Initiative for a New Communist Organization and Programme
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The capitalist restructuring
The exploitation of the wage-earners and the production-sale of commodities are both central to capitalist relations. However, this doesn’t mean that production remains stagnant, nor that capitalist relations appear solely in the direct production process. On the contrary, they form a broad matrix, an economic-socio-political-cultural whole that has the new ways of extracting relative and absolute surplus value and the maintenance of the bourgeois political domination at its core.
In the field of production, while the possibilities deriving from the rise in labour productivity are unprecedented, reality is painted black for modern workers, as a result of capital’s need for maximising profitability. Wages are being squeezed down to historic lows and the loss is engrossed even more by the confiscation of the so-called ‘indirect wage’. The level of unemployment remains high – particularly among young people and women. Labour flexibilisation is increasingly becoming another negative factor of the labour landscape, while working from home is changing the nature of the work process. In this context, capitalists also exploit the “weapons” provided by the new technological-digital environment to extract additional surplus value, squeeze the value of labour power and replace with machines, robots and automated systems, not only the manual, but also a big part of cognitive functions. The complete enslavement of labour to -flexible and employer-selected- machines is imposed, work rhythms and employer control are intensified. The automation of production threatens employment, yet, as the case of China demonstrates, the proportionately more industrial robots coexist well with the numerous and underpaid working class. On the other hand, even the cost of reproducing labour power is now being passed on to the working class (as seen through reforms in health, education, insurance, social housing, etc.). The profitability of capital at the expense of labour is reinforced by new possibilities of control-monitoring of workers, intensification of labour, dehydration of labour from creative elements, widening of the zone of digital Taylorism, accelerated subordination of living labour to deadened labour (and through the latter, subordination of workers to the employer).
There is a clear tendency to widen the sphere of commodity production – that is, the expansive development of capitalist relations. First of all, through the overcoming of the “setbacks” of the public sector. Privatisation, the assignment of the provision or management of ‘public works’ to private individuals, the filling of all gaps left by the deterioration of public services, the exploitation of all kinds of infrastructure, and even policing and the army are some of the new fields of profitability. But capital also creates new ways of development for commodity relations. The new digital reality of the internet, artificial intelligence, the so-called ‘green transition’, big data, the development of the life sciences (biology, genetics, biochemistry) and the intertwining of these two fields (bioinformatics) are creating opportunities for profitability in fields that did not formerly exist, and does so with the desired rate of profit. The expansion-penetration of commodity relations in every aspect of human life and nature is a third development with regards to the aforementioned field. It is achieved through the commodification of the fulfillment of every human need (spiritual, mental, communication, recreation, socialising, teaching, physical well-being, etc.) and the superior exploitation of the natural environment (subsoil, seas, forests, arable land, water, space).
The concentration of capital is strengthened, especially in critical sectors (agriculture-food, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, trade, digital environment, etc.) – and will be further strengthened as many small businesses will be hit with the shocks of the period, especially once state support is withdrawn. The unprecedented monopolistic role of multinational giants is yet another indicator (e.g. Big Pharma in pharmaceuticals, Big Farm in agri-food, etc.). Another indicator is the Mergers and Acquisitions boom (in 2021 up 63% from 2020 and far outpacing 2007, mainly directed towards technology and healthcare) and the fact that the top 20 hedge funds earned 1/3 of the total world profits in 2021.
Financial capital retains its key role, regardless of having been considered as the culprit of the 2008 crisis. Its role is maintained because it reflects and exploits real procedures: the large increase in the mass of extracted surplus value in production, from which the financial capital claims and extracts an increasing share (China’s foreign exchange reserves: $3.2 trillion, of which 1.4 trillion is invested in foreign banks); the accumulated capital that is stagnating and seeks ways of profitable exploitation; the opportunities for profitability promised by the market in government and public debt bonds (88 trillion, almost equal to the global GDP); and finally, the potential for profitability offered by the liberalisation of international financial flows and the new digital environment of electronic transactions, cryptocurrencies, etc.
The state is being reconstructed in a reactionary direction
Regarding the state, the political system and the bourgeois institutions, voices (even centre-right ones) appeared in the public debate during the period of the pandemic, talking about the “end of neoliberalism” and the “return of the welfare state”. A similar debate is also taking place in sections of the left, with proposals for New Deals – with whatever adjective they have in front of them, such as the Green New Deal – currently flourishing. In practice, however, any state interventions that appear to contradict the ‘orthodox’ imperatives of neoliberalism (the notorious invisible hand of the market) only handle the regulation of the acute capitalist contradictions and their consequences, rather than addressing the root cause of the problems. Government money is provided for bailing out big business and the capitalists, not for improving working people’s lives. The current trend of “return of the (bourgeois) state” actually means new taxes, reduced social benefits and wages, and of course strengthening of state repression. Apart from control and repression, however, the bourgeois state also uses “persuasion” (coercion in reality) and all its ideological mechanisms in order to convince the people to internalise the needs of the system as their own needs. At the same time, the state and governments engage in an attempt to build social alliances with portions of the lower and middle classes.
The economic-social function of the bourgeois state and its forms of interweaving with capital are being readjusted. In previous periods – especially in the post-world-war period – the state was projected as a ‘neutral’ mechanism that imposed regulatory rules of rational functioning on the market and ensured social reproduction. In our current period, it adopts the rules of the market in its ways of operation: it lays off civil servants, incorporates the economic criteria of the private sector (cost-benefit) into social services, organises taxation, and manages workers’ debts for the benefit of banks. In previous times it appeared to protect certain elementary labour rights; now, with the labour relation laws and the generalisation of flexible working even within the state, it is clearly paving the way for the employers. At the previous stage it also functioned as a producer of goods and services or as a provider of collective/public infrastructure; now it is ceding to capital or even privatising functions belonging to the deeper parts of its core.
These changes on the level of economic functioning are also reflected in the institutional forms of the state. The state of total capitalism entails the reduction of the relatively autonomous legislative role of Parliament and representative bourgeois institutions in general to the point that it can even openly become a formal institution for ratifying decisions taken in the opaque centres of economic and political power. For this reason, many of the powers of the Parliament are being absorbed by the executive power positions, which increasingly rule by means of legislative acts, ministerial decisions and presidential decrees. Increasingly, even the existing bourgeois constitution is being trampled underfoot.
The coupling of surveillance-control-manipulation on one hand and repression on the other is being reconstituted in the state of total capitalism and in the wider mechanisms of bourgeois power. This is promoted by simultaneously strengthening both of its sides with various changes: Through upgrade of the (classical and mainly digital) mechanisms of control-surveillance, preventive detection and repression, and strengthening of the manipulation-direction mechanisms (media etc.), the elevation of ‘security’ as the highest priority factor (under the pretext of counter-terrorism or the ‘edge’), as well as the generalisation of brutal repression, police-military-intelligence interdependence, the militarisation of the police and the policing of the army, private mercenary armies and private security companies. The restructuring of the entire legislative framework/legislation and the judiciary towards reactionary direction. Surveillance-monitoring mechanisms and the “most hidden cells” have been diffused-penetrated everywhere and are operating incessantly. Modern “files” contain much more individual data than traditional ones, are created by big tech companies with information largely derived from individual/voluntary use of the internet, which cannot be burned and can be sold to government agencies, potential employers, insurance or production companies to enforce manipulated consumption.
Finally, the state today integrates a new architecture between the central, the regional-local and the transnational institutions of bourgeois power. Regions and municipalities are fully aligned with the anti-populist policy and the memorandum directions constituting the local state. Important functions of the central state are transferred to the local level, without the necessary or with only absolutely directed funding. Simultaneously with the EU-type integrations, memoranda and guardianship, with the increased importance of supranational institutions and inter-state agreements, crucial elements of the functioning of the national state are bound by their choices, which they internalize and diffuse to the lower links of the chain. The broad transnational matrix of bourgeois power mechanisms might not be a superstate, but it has a decisive character, it is fully controlled by the multinational polyindustrial monopolies and banks, and is completely sterile from popular pressure and control, even from bourgeois parliamentary processes.
Developments in the bourgeois political system
The landscape of political crisis of the urban political systems is taking shape, the expressions of which are:
α) The great political instability, the volatility, the difficulty to form governments. These factors stem from political distrust, disillusionment, disengagement of the “bottom” (hence the reduced participation in elections in many countries), from the crisis of the traditional bourgeois parties (retreat and disintegration in terms of participation of their members, de-ideologisation/depoliticisation/identity-strategy crisis and a rapid decline in their prestige), and from the pulverisation of the political map with the emergence of new parties (which are also finding it difficult to stabilise).
- b) The suffocating limitation of the possibility of governmental management solutions that satisfy social needs to some basic degree.
- c) The particularly dangerous trend of the rise of the far right in a number of countries, which often becomes the battering ram of the bourgeois system of power in order to subordinate the element of “class” to the “national” one. This rise is an expression of capital’s aggression against labour, against social and democratic rights, against immigrants, against everything different, against the struggles and tendencies to question its politics and domination. It is the result of the tremendous sharpening of inter-capitalist antagonisms, of the ‘return’ of capital to the national field (to draw power for the international sharing of the spoils) and of the ability to offer the poor of each nation an illusion that a ‘national policy’ and a return to traditional values can somehow cover their social nakedness.
Within bourgeois politics today three main currents can be distinguished: A current whose main element is the promotion of anti-labour restructuring on a neoliberal basis, with an emphasis on full freedom of markets, “individual rights” (and “individual responsibility”), cosmopolitanism, scientism, anti-discrimination declarations and “inclusion”. A – second – far-right neo-conservative current, with an emphasis on ‘traditional values’, nationalism/racism, misogyny and irrationalism, covert or even overt neo-fascism. And third, a current of bourgeois mutant social democracy. These currents are not separated by strict borders. In principle they all serve the values of profit, property and exploitation, despite their minor differences, which in places can be important. Moreover, each current ‘adapts’ to the extent the circumstances require and to the balance of power in each country and situation, while there are cases where different currents either co-govern or even coexist within the same party. All these systemic currents contribute to and influence the reactionary reform of the bourgeois political system.
The reconstruction of mainstream parties is striven for, in order to correspond to the contemporary needs of the bourgeoisie. We can see a shift of the bourgeois political spectrum towards the right and the far right, with a characteristic – but not unique – manifestation being the clear tendency for rise of various versions of the far right (including fascist tendencies and currents) in critical countries of the capitalist world. In the majority of cases, this trend – which reflects the acute aggression of bourgeois politics in continuity and intersection, but not in opposition to the basic choices of the ‘classical’ bourgeois parties – is accompanied by a major retreat of “left-leaning” political formations which claimed to manage governmental power in conditions of exacerbated bourgeois aggression in all fields. Emblematic examples are the rise of the extreme neoliberalism of Milei in Argentina, country of the well-known experiments in the management of Peronism, as well as the parliamentary representation of three extreme right-wing parties in Greece, where the well-known degenerative developments in SYRIZA are taking place in parallel, or even the rapid rise of the AfD in Germany with the collapse of Die Linke, which was in power in a number of states, etc.
Coalition governments appear more and more often in an attempt to achieve a broader consensus in the formulation, implementation and application of anti-people’s policies and restructuring, but also because the major parties of the past and the classical bipolar alternation are usually absent. With political leaders being media creations, seemingly “popular” or at least far from the “traditional” way of emergence through parties. The bourgeois electoral processes are – in more and more countries – taking on the dominant character of a market-based star system, where the more “popular” the leader is, the more powerful they feel in launching anti-worker offense. Bourgeois politics is increasingly acquiring elements of “consumer choice”, of “spectacle”, with the “Americanisation” of political debate, the replacement of political debate and programmes by “catchphrases” and meaningless advertising campaigns, elements which are rooted in the deep agreement and acceptance of the main pillars and directions of bourgeois politics by all parties, right, far right, “centre” and “left”.
The course of capitalist globalization
With the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the debate on the course of capitalist globalization intensified: on the one hand, the tendency towards further ‘globalization of trade, financial and other flows of capital and digital interconnectivity and, on the other hand, the temporary return to national territory to participate in the international arena almost exclusively on the basis of ‘national power’ (e.g. Trump’s ‘America First’, Brexit).
It is a fact that the war, the blows to supply chains, the recourse to the “breathing apparatus” of state aid -which exists mainly within the separate states-, the conflicts over energy resources and roads, etc., are a reflection of the strengthening of the competitive tendencies and of the views supporting a return to the “national springboard”, but they are also the intensification of the struggle for the crystallization of a new correlation. This is far from leading to a reversal of the trend towards broader and deeper capitalist internationalisation. In practice, internationalisation and antagonism go hand in hand in capitalism, regardless of their intensity per period and phase, as both are objective processes in the development of capitalism. Rearrangements and readjustments (e.g. armouring against the vulnerabilities of supply chains), changes of correlation within it, we will have, perhaps a temporary slowdown, but not a halt and much less a reversal of the trend towards capitalist internationalisation.
This happens because the capitalist internationalisation, apart from being an inherent tendency of capital (expanding its limits for maximum profitability), also is the basis of the constitution of modern total capitalism. It is implemented through various mechanisms and processes (foreign direct investment, financial flows, flows of goods, labour, information, etc.), by many ‘subjects’ (multinational enterprises operating on a national basis and/or independently of it, bourgeois states, capitalist integrations, regional organisations and agreements, etc.).etc.), some of which have a hegemonic position, and with the constant coexistence and interplay of expansionist-competitive tendencies, the protection of ‘our own’ and the desire for ‘next door’.
In recent years we have witnessed developments and cases in which the capitalist integrations have been shaken and other times they have been challenged (mainly from the bourgeoisie, e.g. Brexit), in some cases it was made apparent that the existing level of integration is inferior to the needs (e.g. the EU’s single policy), while in some cases conflicts between the member countries (e.g. health material/vaccines in the pandemic, migration policy and the Ukraine war/sanctions, distribution of EU Recovery Fund resources) in no way resembled allies and inhabitants of a ‘common home’. However, they did not retreat nor dismantle; on the contrary, after renegotiations, these integrations deepened their reactionary – against the working class – character. Moreover, the new realities following the war in Ukraine, the prospect of a lasting energy crisis and the need to redesign supply chains make forms of capitalist integration and integration even more of a necessity for capital.
A new labour movement is struggling to be born
On the other side, in the form of the low tide and flood movement, there has been an appearance of a militant radical current which, despite its contradictions, has left a strong imprint on social and political developments. From the popular uprising in Chile to the prolonged social unrest in France and the major popular mobilizations and explosions in the so-called third world (Iraq, Lebanon, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, etc.), to the radical processes in the United States, the “grassroots” show that they are not prepared to compromise with the “half-life” that the system is shaping for them. This rise in the mobility of the masses is due first of all to the explosive sharpening of the social crisis, and it’s this type of mobility that the young generation stars in, which cannot see any positive prospects on the horizon, plays a leading role.
They present some common qualitative characteristics that need to be studied, as they express contemporary tendencies of resistance and emancipation, but also the characteristic inability of contemporary capitalism to integrate social discontent. The combination of new and more traditional forms of struggle (e.g. France’s yellow vests and the railway workers’ and teachers’ strikes), the long duration of the confrontation followed by an often correspondingly long period of retreat, the combativeness of the forms of struggle and the willingness to clash, the tendencies towards rapid internationalisation (e.g. recent mobilizations for Palestine, or the demolition of statues-symbols of racism after the Floyd assassination) pervade contemporary movements horizontally. At the same time, a continuity and a succession of class struggle is expressed, where the social avant-gardes that are born seem to feed the next ones. In France, the ‘standing nights’ were followed by the ‘yellow vests’, which in turn gave the baton to new struggles. Black Lives Matter expressed elements of earlier movements in the U.S. such as Occupy Wall Street or the $15 an hour movement, but also the historical confrontation with racism as a fundamental element in the constitution of the American state. A tendency to return labour rallying/organizing to the heart of capitalist production has appeared, which is incredibly valuable. The formation of unions at the heart of modern capitalism (Google, Amazon, Starbucks, UPS, etc.), the gigantic strikes of over 200 million workers in India, and the longest strike in France – even since the historic May ’68 – have set out to prove how wrong those who were quick to write off the working class were. At the same time, anti-war struggles, feminist struggles and struggles against the destruction of the environment and climate change are coming to the forefront.
The main reason why these struggles, despite their creativity and heroism, are ultimately limited and lose their momentum is the deafening absence of a comprehensive political proposal and perspective from the point of view of the strategic interests of the working class and the oppressed. The degeneration of the historical communist movement and the influence of bourgeois ideology often contribute to the fact that new currents of radicalisation are often formed at a distance from the legacies and emancipatory aims of the left, with the case of the Yellow Vests or the first phase of the anti-memoranda movement in Greece with their hostility towards anything organised being typical. Thus, despite the fact that individual radical goals may be set (e.g. stopping the contribution of universities or corporations to the war massacre in Gaza), the development of consciousness is left halfway and ends up being trapped in the bourgeois parliamentary game or limited to activist actions, concepts and spaces-areas of partial questioning of the system without an overall revolutionary perspective. The rebirth of a new communist hope seems more than urgent, and can only be developed in the fertile field of the contemporary movement.
Initiative for a New Communist Organization: The capitalist world today
