BY JACK BARNES
The selection below is excerpted from the article "Imperialism's March toward Fascism and War" by Jack Barnes. It is based on talks given between February and April 1994, and was discussed and adopted by the Socialist Workers Party national convention in August of that year. The entire article appears in issue no. 10 of New International, copyright (c) 1994 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp., and reprinted by permission. Subtitles are by the Militant.

There is not and will not be a substitute for the dollar as the predominant currency of world trade, investment, banking, accounting, payment, and reserves. At the same time, the deepening crisis of world capitalism means that the dollar itself is a less and less stable and reliable unit for the owning classes of the world. It will never again be the world currency it was from the time of Washington's victory in World War II until Nixon was forced to end its convertibility into gold in 1971. The almighty dollar was humbled forever by the weakening of U.S. imperialism coming out of the Vietnam War, the related war- fueled inflation, and the relative advance of capitalist Japan and Germany as manufacturing and trading powers.

Since the closing years of the 1980s, however, U.S. imperialism has scored substantial further gains over the capitalist powers it defeated in World War II.... Competition and conflict is rising among all the imperialist powers, but the contest revolves above all around the United States, Germany, and Japan. The losers in World War II, just like the losers in the first interimperialist slaughter a quarter century earlier, are once again having to fight the enormous pressures of the victor.

This is the opposite of how the world has often been portrayed by bourgeois politicians, press commentators, and the labor officialdom in the 1970s, '80s, and even into the '90s. Novels, movies, and docudramas (the self-serving soap operas of the TV intellectual) have all sounded the alarm against the rising economic power of Japan. Soon no one was going to be able to buy a car, a television, or a laptop computer that wasn't made in Japan. Japanese capital was buying up U.S. real estate and factories at a dangerous rate, we were told. They bought Rockefeller Center, a national landmark! Would there be any "American-owned" land left in Los Angeles? They were even taking over Hollywood movie studios and recording companies! The hype reached the point where if you took it seriously, you would have thought the United States was on the verge of being turned into a semicolony of Nippon.

With regard to German capitalism, the hype has had less of an openly racist and chauvinist edge, although the specter of the Hun, the kaiser, and the Third Reich has not been far beneath the surface in some bourgeois commentary-especially in the New York Times and in initially Thatcherite and now broadening ruling-class circles in Britain. If the propaganda never reached the point of predicting a German buyout of U.S. land and factories, at least the deutsche mark was allegedly destined to establish unbridled dominance over Europe, west and east.

End of the `Japanese miracle'

As recently as the 1992 U.S. presidential elections, Clinton and some in his economic "brain trust" were still pointing to the postwar miracle of German and Japanese capitalism as a fount of practical lessons to help U.S. employers pull out of their malaise. This became a common theme among U.S. liberals in particular during the 1980s: emulate the German and Japanese capitalists, while bashing them with protectionist bludgeons to hold off their exports of commodities and capital.

Underneath these self-serving rationalizations for U.S. nationalism there is, of course, a partial truth-the relative decline of the domination of U.S. imperialism since the end of World War II. That is a glorious fact....

U.S. capitalists have so far been much more successful than their German or Japanese competitors in driving down the price of labor power. Reversing the trend over the previous several decades, unit labor costs in the United States were driven down by the employers in the 1980s, while they continued rising in Japan and most countries of capitalist Europe. Fewer than ten years ago, in 1985, hourly wage rates in the United States were higher than in any of its major imperialist rivals: Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, or Canada. Of these countries, only in Britain today are hourly wages still lower than in the United States, and that gap has narrowed. U.S. exports have grown at three times the pace of those of Japan and Germany since the mid-1980s, and since 1991 U.S. capitalists for the first time are exporting a higher percentage of their domestic output than their Japanese competitors.

Only in New Zealand have the capitalists perhaps achieved more than in the United States, in relative terms, in pushing back the wages, conditions, and union rights of the working class....

The capitalists in Germany and a number of other countries in Europe suffer from the fact that they have not yet been able to smash the system of social insurance and related gains-health care, unemployment compensation, pensions, vacations-that the working class and labor movement won through struggles in the decades following World War II.

Workers in the United States can say to our sisters and brothers in Germany, France, Sweden, and elsewhere in capitalist Europe: "What has happened to us is now going to happen to you. And it's going to be rougher in some ways, because the capitalists have to chop more since the social conquests you won in struggles over the past half century were greater." As we approach the 150th anniversary of The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, written by Engels to alert the democratic movement in Germany to what capitalism held in store for their future, communists in Europe today can point to the United States for similar lessons.

In fact, the employers and their governments from Bonn to Stockholm, from London to Rome have already begun to make headway in the past year or so in going after prior gains. But they need to take much, much more and are pressing to do so. As working-class resistance to these attacks develops, so too will the hunger of vanguard fighters to link up across national borders to engage in common discussion and action.

Impact of high land prices in Japan
Japanese imperialism is paying a price for its relatively recent feudal past and the U.S. military occupation following World War II. This is part of the reason land prices are so astronomically high in Japan compared to other advanced capitalist countries. Among other effects, the monopolization of land ownership means the rent workers have to pay to keep a roof over the head of their families is also disproportionately high. The big majority of the value workers produce with our labor is taken by the employing class-that's what Marx called surplus value, out of which they derive their profits and their lavish personal wealth and incomes. But out of the value workers produce, the bosses also have to pay us enough to be able to live and work and to reproduce the next generation of workers. Marx called that the value of labor power, and it varies from one country to the next depending on a combination of historical factors, including the class struggle between labor and capital. So when housing rents are very high, as they are in Japan for historical reasons, that's not only bad for workers who have to pay those rents; it's also bad for the capitalists, who end up having to apportion a larger share of the value workers produce to making it possible for them to pay those rents. And that puts Japanese employers at a disadvantage to their rivals in other imperialist countries, where rents are relatively cheaper. Similar considerations apply to the very high food prices in Japan, which are another result of sky-high land prices, as well as of protectionist policies to benefit the big capitalist farming interests, landowners, and rice and meat traders in Japan.  
 
 
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