The Political Situation (1/14)
Paul says,
“Anyone who thinks the current geopolitical order will survive hasn’t understood the 1930's.”
However, as I set out in the previous section, the current economic conditions are not comparable to the 1930's, but more akin to the 1890's, or the 1950's, so basing yourself on lessons of the 1930's, is somewhat pointless, even if your understanding of the 1930's, and the lessons from what happened, were correct, which, in Paul's case, they are not.
The 1920's were a period of crises of overproduction. Capital had expanded since the 1890's, labour had become relatively scarce, causing wages to rise, and the working-day to be reduced, labour supply did not increase fast enough to increase the social working-day, leading to a squeeze on profits. Workers had become much better organised, and had created mass social-democratic and communist parties. All of the technologies developed in the 1870's and 80's, that had raised productivity and profits, enabling the boom after 1890 to take place, had become the standard technology. Capital needed a new technological revolution, and as such revolutions mean that production takes place on a larger scale to be efficient, it also increases the need for larger single markets, with standardisation and common rules. That is why it spurs the need for a single European state, which is the driving force for both the First and Second World Wars, in Europe, and a similar drive is responsible for the war in the Pacific.
In fact, the same pressures were in place in the 1970's and 80's, but, in place of a war to achieve it, the European states came together peacefully and voluntarily to extend the customs union and common market they had created after WWII, into such a single market, and currency union. In itself that was probably the most progressive event in human history. In South America the same economic forces led in the 1980's to the Latin American Integration Association, which in 1991 became Mercosur. In Asia it led to the creation of ASEAN. The most recent manifestation has been the creation of the largest such bloc, covering 1.5 billion people in the African Continental Free Trade Area.
As Lenin notes,
“This brings us to the question of why a capitalist country needs a foreign market. Certainly not because the product cannot be realised at all under the capitalist system. That is nonsense. A foreign market is needed because it is inherent in capitalist production to strive for unlimited expansion—unlike all the old modes of production, which were limited to the village community, to the patriarchal estate, to the tribe, to a territorial area, or state. Under all the old economic systems production was every time resumed in the same form and on the same scale as previously; under the capitalist system, however, this resumption in the same form becomes impossible, and unlimited expansion, perpetual progress, becomes the law of production...
Thus, different conceptions of realisation (more exactly, the understanding of it, on the one hand, and complete misunderstanding of it by the romanticists, on the other) lead to two diametrically opposite views on the significance of the foreign market. For some (the romanticists), the foreign market is an indication of the “difficulty” which capitalism places in the way of social development. For others, on the contrary, the foreign market shows how capitalism removes the difficulties of social development provided by history in the shape of various barriers—communal, tribal, territorial and national.”
In the 1970's, Britain too felt the force of economic necessity to be a part of that process, which shows just what an absurdity, and aberration Brexit is, and why it will ultimately fail, as all such attempts to stand against the march of history fail. It also shows why it is political suicide for any socialist not to recognise that fact, and to fail to bring it to the attention of the working-class, and begin the process of reversing that decision. There is a danger of looking at Brexit, and the peculiar political conditions in Britain, and generalising that into a vision of the global political situation, or the situation, at least, in Europe. The election of Trump enhances this view. However, its necessary to understand what those political forces represent, and how they differ from the forces that led to fascism in the 1930's, in completely different conditions.
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