The ruling-class is a global class of speculators, of owners of fictitious capital. But, this global ruling class, does not have a global state to represent its interests, as every other national ruling class had in the form of the nation state. It has attempted to create such, with global para state bodies, such as the UN, WTO, World Bank, IMF and so on, but these cannot substitute for such a state, and simply continue to reflect antagonisms between the existing nation states, and the material national interests they represent. Indeed, not least amongst those interests are the material interests of the dominant form of property, the property upon which the revenues of the ruling class, and of the state depends, i.e. the interests of large-scale, socialised, industrial capital.
This is, in effect, a repeat of the analysis and debate about the United States of Europe, between Trotsky and Lenin, in 1915. Both Lenin and Trotsky agreed that imperialism drives towards such a solution, and that it is progressive, but, where, Trotsky argued, therefore, for raising the demand for a United States of Europe, Lenin argued that the divisions between the various imperialist states in Europe would prevent them from bringing it about, and that it would only be possible after the socialist revolution. In the 1920's, Lenin and the Comintern adopted the position put forward by Trotsky, of arguing for a United States of Europe as a transitional slogan.
Lenin, in fact, consistent with his analysis in “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism”, misunderstood the nature of imperialism, partly conflating and confusing it with the already outlived era of colonial empires, in which the world was carved up into geographically based territories controlled by the dominant colonial powers – Britain, France, Germany and Russia. Trotsky, also, was misled by this analysis of Lenin, formulated during WWI, and largely as a polemic against Kautsky, and his theory of super-imperialism. But, Trotsky, as seen in his analysis in “The Programme of Peace”, more accurately saw the true nature of imperialism, and of that war as being, not about colonialism, but about the need of capital to develop ever larger single markets, just as the nation state had so developed in the 18th and 19th century.
“At bottom of the war lay the need of the productive forces for a broader arena of development, unhampered by tariff walls. Similarly, in the occupation of the Ruhr so fatal to Europe and to mankind, we find a distorted expression of the need for uniting the coal of the Ruhr with the iron of Lorraine. Europe cannot develop economically within the state and customs frontiers imposed at Versailles. Europe is compelled either to remove these frontiers, or to face the threat of complete economic decay. But the methods adopted by the ruling bourgeoisie to overcome the frontiers it itself had created are only increasing the existing chaos and accelerating the disintegration.”
(Trotsky - Is The Time Ripe For The Slogan: ‘The United States Of Europe’?)
Trotsky raised the demand for a United States of Europe, as a transitional demand, in the same kind of way that Marxists had supported demands for the national bourgeois revolution, in the 19th century, not as an end in itself, but as part of the process of class struggle, whose goal is the socialist revolution. It was raised alongside the transitional demand for a Workers Government.
In other words, the majority of the masses, including the proletariat, did not posses a revolutionary class consciousness. They continued to hold bourgeois-democratic illusions. We do not, but as long as the masses do, we have to deal with that reality, and, in the process of struggle, win the masses away from those illusions. The masses would continue to place faith in bourgeois and reformist workers parties in elections, and in periods of intense class struggle, as in 1905 or 1917 in Russia, in which these bourgeois-democratic struggles become folded into the wider class struggle (permanent revolution), the Marxists promote the development of workers' self-government, in the form of the soviets/workers' councils as the means of struggle for these demands.
The Marxists would not join any such Workers Government, made up of these reformist and centrist parties, but would utilise the soviets to press down on it. As he writes in The Transitional Programme,
“From April to September 1917, the Bolsheviks demanded that the SRs and Mensheviks break with the liberal bourgeoisie and take power into their own hands. Under this provision the Bolshevik Party promised the Mensheviks and the SRs, as the petty bourgeois representatives of the worker and peasants, its revolutionary aid against the bourgeoisie categorically refusing, however, either to enter into the government of the Mensheviks and SRs or to carry political responsibility for it. If the Mensheviks and SRs had actually broke with the Cadets (liberals) and with foreign imperialism, then the “workers’ and peasants’ government” created by them could only have hastened and facilitated the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But it was exactly because of this that the leadership of petty bourgeois democracy resisted with all possible strength the establishment of its own government. The experience of Russia demonstrated, and the experience of Spain and France once again confirms, that even under very favourable conditions the parties of petty bourgeois democracy (SRs, Social Democrats, Stalinists, Anarchists) are incapable of creating a government of workers and peasants, that is, a government independent of the bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, the demand of the Bolsheviks, addressed to the Mensheviks and the SRs: “Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power into your own hands!” had for the masses tremendous educational significance. The obstinate unwillingness of the Mensheviks and SRs to take power, so dramatically exposed during the July Days, definitely doomed them before mass opinion and prepared the victory of the Bolsheviks.”
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