Capitalism: A Parenthesis in History
The development of historical capitalism is based on the private appropriation of agrarian land, the submission of agricultural production to the requirements of the ‘market’ and, on this basis, the continuing and accelerating expulsion of the peasant population for the benefit of a small number of capitalist farmers, who were no longer peasants and who ended up by forming an insignificant percentage of the population (from 5 to 10 %).
They are, however, capable of producing enough to feed (well) all their country’s population, and even export much of the surplus production. This path, started by England in the eighteenth century (with the Enclosures) and gradually extended to the rest of Europe in the nineteenth century, constituted the essence of the historical path of capitalist development.It seemed very effective. But whether it is effective or not, can it be imitated today in the peripheries of the system?
This capitalist path was only possible because the Europeans had at their disposal the great safety-valve of immigration to the Americas, which we mentioned earlier. But this solution simply does not exist for the peoples of the periphery today. Moreover, modern industrialisation cannot absorb more than a small minority of the rural populations concerned because, compared with the industries of the nineteenth century, it now integrates technological progress—the condition of its efficiency—which economises the labour that it employs. The capitalist path cannot produce anything else than the ‘‘slum planet” (which is visible in the contemporary capitalist Third World), producing and reproducing indefinitely cheap labour. This is in fact the reason why this path is politically unfeasible. In Europe, North America and Japan, the capitalist path—involving emigration outlets and the profits from imperialism—certainly created, rather belatedly, the conditions for a social compromise between capital and labour (particularly apparent in the period following the Second World War, with the welfare State, although this had already existed in less explicit forms since the end of the nineteenth century).
The conditions of a compromise based on this model do not exist for the peripheries of today. The capitalist path in China and Vietnam, for example, cannot create a broad popular alliance, integrating the worker class and the peasantry. It can only find its social basis in the new middle classes that have become the exclusive beneficiaries of this development. The ‘‘social-democratic” way is now therefore excluded. The inevitable alternative is one of a ‘peasant’ development model.The question of natural resources constitutes a second decisive issue in the conflict of civilization that opposes capitalism to socialism in the future. The exploitation of the non-renewable resources of the South for the exclusive profit of the consumption wastage of the North is also a form of accumulation by dispossession. The exchange of these resources against renewable goods and services jeopardises the future of the peoples of the South, who are being sacrificed on the altar of the super-profits of the imperialist oligopolies.
The destructive dimension of capitalism, at least for the peoples of the peripheries, makes it impossible to believe that this system can be sustainable and ‘imitated’ by those who seem to be ‘backward’. Its place in the history of humanity is that of a parenthesis that creates the conditions for overtaking it. If this does not happen capitalism can only lead to barbarism, the end of all human civilization.
The course of really existing capitalism is composed of a long period of maturing, lasting over several centuries, leading to a short moment of apogee (nineteenth century), followed by a probably long decline, starting in the twentieth century, which could initiate a long transition to globalised socialism.
Capitalism is not the result of a brutal, almost magical apparition, chosen by the LondonZAmsterdamZParis triangle to be established in the short period of the ReformZRenaissance of the sixteenth century. Three centuries earlier, it had experienced its first formulation in the Italian cities.
The first formulas were brilliant but limited in space and thus crushed by the surrounding ‘feudal’ European world. This is why, having been set back by successive defeats, these first experiences collapsed. It is also possible to discuss various antecedents to these, in the commercial towns along the Silk Route of China and India to the Arab and Persian Islamic Middle East. Later, in 1492, with the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish and the Portuguese, began the creation of the mercantile/slavery/ capitalist system. But the monarchies of Madrid and Lisbon, for various reasons which we shall not go into here, were unable to give a definitive form to mercantilism which, instead, the English, Dutch and French were to invent. This third wave of social, economic, political and cultural transformations, which was to produce the transition to capitalism in its historical form that we know (the Ancien Regime) would have been unthinkable without the two preceding waves. Why should it not be the same for socialism: a long process, lasting centuries, for the invention of a more advanced stage of human civilisation.The apogee of the system did not last long: hardly one century separated the industrial and French revolutions from 1917. This was the century when these two revolutions were accomplished, taking over Europe and its North American offspring—as well as the challenges to them, from the Commune of Paris in 1871 to the 1917 revolution—and achieving the conquest of the world, which seemed resigned to its fate.
Could this historical capitalism continue to develop, allowing the peripheries of the system to ‘‘overcome their backwardness’’ to become ‘developed’ capitalist societies like those in the dominant centres? If this were possible, if the laws of the system allowed it, then the ‘‘catching up’’ by and through capitalism would have had an objective unavoidable strength, a necessary precondition to an ulterior socialism. But this vision, obvious and dominant as it seemed, was simply false.
Historical capitalism is—and continues to be—polarising by nature, rendering ‘‘catching up’’ impossible.Historical capitalism must be overtaken and this cannot be done unless the societies in the peripheries (the great majority of humanity) set to work out systematic strategies of delinking from the global system and reconstructing themselves on an autonomous basis, thus creating the conditions for an alternative globalisation, engaged on the long road to world socialism. I will not take up this analysis here, as it can be read in my Obsolescent Capitalism (Annex IV). Pursuing the capitalist path to development thus represents, for the peoples of the periphery, a tragic impasse. This is because the ‘developed’ capitalism of some— the dominant minority centres (20 % of the world population)—requires the ‘‘under-development’’ of the others (80 % of the world population). The impasse can thus be seen in all dimensions of social, economic and political life. And it manifests itself most strikingly in the agrarian question.
5.1.1 The Twentieth Century: The First Wave of Socialist Revolutions and the Awakening of the ‘South'
Thus the apogee of the system lasted only a short while: hardly a century. The twentieth century experienced the first wave of the great revolutions conducted in the name of socialism (Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba) and the radicalization of the liberation struggles of Asia, Africa and Latin America (the peripheries of the imperialist/capitalist system) whose ambitions were expressed in the ‘‘Bandung project” (1955-1981).
This coincidence was not by chance. The globalisation of capitalism/imperialism had imposed the greatest tragedy in human history on the peoples of the peripheries concerned, showing up the destructive character of capital accumulation. The law of pauperisation formulated by Marx at the level of the system was still more violent than the father of socialist thought had imagined. This page of history has been turned over for good.
The peoples of the periphery will no longer accept the destiny that capitalism reserves for them. This change of fundamental attitudes is irreversible. It means that capitalism has entered into its decline. This does not exclude various illusions: those of reforms capable of giving capitalism a human face (which it has never had for the majority of peoples), those of a possible ‘‘catching up” in the system, which is cherished by the governing classes in the ‘emerging’ countries, exhilarated by momentary success, those of nostalgic retreat (para-religious or paraethnic) into which many of the ‘excluded’ peoples have sunk at the moment. These illusions continue as we are still in the trough of the wave. The wave of the revolutions of the twentieth century is spent and that of the new radicalism of the twenty first century has not yet affirmed itself. And in an interregnum, ‘‘a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’’, as Gramsci wrote. The awakening of the peoples of the periphery has made itself felt since the twentieth century, not only because of their demographic catching up, but also by their express desire to reconstruct their State and their society, delinked from the imperialism of the four preceding centuries.I therefore proposed looking at the twentieth century as one of the first wave of struggles for the emancipation of the workers and of peoples, of which I mention here only the main theses.
5.1.2 Bandung and the First Globalization of the Struggles (1955-1981)
The governments and peoples of Asia and Africa proclaimed at Bandung, in 1955, their desire to reconstruct the world system on a basis of recognizing the rights of nations that had up until then been dominated. This ‘‘right to development’’ was the foundation of globalisation at that time, implemented in a multipolar negotiated framework imposed on an imperialism that was forced to adjust to these new requirements.
The industrialisation progress that started during the Bandung era was not the result of imperialist logic but it was imposed by the victories of the peoples of the South. Undoubtedly, this progress cherished the illusion of ‘‘catching up” which seemed on the way to becoming a reality, while imperialism, forced to adjust to the demands of the development of the peripheries, recomposed itself around new forms of domination. The old contrast of imperialist countries/dominated countries, which was synonomous with the contrast of the industrialised countries/ non-industrialised countries, gradually gave way to a new contrast based on the centralisation of the advantages associated with the ‘‘five new monopolies of the imperialist centres” (control over new technologies, natural resources, the global financial system, communications and weapons of mass destruction).
5.2