Global Capitalism Brings Misery to Millions - Only the World Working Class Can End that Misery

“Everything is for the best in this best of all of all possible worlds” is the latest message from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund about the state of the global economy. As May Day 2007 approaches the IMF celebrated the prospect of a fifth year of high world economic growth. Not to be left out, the World Bank produced a report showing that the numbers of people living on less than a dollar a day has fallen below 1 billion for the first time.

The “solid economic growth” of 3.9% per year since 2000 in “developing countries” is credited with this new capitalist achievement. Profits are increasing at new levels as labor productivity expands. All this is grist to the mill of the capitalist propaganda machines that are once again asserting that the capitalist method of production is the only way of doing things. The new “global market” has revived capitalism so that we really have reached “the end of history”.

At the same time we are told that the working class, at least in the advanced countries, is a dying breed and that the class struggle is a thing of the past. We are all citizens now, enjoying the benefits of expanding democracy. Even the protest voice of the anti-globalization movement seems to have gone silent.

Contradictions of the System

In reality the contradictions of the system are increasing not diminishing. Statistical aggregates are never very good guides to social reality and, as always, there is another way of viewing the figures. The fact that the number of people living on less than a dollar a day has fallen from 1.5 billion in 1990 to 985 million in 2007 has as much to do with the declining value of the dollar in that period as to improved living standards. The statistic does not tell us that the average income in the advanced countries in the sixties was about ten times that in the poorer countries, whilst today, that ratio has doubled. Underdevelopment is a necessary condition for global capital accumulation in the era of imperialism, the era of capitalism’ parasitism and decay. It does not bring progress but misery to the majority of humanity who create its wealth. Inequality is growing both between and within states. 80% of the world’s workforce lives below what the advanced countries would consider the poverty line. And no statistic can tell us about the sum total of human misery of those who are either, not integrated into production, or work only as virtual slaves.

This year capitalism is celebrating 200 years since the British Parliament voted to end the slave trade in 1807. What they don’t say is that this was done because wage slavery is a lot more efficient to exploit than chattel slavery (as a slave owner has a material incentive to keep a slave alive but free wage laborers’ costs can be driven below the level of subsistence). In China, according to Amnesty International, wage labor costs are kept low, despite labor shortages, because 200 million migrant workers have no legal status to live in the places where the work is. Pay is three to four months in arrears and with no right of residence they have no legal redress against employers. These workers produce the ridiculously cheap commodities of the advanced world and thus allow the wage rates there, especially of those on the minimum, to be frozen or reduced. The cheap cost of Chinese (not to mention Vietnamese and Indian) labor has a knock-on effect on living standards over the rest of the world. Precarious working conditions, lower wages, and a decline in the social provision of the state, are all part of the offensive of a globalized capitalist system of production. And in the advanced countries the myth is propagated that class no longer matters and that the class struggle is a thing of the past.

The myth has some force, given that the rise in exploitation worldwide has meant that the capitalists have made us pay for the crisis of accumulation, which opened, with the devaluation of the dollar in 1971. But like so many phases in history there is a limited time scale for this situation to continue since the contradictions of the system have not gone away but on the contrary have intensified. Today 2% of the world’s wealthy own over 50% of the world’s wealth whilst even in the advanced countries the working class share of national GDP is falling. In short, exploitation is increasing. In the US the lowest earning 10% of the population live better than two thirds of the rest of the world but as the Swiss Bank UBS research showed “we find that low income Americans have been in recession all this century”. There is no greater demonstration that there is no trickle down effect under capitalism but a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of those who do not work whilst the arms of those who do work get ever more but ever thinner. Or as Marx put it in 1847:

Society as whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.

The Alternative

And today some capitalists have grown extremely nervous about this. No less a figure than Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve has suggested that “global inequalities” are the “greatest threat” to the stability of the system. Investment banks are commissioning research into the global poverty their activities have helped to create. They are right to be nervous. Whilst capitalism has enjoyed long periods of comparative social peace these have never lasted. Irrespective of the mountains of debt and the gross speculative activity of finance capitalism a crash in this sphere will not bring a better society of itself. That can only come from the growing anger against the system itself. In Capital Volume III Marx wrote that “in the last resort the cause of all real crises” lies in the “restricted consumption and poverty of the masses”. Perhaps this is what Mr Bernanke has been reading?

But the crisis in whatever form it manifests itself cannot have anything other than a solution of increasing barbarism unless those masses in the world’s working class develops a consciousness of their own place in the scheme of things, and develop their own program. This is not about yet again simply begging for wage rises, nor is it about trust in a populist who pretends to redistribute wealth, like a Chavez. The history of the twentieth century demonstrated that state-controlled capitalism (as in Stalinist Russia) was still capitalism and not communism. It was not even a step towards it but simply another form of extorting surplus value from the working class.

Today there are enough resources to give everyone a decent existence without having long hours of labor but the current antagonistic system of production will not accede to this. Capital accumulation depends on the poverty of the vast majority. The vast majority, who create the world’s wealth hold the key to ending it and to creating a better method of production. The class struggle will not go away although the deliberate censorship of news of thousands of workers strikes around the world makes it seem like that. The collective fight against capitalism’s constant attacks has to give birth to a genuinely anti-capitalist movement, which for the first time actually attempts to implement the communist program. But this cannot come about overnight. Every partial struggle must lead to reflection on the nature of the system, and to greater numbers of workers becoming aware of the stakes. But this can only happen if revolutionaries take a leading role in that struggle, and that reflection, and to win workers to the fight for a future communist society. Although we start from a weak base that is what the groups of the International Bureau are dedicated to, in order to help forge the future World Party of the Proletariat well in advance of such a historic showdown. Such a party will not be an instrument of rule but a leadership in the struggle, fighting against all the false alternatives that a decaying and desperate system will throw in the workers’ path.

The real alternative is stark. Either capitalism carries on increasing the misery of millions, creating hunger, famine, environmental disaster and even more war, or the working class re-asserts itself politically as a class and rediscovers its own programme. The great issue of history remains their barbarism versus our socialism.

Workers of the World Unite!
We have a World to Win!