And, so can also be seen the reason for the opposition to such regulation, for example by the EU, from all of those petty-bourgeois producers and traders, who grew in social weight from the 1980's onwards, and who captured conservative social-democratic parties, be it the Tories or Republicans etc., and who developed a series of reactionary, petty-bourgeois, populist parties, on their right flanks.
Marx notes that the fact that without regulation there would be no limitations shows that capital has a naturally stronger position. Competition for work weakens the position of labour. In contrast, Marx notes the point made earlier, about workers in the United States.
“The position of a wages labourer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term. To mend this colonial state of things the paternal British Government accepted for some time what is called the modern colonization theory, which consists in putting an artificial high price upon colonial land, in order to prevent the too quick conversion of the wages labourer into the independent peasant.” (p 89)
This fact led US capital to start by using machines and technology to a greater degree, in place of labour. The Civil War, also, meant that Northern industry could draw in black workers from the South, similar to the way England sucked in agricultural workers to the towns.
Marx, then, turns to the situation in agriculture, in Britain, between 1849-59. It was a period of long wave boom. Many rural workers moved to higher paid industrial jobs, but, also, during this period, more people were employed in railway construction than any other sphere. On top of that, others were drawn into the army, during the Crimean War. The result was a shortage of agricultural labour, and rise in wages.
“What was its consequence? The farmers could not, as our friend Weston would have advised them, raise the value of wheat, nor even its market prices. They had, on the contrary, to submit to their fall. But during these eleven years they introduced machinery of all sorts, adopted more scientific methods, converted part of arable land into pasture, increased the size of farms, and with this the scale of production, and by these and other processes diminishing the demand for labour by increasing its productive power, made the agricultural population again relatively redundant. This is the general method in which a reaction, quicker or slower, of capital against a rise of wages takes place in old, settled countries.” (p 89-90)
Marx notes that these factors lead to a rising organic composition of capital that, in itself, puts labour in a weaker position.
“If of a total capital of 600, 300 is laid out in instruments, raw materials, and so forth, and 300 in wages, the total capital wants only to be doubled to create a demand for 600 working men instead of for 300. But if of a capital of 600, 500 is laid out in machinery, materials, and so forth and 100 only in wages, the same capital must increase from 600 to 3,600 in order to create a demand for 600 workmen instead of 300. In the progress of industry the demand for labour keeps, therefore, no pace with the accumulation of capital. It will still increase, but increase in a constantly diminishing ratio as compared with the increase of capital.” (p 91-2)
In China, as already detailed, Stalinism let slip a golden revolutionary opportunity, in the 1920's. The Chinese proletariat had grown rapidly, and gave its support to the Chinese Communist Party. Unlike the Russian peasants, which had created their own peasant party – the S.R.'s – the Chinese peasants had not. They too gave their support to the Chinese Communist Party. The prestige of the Communist Party and of the Comintern was high, following the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, in 1917. But, Stalinism squandered this opportunity, and betrayed the Chinese Revolution.
Its policy of the Popular Front (bloc of four classes), subordinated the workers and poor peasants to the Chinese national bourgeoisie, via the KMT, in the name of pursuing the limited goal of an “anti-imperialist” struggle, and bourgeois national revolution. For Stalin, this was driven not only by his factional struggle against the Left Opposition, which led him to oppose permanent revolution, and the ideas which guided Lenin in the Russian Revolution, and his principles for revolutionaries in relation to the national and colonial questions, but also by his own theoretical weakness. Stalin reverted to the same ideas he had prior to Lenin's April Theses. In addition, having adopted the theory of Socialism In One Country, and the consequent abandonment of the international socialist revolution, in order to try to obtain a “breathing space” from imperialism, by not antagonising it, Stalin, and consequently the Comintern, attempted to appease imperialism, by showing them that it could be trusted to hold back any attempts to move beyond purely bourgeois democratic revolutions, and if need be, to sabotage any attempts to do so.
That strategy was disastrous. After Chiang Kai Shek's coup in April 1927, the Chinese workers abandoned the Communist Party, as a result of its betrayal. That strengthened the social weight of the peasants in the Chinese Communist Party. Stalin repeated the error by subordinating the workers to the Left Kuomintang, with the same results, and when the Left Kuomintang allied once more with the KMT, the Chinese Communist Party, effectively took its place, as a revolutionary peasant party, becoming basically a Chinese equivalent of the Narodniks, or S.R.'s. Its political programme and revolutionary strategy, from the late 1920's, reflected that, as it abandoned the programme and strategy of proletarian revolution for the program of Peasant War, and rural guerrilla warfare, epitomised by Mao Zedong, and the PLA. Indeed, in his youth, Mao was influenced by the anarchist ideas of Kropotkin.
In the early 1920's, Mao's activity inside the KMT, was almost exclusively directed towards organisation of the peasantry, whose revolutionary potential he promoted. In 1924, after the Stalinists took the Chinese Communists into the KMT, Mao was elected on to the latter's Central Executive Committee, in Guangzhou. He proposed four resolutions to decentralise power to urban and rural bureaus. In 1926, he ran the KMT's Peasant Movement Training Institute.
As detailed in previous sections, following the disaster of the Stalinist's Popular Front strategy, leading to the coup of Chiang Kai Shek, and its sequel with the Left KMT, not only did the Communist Party lose its proletarian base, leaving it dominated by peasants, but, it resorted to adventurist stunts, like the Canton Uprising, and increasingly turned to those measures of Peasant War, and rural guerrilla warfare typical of a peasant party, and which Mao had promoted. That condition of civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT, carried out in rural areas, continued for the next ten years. During this period, all of the deficiencies of Peasant War, disconnected from proletarian revolution in the urban areas, previously described by Trotsky, were apparent. It was during this time that Mao became leader of the Chinese Communist Party, on the basis of assuming the position of its military commander.
Much as with the mythology created around the defeat of the British Army at Dunkirk, the Long March conducted by Mao's Peasant Army has also been romanticised. Yet, it was a similar disaster to that of Dunkirk. Of the 100,000 that set out on the march, only about 8,000 reached the final destination, in Shanxii.
But, between that minimum and maximum of wages, there is an infinite variation. Marx, then, sets out what determines where this settles, and why it always means that capital has the upper hand, and that it is strengthened, over time, as against labour. This does not contradict what was said earlier about crises of overproduction arising when wages squeeze profits. The rise in wages does not result in the mass of profits disappearing, only that it stops growing, as Marx describes, in Capital III, Chapter 15, and in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 21.
In other words, if total capital is £1 million and profits £100,000, an increase in capital to £1.2 million, and consequent rise in employment, leads to rising wages to an extent that profits remain at £100,000. The additional £0.2 million of capital does not act as capital, because it does not self-expand, does not produce additional profit. It has been overproduced, relative to labour. But, this illustrates the point, because, at this point – where the rate of profit falls, because of a fall in the rate of surplus value, which is a quite different condition to that of The Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, described by Marx, where the rate of surplus value rises – of crisis, labour is thrown out. Capital responds by replacing labour with machines.
“The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.
The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.” (p 88)
But, this begs the question of what determines these respective powers, and why it varies at different phases of the long wave cycle.
Marx notes that, as far as the working-day was concerned, the matter had never been resolved without legislative intervention. In other words, capital in general, via its state, had to regulate the damaging competition between the many individual capitals. The workers continually pressed for such laws, as against having to negotiate with individual employers, but without success until some of those employers also favoured such regulation. Even where laws were introduced, they were often flagrantly breached. As Marx says, in Capital I, its only when some of the larger employers recognised that competition would prevent any limitation without such laws that regulation becomes effective. As Marx notes, in The Poverty of Philosophy, this is the reality that laws simply rubber stamp what has already become material reality, and as capital develops, this material reality changes, requiring greater regulation.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx says in response to Proudhon, that, in England, parliament had to repeal The Combination Acts that made unions illegal, and that was simply a reflection of reality, as it had developed under pressure of capital accumulation.
“Parliament had to modify the law in order to bring it more and more into line with the conditions resulting from free competition, it had of necessity to abolish all laws forbidding combinations of workers. The more modern industry and competition develop, the more elements there are which call forth and strengthen combination, and as soon as combination becomes an economic fact, daily gaining in solidity, it is bound before long to become a legal fact.”
As Engels also points out, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of The Working Class, it reflected the fact that the larger capitals no longer required those methods, and regulation acted to their benefit, against the smaller capitals.
“The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed — at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case — to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages.”
What permanent revolution demonstrates is that, in the age of imperialism, where industrial capital has grown, and along with it the industrial working-class, this working-class can, lead the bourgeois national revolution, where it has not already taken place, and, where it does, it will be led to go beyond the tasks, purely of that revolution, that it will be led to fulfil the tasks of that revolution, by proletarian not bourgeois means. (Incidentally, this shows the lack of understanding of revolution as a dialectical process, rather than as an event portrayed by Lars T Lih, in his recent article in the Weekly Worker) But, can that bourgeois national revolution occur without the working-class taking that leading role, and so without the process of permanent revolution being set in motion? Yes, of course it can.
For one thing imperialism is not colonialism. Colonialism is the expression of mercantilism, of the symbiotic relation between the landed aristocracy with merchant capital, and the financial oligarchy. The same appropriation of surplus value via unequal exchange that characterises rent, commercial profit and interest is what characterises the extraction of surplus value from colonial possessions. It also is an extension of the old monopolies and protected markets, that industrial capitalism sweeps away. This is a fundamental error in Lenin's “Imperialism”, in which he continued to see the issue in terms of colonialism, and a struggle for division of the world, to acquire these protected markets, whereas the real issue was a struggle to create, and dominate ever larger single domestic markets, subsumed within ever larger, multinational states.
Rather than seeking to create protected markets, what multinational capital actually sought, as industrial capital had done in creating the nation state, was to ensure the openness of those global markets, as sources of supply of materials, and locations where it could invest capital, and, thereby, exploit labour, i.e. the extraction of surplus value, not via unequal exchange, but directly in production, via the production of ever larger quantities of relative surplus value, and ever larger masses of capital. World War I and II, in Europe, was about creating a single European market, for example. It required not the old protectionism, but free trade and a level playing field for all capital operating within it, which requires a single, European, multinational state.
So, colonialism after WWII, no longer served the interests of capital, which had become dominated by multinational industrial capital - imperialism. As Trotsky notes, western imperialism had financed revolutionaries to overthrow Tsarism, whose political regime was no longer compatible with the needs of industrial capital. The development of industrial capital, and the consequent decline of the old landed aristocracy, as well as of the peasantry/petty-bourgeoisie, inevitably leads to the social dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, whose preferred political regime is that of the parliamentary republic, as Lenin described in “State and Revolution”.
Towards the end of WWII, Roosevelt proposed to Stalin that, if required, they should join forces to ensure the break-up of the old colonial empires, which, of course, the US required, in order to gain access to them. That did not happen, but those old colonial empires were broken up, as a consequence of the dominance of US imperialism, the bankruptcy of the old European capitals, and the national liberation struggles conducted within those former colonies. What imperialism required was no longer colonial slaves, but wage slaves, and that meant it no longer required colonies, or even neocolonies, but the ability to move capital freely to wherever labour could be best exploited to maximise profits. It required something approaching a global rule of law protecting capitalist property rights, and so something approaching bourgeois-democratic states, implementing and enforcing such laws.
Of course, as the Revolutions of 1848 demonstrated, such bourgeois republics require either that the ruling class is dominant, and able to exercise direct control over its state, or else that a large, professional middle-class, and proletariat exists upon which social democracy rests. In many developing countries, no such conditions existed, or indeed exist. The domestic ruling class is often weak, with foreign capital being strong.
As in Russia and China, that also means that the working-class may develop rapidly, concentrated in these large scale, foreign owned enterprises, whilst the rapid expansion of commodity production and exchange, at the expense of direct production, leads to the rapid development of the domestic petty-bourgeoisie. As the working-class may assert its interests against capital, this petty-bourgeoisie, sees its net social weight increase, and, in many cases, other cross-cutting cleavages, for example, based on caste, religion, or ethnicity may weaken class division. In these conditions, Bonapartism again thrives, imposing order from above.
The US and its subordinates within the NATO imperialist bloc is already at war with Iran and Russia. As Von Clausewitz noted, “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” This is, also, another means of saying that, war, like everything in the real world, has a birth, maturity and death, and is not just some single event, occurring at a given moment, even if we could define what a moment is. Every such “moment”, is, itself, a process. Just ask a Mother, about the “moment” of birth, for example, which can last for hours of painful labour.
The current genocidal war being undertaken by the Zionist state, in Israel, against the Palestinians and other Arab populations in Lebanon and Syria, can only be viewed as either that Zionist state being the tail that wags the US imperialist dog, or else that the US imperialist dog is wagging the Zionist tail, whilst pretending that the tail has a mind of its own. The former version of events, is, of course, the familiar, anti-Semitic trope that, somehow, a small number of Jews, control the levers of power across the globe. It is nonsense, and has always been nonsense.
For one thing, when Ronald Reagan was President, and the Zionist state invaded Lebanon, a single phone call from Reagan to the Zionist Prime Minister, the former terrorist, Menachem Begin, telling him to stop, was enough to have the Zionist state end its operations within 24 hours. Of course, on that occasion, it was not some pang of moral conscience that led Reagan to act, but was the fact that, the Saudi King had, in turn, rang him to say that he needed to end it, as the pictures appearing on screens of Arab civilians in the refugee camps being slaughtered by the Zionists, was leading to their own populations rising up, and demanding they act. That was at a time when the US, and its imperialist allies were still highly dependent on the oil flowing from the Gulf, and the memory of what happened in 1973, when that flow was stopped.
What is different this time, is that no such calls are coming from Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States, and the US, as with other imperialist states is much less dependent on that oil, anyway. Technology has massively increased the efficiency of energy use, so that oil plays a much smaller role in relation to the growth of economies; the US has, also, again as a result of technology, increased its own oil production, to again become an oil exporter. So, the Gulf states have less leverage over the US, even if they wanted to use it, which, they do not seem to want to do, anyway. But, more importantly, and connected to the last point, as I have set out before, the reality is that the Zionist state is acting, in this current war, as the instrument of US/NATO strategic policy.
The idea that the US/NATO has not sanctioned, and helped plan, the current genocide in Gaza, and its extension into the West Bank, and, now, into Lebanon is laughable. At each stage, every time the Zionist state has breached the supposed “red lines”, set out purely for public consumption, by Biden, the response has been not only to retrospectively sanction and support those actions, but to further endorse them by providing the Zionist war machine with even more weapons to “get the job done”, as Trump so honestly and openly described it. When the “international community”, and so called “rules based order”, in the form of the United Nations, and its courts, the ICJ and ICC, ruled against the actions of the Zionist state, and its genocide, the response of US/NATO imperialism was not to back it up with a demand that its rulings be upheld, but was, instead, to attack the UN, the ICC, and ICJ, and, indeed to impose sanctions upon them, and their judges!
The Zionist state, in its genocide in Gaza, is implementing, directly, the wishes of US/NATO imperialism, and no other rational conclusion can be drawn, given the dependence of the Zionist state on US imperialism. To argue otherwise is simply to repeat those old anti-Semitic tropes, about a mysterious power of Jews to control the US.
One argument that has been used is that, even if the US did stop its arms supplies to the Zionist state, it has a large stockpile, and its own arms industry. Even were that a legitimate argument, it is no reason for the US not having, then, stopped those supplies months ago, when its publicly pronounced red lines were breached. The very fact, of announcing the ending of such supplies would have sent a powerful message to the Zionists. Indeed, even the pathetic, token suspension of just 8% of UK military supplies to the Zionist state, was enough to have the Zionists protesting vociferously, even though the UK supplies only a small proportion, compared to the US.
Moreover, the argument is false, anyway, because the US has had to continually increase its supplies to the Zionist state, over the last year, as it has been rapidly depleting its stocks, and, although it does have its own advanced arms industry, that still relies on the supplies of components and so on. Finally, that argument is false, when considered from the standpoint that, if the US really wanted to uphold international law, in the way it claimed to do, when it intervened in Serbia, Iraq, Syria and Libya, it would, also, have put military teeth into the UN resolutions, rather than itself vetoing the resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire, and so on. In fact, so far from doing that is it that it will not allow the Lebanese state to have its own air defence systems to defend itself, let alone allow the Palestinian state any such means of defence against Zionist aggression. So much for its much vaunted two bourgeois states solution.
The Zionist state has continually been prodding Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran with the support of US/NATO imperialism standing behind it, as part of a conscious strategic plan. In all these countries, Iran has proxies such as Hezbollah. The strategic plan of US imperialism, implemented by its Zionist proxy is to force Iran itself to engage in a direct attack on the Zionist state in Israel, which will provide the justification for an all-out war between the Zionist state and Iran, which will provide, also, the justification for US/NATO imperialism to attack Iran openly. It is the same strategy used in Serbia/Kosovo, where the US used channels, via its, then, ally Osama Bin Laden, to promote the criminal gang of the KLA into an insurgent group stirring up ethnic violence between Serb and Albanian Kosovans, so as to force Serbia to intervene, which then gave the pretext for the US/NATO to attack Serbia.
It is the same strategy used in Eastern Europe, and, now, also in Ukraine, and through which US/NATO imperialism, in the words of former NATO Secretary-General, George Robertson, goaded Russia into invading Ukraine, just as it had previously done, in 2008, in Georgia, with its attacks on ethnic Russians in South Ossetia, as part of the continual expansion of NATO Eastwards, in order to surround Russia. Another current example, is the use of Taiwan by the US/NATO against China. The strategy is, again, the same. Either Russia responded to the goading, or it allowed itself to be surrounded by the hostile forces of US/NATO imperialism, opening it up, immediately, to further interventions, amongst its own ethnic minorities, to destabilise it, and stir up separatist tendencies, and communalism, and, in the longer-term, to its salami slicing and dismemberment.
Similarly, the Zionists have continually stepped up their goading of Iran, attempting to draw it into a significant attack on Israel that would justify a qualitative increase in the conflict into a regional war, and justification for overt US/NATO intervention. But, at each stage, Iran has limited its responses to Zionist aggression, such as its bombing of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, with very measured attacks.
The US/NATO/Zionist strategy is salami slicing the Iranian proxies in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria away from it, goading it into coming to their support, and a significant strike on Israel itself. If it does not come to the defence of its proxies, it will appear weak, and will, indeed, become weaker, but, nor will it save itself either. At some point, no matter how much Iran sits on its hands, the US/NATO and its Zionist proxy is coming for it. They will engineer some event, real or as a false flag operation, that they will pin on Iran, and use it as justification. One reason for that, now, is not only that set out previously, of the need to eliminate the Palestinians to establish a Greater Israel, but is, also, the fact that Iran seeing the current developments, is likely to step up its nuclear programme, and may test a nuclear weapon in the next three months. At that point, all plans for invading Iran are off.
Nor is it just in terms of wages that there is this elasticity of the limits. As previously described, it applies, also, to the length and intensity of the working-day. Capital may push towards its absolute limit, but comes up against these material constraints.
“However, as I said, this limit is very elastic. A quick succession of unhealthy and short-lived generations will keep the labour market as well supplied as a series of vigorous and long-lived generations.” (p 86)
But, again, as described earlier, in modern societies where each generation of workers must be educated and trained, and this period of education and training becomes more extended, even this is not true for capital. If workers require, on average, 15 years of education and training, during which time they are consumers of value, not producers of it, as they must eat, be clothed, sheltered and so on, it makes considerable difference whether they live for 40 years, or 70 years.
In the first case, they only have 25 years, during which they are producers of new value, whereas in the latter case, they have 55. In the former case, the new value produced constitutes 166% of the value they consume, whereas in the latter case, it constitutes 366%. So, its no wonder that, having invested all of this produced value in educating and training workers, capital, now, seeks to maximise its use of that labour, which requires the worker to live longer, requiring better levels of diet, shelter, and healthcare.
Capital may, in various circumstances, reduce these historical and social components, down towards the physical minimum. Certainly, in the age of imperialism, as capital establishes production in developing economies, it will view the value of labour-power, there, differently. And, as this process leads to the averaging out of these differences, it may be that, whilst that means a movement away from the physical minimum in those developing economies, it will mean a movement towards it, or at least a slower movement away from it, for workers in developed economies.
“The English standard of life may be reduced to the Irish standard; the standard of life of a German peasant to that of a Livonian peasant.” (p 86)
In fact, Marx notes that, during the anti-Jacobin wars, English farmers depressed agricultural wages, even below that physical limit. To prevent them being wiped out, these wages were supplemented via the Poor Laws, but that was financed via Parish taxes, which fell on the Yeoman farmers, driving them out, and facilitating a concentration of capital. The equivalent, today, would be the expansion of welfarism and benefits, financed by higher taxes on the petty-bourgeoisie, and better paid workers.
“This was a glorious way to convert the wages labourer into a slave, and Shakespeare's proud yeoman into a pauper.” (p 87)
Even if there is no change in productivity, driving a reduction in the value of wage goods, and so of the value of labour-power, there is, then, over time, changes in the value of labour-power/wages, and consequent movement in profits. The physical minimum establishes the lower bound for wages, and consequent upper bound for profits, but, again confounding the claims of those who believe that it is tiny changes caused by The Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall that causes crises, Marx notes that there is no maximum for wages, and so, no minimum for profits.
“We cannot say what is the ultimate limit of their decrease. And why cannot we fix that limit? Because, although we can fix the minimum of wages, we cannot fix their maximum.” (p 87-8)
