The Spanish edition of Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March. The book explains the coming apart of the imperialist world order, put in place by the U.S. rulers after their bloody victory in World War II. The excerpt is from the chapter “So Far From God, So Close to Orange County: The Deflationary Drag of Finance Capital.” In this 1995 talk Barnes explained why U.S. imperialism lost the Cold War and why capitalist rivalries are pulling the NATO alliance apart. Copyright © 2000 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
Workers in Russia, workers across Eastern Europe, and workers in China are not going to travel along some different line of march from the rest of our class. They are less likely to do so as we enter the twenty-first century than ever before. There is not some separate set of social laws that will determine the outcome. … What happens there, like everywhere else, will be determined by the dialectic of the crisis and decline of the world imperialist system and the class battles unleashed by its pressures. The workers will become the decisive actors. But the action — including the growth in the size and social weight of the working class — will be produced and precipitated by the inevitable workings of the capitalist system on a world scale.
From one point of view, this outcome to what has been called the Cold War is a frustrating one for revolutionary-minded workers and youth. We can see all the doors that have been opened. Stalinist calumnies and political prejudice are less effective than at any time since the mid-1920s in closing the minds of fighters and revolutionists to communist ideas. We take full advantage of these open doors. We distribute books, pamphlets, and newspapers presenting a revolutionary perspective in parts of the world where only five or ten years ago it was nearly impossible to do so without being arrested or worse.
Communist workers see the hunger for ideas everywhere we go abroad, whether it is along the Silk Road in Iran or Azerbaijan, or at a conference of the African National Congress in South Africa, or to young people we meet at a gathering somewhere in Asia. We find that same interest among workers and young people we meet in Cuba and fellow revolutionists we collaborate with there.
But there is frustration as well. The fact that world capitalism has been weakened does not translate into a burst forward of working-class struggles or an advance for independent labor political action and organization. It does not mean that the working class conquered new ground.
Similarly, the collapse of the Stalinist apparatuses does not, on its own, increase the size of the communist movement. It is one thing to celebrate the collapse of these oppressive regimes and to recognize that this tears down the greatest obstacle to drawing workers into world politics and leading the best of them to communist conclusions and organization. But it is another thing to say the working class in these countries has been strengthened politically or organizationally; it hasn’t been. In order for communist leadership to be qualitatively expanded, the class struggle must first sharpen and expand.
The most important thing for class-conscious workers to understand, however, is that communists are in a better position today than at any time since the opening years of the Russian revolution to fight for proletarian leadership of revolutionary struggles as they develop. And the worst mistake we can make is to think that the rulers, that the enemies of the working class, are stronger than they are. To the contrary, they are weaker than they appear.
Everything we might think is strong — if we believed the bourgeois propaganda — is actually weaker than it seems. The rulers’ moves are moves from weakness, not strength. They are moves marked by the extended, deflation-biased wave of capitalist development since the opening half of the 1970s.
This closing month of 1994 has been a particularly good one for illustrations. … The U.S. dollar is weaker than it seemed (and at the same time relatively stronger compared not only to the Mexican peso or Canadian dollar but to the currencies of its rivals in Europe and Japan). The Russian army is weaker than it seemed.
What about NATO? NATO is not only weaker than it seems; it is not even an organization, contrary to what the name North Atlantic Treaty Organization implies, and it is less of an alliance than ever before. For most of the political lives of many of us, we thought of NATO as a thing. Even at its strongest, however, NATO was never a thing; it was the registration of a certain international relationship of class forces. It was a name for a collection of imperialist nation-states, each with its own government, its own armed forces, its own currency, and its own class interests. But we used shorthand, as human beings do, and fetishized the NATO alliance. …
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and Warsaw Pact, however, the rulers of the various European and North American capitalist powers no longer have any commonly perceived threat greater than their own diverging interests that would impel them to pay the price they once did to huddle under Washington’s strategic nuclear umbrella. …
If we recognize that fact, then we can understand what is behind the current tussle among various imperialist powers about how rapidly to extend NATO membership to certain former Warsaw Pact members in Central Europe, especially Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. The debate over that aggressive move represents a further weakening, not a strengthening, of NATO. It deepens the divergence among NATO members, with the U.S. rulers in their big majority at the head of those pressing for eastward expansion. And, of course, it sharpens tensions between Moscow and Washington and other NATO governments.