgeoisie could not do is
done through the state dispossessing labor from the organs of its own power,
the soviets that represented the potential for the emancipation of labor as
opposed to the mimicry of the relations of value production. Again the state acts as counterrevolution
within the revolution, but without the connection to bourgeois property,
production as and for the accumulation of value, flourishes in the breakdown
and disorganization of the economy.
The struggles in the Mideast are struggles precipitated by
the failure of the national state in its role as organizer, broker, and
incorporator of labor; in its role as distributor of value; in its function as
vector for accumulation. The “national
revolution,” presented once as an intermediation to the proletarian revolution
is exposed by the failure of the state as the opponent to proletarian
revolution.
The “democratic revolt” has no place to turn, and no standing.
Next: Part 2 (no kidding, really?)
S.Artesian
August 6, 2012
