New International no. 13 will be published in February together with a companion volume, no. 12. Both will be published at the same time in Spanish as issues 6 and 7 of Nueva Internacional.

The introduction and excerpt that follow are copyright © New International 2005. Reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

Take a look at Earth at Night on our back cover. The shimmering clusters, faint patches, and dark expanses underscore the brutal class fact that a majority of the world’s working people—largely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—subsist without electricity or modern sources of energy, even for cooking and heat.

This composite of hundreds of satellite photographs is a stark measure of the huge inequalities, not only between imperialist and semicolonial countries but also among classes within almost every country, in social and cultural development and in the foundations for any sustained economic advance. These disparities, produced and accentuated every day simply by the workings of world capitalism, will widen further as competition for markets intensifies among the U.S. ruling families and their imperialist rivals in Europe and the Pacific.

Electrification “is an elementary precondition if modern industry and cultural life are to develop,” Jack Barnes emphasizes in our lead article, “and communists fight for it to be extended to all—all—the world’s six billion people. This fight is a prime example of how proletarian politics, our politics, start with the world.”

In order for class-conscious workers to build a world communist movement of disciplined proletarian parties, he notes, their week-by-week activity needs to be guided by a program, a strategy, to close—and then keep closed—these enormous economic and social disparities. Our job “is to make a revolution in the country where we find ourselves, where we live and work,” Barnes explains. To accomplish that, “it’s above all necessary for us to understand, and understand thoroughly, politics and the class struggle within those national boundaries.  
 
Working class has no homeland
“But we can do so only by starting with the fact that those national peculiarities and their changes are a product of the workings of a world market,” he says. “We need to recognize that we are part of an international class that itself has no homeland— the working class—and to act always as though we are part of an international alliance with exploited and oppressed toilers throughout the world.

“That’s not a slogan. That’s not a moral imperative. It’s not a proposed act of will. It is a recognition of the class reality of economic, social, and political life in the imperialist epoch.” It is, Barnes says, an irreplaceable part of the activity of politically organized revolutionary workers, “the only force on earth that can carry out successful revolutionary struggles along the line of march of the proletariat toward political power.”

“Our Politics Start with the World” was presented by Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, to open a discussion at an international socialist conference held June 14-17, 2001, in Oberlin, Ohio. Among the nearly 400 participants were members, supporters, and friends of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as dozens of Young Socialists and other workers, farmers, and young people from North America and elsewhere around the world. The following year “Our Politics Start with the World,” edited for publication, was debated and adopted by delegates to the 2002 SWP national convention.  
 
Capitalism’s long hot winter has begun
“Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun,” the political report and summary by Barnes adopted by that same convention, together with “Their Transformation and Ours,” SWP National Committee draft theses prepared by Mary-Alice Waters, editor of New International, are the featured articles in issue number 12 of this magazine. These companion issues, New International numbers 12 and 13, complement each other. “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun,” too, starts with the world. It centers on the accelerated contradictions—economic, social, political, and military—that have pushed the international imperialist order into the opening stages of a global financial crisis and depression, as well as a new militarization drive and expanding wars. This long, hot winter that world capitalism has now entered, Barnes notes, is one that “slowly but surely and explosively” will breed “a scope and depth of resistance not previously seen by revolutionary-minded militants throughout today’s world.”

The contents of these two issues of New International, published at the same time, are a contribution to the political preparations for that stepped-up and increasingly worldwide resistance by the toilers and their allies.

§

The wealth that makes possible human civilization and progress is, in its entirety, the product of social labor’s transformation of nature, a labor that simultaneously transforms itself.

“Human labor is social labor,” Barnes emphasizes in the closing remarks to the 2001 socialist conference printed here. “Its product is not the result of the work of an individual, nor even the work of many individuals summed together.” The output of the labor of a farmer, a seamstress, a butcher, or a miner, he says, “is determined by the class relations under which they toil. It is social labor that bequeaths generation after generation the culture, the blueprints, to transform material reality in new and more productive ways and to make possible the creation of a better world.” But, he added, as Marx taught us, so long as capitalism reigns, these improvements in the forces of production will simultaneously tend both to increase the intensification of labor and to produce more horrendous forces of destruction.

These questions of Marxist politics and theory, on which much of the discussion at the 2001 international socialist gathering focused, were the topic of one of seven classes organized for conference participants. The class was presented by Steve Clark, a member of the SWP National Committee. A few weeks later Clark used the presentation, enriched by the discussion at the conference, as the basis for preparing a four-part series in the Militant, a New York newsweekly published in the interests of working people worldwide. The series has been edited for publication here as a single article entitled, “Farming, Science, and the Working Classes.”

§

“Capitalism, Labor, and the Transformation of Nature,” an exchange between Richard Levins and Steve Clark, is the final item in this issue. Following publication of the articles by Clark in the Militant, Levins, professor of population sciences and a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote a response.

Levins is active in the July 26 Coalition, a Boston-area Cuba solidarity organization, and works with the Institute of Ecology and Systematics of the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment. Levins’s article is published here for the first time, followed by Clark’s reply and final comments by each author.

December 2004

 
BY JACK BARNES  
In December 1920, the third year of the workers and peasants republic in Russia, V.I. Lenin made a statement that has often been repeated but less often understood. Speaking to the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, Lenin said: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country.” ¹

Since that day, any organization claiming to be communist has had to come to grips with that assertion. What connection does it have to the tasks of a revolutionary government fighting to consolidate workers and farmers power? What kind of clarity in thought and deed does it demand from a proletarian nucleus well before the final revolutionary struggles through which the toilers come to power? What do working people think of when they hear the name of the party, a communist party? What is it fighting for? Where is it heading?

Lenin’s statement begins not with electrification but with Soviet power: the elected councils of workers, peasants, and soldiers whose meetings and decisions constituted the working-class power on which the new revolutionary government was based. But he doesn’t stop there. To many at the time, and even more so eight decades later, it must have seemed that “Communism is soviet power plus electrification” was an overreaching simplification. “That’s Lenin, you know. As always, pushing a point a little too far.” But Lenin, as always, was starting from a world view—from the concrete place of the workers and peasants of Russia as determined by the workings of the world imperialist system, its laws of motion. Not vice versa. Not the world as seen from Moscow or Petrograd. Not Russia somehow “ fit into” the world.  
 
Strengthen worker-peasant alliance
Lenin, again as always, was also starting from the practical need to strengthen the alliance of workers and peasants, the two classes upon whose allied shoulders the dictatorship of the proletariat rested. The destiny of Soviet power was now inseparably intertwined with the advance of the struggle for national liberation and socialism throughout the world. What concrete steps were necessary to narrow the political gap between those two exploited classes, urban and rural? To narrow the gap in their conditions of life, their possibilities of education and culture, their political experience? How was it possible to narrow the gap in self-confidence, proletarian class consciousness, and political clarity? The differences in ability to politically understand, sacrifice for, and advance the proletarian dictatorship in Russia and extension of Soviet power to the world?

Lenin placed great store in the competent and disciplined use of technologies inherited from capitalism, as well as the skills of scientists and engineers willing to place their knowledge and training at the service of the Soviet republic. But what Lenin was raising was not a technical challenge, first and foremost. Nor was it primarily a military question, even though the strength of the worker-peasant alliance had just been put to the test of fire by the devastating human and material consequences of the civil war launched by Russia’s capitalists and landlords, supported by the allied invasion of fourteen imperialist powers, including the United States. By late 1920, when Lenin presented the electrification plan, workers and peasants in Soviet Russia—and peasants made up more than 80 percent of the ranks of the Red Army—had defeated the counterrevolutionary forces.

The task now before the communist leadership of the revolution, Lenin said, was to lead these two classes in such a way that tens of millions, in both city and countryside, could see their conditions of life converging. Along that road the ground would be laid for the working class to become a larger and larger percentage of the toilers of city and countryside,² as well as for workers and peasants to more and more converge in political goals—to increasingly see the world, and their relationship with toilers’ struggles in other countries, through a common pair of proletarian glasses.

Only as this gap was narrowed could the working class learn how to organize to move beyond workers control of industry toward the management of production. Only as these divisions grew smaller could peasants see beyond the guarantees they had won to use the land they tilled and to obtain cheap credit, and move toward a broader perspective of the industrialization of the entire country that would progressively overcome the chasm between urban and rural life. The proletariat would consequently grow in size—in absolute numbers, as well as relative to the peasantry—and in political confidence.

The alliance of the working class with the peasantry, and thus its class rule, would be strengthened and stabilized. With added confidence, the power of its example would increase. With added confidence, its offer of help to toilers worldwide would be extended and accepted more frequently, and carried out with greater success.  
 
‘Supply peasants industrial products’
The use of equipment and machinery powered by electricity and internal combustion had to be widely extended to the countryside, Lenin said: “[W]e must prove to the peasants that in place of the old separation of industry from agriculture, this very deep contradiction on which capitalism thrived and which sowed dissension between the industrial and agricultural workers, we set ourselves the task of returning to the peasant the loan we received from him [during the civil war] in the form of grain… .

“We must repay this loan by organizing industry and supplying the peasants with the products of industry,” Lenin underscored. “We must show the peasants that the organization of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of the land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism.” ³

Lenin pointed out that without such a course, conditions in the young workers and peasants republic, especially in the countryside, would create and continually recreate layers of independent commodity producers who would face periodic crises and become increasingly differentiated economically. Easily convinced they were being betrayed by the proletariat, such layers would turn back to the bourgeoisie for leadership. That had become the greatest counterrevolutionary danger confronting the working class.⁴  
 
Program of economic development
Politically, the peasantry always follows one of the two major urban classes, either the capitalists or the working class. That fact is demonstrated by the entire history of the modern class struggle. So maintaining Soviet power depended on what might superficially seem to be a technical matter, a large-scale engineering project. But as Lenin emphasized, electrification of the country had to be understood and organized for what it was in history: a profoundly political question, the answer to which would determine, in life, whether the alliance of workers and peasants would rise or fall. Recognizing this task and aiding its realization was not simply a challenge for the toilers of Russia and their Bolshevik vanguard; it was a worldwide responsibility of communists, class-conscious workers, and revolutionary-minded farmers.

The communist party, Lenin said in his December 1920 report to the congress of soviets, has a political program that “is an enumeration of our objectives, an explanation of the relations between classes” in the young Soviet republic. But this party program “must not remain solely a program of the Party,” he said. “It must become a program of our economic development, or otherwise it will be valueless even as a program of the Party. It must be supplemented with a second Party program, a plan of work aimed at restoring our entire economy and raising it to the level of up-to-date technical development. Without a plan of electrification, we cannot undertake any real constructive work….

“Of course, it will be a plan adopted as a first approximation. This Party program will not be as invariable as our real Party program is, which can be modified by Party congresses alone. No, day by day this program will be improved, elaborated, perfected and modified,” ⁵ Lenin emphasized. It will be a task of workers and peasants in every workshop and in every rural area.  
 
‘Unnatural light’
Lenin told the congress a story about visiting one of the first villages in Russia to be electrified. A peasant came forward to speak, welcoming the “unnatural light” that the new Bolshevik-led government had made possible. It was to be expected that rural toilers would initially look upon electricity as “unnatural,” Lenin remarked. But what class-conscious revolutionists consider unnatural, he added, “is that the peasants and workers should have lived for hundreds of years in such backwardness, poverty and oppression under the yoke of the landowners and the capitalists.” ⁶

Everything that marks progress in the human condition is “unnatural” in that materialist sense—not just electricity but agriculture, livestock, handicrafts, and industrial products of every kind. None of these are directly appropriated from nature by individuals; all are the end result of human beings working together in a mesh of social relations. Every aspect of what we call civilization and culture is the product of the transformation of nature by social labor. (And we forget at our peril that we are at the same time part of nature, part of what is being transformed.)

What is unnatural has been the stunting of this potential for human development by social relations of exploitation, relations maintained through force of habit, supplemented by terror organized by the propertied classes. With the workers’ and peasants’ conquest of power, their government could finally organize to carry out what had been possible technically for several decades—that is, for toilers of both city and countryside to have electric light after the sun goes down. To have the option to extend the use of the day. To be able to decide whether to stop a meeting because it’s getting dark. To have the possibility to study and work comfortably after sundown. For children to do their schoolwork or to read to each other in the evening. Simply to pump water to village after village, saving countless hours of backbreaking work for every family, and especially for women and girls.

The Bolsheviks’ course was aimed at accomplishing something broader than the economic and social development of Soviet Russia. Lenin presented these perspectives on strengthening the worker-peasant base of Soviet power for discussion, debate, and adoption by the Third Congress of the Communist International, the world party of revolution founded in 1919 at the initiative of the Bolsheviks.⁷ Without proletarian victories spreading to other countries, the socialist revolution in Russia would be hemmed in by the imperialist powers and defeated. This revolutionary perspective had to be fought for by an expanding worldwide alliance of workers and peasants, led by the communist workers movement.  
 
Bridging gap among world’s toilers
The Bolsheviks understood that such a goal—workers of the world, unite!—was possible only if the conditions of the toilers on an international scale were converging. Only if this cultural gap was closing. Only if more and more working people across the globe were taking an active part in social and political life, and could thus recognize toilers engaged in such social activity elsewhere as their brothers and sisters. Understanding and then acting on this reality is the foundation of a citizen of the world.

The effort to electrify the entire country, Lenin said in the December 1920 congress debate, would go hand in hand with the “endeavor to stamp out illiteracy—but that is not enough…. Besides literacy we need cultured, enlightened and educated working people; the majority of the peasants must be made fully aware of the tasks awaiting us.” ⁸

At the opening of the twenty-first century, these questions, and others like them, remain at the center of building proletarian parties and a world communist movement. They remain central to the possibilities for concrete political collaboration and joint activity by working people in the battle for national liberation and socialism. This perspective is advanced by the growing size and social weight of the working class throughout Asia, Latin America, and expanding areas of Africa, as well as by every step to improve the economic and social conditions of urban and rural toilers—from electrification to literacy, from sanitation and potable water to access to modern medicine.

Our politics—proletarian politics—start with the world. That’s not simply an accurate observation. Nor a snappy theme for a socialist conference. For all the reasons we’ve been discussing, it is a political necessity, the only place the working class can start and not end up in a swamp. In any one country, we are not more powerful than our own ruling class, much less the sometimes combined forces of several imperialist powers defending their world domination. A proletarian revolution has never triumphed and survived without international working-class solidarity powerful enough to affect the course of history.

It is the proletarian internationalism of communist politics above all that sets us apart from all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces.

The intensifying rivalry of the imperialist rulers constantly drives them to every nook and cranny of the globe in the hunt for markets for their commodities and capital, as well as for sources of cheap labor and raw materials. In face of uprisings by the toilers and conflicts among themselves, they carve out international alliances and negotiate treaties to strengthen their respective positions, economically, politically, and militarily. But the world is not where they begin.

Capitalist politics start with their borders, their currencies, their armed forces, their states—with bourgeois nationalism and patriotism in defense of their profits, prerogatives, and class rule.

NOTES

1. V.I. Lenin, “The Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets” in Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), vol. 31, p. 516. Hereafter LCW.

2. In 1917 the population of the young Soviet republic was 140 million. Some 80 percent were peasants, and 10 percent were in the working class, including 2 million factory workers.

3. Lenin, “Report on the Work of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee,” LCW, vol. 30, p. 335.

4. Lenin, “The Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets,” LCW, vol. 31, p. 516.

5. Ibid., p. 515.

6. Ibid., p. 517.

7. See “The Material Basis of Socialism and the Plan for the Electrification of Russia” in the “Theses for a Report on the Tactics of the R.C.P.” drafted by Lenin, as well as his “Report on the Tactics of the R.C.P.,” in New International no. 12 and in LCW, vol. 32, pp. 459, 492-94.

8. Lenin, “The Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets,” LCW, vol. 31, p. 518.  
 
 
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