By Daniel Campos- La Marx International
Introduction
When the first global revolutionary wave against capitalism broke out in 2011, one of its most important mobilizations was that of the 15-M movement in Spain, also known as “Indignados”. The crowds created and sang in the mobilizations a famous song: “Olé, olé, they call it democracy, and it is not.” The meaning of the song had a deep content: The questioning of the bourgeois democratic regime, a political regime that presents itself as “Democracy”, but that in reality does nothing more than establish terrible conditions of poverty, misery, inequality for the people in favor of the bankers, and owners of the large capitalist corporations that dominate the world capitalist economy.
Bourgeois democracy is the classic political regime of capitalism, with its division of three Executive, Legislative and Judicial powers. Most believe that this regime has always existed, but it is not. Its forms are the result of a long process of political and social evolution through the centuries that went through revolutions, wars, massacres, insurrections, and struggles. The objective of this work is to define what the bourgeois democratic regime is, how it emerged, what is its current situation in the class struggle, and what is the policy that Marxists have towards this regime.
The bourgeoisie has launched various campaigns to deceive the workers and the people about what the bourgeois democratic regime is. Opinionists and bourgeois scribes who defend capitalism, along with universities and schools repeat all the time that the bourgeois democratic regime is ” democracy”, that “it is not a perfect system, but it is the only one there is”, that it is the “representation of all the people”, that the “citizen chooses through the vote”, and many commonplaces that are part of the slogans, and campaigns that ideologues, and spokesmen of the ruling classes write all the time in defense of the regime bourgeois democratic, to deceive the people.
But despite all the campaign of lies, the bourgeois democratic regime has entered a serious crisis all over the world. Capitalist governments are short-lived, they are overthrown in many countries, or live in permanent crisis, the mandates of officials are not fulfilled, the population no longer believes in capitalist political parties, and there are high levels of abstention when there are elections. This is the product of the serious crisis that affects the capitalist system at a global level, which hits on the political regime of the capitalists, and their political parties that suffer the questioning of the masses of the world. This happens as a result of the suffering suffered by the peoples due to the injustices of capitalist governments, Global Corporations, the concentration of wealth, and social inequalities.
I- The Marxist definition of the bourgeois democratic regime
How do we Marxists define the bourgeois democratic regime? To do so, the first thing is to define what the concept of political regime is. For Nahuel Moreno: “The political regime is the different combination or articulation of state institutions that the ruling class (or a sector of it) uses to govern. Specifically, to define a political regime we must answer the questions: What is the institution foundation of government? How are the other state institutions articulated in it?” (Nahuel Moreno- Revolutions of the 20th Century)
Therefore, we define the bourgeois political regime as a combination of capitalist institutions used by the bourgeoisie as the ruling class to carry out the unjust exploitation of the working majority by a minority of large owners. The central institution that distinguishes the bourgeois democratic regime from all other regimes of capitalism is Parliament. Bourgeois democracy is, in reality, “democracy” only for the ruling classes, and it is completely undemocratic for the great popular masses, and the working class. Being a political regime of the exploiters and the ruling classes, bourgeois democracy threatens, limits, threatens, and curtails democratic freedoms permanently.
Democratic freedoms are the rights and guarantees achieved by peoples over the centuries, such as the rights to assembly, freedom of the press, petition, expression, freedom of worship, education, due process, mobilization, strike , association, universal suffrage, to organize unions, etc,. Those freedoms and rights were achieved by the peoples and the working classes throughout the centuries in the fight against kings, tyrants, and all kinds of authoritarian regimes. The bourgeoisie was part of that struggle, but these democratic liberties should not be confused with the bourgeois democratic regime.
Democratic freedoms are for all the people, while the bourgeois democratic regime is only at the service of the ruling classes. The bourgeoisie and the bourgeois democratic regime tolerate democratic liberties, as long as the development of these liberties does not threaten “their rights” , and their “security”, that is, their condition of ruling class, and their control over the property of the means of production as explained by Karl Marx: ” personal freedom, of the press, of speech, of association, of meeting, of teaching, of worship, etc.., each one of these liberties was proclaimed as the absolute right of the French citizen, but with an additional comment that these liberties… are limited “… by public safety…” (Carlos Marx- “On 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”)
Therefore, the bourgeois democratic regime is only democratic for the minority of society, the ruling and exploiting classes. But for the majority of society, the bourgeois democratic regime represents the dictatorship of capital, a regime that defends the profits of the capitalists, and seeks to perpetuate the exploitation and oppression of 99% of society, at the service of 1% of the poor. exploiters. It does so through an articulation of the institutions that make it a completely undemocratic political regime.
II- The anti- democratic articulation of institutions of the bourgeois democratic regime
The articulation of the set of institutions that make up the bourgeois democratic regime make it a completely undemocratic system. The first thing is the electoral system, which only seeks to guarantee the representation of the ruling classes, and their political parties, articulated in an absolutely undemocratic way for the great popular masses. Deputies and senators are elected based on the preparation of districts, or constituencies artificially established to reduce the weight of populations with more representation of the working classes, and dilute the representation of the worker and popular vote.
Another anti-democratic element of the bourgeois democratic regime is that numerous electoral systems reduce the right to vote to vast sectors of the population such as people of a certain age, immigrants, foreigners residing in the country, racial sectors, privileging the capacity of participation of some religious or racial fractions, and excluding others from these rights. Another anti-democratic element of the bourgeois democratic regime is that electoral campaigns require huge million-dollar budgets from political organizations to be able to participate, which generates corruption and alignment with the ruling classes.
Electoral systems are crisscrossed by undemocratic regulations such as primary elections, and other proscriptive regulations for the registration of candidacies that make it difficult for worker, socialist, and revolutionary organizations to participate. These anti-democratic mechanisms allow only the bourgeois and reformist political forces to participate, whose main strategy is to run for election, which generates a permanent debt burden and economic dependence on the budgets of the capitalist state.
Another undemocratic element of the bourgeois democratic regime is the character of its officials. Deputies, senators, presidents, and all kinds of elected officials such as mayors, mayors, councilors, vereadores, etc., have mandates of 4 or 6 years or even longer depending on the different electoral systems, and cannot be revocable. In this way, if these officials establish measures and policies that attack the rights of the most dispossessed, they cannot modify them, nor prevent them from acting politically against the working class.
Another profoundly undemocratic element of the bourgeois democratic regime is the structure that Parliaments possess. In general they have two chambers, the Senate is always the most undemocratic chamber, and representative of oligarchies, and millionaires that dominate regions, it is in charge of monitoring, supervising, and repressing any project that threatens the interests of the capitalists that could arise from the Chamber of Deputies. In general, both chambers live in concert all the time around the strong interests of the ruling classes with the participation of “lobbyists” , that is, professionals in negotiation and defense of the interests of large business corporations that seek to issue laws that support their businesses. , and interests.
The Executive Power is also a profoundly anti-democratic element of the bourgeois democratic regime. This power retains the power to veto Parliament’s measures, and depending on the political situation, the president can rule by decrees and resolutions. T he “Presidentialism” is a profoundly undemocratic feature of the bourgeois democratic regime, which gives the regime a Bonapartist, and reactionary bias, where one person rises above the institutions to make decisions that involve millions of people, without any control of the population.
This is how Karl Marx explains it: ” On the one hand, 750 representatives of the people, elected by universal suffrage and re-eligible, who form aNational Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, that decides in the last instance about war, peace and commercial treaties, the only one that has the right of amnesty and… On the other hand, the president, with all the attributes of the royal power, with faculties to name and remove its ministers, independently of the National Assembly, with all the means of the executive power in its hands, being the one that distributes all the positions… that depend on the 500,000 civil servants and officials of all grades. He has under his command all armed power… The initiative and direction of all foreign treaties are powers reserved to him. While the National Assembly constantly acts on the stage, exposed to the light of day and public criticism, the president leads a hidden life on the Champs-Élysées” (Carlos Marx- The 18th Brumaire of Luis Bonaparte)
Another deeply undemocratic element is that all these officials receive high salaries and stipends, which increases the search for positions by the most greedy and corrupt who are only interested in holding positions to collect those high salaries, and establish businesses, and benefits for themselves. amass fortunes. In this way, they establish their political actions not based on what is best to satisfy the needs of the workers and the people, but rather on what is best to increase their fortunes and personal benefits.
The Judiciary is another profoundly anti-democratic element of the bourgeois democratic regime, since its fundamental objective is to defend the laws that benefit the ruling classes, private ownership of the means of production, exchange, and the profits of the capitalists. Its magistrates are elected through intricate mechanisms and negotiations and practically hold their posts in perpetuity, with practically no control or control mechanisms over their actions that are protected by charters, or other privileges. These are the mechanisms and features of the bourgeois democratic regime that guarantee that it is the regime of the exploiters and the ruling classes.
In turn, the Constitutions or Magna Cartas constitute another anti-democratic element of the bourgeois democratic regime, since they consecrate the unity of the institutions of bourgeois democracy with reactionary institutions of the capitalist state such as the Church, certain religious cults, Monarchies, the Armed Forces, of internal security, or espionage. In this way, the bourgeois democratic regime grants subsidies to religious cults, regulating the stipends of officials of the Armed Forces, Monarchies, or the Church, and establishing laws that provide budgets for these reactionary institutions. These deeply reactionary institutions permanently threaten democratic liberties, their entire layer of officials enjoys high privileges, and salaries assigned in their capacity as “senior officials” of the state bureaucracy.
III- The rise of the bourgeois democratic regime
Nahuel Moreno began to raise many of these theoretical problems about political regimes at the school of cadres in 1984, when he organized a school of cadres especially dedicated to this objective. In this school Moreno expressed: Behind this comes this problem of the regimes. Marxism is very weak, very weak. And our course does not overcome this weakness at all, the only merit it can have is that it raises the problems. These are issues of regimes. Almost nothing has been written about political regimes, institutions, which are progressive and which are not. Some issues like unitary republics are more progressive than federal ones… But not an exhaustive analysis of the regimes… I say that this problem of regimes is a very serious problem, very, very serious, little worked on by Marxism and that they realize the enormous programmatic, tactical and strategic importance that it has…” (Nahuel Moreno- Escuela de Cuadros del 1984 )
It is necessary to elaborate on the terrain of the Marxist theory on the bourgeois democratic regime. A long historical process of development made possible the emergence of this regime, given that to seize power, the bourgeoisie had to confront absolutism, monarchs, tyrants, kings, and displace them through violent revolutions. As George Novack explains : “The annals of history show that none of the important democracies of the bourgeois era came to life by peaceful, legal methods.”and gradual. Bourgeois democracy was actually installed as an accepted method of progressive government through a series of revolutionary victories, which took place over the 300 years from the rise of the Dutch republic in the 16th century to the American Civil War in mid-19th century”. (George Novack- “Democracy and Revolution”)
Where the bourgeois democratic regime as we know it today appeared for the first time with a presidential Executive Branch, a Legislative Branch with two chambers: One of senators, and another of deputies, and a Judicial Branch was in the United States. It arose as a product of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention that took place between May 14 and September 17, 1787, and was based on a revolutionary organization, the Continental Congress, which led the War and diplomacy, by signing agreements with foreign powers, and draft the documents of Independence. T he peculiarity of the bourgeois democratic regime in the United States has to do with the fact that it was the product of a revolution, but different from the English or the French one.
While in England or France the revolutions confronted totalitarian regimes, kings, and tyrannies of absolute monarchs, the American revolution, on the other hand, was a revolution that, in addition to confronting tyranny and the monarchy, confronted an empire. It was an anti-imperialist revolution that defeated the largest empire of that time: The British Empire. This is how Nahuel Moreno explains it: ” … there were two great bourgeois democratic revolutions throughout the world, and the first was anti-colonial, the Yankee, North American bourgeois democratic revolution. It took place before the French Revolution…” ( Nahuel Moreno- School of Pictures 1984)
The Continental Congress and George Washington had led the American masses to victory against British imperialism, constituting the “First American Revolution.” The Treaty of Paris of September 3, 1783 consecrated the triumph of the North American patriots with the recognition of Great Britain of the independence of the United States, and the renunciation of all British claim on its territory. After the years of the cruel and harsh war for independence, feelings against tyranny, against the empire, against the monarchy, for democracy and freedom took very strong root in the North American people.
Seven months after the victory, several officials suggested something reasonable in the context of the 18th century: that the United States should establish a monarchy and that George Washington should become king. Washington immediately rejected the monarchy as inappropriate and dishonorable, demanding that the subject never be brought up again. However, Parliament was not born in the young republic of the United States. The history of this institution goes back to previous centuries with the Dutch and English revolutions. Although both the Parliament and the US Constitution are institutions that emerged from the First American Revolution, they are not the pure and exclusive creation of the revolutionary leaders, known as the ” Founding Fathers”.Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Paine, George Washington, or James Madison. Parliament had arisen much earlier in history.
IV- The Parliament arises from a long fight of centuries
The growing presence of capitalists and bourgeois in a world still dominated by the nobles, was expressed in Europe in the integration of new organizations and Parliaments, or in agreements such as the Cortes de León of 1188, the Magna Carta of 1215 in England , the Catalan Courts of 1192, or the Golden Bull of 1222 in Hungary. All these new institutions and agreements in various ways and reasons limited the powers of the king, and required a series of democratic claims. In England, the growing influence of the bourgeoisie was expressed in the composition of Parliament made up of representatives of the Church and the nobles, pillars of feudalism, but also made up of representatives of the bourgeoisie from the counties and the most important cities.
The English Parliament arose based on the Great Council, the monarch’s advisory body during the Middle Ages where bishops, abbots, barons and counts participated, summoned when the king needed to raise money through taxes. To the extent that the primitive capitalist Forms of Accumulation developed in Europe, the bourgeoisie as a social class was gaining more and more weight and economic and social importance, which was reflected in the composition of the convocations of the Great Council.
Parliament was imposed on the king following the letter of the Magna Carta, but the nobility and the kings resisted, trying to sustain and strengthen the institution of the monarchy. That is why a revolution was necessary to impose parliamentary forms in England, which was led by the nobleman of French origin Simon V de Montfort, who with the battle of Lewes on May 14, 1264, defeated the Plantagenet monarchy. After Monfort’s triumph, the call to Parliament was carried out without prior royal authorization, and had a political novelty: Together with the bishops, abbots, counts and barons, 2 bourgeois from each borough were summoned, elected in their municipalities or neighborhoods of the kingdom.
The representation of the bourgeoisie and its elective nature was a revolutionary measure for the time. Simon de Montfort was forced to impose it to offset the power of the monarchy and the nobles, which began to institutionalize the participation in the parliament of knights and burghers historically known as the meeting of “the Commons”. The nobility unleashed a counter-offensive, whereby Montfort was defeated and killed at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, and the king’s authority restored. But the revolution could not be turned back, and Simón V de Montfort remained for posterity as one of the fathers of parliamentary democracy.
In 1341, the nobility and clergy were summoned separately for the first time, creating what would effectively be an Upper House, called the House of Lords, and a Lower House, called the House of Commons. However, the English bourgeoisie had not yet managed to consolidate a democratic regime such as the one it aspired to develop. The King still had a veto on Parliament’s decisions, and the House of Lords was more powerful than the House of Commons. However, the power of the nobility diminished at the end of the 14th century due to the 100 Years War, in which a large part of the ruling classes of feudalism died on the battlefield, or were subsequently executed for their participation.
Many aristocrats lost their lands, and the nobility entered the final stage of its history. The crisis of the 14th century, with the 100 years war, and events like the “Black Death”, constituted the end of the feudal mode of production, and the beginning of the capitalist mode of production. However, even when feudalism entered its stage of final decline, the nobility established the supremacy of the absolute monarchy in England through the Tudor dynasty with the Imperial Crown. The absolute monarchy and the king were supported by the powerful House of Lords, which subordinated all the movements of the House of Commons.
V- Parliament and the Dutch Revolution
While this was happening in England, the confrontation between the nobles and the bourgeois reached an international character and crossed Europe from the mid-16th century to the entire 17th century. This process reached a high point with the Dutch Revolution. Known as the 80 Years’ War or the Flanders War, this war was waged by the bourgeoisie of the United Provinces of the Netherlands against the international nobility headed by Charles V who presided over the powerful absolute monarchy of the Habsburgs. In the bourgeois history books, the Dutch Revolution is presented as a religious war between Protestants and Catholics, but the fact is that at that time, political parties did not exist as we know them today, and the different social sectors acted defending their organized interests. in religious orders,
Thus, the bourgeoisie organized the different Protestant religious orders in Burgundy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany and Holland, against the powerful alliance of the Habsburgs, the Holy See and the Inquisition, which were the highest authority in Europe. The Dutch Revolution had characteristics similar to the First North American Revolution: It combined democratic claims with the anti-imperialist struggle, for national liberation, in which the United Provinces defeated the powerful Spanish Empire and achieved, in 1648, the recognition of their independence. And it had another characteristic in common with the First American Revolution: It was led by Parliament, which was the Estates General, an assembly that originally brought together the three estates, nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie.
The Estates General were summoned by the Burgundian dukes when they needed funds, but in a complex process they led to the institution that led the war, established the Republic of the United Provinces, formed a confederal government that exercised power, and controlled some of the provinces. the country’s largest commercial capitalist enterprises such as the Dutch West India Company. The nascent Republic consolidated the figure of the stadtholder, an embryo of the figure of the Executive Branch, Prime Minister or President. Thanks to this modern political system, the United Provinces emerged as a world power thanks to its powerful navy and merchant fleet.
But above all, Holland was placed in the vanguard of the development of the productive forces of the time due to the development of new capitalist Forms of Accumulation such as Commercial Companies, and Manufactures that acted, in economic terms, in a complementary way, in that stage of capitalism. The Commercial Companies were a Form of Capitalist Accumulation constituted by investor societies that obtained profits based on the dominance of trade between metropolis and colony and the exploitation of labor in the discovered colonies.
They acted at the service of the domain of vast colonial territories in which these companies acted as a true state and government, made investments, developed manufacturing and exploited local labor, which allowed them to obtain enormous profits. The Dutch Revolution shook the international political arena and was an incentive for the English bourgeoisie, faced with the absolute monarchy of the Stuarts, successor to the Tudor dynasty. The Netherlands became the axis of accumulation of the capitalist manufacturing regime, and experienced an important economic and cultural boom, becoming the great power and the most important country of the time.
VI- Parliament and the English Revolution
In England the House of Commons sent the Petition of Right to Charles I in 1628, demanding the restoration of his liberties. But Carlos I’s response was to dissolve Parliament, and govern without it for 11 years. Following the financial disaster of the Bishops’ Wars, the Stuarts were forced to convene Parliament so they could authorize new taxes, forming the assemblies known historically as the Short Parliament, and the Long Parliament which met with various recesses and forms in between. 1640 and 1653.
Tensions between the king and his parliament rose and further deteriorated. This led to the outbreak of the English Civil War between the burghers and nobles which began with the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642 and culminated in the final victory of the Parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell. Parliamentary forces executed Charles I in January 1649, and established the Republic, based on Parliament, in alliance with the new model army, abolished the House of Lords, and exercised power from the House of Commons.
The Revolution had a left wing embodied in the so-called “Levellers”, a political movement made up of the primitive detachments of the English working class. To confront the right wing and the left wing of the Revolution, Cromwell dissolved parliament and exercised a dictatorship: he Crushed the Levellers, and exercised power with the title of Lord Protector of the realm. He refused to be king, and summoned different parliamentary forms, based on the document called ” Humble Petition and Council “.In that document he proposed a political regime based on Parliament, with the House of Commons elected as the Lower House, a House of Lords made up of nobles from the kingdom as the Upper House, and a monarchy subservient to the constitution serving parliament and laws. of the nation
The nobles reacted with a counter-revolution to restore the Stuart monarchy. Supported by nobles from France, Spain and Scotland, they launched a coup led by Army General John Lambert. Scottish forces led by George Monck, together with international forces, invaded England, summoned Parliament, and reinstated the monarchy and the House of Lords. Charles II returned to England as King in May 1660, and restored the absolute monarchy of the Stuarts, who dissolved Parliament in 1681. On the death of Charles II, his brother James II advanced the Stuart counter-offensive, seeking to restore the power of the Catholic Church in England.
Not satisfied with consolidating its counteroffensive in England, the absolutist dynasty of the Stuarts began to establish the possibility of making agreements with Louis XIV of France, to take the absolutist counteroffensive to all of Europe. There was the possibility of an international agreement between James II, head of the absolute monarchy of the Stuarts, who carried out the counteroffensive in England, and Louis XIV, the so-called “Sun King” head of the absolute monarchy of the Capetians in France. Louis XIV summed up the program of monarchical absolutism with one sentence: “I am the state” . Faced with the danger of the unity of both powerful absolute monarchies, the European bourgeoisie reacted by grouping a powerful invasion force against England in Holland.
This force was financed by the city of Amsterdam, by bankers from Portugal, Genoa and Lombardy, such as Pope Innocent XI, who made a million-dollar loan on behalf of the bank of Genoa, or the Jewish-Portuguese banker Francisco Lopes Suasso who lent 2 millions of guilds Heading the bourgeois coalition was the powerful Orange-Nassau banker oligarchy, headed by William III of Orange, who chartered 400 transports, and negotiated the contracts for 14,000 German mercenaries from Brandenburg, Württemberg, Hesse-Kassel and Celle. William had a hard time convincing the Dutch ruling elite that such an expensive expedition was really necessary, but when Louis XIV attacked Dutch ships in French ports, the bourgeoisie understood that they had to act fast.
The Dutch were careful not to appear as an “invasion” to the English people, so the Dutch fleet of 53 warships was placed under the command of English Rear-Admiral Arthur Herbert. The so-called “Glorious Revolution”triumphed when the troops of the bourgeoisie defeated James II at the Battle of Reading, a military action that was accompanied by strong anti-Catholic demonstrations in Bristol, Bury St. Edmuns, Hereford, York, Cambridge and Shropshire and the assault of a mob Protestant to Dover Castle. The Stuarts, the Queen and the Prince of Wales fled to France, and in 1689, the Convention of the Parliament of England declared that the flight of James meant a declaration of abdication. Guillermo III of Orange acceded to the throne of England and sanctioned the Declaration of Rights (in English, Bill of Rights).
The content of the Bill of Rights is in the text of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of 1776, of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 that was signed in the French Revolution, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The Bill of Rights states that the King cannot create or eliminate laws or taxes without the approval of Parliament, he cannot collect money for his personal use, without the approval of Parliament, and he cannot recruit and maintain an army in peacetime, without the approval of Parliament. It enshrines that the elections of members of Parliament must be free, that the words of Parliament cannot be hindered or denied, and that Parliament must meet frequently.
The Bill of Rights was supplemented by another law, the Toleration Act, which grants Anglicans religious freedom, freedom of public worship, the right to open schools and access to all public functions. The Parliamentary monarchy regime imposed by the Glorious Revolution prompted the creation of the Bank of England in 1694, the first central bank in the history of capitalism. And the Ministry of Commerce (Board of Trade), which allowed the English and European bourgeoisie to obtain important commercial advantages. This gave an enormous impetus to English capitalism and the works of intellectuals who laid the foundations of scientific and political thought such as Newton, Pope, Leibniz, Swift and John Locke, with his ” Essay Concerning Civil Power “.” of 1690. And the revolutions that occurred gave Parliament more and more relevance.
VII- The French Revolution
The central revolutionary event of the bourgeois age was the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution destroyed the backbone of European monarchical absolutism, provoked the slave uprising in Haiti, and as the last of the most important bourgeois Revolutions was the most modern because in its development it began to question the interests of the Manufacturing bourgeoisie, it began to express the interests of the Industrial bourgeoisie, and it began to express the first and incipient elements of the program of the working class.
The modern changes that the French Revolution introduced in the bourgeois democratic regime included the novelty of the political parties that until then, as we saw, did not exist, and arose expressing the program and the interests of the different class sectors that intervened in the revolution. like the Girondins party, or the Jacobin party. The French Revolution confronted the Bourbon dynasty, the oldest in Europe that had been in existence for 800 years, and had reached the forms of Monarchical Absolutism just like all other European monarchies.
In the convocation of King Louis XVI of the States General in 1789, the representatives of the three estates attended, the clergy that was the First Estate, the nobility that constituted the Second Estate and the bourgeoisie that represented the Third Estate. But on June 17, dissident nobles together with the bourgeoisie took the step of converting the General State into a National Assembly, and govern in place of the king, and declared themselves as the only members of a National Assembly that would not represent the wealthy classes, but the people. . They set themselves the goal of having the National Assembly draft a new French Constitution, and they dragged members of the First and Second Estates into the call.
The king ordered large contingents of troops to be assembled, but on July 9 the Assembly named itself the National Constituent Assembly, and on the 14th the insurgent masses that supported the Constituent Assembly stormed the Bastille fortress, symbol of monarchical absolutism. The insurgents took the prison, killed its governor, the mayor of Paris, and spread the revolution through cities and towns, creating new town councils that only recognized the authority of the National Constituent Assembly. An agrarian insurrection, known as the “Great Fear” took place in the countryside.in which the burning of titles on easements, the elimination of tithes, stately justices, and the abolition of land ownership by attacking castles and palaces were developed.
With the emergence of the National Constituent Assembly there was an important change in the bourgeois democratic regime. The National Constituent Assembly means the emergence of an institution superior to the 3 powers, Executive, Legislative, and Judicial, and the constitution of a more democratic political regime than the bourgeoisie could offer throughout history. An institution that has the power to debate publicly, on tables, about all economic, social, institutional, and political matters that the people require, from fully reorganizing the country, drafting a Constitution, taking all kinds of measures, uniting in a same power to the Executive and Legislative powers.
The National Constituent Assembly approved all the measures imposed by the agrarian insurrection, and established equality before taxes, before penalties and in access to public office. The revolution fell entirely into the hands of the lower and popular classes who put their bodies in the streets to demolish the Absolute Monarchy, as George Novack explains: “…the big bourgeoisie did not trigger the revolution, nor did it carry it forward by themselves. same…The revolutionary offensive took its great strides through the interventions of the lower middle classes and poor workers, who, animated by their own demands and aspirations, shouldered the heavy and bloody tasks of fighting… and to safeguard the good course of the revolution” (George Novack, Idem)
On August 27, 1789, the Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, inspired in part by the Declaration of Independence of the United States and establishing the principle of liberty, equality and fraternity. The National Constituent Assembly was influenced mainly by the Girondino Party led by Brissot and Roland, representatives of the Manufacturing bourgeoisie, which abolished tithes, confiscated all church property, dissolved religious orders and monasteries, and imposed the first constitution of the history of France.
This Constitution established a bourgeois democratic regime with the model of a constitutional monarchy following the example of England, in which the King had to share his power with the Assembly, and he only had to exercise the Executive Power with the power to choose his ministers. and the right to veto the laws approved by the Legislative Assembly. The Judiciary was left with magistrates independent of the Crown. It was, in any case, a rather oligarchic Constitution, which gave only representation and voting power to those who possessed property and fortunes, as George Novack explains: “… The constitution, finally brought to light by the Assembly National in the spring of 1791, … It divided the French into active and passive citizens and only the former were given the right to vote for the legislature. They had achieved such asset qualification by paying a small direct tax, certifying ownership of a considerable amount of real estate. The limitation of voting rights to a small minority of property owners was deliberately put in place to exclude common people from participation or representation in the national government” (George Novack-Idem)
The Legislative Assembly, the newly elected Parliament, met for the first time on October 1, 1791 with 264 deputies located to the right, members of the Girondino Party who proposed a federal republic. In the center were 345 independent deputies, lacking a defined political program, and on the left 136 deputies registered in the Jacobin club or in that of the cordeliers who proposed the elimination of the monarchy and the establishment of the Republic. The Jacobins were led by Jean-Paul Marat and Georges-Jacques Danton, representing the humblest people, the petty bourgeoisie, and the workers of Paris.
But the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Prussia threatened to invade France if the King was not restored. The revolutionary movement was threatened by the Austro-Prussian coalition, and by counterrevolutionary forces. Who saved the revolution again was the people of Paris mobilized in the streets as George Novack explains: “The ideal system for bankers, merchants and manufacturers…was a constitutional monarchy. But a regime so restricted and so undemocratic could not be sustained in the raging torrent of revolution in full tide. The Legislative Assembly, elected on the basis of the bourgeois constitution, was swept away by the uprising of the working-class neighborhoods of Paris on August 9 and 10, 1792 …they stormed the Tuileries, clearly defeated and killed the Swiss Guards, they seized the king and the royal family and consequently toppled the throne. This “second revolution” destroyed the authority of the Legislative Assembly, doomed the monarchy, and effectively handed over power to the insurgent Paris Commune. This body, dominated by Danton, Robespierre, and Marat, had overthrown the municipal government, occupied the city council, and established its revolutionary rule. (George Novack – Idem)
King Louis XVI withdrew from his executive functions, these fell to the Committee of Public Safety, a new institution created between April 5 and 6, 1793 by the Jacobins, but due to the weakness of the Convention and the numerous threats that stalked France, power passed from the Girondin Party to the Jacobin Party, and the Salvation Committee became, de facto, the main governing body of the country, acquiring immense power. The threat of the Imperial Armies and Prussia to invade France led Louis XVI to be seen as a conspirator for which the Convention sentenced the King to death and he was publicly executed by guillotine.
The government of the Committee of Public Safety was a government of the extreme left for that time, which advanced beyond the limits of what the manufacturing bourgeoisie could carry out, what French capitalism could carry out at that time, and advanced towards the defense of the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie even when industry was a Form of Accumulation that had recently emerged in historical terms. French troops made up of shopkeepers, artisans and peasants from all over France defeated a Prussian army for the first time at Valmy, signaling the start of the so-called French Revolutionary Wars.
But the revolts of the poorer classes continued, and the so-called sans-culottes artisans, workers and the poor of Paris who did not wear “the culotte”, the garment of the rich, expressed their discontent with the measures that harmed the working class. As George Novack explains: “…The leaderships of the Girondin moderates and the Jacobin radicals represented different sectors of the propertied classes…both contending factions were staunch defenders of private property, were presided over by divergent interests…The exasperated sans-culottes of Paris … rose up against the Girondins at the end of May 1793 and brought the left-wing Jacobins to power” (Geoge Novack- Idem)
The Committee of Public Safety under the command of Robespierre and the Jacobins unleashed the Reign of Terror between 1793 and 1794 in which around 10,000 people were guillotined on accusations of counterrevolutionary activities, although there is no agreement on the numbers of those executed, which can be very greater. The Jacobin dictatorship of Roberspierre was also a victim of its class limitations. Like Cromwell, he not only eliminated his enemies on the right but attacked the Sans Cullottes, and the group of the enragés (in Spanish, “the furious”) the most radicalized groups headed by Jacques Roux, Jean-François Varlet, and Jean Théophile Victor Leclerc who brought to the Convention the proposal of the death penalty for hoarders and speculators, who caused so much damage causing the people’s famine.
Robespierre crushed the “Enragés”, which made the government of the Committee of Public Salvation lose support from the most plebeian sectors, and from there, the revolutionary tide began to fall. As Geoge Novack explains: “… The Jacobin dictatorship rested on a coalition of the revolutionary bourgeoisie with the plebeians. Its leaders were willing to call on the masses to political protest and even armed insurrection when it served their purposes. But they were afraid of giving free rein to the energy of the masses and they were preparing to immobilize any step that came from below and threatened their positions and their wealth… Devastating the Dantonists on the one hand and the most intransigent revolutionaries of the Commune on the other … by dislodging the masses from the positions of power they had conquered, Robespierre undermined the foundations of their earlier support. The grave he had dug for others had room for himself ” (Geoge Novack- Idem)
From the repression of the enragés began the decline of the Jacobin government. The ebb of the revolutionary tide, and its ebb after the peak reached, was followed by decadence, and the decline in the popularity of the Jacobin dictatorship, which allowed the reactionary sectors to begin to raise their heads. The events known as “Thermidor Reaction” began to develop on July 28, 1794, called “Thermidor” because it comes from one of the summer months in the Republican calendar, which coincided with the date on which the fall occurred, and the execution of Robespierre.
The fall of the government of the Jacobins gave way to the government of the conservative republicans, and Girondins, under which the Convention approved a new constitution on August 17, 1795 that conferred executive power on a Directory formed by five members, and established a power legislature with a bicameral assembly. The return of the Girondino Party provoked protests and uprisings among the people, including the so-called “Conspiracy of the Equals” headed by François-Noël Babeuf, against the government of the Directory. Babeuf was arrested and later executed, he died fighting for his ideals of equality.
Babeuf advanced in his essays elements that will later be developed in Marxist theory, as George Novack puts it: “Despite the fact that his immediate program was not new, Babeuf introduced two memorable innovations in the history of the bourgeois revolution… One was the concept of uninterrupted revolution, which was to bring the struggle between patricians and plebeians, rich and poor to its true end.This doctrine of consistent class struggle prefigured the dictatorship of the proletariat without the scientific basis of historical materialism… Here one can perceive the germ of the theory of permanent revolution, later adopted by Marx and Engels and developed more fully by Trotsky in the 20th century” (George Novack-Idem).
The French Revolution liquidated the longest Absolute Monarchy in history, brought freedom to all corners, strengthened the peoples of the world who rose up against tyrants everywhere singing “La Marseillaise”. He took the tricolor cockade to all corners and became the most important symbol of his time. The French Revolution left the existence of political parties forever, and with Babeuf, the left Jacobins, and the Enragés, it left antecedents and bases that will contribute to developing the theory of Marxism and Scientific Socialism.
VIII- Contradictions and evaluation of the bourgeois democratic regime
The rise of the bourgeois democratic regime was the product of a political revolution. The economy of societies like the Netherlands, England, France, and the colonies like the United States were already capitalist, but economic development was crashing, and was permanently in contradiction with the feudal superstructure of society. This first contradiction forced the bourgeoisie to fight for centuries to establish their own political regime, and their own institutions, demolishing the old institutions of feudalism such as the nobility, the properties of the Church, the political division of societies into kingdoms, duchies, and counties, to establish the modern capitalist social formations constituted as countries, and national states.
The Continental Congress, which gave rise to the US Parliament, followed in the footsteps of the Dutch Estates General, Simon de Monfort’s House of Commons, the English Civil War Long Parliament headed by Oliver Cromwell, and the Definitive Parliament. consecrated by the Glorious Revolution led by William of Orange. The various parliamentary forms that developed throughout the 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were continued with the Estates General, and with even more radicalized parliamentary forms that arose in the French Revolution.
These first and incipient parliamentary forms and outlines of political regime, served to build the republican political regime, and locate Parliament in it, as one of its central institutions. But from the beginning, those who built the bourgeois democratic regimes and had to write the Constitution of the countries ran into another contradiction. Those who promoted these political regimes and held power by displacing the nobles, were an owner class of magnates and businessmen, a very rich oligarchy of capitalists and bankers, who feared the poor people as much as the kings they themselves displaced had feared.
As a result of the fact that power was passing from one rich property-owning class to another, and that this oligarchy of capitalists and bankers that seized power feared the people, the regimes they promoted gave very limited freedoms to the poor masses. As Novack puts it : “The tenacious bourgeois republic established by the Dutch pioneers was far more oligarchic than democratic. In 1640, the Dutch statesman François Van Aersens declared that the government of the Netherlands was really an aristocracy, “where the people have no voice” (George Novack- “Democracy and Revolution”)
Behind the Dutch revolutionaries were powerful capitalist banking houses, the business community of Amsterdam that in the fifteenth century became the main European trading port for grain from the Baltic region. Wealthy businessmen owned Trading Companies that whaled off the Svalbard coast, traded spices in India and Indonesia, and founded manufacturing companies in New Amsterdam, now New York, South Africa, and South America.
The fact that the interests of these business layers were defended by absolutist governments, monarchs or leaders who held noble titles should not be misleading. The absolute monarchies already openly defended the capitalist businesses of the Genoese, Portuguese, Venetian businessmen, of the businessmen of Castile and Aragon, of Burgundy, of the banks of Lombardy and the Netherlands. Even the papacy itself was already an institution that had stimulated and developed capitalism for several centuries, controlling powerful companies, businesses of all kinds, commercial, financial, and real estate. Feudalism was eaten to the root by the powerful capitalist companies that dominated the economy of entire regions, installed factories on the 5 continents, exploited indigenous labor, and trafficked millions of slaves from Africa.
As early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the powerful interests of capitalist entrepreneurs were expressed behind the absolute monarchies: behind Charles V and the Hasburgs was the Fugger bank, or the Rotschild banking dynasty, which operated throughout Europe. The absolute Monarchies were the expression of rising capitalism, and the class of the bourgeoisie that relied on these tyrannical regimes, which arbitrated between the decadent nobility, and the emerging bourgeoisie, to mercilessly crush the peoples, which allowed them to guarantee high rates of exploitation of human labor.
Behind William of Orange was the extremely wealthy Nassau oligarchy of Burgundy. These layers of businessmen had to remove the feudal state in order to build their own state, but they feared giving too many liberties to the poor and laboring masses on which they had relied, to carry out the revolutions against the nobility. And this was precisely the second contradiction encountered by those who built the bourgeois democratic regimes, who were members of the capitalist classes, rich landowners, owners and owners of slaves.
As George Novack explains : “Although the new native ruling class, made up of merchants and other large landowners in the North and planters in the South, seized the reins of power from British officers… of the country, disputes broke out in almost all the states of the confederation, from 1783 to 1787, between the patricians and the plebeians to decide who should govern and how they should do it…” (George Novack- Democracy and Revolution).In other words, as we saw previously, the bourgeois democratic regime is only democratic for the minority of society, the ruling and exploiting classes. But for the majority of society, commoners, fishermen, workers, slaves, the bourgeois democratic regime from its birth was absolutely undemocratic, it already represented a true dictatorship of capital, which defends the profits of the capitalists.
The limitations on the democratic rights that the new republican regimes had for the poor masses were the product of the contradiction that the bourgeoisie lived between the need to carry out a revolution against the old exploiting class of the feudal lords and their empires, but at the same time, maintain private ownership of the means of production and exchange. As Novack explains it: The reasons for these restrictions were candidly put forward by leading spokesmen for the upper classes… John Adams, whohe was to be the second president, he wrote in 1787-88… “It is essential to liberty that the rights of the rich be secured; if they are not secured, the rich will soon be robbed and become poor, and in their turn rob their thieves, and in this way neither the liberty nor the property of any will be respected…” (George Novack- “Democracy and Revolution”)
However, for the historical evaluation of the parliamentary regimes that emerged at that time, with all its political and social contradictions, it is necessary to place the analysis in its historical context to assess them correctly. For the time, these regimes were a huge advance compared to the brutal regimes of absolute monarchies, tyrannies, and Holy Inquisitions that had dominated Europe in preceding centuries. The replacement of the regimes of nobles and kings by the bourgeois democratic regime was a step forward in history, because even with their limitations, those republican regimes settled on the valuable and enormous advances in democratic rights that the masses were conquering. . Precisely for this reason, the replacement of a political regime by a more progressive one,
The death of millions who gave their lives was necessary to conquer those liberties. An example of this is the bourgeois democratic regime in the United States, as Novack explains: ” Despite its limitations, the Yankee republic was the most progressive democratic governmentof the world in that stage of expansion of world capitalism. Their existence encouraged the democratic forces of the Old World in their often heartbreaking struggles against the old and oligarchic regimes. His example of victorious resistance, against the largest empire in the world, would provide a powerful stimulus for the wars of independence that the Latin American peoples would wage against the weakest Spanish colonization in the following century. Thus, the United States constituted a working model of democratic and republican government born through the revolutionary action of the masses” (George Novack-“Democracy and Revolution”)
IX- From Absolute Monarchies to Parliamentary Regime: The Role of the Manufacturing Bourgeoisie
The social class sector that carried out the political revolutions against the absolute monarchies to impose the bourgeois democratic regime was the manufacturing bourgeoisie. Absolute monarchies were essential for the economic rise of the manufacturing bourgeoisie in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a sector of the bourgeois class that exploited human labor by grouping in the workshop, or in large establishments such as haciendas, ranches, and plantations, workers who produce goods for the local market, or for export to the international market.
With Manufacturing, manual labor is established with a division of labor that goes beyond the technique of simple cooperation, typical of Factories, which is displacing the old residual craft guilds of the Middle Ages, and capitalist Factories. In the Manufactures, be it the workshop, the Hacienda, the Estancia, or the Plantation, each one of the workers specializes in one or several specific operations within the establishment, which increases the productivity of work, the exploitation of workers, achieves a qualitatively superior quantity of merchandise production, and achieves cheaper merchandise, which allows a greater accumulation of capital and profits.
This stage of capitalism is called “Mercantilism” for the bourgeois economy, but in reality the explosion in the production of goods was achieved by the manufacturing bourgeois based on the planning of the exploitation of human labor, based on the division of tasks at inside the establishment. However the development of manufacturing and the manufacturing bourgeoisie required all the repressive weight of the state to force thousands of people to work under the lash. A brutal state repression was necessary for the Landowners, Estancieros, and owners of the Workshops to exploit thousands of people imposing exhausting work days, with practically no rights of any kind, most of them working for house and food, for small conditions , or a rudimentary salary, since at that time the working class did not yet exist, and the salary as we know it today.
The development of the Manufacture was based largely on pre-capitalist production relations such as slavery, and various types of servitude, for which millions of people, especially the original peoples of Europe, and later of the 5 continents were expropriated, and brutally subjected to the point of being sold and transformed into “Merchandise”. The Manufacture could only be possible due to the existence of absolutist regimes based more and more on the machinery of the state bureaucracy, the army and the set of officials around the centralized and increasingly absolute power of the King. He required these tyrannical, brutally repressive regimes, not only of the conquered civilizations, but also of the small production and property of the dispossessed, and new exploited of Europe.
Through absolutism, brutally repressive institutions coexisted such as the Holy Inquisition, the witch hunt, the Absolute Monarchies, which liquidated and persecuted opponents, accusing any scientist or person who rejects the idea of God or the divine authority of the King as heretic. This made it possible to impose brutal tyrannies that established industrial and mining manufacturing through institutions that brutally repressed to enslave millions, as in the case of mitas, missions, and encomiendas in America, based on the semi-salaried and slave labor of the Indians, but also he establishment of large farms for production based on the slave labor of primitive communist tribes captured in Africa, or the development of Manufactures in South Africa, North America, Brazil, India, or Indonesia.
Manufactures, even though they are based on slave labor or servitude, are capitalist companies as Carlos Marx explains: “… plantations are, from the moment commercial speculations are created, production centers for the world market where it exists. a regime of capitalist production, if only in a formal way, since the slavery of blacks excludes free wage labor, which is the basis on which capitalist production rests, It is, however, capitalists who run the business of the slave trade. The production system introduced by them does not come from slavery, but is grafted onto it. In this case, the capitalist and the landlord are one person.” ( Karl Marx- “Critical history of surplus value”)
From this time, the process of destruction of productive forces that led to the Manufacture consisted of a true global genocide, without any agreement among the researchers about the number of Indians killed in America, which oscillates between 50 and 90 million between the 16th and 18th centuries, the horrific numbers of men and women kidnapped to be sold as slaves, with calculations ranging from about 60 million enslaved human beings and distributed in 24 million in America, 12 million in Asia, and 7 million in Europe, while 17 million died on the journeys. This genocide was perpetrated by the brutal absolute monarchies.
The horrible methods of the Capitalist Accumulation Manufacturing regime are typical of the upper stage of the Capitalist Original Accumulation period, as stated by Carlos Marx: “It is known that in real history conquest, enslavement, robbery play a great role and murder, violence, in a word.But in the sweet Political Economy, idyll has always reigned…In reality, the methods of original accumulation were anything but idyllic …they resort to the power of the state, to the organized and concentrated violence of society…” ( Karl Marx, Capital, Vol I Chapter XXIV)
The absolute Monarchies play a central role in this period of capitalist Original Accumulation, as the last trench of feudalism in the control of the State. This is how Nahuel Moreno puts it: “… this is a very complicated problem, comrades. For example, Perry Anderson… English independent Marxist. He poses a tremendous theoretical problem… that absolute monarchies is a regime, the last regime of decadent feudalism… but a feudal regime, with very big differences with the previous feudal regimes, but it is the last trench of feudalism…”. (Nahuel Moreno- Idem) Absolute Monarchies are the last trench of feudalism, the terrain of the political superstructure of society, to the extent that it allows the nobility to continue to control the springs of the state. But in the field of Infrastructure and the economy, absolutist regimes are a trench of capitalism because they make possible, through brutal repression of millions, the emergence of Manufactures, and the development of the Manufacturing bourgeoisie.
As the manufacturing bourgeoisie became more and more brutally exploitative and slave-owning, rich and powerful, it sought to impose its own political regime, which made it necessary to carry out great revolutions against the nobility. But the bourgeois democratic regime that arises with the Manufacturing bourgeoisie does not represent any democracy for 99% of society, it is a brutal dictatorship of capital, which defends the profits of the Manufacturing capitalists. This dialectical character can be seen, for example, in the personality of leaders like George Washington who carried out extraordinary revolutions against the British Empire, and at the same time exploited human labor on their Virginia plantations, owning hundreds of slaves. Or William of Orange, who liberates the English people from the Stuarts,
A serious mistake that many Marxist works make is that they confuse the Manufacturing bourgeoisie with the feudal Nobility , as Nahuel Moreno explains : “The important thing is that this capitalist production originated from the beginning… a capitalist class… That class is similar to that of the southern United States that gave Washington Washington.Liberal historians and their Marxist emulators have ignored the existence of this class because it was not an industrial bourgeoisie and have classified it as feudal landlords, when, on the contrary, it is a bourgeois class…” (Nahuel Moreno- ” Four theses on Spanish and Portuguese colonization”- thesis II- 1948).What confuses liberal and Marxist historians is that many of these manufacturing bourgeoisie hold noble titles of Count or Duke, adopt customs of the nobility, exploit workers under regimes of serfdom or slavery, and own vast tracts of land. .
But the companies, workshops, farms, farms or plantations that they own are oriented towards the search for profits, allocating merchandise to the local or international market, which defines them as a capitalist class. The classes are not defined by their external forms, but by their objectives, in this case, what defines the manufacturing bourgeoisie is profit, which is a capitalist objective. To the extent that capitalism is in a more advanced stage of its stage of primitive accumulation, the nascent bourgeois democratic regime expresses the stage of ascent of the capitalist mode of production, and the manufacturing bourgeois considered themselves as leaders of this process. who lives capitalism.
X-The battle between the Manufacturing and Industrial bourgeoisie
This is how, after demolishing the absolutist states, the manufacturing bourgeoisie found itself on the one hand with the contradiction that it was an oligarchic class, and a minority that needed to crush the liberties of the great masses, but on the other hand it began to feel the weight of a new emerging contradiction in capitalism: The rise of the Industrial bourgeoisie. The industrial bourgeoisie begins to rise in England from the eighteenth century, they are the owners of a Form of Accumulation superior to Manufacturing because in Industry the capitalist incorporates the machines in the establishment where he groups the workers, which is transformed into a factory .
The Industrial Accumulation regime implies the division of labor in the establishment combined with machines that replace manual labor, which allowed mass production, raised labor productivity, increased the rate of exploitation, and implied a gigantic leap in the production process. accumulation of capital and profits, which exceeds and contains that achieved by the Manufacture. To the extent that industry developed, the conflict between the industrial and manufacturing bourgeoisie became more and more acute, from which conflicts broke out between both bourgeois sectors, because the interests of the manufacturing bourgeoisie, and the industrial bourgeois are opposite.
The manufacturing bourgeoisie seeks a political regime based on the imposition of parliamentary republics with a federal or federative structure, where the different manufacturing sectors have control of different states, which in turn federate among themselves through economic and political agreements. From these agreements comes the establishment of internal customs between the states, the creation of banks for each state or province. On the other hand, the industrial bourgeoisie proposes the structure of a unitary republic, abolishing internal customs that prevents the free flow of capital, and trade between the different branches of production, and establishing a single central customs office for the development of imports of machinery essential for the development of the industry.
The manufacturing bourgeoisie seeks the permanent colonization of markets and lands for the development of manufacturing establishments in the form of plantations, haciendas, or ranches; promotes the creation of new states, or colonies, tolerance or encouragement of slavery and servitude for the exploitation of human labor of nations or tribes in the Manufactures. The industrial bourgeoisie wants to carry out the distribution of the land, the agrarian reform, and proposes the elimination of slavery and bonded labor, because it needs the working class to emerge. The industrial bourgeoisie promotes the enclosure of the land, and the opening of schools and general public instruction so that the peons become workers, for which it massively promotes immigration.
The manufacturing bourgeoisie defends the creation of different banks in each state or province, the circulation of different currencies, the creation of the Bank of each state, because each state of the federation can carry out trade on its own terms, whether in the local terrain, as international, in fact for the Manufacturing bourgeoisie the Confederation, or Federation implies the agreement of different countries and states, which can negotiate freely. On the other hand, the industrial bourgeoisie wants a single state without internal barriers, a national state with a Central Bank that has the capacity to grant abundant credit to be able to found industries, purchase machinery, that eliminates the different types of currencies to go towards a single currency.
The manufacturing bourgeoisie and the industrial bourgeoisie were two sectors of the capitalist exploiting classes with completely opposite interests and programs, which proposed two completely different models of bourgeois democratic political regime. This inexorably led both bourgeois sectors to sharp confrontation or civil war for control of the state. To the extent that they were crushing the Monarchies, and the last remains of feudalism, there was a change in the bourgeois democratic political regimes that is the emergence of political parties, which from the French Revolution expressed the different bourgeois sectors.
In all bourgeois democratic political regimes, the struggle arose between the Federalist, Confederate, or Federal parties, which represented the manufacturing bourgeoisie, against the Unionist, Liberal, or Unitary parties, which represented the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie. It was an international conflict that broke out unevenly and combined in all the capitalist countries of the world, at a time when the regime of industrial accumulation was expanding throughout the world, giving rise to the emergence of the working class. It is at that moment that the capitalist mode of production reached its peak and definitive conformation with its two fundamental social classes: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
Since Industry is a Form of Accumulation superior to Manufacturing, the industrial capitalist Accumulation regime was displacing the manufacturer in all the capitalist countries of the world. But the Law that no social class disappears from history without fighting was inexorably fulfilled with the fight that the manufacturing capitalists waged throughout the world, which forced the industrial bourgeoisie to carry out new political revolutions to displace the manufacturing bourgeoisie. , just as it had done with absolute monarchies in previous centuries.
The entire 19th century was crossed by the struggle between the manufacturing and industrial bourgeoisie that has an international scope. But the industrial bourgeoisie was a sector of the capitalist social class that had recently emerged in historical terms, very weak, or non-existent in many countries, and which had to face another sector of the capitalist class that had held power for centuries, was rich, and owned very powerful armies. The entire 19th century was a show of blows and counterblows that one social class inflicted on another, of revolutions and counter-revolutions, a process in which the objective conditions matured faster than the subjective ones, given that while the industrial bourgeoisie had not yet the strength to exercise power, the industry made its way in all countries tearing down barriers, tariffs, creating thousands of workers,
The phenomenon already seen in history was produced then, and understandable by the Law of Uneven and Combined Development that sectors of a social class fulfill historical tasks of another social class . It is Napoleon Bonaparte who expressed the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie by exporting the revolution to all of Europe, threatening agrarian reform to all European landowners and landlords. His peasant-based revolutionary army crushed the Austrian Empire, crushed the Pope, crushed the King of Spain which sparked political revolution in the Spanish colonies in America, and the wars of Independence in the Spanish Viceroyalties in America.
Napoleon displaced in France the government of the Girondins, which represented the Manufacturing bourgeoisie, and established with his government the centralization of the administration, higher education, a new tax code, a central bank, and a national system of highways. Contradictorily, in order to carry out this revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte had to suppress bourgeois democracy, with which “Bonapartism” was born, a one-person capitalist political regime supported by the Armed Forces, with a Constitution that declared him “Consul for Life.” Bonapartism was actually a dictatorship that constituted the “spectre”of the weak industrial bourgeoisie, a regime that carried out the task of liquidating the manufacturing bourgeoisie, and making way for industrial development.
However, the manufacturing bourgeoisie responded with an international counter-coup with the defeat of Napoleon and an international coalition headed by the Habsburg Austrian Empire with Chancellor Metternich, head of the international counter-revolution. But the revolution struck back with the revolutionary waves in 1820, 1830, and 1848, while the manufacturing bourgeoisie responded to the revolutionary wave with the Bourbon restoration in France, or the invasion of Mexico, the most important former Spanish colony, and the coronation of the Emperor Maximilian of the House of Habsburg and the Austrian Empire supported by the armies of the Bourbons of France. The invasion of Mexico sought to build an alliance with the manufacturing bourgeoisie of the southern United States, and overthrew the government of Benito Juarez.
In that historical period, all kinds of Bonapartist regimes arose, even under the forms of “Emperor” or “Military Chiefs” who generally settled in a state or region of greatest industrial development to fulfill the tasks of the industrial bourgeoisie as the case of Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck’s regime that, being a member of the manufacturing bourgeoisie, the “Junkers”, supported Prussia to defeat the German Confederation, the Austrian Empire, and carry out the unification of Germany in 1871. Or the case of Garibaldi in Italy who promoted the agrarian reform supported by the Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia, defeated the Austrian Empire, the Papacy, and achieved the ” National Unity” of Italy in 1870.
The unequal and combined nature of the revolutionary process gave rise to new bourgeois democratic political regimes in which bourgeois institutions coexist with others of feudal origin such as Parliamentary Monarchies where kings coexist, and emperors with Parliament as in the reunified Germany of Bismarck where a Emperor or “Kaiser” , with a President or Chancellor, and a Bicameral Parliament. Also the “Enlightened Despotism” where Parliament coexists with a semi-dictatorship of a nobleman, or Bonapartism where Parliament coexists with a semi-dictatorship of a Consul supported by the armed forces. The negotiations, and struggles between the different sectors of the capitalist classes, the revolutions, and counter-revolutions gave rise to all kinds of combinations of new capitalist political regimes, and all kinds of new unitary and federal structures of the emerging republics.
The international revolution of the industrial bourgeoisie led to the civil wars in the United States between the Union and the Confederacy between 1862 and 1865, the “Second North American Revolution” that liquidated slavery, manufacturing and unified the country. Or the long civil war between unitarios and federales in Argentina 1820-1861, the civil war of 1884-1885 in Colombia, the Revolution of the Sepoys in 1857 in the vast English possessions in India that led to the dissolution of the English Company of East Indies, England’s leading manufacturing trading company. In Indonesia there was the bankruptcy of the Manufacturer Dutch East India Company (VOC). In Mexico, the 30-year Bonapartist regime of Porfirio Díaz 1876-1911, began to establish the regime of industrial accumulation “from above” with completely undemocratic methods.
XI- Imperialism and Revolutionary Regimes
The bourgeois democratic regime is then, the political regime of the bourgeoisie in the stage of rise and consolidation of the capitalist mode of production. The unequal and combined character of the different bourgeois revolutions gave rise to the most diverse political regimes, and combinations of institutions with which the ruling class exercises control of the capitalist state. The Bonapartism that emerges at this stage of capitalist development is a progressive regime, a progressive dictatorship because it confronts the reactionary regimes of the nobility and the manufacturing bourgeoisie.
New regimes emerge such as “Bismarckism”, a kind of Bonapartism carried out by the German bourgeoisie, where the Chief of the Army carried out reforms of the state and the capitalist economy “from above”. When that regime no longer fulfills progressive tasks and enters a crisis but the revolution does not have the strength to overthrow it, the so-called “Senile Bismarckism” arises , it is the dictatorial regime that languishes, and slowly dies, until the revolution finally sweeps it away. as happened later with the PRI regime in Mexico.
However, already during the 19th century, while the manufacturing and industrial bourgeoisie disputed control of the capitalist state, and the capitalist mode of production reached its apogee, the development of the productive forces led to the irruption and rise of a new social class: The working class. The proletariat or working class is the social class of those who live on a salary, and do not own the means of production and exchange. To the extent that the regime of industrial accumulation develops throughout the world, this class develops, and grows in all countries, reaching gigantic proportions, taking over entire neighborhoods of the great capitals, and industrial cities of Europe, and the world. .
To the extent that the working class gradually became a large social class, and began to outnumber all the exploiting capitalist classes, it became a determinant of social processes and gained ever greater prominence. Their demands such as wage increases, improvements in working conditions, the right to unionize, to strike, to protest, entered into a permanent contradiction with the bourgeoisie, its profits, and its interests. The conflicts between the different sectors of the bourgeois class continued to develop, but an increasingly powerful social class emerged that imposed its demands based on revolutions, and workers’ struggles, and the methods of the proletariat burst into force in the class struggle, the strike, the mobilization, the pickets, and the unionization.
In 1871 the working class seized power in Paris, constituting the first workers’ government in the history of humanity, called the “Paris Commune”. It was a very brief government, which lasted just 2 months, culminating in a violent repression of the French bourgeoisie, but it left lessons forever. New changes took place in the bourgeois democratic political regimes because the parties that represent the interests of the working class arose, the Labor Party, the Socialist Party, or Social Democrats, and the bourgeois democratic regime began to have deputies and senators that represented the members of the workers’ parties. This gave rise to “reformism”, the political current that abandons Marxism, abandons the project of abolishing capitalism to integrate into the bourgeois democratic regimes, and limit itself to introducing “reforms” in capitalism.
To the extent that capitalism developed the productive forces, and could grant demands to the proletariat, the reformist parties gained momentum. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the socialist parties of Europe grew, but from the year 1903 the capitalist mode of production entered a stage of decline to the extent that the recently emerged monopolies were placed at the center. of the economy as the predominant Form of Accumulation .Monopolies are capitalist companies that dominate a branch of production, commerce and industry on a national scale, which supposes a leap in the centralization of capital, liquidating competition, and causing over-accumulation and concentration of wealth, and expansion of the social inequalities, at levels never seen.
The capitalist mode of production entered a stage of decadence of capitalism, the imperialist stage. This impacted the bourgeois democratic regime, opening a crisis in it due to the growing weight of the monopolies, and the monopoly bourgeoisie that displaces all other bourgeois sectors from the control of the capitalist state. The program of the reformists and Social Democrats was left without support when capitalism entered the imperialist stage that no longer grants great economic concessions to the working class. ANDThe role of the reformists and the Social Democratic parties was to defend the bourgeois democratic regime, give it stability in the midst of the rise of the working class, fulfilling a role of defense of capitalism, its own bourgeoisie, which led them to nationalist patriotism, and support for the war budgets of each imperialism, which constituted a betrayal of the world working class.
The exhaustion of monopolies as the predominant Form of Accumulation led to the world crisis of capitalism, and the inter-imperialist World War I in 1914 to determine which imperialism imposed its monopolies. The reformists collaborated with the development of the war, and their betrayal caused millions of workers to kill each other in defense of the interests of their respective capitalist classes. A new change in the bourgeois democratic regimes took place when members of the Socialist Party joined the capitalist governments as ministers. There was already a precedent such as the case of Alexandre Millerand of the Socialist Party, who became a minister in the French capitalist government in 1899.
In 1914 the French Socialist Party appointed two of its best-known leaders, Jules Guesde and Marcel Sembat, to the capitalist government, while in Britain Labor Party secretary Arthur Henderson joined Asquith’s capitalist government. Thus arose “class collaboration governments”,with the workers’ parties, and officials from the workers’ parties joining the capitalist governments, an expression of the denial of the growing weight and influence of the working class in capitalist society. From then on, the role of the reformists will be to join the governments and bourgeois democratic capitalist regimes to give them stability, in the face of the threat of the worker and popular revolution, a counterrevolutionary role that reformism fulfilled from now on. throughout history.
But then an event happened that changed history forever: The Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution was part of a revolutionary wave between 1917 and 1922 in France, Germany, Hungary, Great Britain, the Balkans, etc. that traversed the world. One of the great revolutions was that of Ireland in the fight for its national liberation through guerrilla warfare against the British Empire between 1919 and 1921 led by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the second wave of revolutionary struggle between June 28, 1922 and May 24, 1923, which had the Republic of Munster as a bastion. In Mexico, the extraordinary Mexican Revolution took place, between 1910 and 1920, led by Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa who developed the mass guerrillas, a revolutionary process that gave rise to mass self-determination organizations such as the Commune of Morelos. Everywhere self-determination organizations and worker and popular self-organization arose that expressed the power of the working class, and disputed power with the exploiting classes.
In Russia these organizations were the Soviets, which included the soldiers, hence the famous slogan “All or power to the Soviets” that the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin launched to popularize the need for the working class to govern. After the fall of the Tsar, and the failure of the successive capitalist governments, on July 20, 1917, a leader of the Social-Revolutionary party took over the capitalist government of Russia, Alejandro Kerenski, a very weak government against which the worker mobilization emerged. and popular, and the powerful Soviets. A new type of bourgeois democratic political regime arose, the “Kerenkismo” or “Kerenkista Regime”when a bourgeois government is weak, and is threatened by the workers’ revolution, and popular with strong dual power organizations that dispute power, and appear as an alternative regime to the bourgeois democratic regime.
In the Russian Revolution of 1917, the working class seized power, and began to build a state led by a social class that is neither proprietary nor exploitative: The Workers’ State. The seizure of power by the working class opened a new epoch in the history of humanity, the epoch of the international workers and socialist revolution, of the struggle for the end of the capitalist system, and of class society. From there, new political regimes arose that expressed the combination of two new elements: On the one hand, the entry of capitalism into its imperialist stage, of decadence and finality, and on the other, the struggle between the socialist revolution and the capitalist counterrevolution.
The new and different political regimes expressed the different conjunctures, situations, and stages of the international class struggle between the workers’ revolution and the bourgeois counterrevolution. As Nahuel Moreno explains: “…That is, how to go from one regime to another, which is also full of subtleties. Because how to go from one regime of exploiters to another and how from a regime of exploiters to the exploited Do they obey the same laws or are there different laws? We believe so, that there are political regimes that have a certain autonomy, and that some are more progressive than others…”. (Nahuel Moreno- Idem)
Along with the workers’ state, a new political regime arose: The “Regime of workers’ democracy”, which we can call the “Leninist Regime”, because it is inspired by the program that Lenin outlines in “The State and the Revolution”, and they impose together with Leon Trotsky between the years 1917-1923 . We can also call this type of political regime “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” due to its older terminology, according to the name that Carlos Marx made of it, and which were collected in the works of Lenin in “The State and the Revolution”, whichthey had studied the different revolutionary models that emerged from the experiences of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune.
Frederick Engels further specified the concept of “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” as a type of state or political regime taking the Paris Commune as a model, as he explained it: ” Lately, the words “dictatorship of the proletariat” have returned to plunge into holy horror to the social-democratic philistine. Well, gentlemen, do you want to know what face this dictatorship presents? Look at the Paris Commune: that is the dictatorship of the proletariat!” ( Friedrich Engels, Introduction to “The Civil War in France” by Karl Marx). In the case of the Russian Revolution , the Sovietsat take power, they are transformed into institutions of the workers’ state, with elected and revocable deputies that express the working class, and aim to form a new type of state, the socialist state, with the birth of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ( USSR).
The Leninist regime has two central characteristics: On the one hand, it is a regime that expresses the most exploited and oppressed layers of society that stand up and pronounce their most urgent demands through their democratically elected representatives in factories, neighborhoods, schools. , and workplaces. It is a political regime opposed to the bourgeois democratic regime that is democracy for the minority ruling classes, but dictatorship of capital for the majority working classes. The Leninist regime is a democracy for the most oppressed, for the oppressed nations, for women, for the peasants, for all the oppressed minorities, but it is at the same time a dictatorship for the minority exploiting classes, it is the dictatorship of the proletariat.
As George Novack explains: “With the victory of the Bolsheviks in 1917, the struggle for a new type of democracy, according to socialist criteria, went from being a theoretical forecast to being a political reality. Democratic tasks that had been carried out under Bourgeois auspices in earlier revolutions, such as the overthrow of the aristocratic monarchy, the state Church, and the landed nobility, the distribution of land to its plebeian cultivators, the independence of oppressed nationalities, and the creation of representative political institutions, were for the first time once undertaken under the leadership of the industrial proletariat, at the head of the popular masses…” (George Novack- Idem)
On the other hand, it is a political regime for the permanent mobilization of workers and the people. It is a political regime at the service of the development of the international revolution, and the defense of the revolution. It promotes the world revolution of the workers because no workers state can survive locked in the national borders. It must confront capitalism and world imperialism, which is why the Third International, an international organization of the revolutionary socialist workers’ parties, appears as a fundamental institution of the regime of workers’ democracy for the promotion and development of the international socialist revolution. The USSR is a transitional social economic formation, it is a workers’ state, but it is not yet a socialist country, it can only advance to socialism if the world revolution develops,
The workers’ democracy regime relies on the Soviets, as long as they promote permanent mobilization, and if they don’t, it will seek to rely on other organizations that do. As Leon Trotsky puts it: “It is important to keep all these eventualities in mind so as not to fall into organizational fetishism or transform the soviets , from a flexible and vital form of struggle, into a principle of organization introduced from outside the movement, and hindering its regular development.” (León Trotsky, Lessons of October, 1924). And just as Cromwell, Washington, or Roberspierre did to impose the bourgeois democratic regime, the Leninist regime imposes itself by appealing to “all necessary means”, as Malcolm X explained several decades later, to defeat the counterrevolution.
The regime of workers’ democracy is the most progressive political regime known in the history of humanity up to now. There was already a trial of a workers’ democracy regime in the first workers’ government in history, which was the Paris Commune, but it lasted only two months, because the working class had no idea how to take charge of the state, nor how to carry on a revolution. In the Russian Revolution, the Leninist regime also lasted very little, barely 6 years, but it is an enormously progressive regime that inaugurated a completely new stage in the history of humanity: The stage of the struggle for dual power that inevitably occurs in the revolutions, the struggle for workers’ democracy regimes, and the struggle for a new type of workers’ and socialist state, without exploiters or exploited.
XII- Imperialism and Counterrevolutionary Regimes
The Leninist regime, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is then the political regime of the rise of the international workers’ revolution. However, the revolutionary process that made possible the regime of workers’ democracy in the USSR was defeated in 1923. By that year, the revolution had already been defeated in Germany, the most important country in Europe, and the entire revolutionary wave of the years 1917-22 was defeated. The USSR had survived the invasion of more than 23 imperialist armies, but suffered damage to its productive forces with millions of deaths, famine, and political and social isolation as a result of the defeat of the European and world revolution. Also that year, Lenin, the most important leader of the Russian Revolution, the Communist Party, and the Third International, died.
Starting in 1923, a new stage of the class struggle began at the international level: a stage of defeats that lasted practically 20 years, in which the forces of reaction and counterrevolution were strengthened everywhere. Two political forces emerge that, as they come to power, impose brutal totalitarian regimes: Nazism, and Fascism. They are capitalist regimes that express the rise of monopolies, the stage of decadence of the capitalist-imperialist mode of production, its horrible capacity for the development of destructive forces, to the extent that they use totalitarian methods, slavery, genocide, and barbarism. like concentration camps for mass extermination.
Nazism and Fascism are political regimes based in the Armed Forces that imply the suppression of the bourgeois democratic regime, of all political parties, of all democratic freedoms, the crushing of nations, and minorities. In the Nazi or Fascist regime, methods of civil war are carried out against the population, systematically applied from the state through armed bands that sow terror. Espionage and state terrorism are institutionalized for the persecution of opponents that is total and absolute. All culture is only authorized by the Nazi regime, which controls all the media, imposes censorship, book burning, and controls all artistic and scientific expressions, which causes a massive flight of musicians, writers, actors , filmmakers,
Nazism, and Fascism take Bonapartism to its maximum expression, in which the character of Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco is glorified, a cult of personality develops, the “leader” is above all of society, and His leadership is based on control of the Armed Forces, and repressive. Contrary to the Bonapartism of the 19th century, which fulfilled some progressive tasks, these regimes have a retrograde and sinister Bonapartist character, which does not fulfill any progressive task, because it is profoundly counterrevolutionary. The goal of the Nazi regime is to crush the workers’, and socialist, revolution no matter what the means, with widespread massacres, mass incarceration, deportations, and torture.
The Nazi regime is not only a material, social, and political involution, it is also an ideological involution of the bourgeoisie, which delves into the most retrograde ideologies of the past: Biology and science are replaced by religion, anthropology is reduced to “a master race” , history is reduced to the “manifest destiny of a nation”, the state is reduced to the “Third Reich” , the fate of society is in the hands of the “infallible Furher”, and everything that opposes this is “Bolshevik barbarism”,which must be removed. The Nazi regime wipes out all the scientific and theoretical advances that bourgeois ideology could have brought about, and replaces it with a handful of medieval brutalities.
Parallel to the Nazi and fascist regimes, the Stalinist regime developed in the USSR. The defeat of the European revolution, the isolation, the disaster caused by the civil war, leads to a first defeat of the Russian Revolution: The change of political regime that Stalin imposes on the USSR through which the “Bureaucratic Regime of the Workers’ State” emerges. “, or “Stalinist Regime”. Just as the Nazi regime suppresses the bourgeois democratic regime of the bourgeois state, the Stalinist regime suppresses the workers’ democracy regime of the workers state. And it does it with the same methods as the Nazis: persecution, killings, concentration camps, liquidation of opponents, torture, censorship, and mass murders.
The regime that Stalin imposed liquidated and assassinated the entire leadership of the Bolshevik Party, established espionage and conspiracy as a method, ended up assassinating Leon Trotsky through his agents, and established a true genocide to impose the retreat of the Leninist regime on the retrograde Stalinist regime. The Stalinist regime is the rise to power of a clique of bureaucrats and privileged officials, who through violence, and their gangs of thugs, destroyed the revolutionary forces in the USSR for several years, to impose a dictatorial regime. It transformed the Soviets into an empty shell of functionaries addicted to the regime, it turned the Communist Party into an empty compound without internal debate, with Congresses that approve everything “Unanimously”, and they limit themselves to approving everything that Stalin and his clique propose.
The organizations of the Soviets, of the state, of the party, and of the International became a monolithic machinery without debate, nor dissent of any kind, opposed by the vertex to the method of almost permanent debate, of the emergence of realignments, fractions, and trends that characterized the Bolshevik Party during Lenin’s lifetime, and the Third International, during the Leninist regime. The Stalinist regime also takes Bonapartism to its maximum expression, it becomes a Bonapartism of the workers’ state, as Leon Trotsky explains: ” The current political regime of the USSR is that of “Soviet” (or anti-Soviet) Bonapartism. Although Stalin lacks the luster… he surpasses Bonaparte I with his regime of organized subservience. He could only obtain that power by strangling the party, the soviets, the entire working class… He crushed the old cadres of Bolshevism. He crushed the revolutionaries. He replaced them with functionaries with flexible spines. Marxist thought was displaced by fear, slander and intrigue” (León Trotsky. The workers’ state, thermidor and Bonapartism- 1935)
Stalin eliminated all the leaders of the Red Army addicted to Trotsky, or opponents. Stalin is glorified, the cult of personality included the modification of the history of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky is erased from history, from photos, from images, and the new version of the Russian Revolution emerges where Stalin is the “leader” who succeeds Lenin after his death. Stalin is the “infallible guide”of the socialist society that must trust in its leadership. Imperialism relied on this disastrous historical falsification made by Stalinism to sow the ideology that Stalin, and his horrible regime, arose as a product of the Russian Revolution itself, and not against it. In the history of the USSR that Stalinism tells, 20 years of internal struggle in the USSR, within the Communist Party, and the Third International of the Trotskyists and those who defended Marxism against the new nationalist tendency expressed by Stalin, which appears also as “Marxist” , but it goes against Marxism.
Just as the Nazi regime represents an ideological involution of the political and scientific development of the bourgeoisie in the Middle Ages, the Stalinist regime is an ideological involution from Marxism to “Revisionism” that leads to the most precarious bourgeois ideologies. Under the Stalinist regime, Karl Marx’s concept of “Proletarian Internationalism” regressed to the nationalist ideology of “Socialism in One Country” . From Lenin’s statement of “no support for the provisional government” to the Stalinist statement of “Popular Front Government with the Bourgeoisie”. From Lenin’s “monopoly imperialism” proposal, increasingly warlike, “Peaceful Coexistence” with imperialism. From the proposal of the right to “Self-determination of the Peoples” of Lenin and Trotsky, to Stalin’s Holodomor on the Ukraine. From the laws in defense of Women’s rights in the Leninist regime, to the “defense of the family” , and the return of the Patriarchy, and Machismo in the Stalinist regime
If the Leninist regime, or dictatorship of the proletariat, is the political regime that arises as a product of the rise of the international workers’ revolution, the Nazi, Fascist, or Stalinist regimes express the advance of the Counterrevolution, and the defeat of the revolution. Since the epoch of the international socialist revolution is still open, what is at stake from now on is whether all these counterrevolutionary regimes succeed in crushing the international revolution, an unavoidable objective of these regimes because if the revolution develops, these regimes run the risk of disappear.
The one who raises for the first time in theoretical terms the need for revolutions against these regimes is Leon Trotsky who in his work “The Revolution Betrayed” presents the concept of “Political Revolution” . The Political Revolution is a revolution in the political regime to overthrow the Stalinist regime, and reimpose the Leninist one. A revolution that does not modify the social bases of the state because until then the USSR continues to be a workers’ state, where there is still collective ownership of the means of production, and change.
In this work, Trotsky presents his famous “alternative forecast” in which he warned that if the Political Revolution fails to triumph in the USSR, it will return to capitalism, a fact that the class struggle categorically confirmed decades later. With the concept of “Political Revolution” , the revolution that modifies the political regime without modifying the social bases of the state, Trotsky gave a name to the tasks that the working class must carry out in the regime of the workers’ state, but also, to the tasks that the Manufacturing bourgeoisie, and then the industrial one, had carried out in the capitalist state. And that now it was more necessary than ever to be carried forward, given the emergence of the monstrous Nazi regime.
XIII- World War II: The Struggle Between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution
The unstoppable advance of fascism and Nazism in Europe opened up an unprecedented perspective from the historical point of view for the bourgeois democratic regime. As Nazi troops occupied European countries, and nations fell one after another under the rule of the Nazi boot, the bourgeois democratic regime was suppressed and disappeared. The capitalist state was preserved, but with a totalitarian political regime that established brutal super-exploitation rules for the working class for the benefit of monopolies, for which the Nazi regime needed to completely suppress all democratic freedoms, it needed to suppress all political parties , and classic institutions of the bourgeoisie, and also all the social conquests obtained by the working class up to now,
The perspective of the disappearance of the bourgeois democratic regime then opened up, at the hands of a Nazi or fascist counterrevolution. Instead of the bourgeois democratic regime disappearing suppressed by the workers’ revolution as it was proposed in the revolutionary stage of the years 1917-1922, the bourgeois democratic regime ran the risk of disappearing, but this time as a product of the victory of the counterrevolution. This produced a change in the character of World War II, which clearly differentiated it from World War I.
In World War I there was a confrontation between the different imperialist powers, it was a war between imperialisms, inter-imperialist, of robbery, which expressed the decadence of capitalism. But in World War II, while the inter-imperialist character of the war persisted, two new elements were incorporated that did not exist at the beginning of World War I. The first new element is the existence of the USSR, the first workers’ state in history. And the second new element is the rise of the Nazi regime, which is a phenomenon, new and unknown until that moment. World War II combines inter-imperialist elements with elements of counterrevolutionary warfare, because if the Nazi regime prevails throughout the world, it could open another era in the history of Humanity,
The rise of Nazi fascism, and the prospect of a triumph of the world counterrevolution set up for World War II a complex combination of elements very different from World War I. The Second War was a war of triple nature: On the one hand, an inter-imperialist war, on the other hand, a counterrevolutionary war against the first workers’ state in history that had emerged up to then, the USSR, and thirdly, a war in which two different political regimes face each other, the Nazi-fascist, and the bourgeois democratic. In other words, the unequal combination of the inter-imperialist component of the war with the component of the struggle between the revolution and the Counter-revolution was developing.
In the Marxist school, to analyze the question of political regimes, Nahuel Moreno explained it as follows: “… World War II is not a carbon copy of World War I because something happened, which is the emergence of these counterrevolutionary totalitarian regimes, a new, new phenomenon, and it is embedded,… Nazi and fascist parties arise in all the countries of the world, even in countries where there are no fascist, Falangist, or Nazi capitals, or they are very weak. … all those throughout the world who believe that the time has come to impose counterrevolutionary regimes of a totalitarian type … The First World War was a war between the great bourgeois-democratic imperialist powers. Now there is a new ingredient: a monster has emerged… a new political phenomenon of unusual scope because if it wins it is the prelude to slavery!” (Nahuel Moreno- Idem)
All these combined elements were already expressed in the development of the Spanish Revolution in 1936, where Francoism received the support of the Nazi regime, and the Fascist regime of Mussolini. In the Spanish Revolution there were inter-imperialist elements due to the intervention of Germany and Italy against Spain, there were elements of the struggle between the revolution and the counterrevolution due to the confrontation between the communists and anarchists against the Falangist fascists, and there was an element of struggle between political regimes because the defeat of the Spanish Revolution meant the suppression of the bourgeois democratic regime, and the establishment of the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Practically Franco’s triumph in April 1939 gave the starting signal to the Second World War, 5 months later, in September 1939.
At the beginning, with the invasion of Poland, the determining element of the Second World War is the inter-imperialist one, although the other two elements continue to operate. Stalin gave Hitler oxygen when he signed the shameful Molotov-Ribbentrop “Non-Aggression Treaty” a month before the outbreak of war, which gave Hitler peace to invade Poland and the rest of Europe. But the disaster of Stalin’s policy was revealed when Hitler decided to invade the USSR two years later in 1941, and from then on the determining element of the Second World War began to be that of the counterrevolutionary war.
By 1935 there were 5 concentration camps in Nazi Germany with 4,000 prisoners, mostly communists. But from the beginning of the war the extension of the Concentration Camps jumped until reaching more than 1000 with millions of prisoners, which placed the fight against the Nazi regime as the determining element of World War II. This is how Nahuel Moreno explains it: “What is the determining element in World War II… It depends on the moment because… first the Spanish Revolution had to be defeated for it to emerge, with the triumph in Germany and of Mussolini. Then later went a bit towards the workers’ state and finally turned into a war of all the other imperialist sectors and the workers’ state against Nazism…” (Nahuel Moreno- Idem)
The ” Axis Forces Agreement” of 1940 between the Nazi regime in Germany, the Fascist regime in Italy, and the fascist dictatorship of Emperor Hirohito in Japan, advanced by occupying Warsaw, Riga, Prague, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Copenhagen, China launched the attack on London and the invasion of the USSR, which opened up the possibility of a global triumph for Nazism. The masses of Europe armed themselves against the occupation troops, and the partisan guerillas of France, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Greece arose, in which the working class massively turned to the armed struggle against the Nazis. From there, Stalin, and then the United States joined the allied forces, which formed a true “anti-Nazi front”, made up of the Allied imperialisms of Europe, the US, and the USSR, supported by the mass movement in Europe that carries out the armed struggle against the occupying troops.
The Allied front was forced to defend the bourgeois democratic regime, but it did so with the horrible methods of the exploiting classes, the terrible methods of imperialism, such as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by United States Imperialism, or the horrible bombings of Dresden carried out by Churchill and England with thousands of innocent victims, or Stalin’s sinister policy of not supporting the Warsaw Ghetto revolution, and allowing the Nazi massacres on the Ghetto to defeat it, to name a few. facts.
In no way can the policies and methods of the governments allied with their policy of defense of capitalism be justified, and the monopolies, on the contrary, constitute the worst elements that the Allied front has against the Nazis as Nahuel Moreno explains: “. .. If we support the allied front, the following slogan must be: Death to all the allied governments , death to all the reactionary, pro-fascist, allied governments that are forced to fight against fascism today… Death to the government, Churchill is a scoundrel… Let’s turn to Churchill, let Labor now take power, let the workers control and direct…” (Nahuel Moreno- Idem)
On February 2, 1943 the Nazi and Axis forces were defeated at Stalingrad. Starting off completely changed the course of the War and the Allies went on the offensive. The Battle of Stalingrad where the peoples of Russia and Eastern Europe left 1.5 million lives to stop the end of Hitler’s offensive, was the key defeat of the Nazis that decided the course of the War. In this way, Stalingrad put an end to the counterrevolutionary stage of 20 years of defeats that began in 1923. From Stalingrad began a world revolutionary stage that swept away Nazism, Fascism, and lasted for more than 45 years, sweeping away the remains of the old imperialisms, led to the national liberation of dozens of nations, and the development of new revolutions against capitalism and Imperialism.
The Nazi defeat is a colossal fight in defense of democratic rights, and a great global democratic revolution, the most important in history as explained by Nahuel Moreno: “… the defeat of Hitler, of Nazism, can be interpreted as a great democratic revolution… on a world scale.Great revolutionary triumph, yes. … the war is complex, it is a combination of inter-imperialist war, but it is also a war between regimes … in this case the masses were rightly fighting for the defense of a superior regime, of a political nature, for the masses themselves . Because bourgeois democracy, with all its deficiencies, in the face of a totalitarian-type counterrevolutionary regime, is infinitely superior… “Down with fascism” is a great slogan, and within a slogan structure at a time when Nazism is a power , is the central slogan” (Nahuel Moreno- Ídem)
The Second World War demonstrated that Leon Trotsky’s Theses about the permanent character of the revolution are totally correct. While the imperialisms that direct the Allied Front, the United States, France, and England wanted the revolution against the Nazis to be limited to the defense of the bourgeois democratic regime, the masses carried out armed revolutions that ended with the seizure of power by the communist militants in Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, and France. The Red flag was the first to be waved over the Reichstag in the seizure of Berlin, France, Italy, and Germany, among the main imperialist countries of the world, could have become workers’ states, which would have changed the history of humanity forever. .
But Stalin and his regime were aware that if capitalism was expropriated in the main capitalist economies of Europe, the revolution that began there would end up wiping out Stalin himself, and his regime of privileged bureaucrats. Thus, by signing the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, the Stalinists, to ensure their control of power in the USSR, handed over power in Germany, Italy, and France to the imperialist bourgeoisie. Stalin gave that order to the communist militants, and carried out the dissolution of the Third International at the request of the allied Imperialism. This enabled the capitalist reconstruction of Europe, and gave capitalism a 70-year lifespan.
With the signing of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, the Stalinists carried out the greatest betrayal in the history of the revolution and the working class. However, this betrayal did not manage to prevent the greatest revolutionary victory in history from triggering a world revolutionary wave in the following 45 years that allowed the emergence of the struggles of the most oppressed such as the black race, women, youth, the oppressed nations, the colonies, ended with the remains of the old imperialisms, dictatorships, reactionary regimes, liberated hundreds of colonial countries, and ended up overthrowing the Stalinist regimes themselves starting in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
XIV- The bourgeois democratic regime in the Postwar period
After the defeat of Nazism, the bourgeois democratic regime returned to settle in the main capitalist countries of Europe, in France with the Fourth Republic between 1946 and the 5th Republic in 1958, the Republic of Italy in 1946 after the abdication of King Umberto II, in Great Britain, where it had not been interrupted, continued with the Churchill and then Labor governments, while in Germany with the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the presidency of Konrad Adenauer, and the Federal Parliament (Bundestag). But all these post-World War II bourgeois-democratic regimes displayed completely different features from those existing before the war.
The post-war bourgeois democratic regimes are embedded with new institutions of a fascist, Bonapartist, reactionary and anti-democratic nature such as the Pentagon or the CIA in the United States, the Foreign Documentation and Counter-Intelligence Service (SDECE) that emerged in France in 1946, the Federal Intelligence, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) emerged in Germany in 1946, or the Italian Armed Forces Information Service (SIFAR) emerged in 1949. In Great Britain the M16 began to act alongside the M15 in direct coordination with the CIA , as with the Italian SIFAR.
All these institutions did not exist before the Second World War, except for the M15 and M16 in England, and special agencies in some countries, but none of the pre-existing agencies had the importance, nor the ministerial rank that they acquire in the bourgeois democratic regimes of postwar period. For the formation of these new reactionary institutions, the imperialist governments did not hesitate to hire former Nazi agents, such as Reinhard Gehlen, a former general of the Wehrmacht who was incorporated as head of the German BND, or other engineers, scientists, and soldiers of the Nazi regime. like the inventor of the missile in the Henschel company, Herbert Wagner, or Wernher von Braun for the impulse of the rocketry, in NASA.
The same conformation was acquired by all the bourgeois democrats of the poor, semi-colonial, and colonial countries with bonapartist and reactionary espionage institutions. In the United States, in 1950 “McCarthyism” was launched, an espionage and generalized persecution operation supported by the CIA and the FBI against all communist militants, and on the left, a “witch hunt” under the government of Harry Truman and the Democratic Party, which was promoted by the United States Parliament, and from the Committee on Un-American Activities established in the Senate headed by Senator McCarthy. Thousands of scientists, journalists, workers, artists were persecuted and included in ” black lists”under the accusation of “treason to the fatherland”.
The same “witch hunt” was carried out in the imperialist state of Canada in 1950 by the Royal Canadian Gendarmerie (GRC), and was extended against left-wing activists and militants throughout the world with various mechanisms and operations, supported by the new espionage institutions established in the Constitution of the countries. The Pentagon, the CIA, or the FBI were established as global surveillance and persecution agencies, with the ability to conspire, carry out espionage, and sabotage the governments of any country in the world.
Also in the workers’ states, the Stalinist regimes took Nazi scientists and technicians to the USSR to join the anti-democratic espionage institutions such as the KGB, or the Stasi in East Germany, accentuating the anti-worker and anti-socialist traits of the Stalin regime. . The Stalinist regime preserved in the Postwar period the entire counterrevolutionary structure that it used to eliminate the revolutionary sectors, but the new institutions created by the Stalinist regime, copied from the imperialist states, sought to undermine the social bases of the workers’ state, to guarantee the privileges of civil servants. , and the ruling parasitic bureaucracy. The appearance of strong Bonapartist elements in the post-war bourgeois democratic regimes in the imperialist countries also had to do with a jump in the monopoly concentration of the wealth of the bourgeoisie caused by the emergence of a new type of companies that was placed at the center of the world economy: Multinationals. These are companies that dominate a branch of production on a world scale. They are a Form of Accumulation superior to the monopolies, the cartels and trusts that dominated a branch, but at a national level. As Nahuel Moreno pointed out: “…The fact that I want to point out to you is the emergence of transnationals… This is a new phenomenon .Until the 2nd World War, no monopoly had branches…they are companies that have ten, twenty companies in different countries and all coordinated working together.” (Nahuel Moreno- Idem)
Multinationals arose after the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, and the launch of the “Marshall Plan” , through which the US invested millions of dollars, which allowed the reconstruction of the European economy. In this way, the US monopolies such as Coca Cola, Ford, or General Motors began to have branches throughout Europe, and became Multinationals, with a single command with production and marketing goals, an immense world market almost without limits, and without competition, because the monopolies of the other imperialist countries emerged destroyed after the Second World War, and therefore, at an economic and financial disadvantage.
The US took command of the world economy, and was able to implement the Marshall Plan because its economy accounted for one third of all world exports, possessed two thirds of the gold reserves, and produced half of all manufactured goods. The world capitalist economy experienced growth at historic rates for several decades, and the postwar “boom” developed based on the establishment of the Keynesian regime of capitalist accumulation, also known as the “welfare state”,which consisted of high wages, full employment, economic concessions to the masses, social conquests and increases in social wages, public works plans and a great process of industrialization, at the service of development, and accumulation of the Multinationals.
All these economic processes, both the Keynesian regime, the “boom”, the “German miracle”, or the “Japanese miracle”, were possible because cities, bridges, roads, counties, municipalities and factories, thousands of buildings were previously destroyed , deposits, transport, and more than 70 million human lives between battles, concentration camps and atomic bombs. Imperialist capitalism resurfaced taking advantage of the burning of capital and the massive liquidation of productive forces, the famine, the brutal unemployment and low wages of the proletariat, and the European masses caused by the Second World War. The irruption of the Pentagon, the CIA, the combination of imperialist global espionage institutions were also the expression of the regressive character of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist stage, and the decadent character of capitalism.
The constitution of the postwar bourgeois democratic regimes were within the framework of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. These agreements were established by the ruling classes of the most important imperialist countries headed by British imperialism in retreat, and decadence, which had dominated capitalism until then, the United States, the emerging imperialism that came to dominate world capitalism, and the privileged bureaucracy. parasitic from the USSR. The Yalta and Potsdam agreements established a “New World Order” a whole series of completely undemocratic agreements destined to preserve the continuity of imperialist-capitalism, the interests of the ruling classes of the imperialist countries, and to face all the revolutions and uprisings that the masses could carry out throughout the world.
The Yalta and Potsdam agreements implied the division of Europe, and Germany through the “Berlin Wall “, a deeply undemocratic measure established with the aim of dividing the German, and European, working class among the strongest proletariats in the world. In the economic field, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements meant a new international monetary system established from the Bretton Woods International Conference that established the dollar as the standard currency, and agreed to the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. (BM), with the aim of supporting the development of multinationals.
In the political and military arena, the “New World Order” established the UN and NATO, international organizations that represent the hegemony of US imperialism. The “boom” gave stability to the bourgeois democratic regimes of the imperialist countries that had been at brink of death at times of the rise of fascism, but at the same time these changes in post-war bourgeois democratic regimes express the monopolistic and decadent character of the bourgeoisie, and the anti-democratic and bonapartist traits of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements concluded by Stalin , Churchill, and Roosevelt.
From these agreements, the Stalinists joined the European capitalist governments, just as the Social Democrats had done before the First World War. Maurice Thorez, Secretary General of the French Communist Party, joined the French imperialist government as Minister of the Civil Service from 1945 to 1947, and as Vice President of the Council of State from 1946 to 1947. Stalinists joined various European capitalist governments, and They co-governed with the bourgeoisie in the implementation of the Marshall Plan, carrying out the orientation that Stalin called the “Popular Front”. This experience of co-government, and politics of “class collaboration”of the Stalinists, which had already been experimented with in 1935 with ministers in the capitalist governments, was a reaffirmation of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism.
In this way, institutions of a supranational and global nature arose, which were located above the national states, with the objective of controlling and disciplining the states, carrying out an unprecedented global semi-colonization, in accordance with the existence of the Multinationals that are also supranational companies, which obtain profits from the exploitation of human labor in the five continents. The Pentagon and NATO are also imperialist military institutions of a supranational nature with their 7 fleets installed on the 5 continents with the aim of defending the interests of the Multinationals, and attacking any nation or people that insurrections, rises up, or insubordinates against the Postwar agreements, and imperialist interests.
The Pentagon and NATO are an expression of the capacity of the bourgeoisie to develop the destructive forces of Humanity, and war. In the Middle East, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements and the regional agreements between the imperialist countries lead to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, a Nazi, fascist state, based on discrimination and attack on all nations of the Arab race, since the peoples of the Middle East with the objective of defending the interests of the imperialist Multinationals in the region. ANDn the moment when Nazi barbarism was on the verge of imposing itself, it had been correct to join the defenders of the bourgeois democratic regime in view of the triumph of Nazi barbarism in the Second World War, since the bourgeois democratic regime was treated as a more progressive regime in relation to the Nazi
As Nahuel Moreno explains: “… there are regimes, even with equal economic and social formations, diametrically opposed regimes, some more progressive than others , and this is a political problem of enormous magnitude. If not, nothing less than the political revolution. But this phenomenon of political revolution also finds its expression in the bourgeois social economic formation…there are also different regimes, progressive and regressive, in the capitalist regime…it is a crime, sectarian and unscientific not to specify that these regimes exist and that it is a task of the highest magnitude to defend the progressive regime, even if it is bourgeois, from the most regressive counterrevolutionary regime…” (Nahuel Moreno- Ídem)
But after the defeat of the Nazis, the revolution began to confront the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, and the bourgeois democratic regimes that incorporated Bonapartist and undemocratic institutions to defend the dictatorship of capital. The new post-war bourgeois democratic regimes that emerged from the victory against the Nazis had the objective of confronting and defeating the workers and popular revolutions at the international level. And in turn, those bourgeois democratic regimes combined with reactionary supranational institutions that expressed the imperialist and decadent character of capitalism, its antidemocratic and counterrevolutionary character. It was a question of confronting them, and defeating them, not of joining in governing with them, and supporting them as the Stalinists did. Confronting them was what the masses of the world did, ignoring the calls of Stalinism, and the imperialist governments of the world,
XV- The Postwar Revolutionary Wave
To the extent that the postwar period developed as part of the epoch of the workers’ and international socialist revolution, the entire conformation of the bourgeois democratic regimes, as well as the emergence of these new anti-democratic institutions were the expression of the incapacity of the bourgeoisie , in historical terms, to carry out any task, or democratic conquest. The bourgeoisie already showed itself incapable of guaranteeing national independence, human rights, agrarian reform, or the most elementary democratic liberties. It was the masses of the world who, from the very moment the Second War ended, went out to fight for freedoms and democratic conquests, confronting the agreements and plans of the reactionary bourgeoisie, and conquering new freedoms.
The triumph of the world revolution against the Nazis opened a global revolutionary wave, which included the expropriation of the bourgeoisie beginning in 1946 in Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Albania. Despite the fact that through the Yalta and Potsdam agreements Stalin handed over power to the bourgeoisie in France, Germany, and Italy to facilitate the capitalist reconstruction of Europe, they could not avoid the agreements that capitalism was expropriated in Eastern Europe. In 1945 the Indonesian Revolution broke out, which defeated the Imperialism of the Netherlands and achieved independence in 1949, liberating one of the largest territories in Southeast Asia, achieving freedom for Indonesia.
On August 15, 1947, India declared itself independent from the British Empire after several years of struggle by the independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, which was a severe blow to British imperialism and in 1946 the revolution for National Independence broke out in Cambodia . , Laos, North Vietnam and South Vietnam that ended with the defeat of French Imperialism in 1954, reconfigured the borders of Indochina, and achieved new freedoms for nations subject to French imperialism. In 1948 the Malaysian Revolution broke out which achieved National Independence in 1960, gained new freedoms, and dealt another blow to British imperialism.
The Chinese Revolution in 1949 was a colossal triumph that liberated numerous nations, and achieved, together with the Russian revolution, and in Eastern Europe, the expropriation of capitalism in a third of humanity. In 1950 the revolution broke out in Korea that forced the intervention of the United States, and in 1952 the Bolivian Revolution broke out. In 1953 the revolution broke out in East Germany against the Stalinist regime that began with a strike by construction workers, and then the uprising of 500 towns that had to be crushed by the tanks of the regime. In 1954 the Algerian Revolution broke out , which achieved democratic freedoms, triumphed against French Imperialism, and achieved National Independence in 1962, a triumph that had a global impact.
In 1955 the Black Revolution broke out in the United States. Known universally as the “Fight for civil rights”, it was the revolution that faced for almost 10 years between 1955 and 1965 the system of racial segregation suffered by black people in 19 states of the country. This political regime known as “Jim Crow” in the southern states it was a fascist inlay within the bourgeois democratic regime of the United States, because it discriminated against and limited the rights of millions of people because of their race and skin color. After World War II, black soldiers returned home from their triumph against the Nazis in Europe, where they had fought side by side with white soldiers with equal rights. In the cities and states where they lived they claimed to have the same rights as in the army.
The revolutionary mobilization of the masses in the south of the country violently confronted the racist Democratic governments of the southern states, and the federal governments of Dwight Enhower, John F Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. The “Fight for civil rights”, led by Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, was the “Third American Revolution” that ended up constituting a hard blow to the Imperialist state of the United States, defeated the Nazi ultra-right paramilitary bands such as the Ku Klux Klan that devastated the 19 southern states, liquidated the regime “Jim Crow”of racial segregation, caused an enormous change in the US bourgeois democratic regime, with a global impact, and paved the way for the fight against the abolition of “apartheid” in South Africa, and for the rights of the black masses throughout the world. world.
In 1956 the revolutions broke out in Poznań, Poland, and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 both against the Stalinist regimes. In 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal which was another blow to British imperialism, and another advance in the struggle of the peoples for National Liberation. In 1959 the Cuban Revolution broke out, which expropriated capitalism, opened the stage of the struggle for Socialism in Latin America, and triggered the revolution in Central America. In 1961 the Revolution began in Angola for National Independence against Portuguese Imperialism that spread to Portuguese Guinea and Mozambique. In 1964 the US invaded Vietnam to stop the revolution in Indochina, but in 1967 the revolution broke out in Cambodia, which triumphed in 1975.
In 1968 in Europe, the mobilization of masses in Czechoslovakia known as the “Prague Spring” against the Stalinist regime broke out, and then the “French May” in 1968, which was an insurrection of workers and students in Paris, against the government. capitalist Charles de Gaulle, whose shock wave shook the world. The French May produced the uprising of the Student Movement in West Germany with massive student protests, it provoked in Argentina the “Cordobazo” a worker insurrection with broad support of the student movement ,in Mexico, the student mobilizations that led to the Tlatelolco Massacre, and mobilizations in Uruguay, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and the United States.
In 1973 the revolution that established a before and after in the Postwar period triumphed: The Vietnamese Revolution. US Imperialism suffered a spectacular defeat in the Vietnam Revolution which was an armed mobilization of the Vietnamese people, which was combined with a worldwide mass mobilization, and a mass mobilization within the United States against the war. The movement against the Vietnam War, the struggle in the Universities, the mobilization of women in the United States combined with the outbreak of the “Third Feminist Wave”that achieved the conquest of legal abortion, and the outbreak of the struggle of the LGBTQ Movement with the Stonewall insurrection in New York, and the imposing national mobilization of youth against the war, which had multiple expressions, including the Woodstock Festival.
The post-war revolutionary wave had already struck the old capitalist imperialisms, both English, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch, and inflicted serious defeats that implied heavy blows to the capitalist-imperialist world order, and to the “New World Order” of postwar period. But the Vietnam Revolution opened the first military defeat of the Pentagon and United States Imperialism, which had acted as “global gendarmes” . against the world revolution with the invasion of Korea, Indochina, Vietnam. In turn, the military defeat opened up a huge political crisis in US imperialism. In the midst of the defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal broke out, revealing the existence of an anti-democratic, Bonapartist attempt at massive espionage that was being carried out. by the Nixon administration, which led to the fall of the Nixon Administration, and the resignation of a president for the first time in the country’s history.
Throughout the post-war revolutionary process, the phenomenon already seen in other events in history re-developed, and understandable by the Law of Unequal and Combined Development that sectors of a social class fulfill historical tasks of another social class. Peasant and petty-bourgeois sectors of developing countries and poor nations carried out workers’ revolutions as in the case of North Korea, Cuba, China, or Vietnam. There was also the fact that organizations and political parties that are not revolutionary, such as the bourgeois National Liberation Movements, Stalinist parties, petty bourgeois, or even religious movements such as those headed by Martin Luther King, Gandhi, or Malcolm X, led forward revolutions that won important liberties,
After the defeat of Vietnam and the fall of the Nixon Administration, a political paralysis of North American imperialism began. and a leadership political vacuum that was clearly expressed in the subsequent Administrations of Gerald Ford and James Carter. The coup was of such magnitude that the Pentagon was unable to carry out any aggression or military invasion thereafter for practically the next 30 years. Imperialism tried to get out of the “impasse” caused by the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” through a series of reactionary and Bonapartist measures such as the constitution of the Trilateral Commission promoted by the Rockefeller Group, the most important capitalist economic group in the world at that time, a commission headed by Zbigniew Brzeziński, and Henry Kissinger with the objective of establishing policies to re-establish the political initiative of US imperialism. From this type of organizations, initiatives of a fascist or anti-democratic nature were launched, such as the Condor Plan for Latin America with the aim of imposing fascist military dictatorships that repressed Latin American revolutionary movements.
The defeat of Vietnam opened the crisis in US imperialism, but also the crisis, and the entry of the revolution in Europe. In the 1970s, generalized inflation broke out all over the world, thus officially ending the postwar economic “boom” , which caused the beginning of the crisis of the United States economy, of the Keynesian regime of Capitalist Accumulation, and of Multinationals that entered their exhaustion stage. The crisis had an impact on the weak economies of the workers states, and opened a crisis in all of them, which provoked the reactionary turn of the Stalinist dictatorships that began to establish measures to introduce capitalism in the workers states, austerity plans, indebtedness with the IMF, and cutting labor conquests.
The first was the Mao regime in China, which established an agreement with Nixon starting in 1971 for the creation of special areas for imperialist investment, and from there all the Stalinist regimes began to establish different economic plans, and measures that deteriorated the living conditions of the masses in those countries. In 1980, the revolution against the Stalinist regime broke out in Poland led by the “Solidarity” trade union movement, in demand for improvements in life and work led by the workers of the Gdansk shipyard, which confronted the Jaruzelski dictatorship, heralding the political revolution. that was beginning to develop in those countries, and accelerated as the introduction of capitalist measures into the country’s economy progressed.
In 1974 the “Carnation Revolution” broke out in Portugal, and in 1979 there were two resounding revolutionary victories: one was the triumphant Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua against the military regime of Anastasio Somoza, a process that occurred simultaneously with the outbreak of the revolution in El Salvador. On the other hand, the Shah’s pro-imperialist dictatorship in Iran fell, sparking a revolutionary wave throughout the Middle East. Starting in 1980, the revolutions that ended with the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone in Latin America broke out, first the revolution in Peru led by the CGTP workers union, and mass mobilizations that ended with the military dictatorship of Peru headed by General Francisco Morales Bermudez.
Then the revolution in Bolivia with a general strike of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) that ended the military dictatorship in Bolivia headed by the government of Guido Vildoso Calderón, which led to the fall of the military dictatorship in Argentina headed by the government of General Leopoldo F. Galtieri promoted by the general strikes of the workers unions, the CGT and followed by huge mass mobilizations. In 1985 there was the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil headed by General João Figueiredo, in 1988 the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and in 1989 the end of the military dictatorship in Paraguay headed by General Alfredo Stroessner.
While this was happening in Latin America, in 1982 the Revolution in Lebanon took place, which caused the withdrawal of US troops. In the Philippines, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos fell due to the “People Power Revolution” in 1986 , while In 1987 the “First Intifada” broke out, in Arabic “the uprising”, the insurrection of thousands of young people from Palestine in the territories occupied by Israel, which opened a political crisis in the Zionist state, and provoked massive world support for the struggle of the Palestinian people. All to the postwar global revolutionary wave, constituted a gigantic global revolutionary process that was crowned with the most important revolution of the 20th century: The fall of the Berlin Wall and Stalinism
XVI- The fall of the Berlin Wall, and Stalinism
The entire revolutionary process opened in 1945 after the defeat of the Nazis culminated in 1989 with the most important revolutionary process of the entire post-war period in the 20th century: The Fall of Stalinism in the countries of Eastern Europe, and the USSR. The consequences of these events are of such importance that they impacted the entire reality of the world class struggle, the capitalist economy, the political regimes, the bourgeois democratic regimes, and their consequences marked the destiny of the 21st century. The events universally known as the Fall of the Berlin Wall that occurred in 1989, consisted of the chain fall of the Stalinist regimes that governed those countries.
In Hungary, in May 1989 the “border fence” fellwith Austria, which caused a crisis between sectors of the Stalinist regime that were already openly defenders of capitalism. The government of Janos Kádár implemented reforms introducing capitalism from the Politburo, when he was replaced by Imre Pozsgay, after which the activists opposed to the dictatorship carried out the Pan-European Picnic on the borders, during which Hungarians and East Germans could crossing the border crossings something unthinkable years before. The act of homage to the fallen in the 1956 Revolution against the Stalinist regime became a historic mass action to demand the end of the regime and the withdrawal of USSR troops with more than 100,000 people in Heroes Square of Budapest, which caused the fall of the government, and the regime,
The events in Hungary impacted East Germany, triggering massive demonstrations against the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), with thousands of demonstrators. The general secretary of the Stalinist PSUA/SED, Erich Honecker, resigned from his position on October 18, 1989 to calm the situation, but the Alexanderplatz Demonstrations against the regime took place, forcing the government to allow trips abroad as a way to contain the situation, and the announcements of the end of the restrictions on TV caused that two hours later thousands of people had gathered in front of the Berlin Wall demanding to the GDR guards their right to cross the border according to the government order.
Border guards opened the crossings, and while thousands of East Germans crossed to the west, thousands of West Berliners turned out to greet the new arrivals, an irrepressible mass mobilization on both sides of the Berlin Wall, which the authorities could no longer control. Thousands of people from both sides of Germany with picks and hammers completely destroyed the Wall, putting an end to the Stalinist regime, and to the East German Republic, whose dissolution occurred in the following days. The impact of the events of the Fall of the Berlin Wall spread immediately to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania.
On November 17, 1989, the Czechoslovak police brutally broke up a student march organized by the Communist Youth in Prague, leaving 600 injured . Students and actors from all over the country went on strike the next day, and on November 27 a general strike was declared that led to the resignation of President Gustáv Husák on December 10, and the fall of the Stalinist regime when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia relinquished power. In 1993 the national liberation was achieved, and the independence of the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia, with which Czechoslovakia was officially dissolved.
On November 17, 1989, mobilizations broke out in Bulgaria in the midst of the resignation of the communist leader Tódor Zhívkov, who had ruled the country since 1954, after which the Bulgarian Communist Party and the Stalinist regime of Bulgaria were dissolved. In Poland the trade union “Solidarity” It had been facing the Stalinist regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski for almost ten years, and the violent repression could not defeat the force of the workers’ mobilizations. After 10 years of imposing the illegality of the union, negotiations between Solidarity, Jaruzelski failed, which led to Solidarity obtaining its legal recognition, a huge conquest of the Polish mass movement that led to the crisis of the ruling party (POUP), the dissolution of the regime, and a new government independent of the regime on August 24, 1989.
In Romania the revolution broke out against the head of the government, and also the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, Nicolae Ceaucescu, when he ordered the arbitrary arrest of a Lutheran Protestant pastor named László Tőkés, belonging to the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, which provoked a uprising and mass mobilizations in the city of Timisoara on December 16. The demonstrations in this city spread throughout the country and turned into a massive protest movement with clashes that caused more than 2,000 deaths. The brutal repression of the regime failed and led to a nationwide insurrection in Bucharest on December 21, 1989, which forced Ceaucescu and his wife to flee, who were captured and executed on December 25, 1989.
The impact of all these events reached Albania, where mobilizations broke out in Shkodra and spread to other cities in 1989, against the government of Ramiz Alia, the successor to Enver Hoxha who had headed the Stalinist regime since 1941. Alia’s government saw forced to take measures to allow travel abroad. After the call for elections that the people considered fraudulent, popular protests broke out, a general strike took place, and a strong mobilization that forced the fall of the government, and the formation of a crisis cabinet, after which the Stalinist regime was dissolved. .
In the Soviet Union, a Stalinist group headed by Vice President Gennadi Yanayev launched a coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Republic, called on the people against the coup, and managed to defeat the coup plotters. but the Communist Party of the USSR was already bankrupt, and it collapsed. Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party after the coup, and the Supreme Soviet dissolved the Party, leading to the breakup and fall of the world’s largest Stalinist regime. As a result of this triumph, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia achieved their independence on September 6, 1991, and on December 1, the people of Ukraine voted in favor of seceding from the USSR, which led to the dissolution of the USSR on December 8. from December.
In 1990 the crisis of the Communist Parties of Yugoslavia broke out, when the Slovenes and Croats left the Congress on January 23, 1990, ending the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. On April 8, 1990, the Stalinist regime fell in Slovenia, and on April 22, that of Croatia, which led Croatia to declare its national independence on December 23, 1990, and Slovenia its national independence. In September the independence of Macedonia took place, and in March 1992 Bosnia-Herzegovina proclaimed its independence. But the Serbian oligarchy headed by Slobodan Milosevic, which until then had control of Yugoslavia, did not accept the process of independence of the nations, and launched brutal attacks against the peoples of the republics, with killings, persecution, torture, mass murder against the civilian population, where the Milosevic regime committed all kinds of crimes against humanity, genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Milošević’s attacks were defeated by the mobilization of the peoples of the nations fighting for their independence. Milosevic failed to defeat the people of the independent republics, and began to be hemmed in by protests against him in Serbia itself in October 2000, whereupon he ordered the tanks out into the streets to crush his own people. . The order was not obeyed by his army officers, which led to the fall of his government, and his surrender to the Hague Tribunal in 2001 where he was tried for crimes against humanity committed against the peoples of the nations that fought for their national independence and freed themselves from the yoke of Serbian oppression. Yugoslavia was thus dissolved
XVII- The consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of Stalinism
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Revolutions of 1989 were events that had great consequences of a historical nature, defined the entire world political situation, outlined the perspectives of events towards the 21st century, and opened a new stage of the world class struggle. . The consequences of these events are of such importance that to this day they pervade the entire reality of the world class struggle, the capitalist economy, the political regimes, the bourgeois democratic regimes, becoming the most important political event of the 20th century. with consequences for the entire 21st century.
The entire revolutionary process that meant the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Revolutions of 1989 were the final chapter of the revolutions, mobilizations, and postwar struggles that broke out after the victory against the Nazis in the battle of Stalingrad as explained by Nahuel Moreno . : ” It is my opinion, that from Stalingrad, when Nazism was defeated… from ’43 the greatest revolutionary wave known to humanity began…” (Nahuel Moreno- Idem). This wave of revolutions confronted the borders imposed by Yalta, the old empires, the dictatorships, the reactionary institutions, it questioned the profits and injustices of the multinationals, the old borders, and ended up wiping out the Stalinist regimes that had imposed the new borders together with the world imperialism.
As we have seen, after the Second World War, the bourgeois democratic regimes of the world presented anti-democratic incrustations such as the CIA, the Pentagon, the espionage services, etc. integrated with the objective of defeating the world revolution, accompanied by the global agreements of Yalta and Potsdam, a whole device of counterrevolutionary agreements that the postwar mass insurrection blew up. The post-war revolutionary wave lasted for more than 40 years, liberated more than 70 former colonies, won national independence for millions of people around the world, created dozens of new nations, liberated peoples subjected for centuries, liberated races, cultures, minorities, it had a great role for women, it put the black race, and Africa on the social and political map of the world, won enormous freedoms for billions of people. It opened wide the doors of the struggle for the peoples that have not yet achieved their definitive triumph as the Palestinian people, it hit world imperialism hard, and it dealt a violent blow to United States imperialism with the defeat in Vietnam that left the Pentagon off track for almost 30 years,
A huge global propaganda campaign tried to portray the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1989 Revolutions as “The End of Socialism” . Francis Fukuyama, an opinologist linked to the neoconservative Think Thanks in the United States, led the campaign in 1992 with the book “The End of History and the Last Man.”whose central thesis is that the ideological struggle had ended, and Marxism had been defeated. Fukuyama’s Theses included that we were facing the end of history, and of the class struggle, since capitalism had definitively triumphed. In this way, according to Fukuyama, the bourgeois democratic regime had become the definitive and final political regime in history, whose decisive establishment embodied the definitive triumph of the bourgeoisie.
The “failure of socialism” campaign had as its only real element that the Stalinist regimes were replaced by bourgeois democratic regimes. But from then on, the entire campaign never had a foothold in reality, and the political and social events that took place almost immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed very different paths from the one predicted by the “failure of socialism” propagandists. . The first thing then, is to clearly define what fell with the Berlin Wall, leaving aside the false theories, and charlatanism of the defenders of capitalism like Fukuyama.
When the Stalinist regimes fell, the governments in those Eastern European states and the USSR were moving forward in a process of restoring capitalism. The Stalinist regimes had been carrying out for several years the dismantling of the economic and social conquests that had been achieved in the first stages of the states in transition. What was taking place unevenly in all the countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1989 was the introduction of capitalism, the entry of investment from imperialist capital, austerity plans for the peoples, agreements with the IMF, etc.
Therefore, what fell with the Fall of the Berlin Wall were not “socialist” states, nor “Marxist” states but states in transition that were rapidly moving towards capitalism. The Stalinist regimes advanced cautiously in this process of restoration of capitalism, product of the fear that the outbreaks that were taking place in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland inspired in the privileged officials, which expressed the growing discontent of the masses for the attack. permanently suffered by their living conditions.
On the other hand, the Stalinist regimes that disappeared were neither “socialist”, nor “Marxist”, they were pro-capitalist. They were horrible dictatorships that sought to implement capitalism, and acted as veritable prisons for the people, crushing the most basic freedoms of the workers and the masses. In those countries there was no right to mobilization, free movement, expression, freedom of the press, etc. political dissidents were brutally persecuted, and mobilizations were crushed with tanks, drowning them in blood. Stalinist governments and regimes called themselves “socialist” and “Marxist” but they lied shamelessly to deceive the people. In turn, the capitalist and imperialist governments took advantage of the Stalinists’ lies to carry out a campaign to smear Socialism and Marxism, saying that capitalism was “democracy”, and socialism “dictatorship”, a campaign that continues until today.
Leaving aside now all this charlatanism, Chicanas and lies of the Stalinists and imperialists, it is necessary to evaluate the real impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The reality is that when the Wall fell, the imperialist capitalist governments and the Stalinist regimes worked in partnership advancing in a brutal exploitative offensive attacking the rights of workers and peoples in defense of capitalism. Capitalist governments defended the borders established at Yalta and Potsdam, while Stalinist regimes brutally repressed their peoples to introduce capitalism into the transition economies.
But when the Berlin Wall fell, this work in partnership collapsed. The Yalta agreements, and Potsdam, and all the Postwar agreements collapsed. This collapse hampered the joint plans of the imperialist countries, because without counting on the agreements with the Stalinists, the imperialist governments found it difficult to carry out the offensive against the masses of the most important economies. The consequences for capitalism were very important, because after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conditions that had allowed the super-exploitation of the European and German working class changed.
A fundamental condition to facilitate the exploitation of European and German workers in the postwar period had been to maintain their division with the Wall. Its collapse allowed a process of unification of the powerful European and German working class, among the most qualified, concentrated, with the greatest social conquests and the highest cultural level in the world. In turn, the oppressed nationalities that had been put by fire and blood under the boot of imperialist domination in the postwar period began a process of liberation, which swept the borders of Yalta and Potsdam. The post – war “world order” collapsed, and the “new world order” actually resulted in terrible “disorder” for the capitalist powers.
This is the explanation why capitalism could never again return to the growth rates of the “boom” times, and never again managed to match the economic successes of the postwar Keynesian regime. The fall of the Berlin Wall prevented a global global political agreement of the stature of Yalta and Potsdam that would make possible another “boom” like the post-war one as the world capitalist-imperialist economy lost the support it had had for more than 40 years. . The best demonstration of the blow that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant for capitalism is what happened from then on with China.
In China the opposite happened, there the Wall did not fall, the mobilization of the masses in Tiannanmen Square against the Stalinist regime was brutally repressed and defeated. From these events, China was consolidated as the “paradise” of multinationals and capitalist Global Corporations. After the defeat of the demonstrations, the Chinese dictatorship made progress in obtaining higher rates of exploitation and all kinds of facilities for multinationals to establish themselves. China alone shows the implications of the fall of the Berlin Wall for the world economy. If the fall of the Stalinist regimes had complicated the plans of the imperialist countries in Europe, the triumph of the Stalinist dictatorship of the Communist Party of China transformed it into a bastion and lifeline of capitalism.
With the triumph of the Chinese PC, the capitalist powers obtained a huge market of millions of workers that the Chinese dictatorship disciplined to offer low wages, super-exploitative working conditions, which allowed the economy to grow in the 1990s, although much less to the “boom”. The wages and working conditions of the workers of the other countries that had belonged to the Stalinist orbit were also very deteriorated. Imperialism took advantage of these “comparative advantages” which helped the economy grow and gave a recovery of the rate of profit in the 90s, an economic respite that ran out very soon, which opened a serious crisis in capitalism in the year 2000 with the bursting of the bubble “
In short, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the strategic plans of world imperialism suffered a tremendous blow, because the parties and leaders who provided great services to capitalism fell, agreeing on the capitalist reconstruction of Europe, allowing the development of modern multinationals, and acting as a brake on the revolutionary processes. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world crisis of capitalism worsened to historical extremes, which in turn caused a deep crisis of the bourgeois democratic regimes. The fall of the Berlin Wall reaffirmed that the epoch of the international socialist revolution is still open, and showed the bourgeois democratic regime far from Fukuyama’s prognosis about its “definitive triumph.”In reality, the perspectives were opened for the spectacular political events that took place in the 21st century, which led the bourgeois democratic regime towards a deep crisis of a global nature in the 21st century, the greatest in its history.
XVIII- The imperialist defeat in Iraq
The fall of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements was a strategic blow for capitalism. Thus, the fall of the Berlin Wall was the necessary prologue to the fall of Wall Street, 10 years later. In the economic field, as a product of the exhaustion of the Multinationals, of the Keynesian regime, and the end of the “boom”, capitalism had to advance in a Form of Monopoly Accumulation superior to the Multinationals, and it was able to do so as a result of the horrible destruction of forces productive that imperialism carried out in the postwar period. Global Corporations arose, capitalist companies that simultaneously dominate several branches of industry, commerce, and finance worldwide, superior to Multinationals that only dominate one branch worldwide.
With the Global Corporations, the regime of Capitalist Accumulation of Globalization arose, which was displacing the Keynesian regime of capitalist accumulation. With the change in the accumulation regime, the accumulation pole was also modified, that is, the branch of production on which the economy is based, if in the Keynesian regime the accumulation pole had been made up of the automotive, metallurgical, and oil, in globalization the Pole of Accumulation became information technology, biotechnology, and Telecommunications. The accumulation axis of the world economy was also modified from the US-Europe to the US-China; the accumulation axis shifted from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
Globalization began in the same decade that the Berlin Wall fell, the 1980s, led by the governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, and implied a brutal exploitative offensive aimed at dismantling all the conquests, and social benefits obtained by the masses during the postwar “boom” . However, in no way did this imperialist offensive imply that the revolutions in the world calmed down, quite the contrary. Along with the Fall of the Berlin Wall came one of the most important revolutions in history, which shook the world. After years of struggle, the black masses triumphed, defeating the horrible regime of racial segregation in South Africa, known worldwide as the“Apartheid”.
On February 2, 1990, South African President Frederik de Klerk was forced to announce the lifting of the ban on the African National Congress (ANC), which had been declared illegal for 30 years. The legalization of the ANC and the release of the historic leader for the rights of the South African black race, Nelson Mandela, precipitated the fall and the entire system of laws that had established racial segregation since 1948. On April 29, 1994, the black population exercised its right to suffrage for the first time in the country’s history, imposing the slogan of “one citizen, one vote”, where Nelson Mandela was the broad winner as president of the country.
That same year, another revolution shook the world: On January 1, 1994, the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) took place in Mexico. The Zapatista uprising shook the world in three ways: On the one hand, it began the so-called ” Anti- Globalization Movement” with Sub Commander Marcos’ announcement of his rejection of the Free Trade Agreement that the United States wanted to impose on Mexico. Secondly, the Zapatista uprising placed the indigenous and original peoples of the world at the forefront of the confrontation against the Global Corporations and capitalism.
Third, the Zapatista uprising was the final blow to the Priato, the Bonapartist regime that was established in Mexico after the Mexican revolution. At that time, Bonapartism in Mexico was in absolute decline, a kind of Senile Bismarckism, which collapsed 6 years later, transforming itself into a classic bourgeois democratic regime, ending almost 70 years of the Bonapartist regime. The EZLN uprising was the starting signal for the Anti-Globalization Movement that produced the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle between November 29 and December 3, 1999. In that mobilization thousands of people imposed the general strike of the city, with a violent demonstration that inaugurated the era of global protests against capitalism.
But in the economic field, the crisis of capitalism worsened, each time further away from Fukuyama’s forecasts. Global Corporations, being companies that dominate several branches of production simultaneously, together with the development of the mergers and acquisitions process (in English M&A) developed a new process of concentration of wealth, over-accumulation and centralization of capital, superior to everything lived up to there by capitalism. The Global Corporations concentrated in their hands a mass of capital of 1,000 trillion US$ equivalent to 10 times the Global GDP, which gave rise to a colossal growth of fictitious capital, and all kinds of speculative maneuvers such as derivative products, the repurchase of shares, and Private Equity, among others.
These dangerous speculative maneuvers were the product of the concentration in a few capitalist hands of immense masses of capital that produced the Global Corporations. The violent and gigantic over-accumulation of capital in an asset, a commodity whether it be home mortgages or computers, is called in the jargon of Wall Street speculators a speculative “bubble .” The entire decade of the 90’s was crisscrossed by crises, and “bubble” bursts, first the bursting of the “Tokyo mortgage bubble” (1990) then the British Pound crisis (1992), then the “tequila” effect ( 1994) due to the crisis in Mexico , then the “rice” effectdue to the crisis in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, then the ” vodka” effect (1998) due to the crisis in Russia, then the “caipirinha” effect (1999) due to the crisis in Brazil, etc. All of this movement threatened to enter Wall Street and destroy the heart of the global capitalist-imperialist economy.
The bosses of global capitalism fully trusted the strength of Globalization, the Clinton Administration demolished all the legislation that prevented large speculative movements. The “Committee to Save the World” had been created, made up of Robert Rubin, Secretary of the United States Treasury, Larry Summers, Undersecretary of the Treasury, and Alan Greenspan, President of the United States Federal Reserve, coordinated with the objective of preventing the crisis from exploding. inside the US But the “Committee to Save the World” which was actually the committee to save the United States, failed and the crisis exploded on Wall Street with the crisis of the investment fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) that exploded, and disappeared in the year 2000, and that same year with the bursting of the “dot.com” bubble on March 13, 2000, which caused a drop of more than 9% in the Nasdaq index, leaving 5 trillion dollars in losses, and the massive disappearance of IT companies.
The bursting of the “dot.com” bubble opened the most important global crisis of capitalism in history, the one we are currently experiencing. This is so for two reasons: One, because along with LTCM it was no longer a crisis in peripheral countries, but a crisis at the heart of the world capitalist economy, and on Wall Street. Secondly, because the bursting of the “punto.com” bubble caused a crisis in Information Technology, which is the base branch of production, and the pole of accumulation of the capitalist system of accumulation of globalization. The bankruptcy of ENRON in 2001 did nothing more than reveal the serious crisis that was gripping global capitalism. The world economy entered a recession.
In this way, Fukuyama’s forecasts remained far from reality only 8 years before, that capitalism had triumphed, and we were facing the end of history. History, once again, had been reluctant to accept the ” death of Marxism” as well as the “Triumph of Capitalism.” However, one shocking event forever changed the course of events on September 11 in New York. That day the horrific attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) took place. In response to the attack, the Bush Administration launched the “Global War on Terrorism.” Imperialism launched a global counter-offensive, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which included a long-range war in the Middle East against the “Axis of Evil” and an attack on the democratic freedoms of the American people.
This counteroffensive was launched taking advantage of the global shock caused by the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 with a brutal global raid inside the United States, and a massive espionage campaign was launched globally from the Pentagon, the CIA, and international agencies. as the National Security Agency (NSA) responsible for the monitoring, collection and global processing of information, data for intelligence purposes, as well as national and foreign counterintelligence. The bourgeois democratic regime of the United States once again underwent changes, with consequences of global scope.
First, a new Bonapartist institution was created as the Department of Homeland Security, which constitutes a shadow government in the US that no one elects. The Patriot Act was sanctioned, which suspended the US Constitution and Amendments, military courts were created to try “terrorists”, the rights to assembly and protest were canceled, the closest thing to a coup d’état than a government of that country can do. The laws of the Patriot Act regime established a definition of “terrorist” that criminalized any social activist and political militant. All this body of laws, decrees, and resolutions established a change in the country’s political regime, the classic bourgeois democratic regime of the United States was suppressed, and the Patriot Act regime was established, based on the exclusive domain of the Executive Branch supported in the Pentagon.
The establishment of the Patriot Act regime in the United States had global implications. Around the world, 150 clandestine detention and torture centers called “Black Sites” were established, where thousands of people were detained for years, mainly those of Arab or Muslim origin . “Anti-terrorism laws” were enactedin all countries of the world, all anti-democratic and dangerous legislation used to criminalize activists and militants of social causes, and left-wing parties. The invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) were launched with the false excuse of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. In said war, the Pentagon carried out the massive use of mercenaries, and privatized armies that perpetrated horrible massacres like the one in Fallujah. chaired by the doctrine of his boss Donald Rumsfeld about the use of “Unconventional Capacities”.
The Bush Administration launched this battery of measures to inflict a defeat on the global rise and gag the American people in the face of a horrible destruction of countries, cities and regions that it planned with the objective of carrying out a burning of capital necessary to bring capitalism out of crisis. . It was a fascist policy, presented in other guises of the “anti- terrorist” fight for the rejection of everything that the great tradition of fighting and defeating the Nazis left an indelible mark on the consciousness of the masses of the world, and especially of the United States. Joined. The policy of the Bush Administration could be applied because it had the support of all the political parties, organizations and political leaderships of the masses throughout the world.
But after the initial successes, the PNAC detonated the largest mass mobilization in history. The global irruption of the mass movement covered all the countries of the world, and surpassed the massive mobilizations against the Vietnam War on a global level. The ” Not In Our Name” Movementit mobilized millions, while upon entering Baghdad all hell was unleashed on NATO troops, and the resistance grew in force fueled by thousands of volunteers who flocked from across the region to drive out the invader. The NATO invasion triggered a national liberation war in Iraq, in which a new type of revolutionary warfare developed, uniting urban insurrection with guerrilla warfare. In the postwar period, revolutions like the one in Mexico, Vietnam, China, or Korea, had developed guerrilla warfare in the jungle or countryside, a method typical of the peasantry.
But what imperialism had to face in Iraq in the 21st century was a revolutionary war based on the method of guerrilla warfare but urban, focused on a country with a strong oil working class and a mass insurrection with its epicenter in the cities. , which had the support and sympathy of millions of inhabitants of an entire region. The growth of resistance and the increase in casualties of NATO troops opened a deep crisis of the army, the heads of NATO and CENTCOM resigned, the head of the Pentagon Donald Rumsfeld resigned, and the army veterans represented by Senator Murtha demanded the end of the invasion and the withdrawal of the troops. In turn, within the US
In the United States, millions of Latinos declared a general strike for their rights and mobilized against the Patriot Act, on May 1, 2006. By 2006, three years after the invasion of Iraq, the PNAC had been completely defeated. . US imperialism and the Pentagon once again suffered a devastating blow, after having been off track for 30 years after the defeat in Vietnam. The Bush government in fact fell, but to avoid another deep political crisis like the one imperialism experienced after the fall of the Nixon Administration, power passed into the hands of Parliament where the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission was instituted, which administered the withdrawal of the troops, the call for elections, and the transition from the Bush government to the Obama government.
The defeat of US imperialism is the “Fourth American Revolution.”The fall of the Patriot Act regime was due to the enormous global process of mobilization against the war, the victory of the Iraqi and Middle Eastern masses, and the defense of the bourgeois democratic regime and democratic liberties made by sectors of the American bourgeoisie itself. . Important intellectuals such as Julian Assange denounced war crimes from sites such as Wikileaks, and even from bourgeois sectors and defenders of capitalism such as the Washington Post, or the New York Times, the atrocities of the Bush Administration, the Black Sites, or inconsistencies in the 9/11 investigation. The crimes against humanity committed by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney call for the democratic task of prosecuting those responsible for the massacres in the Middle East,
XIX- The sharp peak of the Capitalist crisis and the first revolutionary wave
The defeat of United States imperialism in Iraq, and before that, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, had left as a result a political, economic, and social reality of both capitalism and the bourgeois democratic regime, very distant from Fukuyama’s forecasts. Far from having triumphed, both capitalism and the bourgeois democratic regime began to go through a global crisis of a historical, epochal, and civilizing nature. After the defeat in Iraq, the two events that occurred almost immediately were the outbreak of the sharp peak of the world crisis of capitalism in 2007, and the explosion of the 1st world revolutionary wave against capitalism between 2011 and 2016.
The crisis in imperialism after the defeat of Iraq was of such magnitude that the leaders of the Democratic Party had to have a black person as their candidate for president to stop the rise of the masses within the country. On January 20, 2009, Barak Obama, the first black president of the United States, took office with the slogan of “Change” (“Change”), seeking the “appearance” of a more “progressive” government.that the US could offer. The same capitalism that in its rise stage had appealed to the enslavement and trafficking of millions of black people, which had segregated blacks under a thick curtain of brutal racism in Brazil, the United States, or South Africa, now used again labor of African-American people, but this time to be placed as officials who tried to stop the process of world revolution against capitalism.
But in 2007, the sharp peak of the crisis of capitalism exploded with the bursting of the “bubble” of “sub-prime” mortgages . The crisis of capitalism that began in 2000 with the bursting of the ” dot.com” bubble had subsided during the years of the invasion of Iraq, but after the defeat, it broke out again with more force. The bursting of the “sub-prime” bubble is normallypresented by the defenders of capitalism as a fact alien to the class struggle, motivated by errors in the management of interest rates by the US Federal Reserve, or the greed of a group of Corporations, a whole literature, events , and even films present things this way. But the reality is very different.
The sale of mortgages is based on the business of the home construction industry. This, in turn, is based on the exploitation of immigrant labor, fundamentally Latino. The rampant speculation around the sale of mortgages for the purchase of homes in the US was based on the approval of Sensenbrenner’s “anti- terrorism” laws against immigrants, but when Latinos declared a general strike in 2006, they defeated the Sensenbrenner Law that left them practically without rights, liquidated the capitalist construction “business” based on semi-slave labor, and left the mortgage business without support.
When the sub-prime bubble burst, all the Global Corporations were stuffed with US mortgage paper, bankrupting them. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, world imperialism realized that historic measures had to be put in place to save capitalism. These unprecedented measures were the Bailouts, a massive injection of money into the Global Corporations that dominate the capitalist economy, carried out by the Central Banks that printed money en masse to put it in the pockets of the 1% aristocracy.
The bailouts were presented on April 2, 2009 at the 2nd G20 summit in London, which placed the IMF as guarantor and lender of last resort. At first, the announcements were supported by the population of the imperialist countries in the US, Europe, and Japan, who saw the need for a response from their governments to the debacle. But after the start of the bailouts, the population began to see how they lost their homes, their jobs, their salaries, and how the austerity plans and adjustments launched by all governments destroyed their living conditions. Discontent grew and in 2010-2011 a global revolutionary wave erupted.
On December 17, 2010, a humble Tunisian vendor, Mohamed Bouzizi, stripped of his merchandise, blew himself up in protest. During his death throes the “Jasmine Revolution” broke out, toppling the 25-year dictatorship of Ben Ali, unleashing a domino effect of revolutions, the ” Arab Spring” which opened the first global revolutionary wave against 21st century capitalism, a complex of mass mobilizations that spanned different continents, fall of regimes, self-organization processes, civil wars, dual power, crisis and division in the armed forces, expropriations, council democracy, mass mobilization, general strikes, armed struggles, emergence of new states and new armies, between the years 2011 and 2016.
In Egypt the revolution began on January 25, 2011 and had as its epicenter Tahir Square, overthrew the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarack that fell after 30 years. Simultaneously, the US took place in the capitol in Wisconsin by the workers with the support of all the people, where they waved flags with the slogan “Winsconsin-Plaza Tahir”. Then the revolution broke out in Libya, which led to a civil war, with weapons and popular militias where the people overthrew the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi after 42 years in power. The revolutionary process spread to Yemen in the so-called “Pink Ribbon Revolution” that ended 21 years of AliSaleh’s dictatorship, but continues and has turned into a Civil War with the armed intervention of Saudi Arabia.
The Syrian revolution then broke out against the Bashar Al Assad dictatorship, whose dynasty had been in power for 46 years, which escalated into a civil war, turning Syria into a decaying state. The revolutionary wave continued in Spain in May 2011 with the 15-M Movement, or the “Indignados” movement., who camped in Puerta del Sol, in Portugal in 2011 the Gerao a Rasca movement, and simultaneously exploded a powerful strike process in Guangdong, China. In September 2011, Occupy Wall Street arose in the US, which expanded to 52 cities in the country, to join the struggle of the Verizon workers, and later of the state workers of New York, but could not defend the occupation of Parque Zucotti before the brutal police repression in New York and Oakland in November 2011. The global process led to 15-O, the first global mobilization against capitalism, called on October 15, 2011.
The global wave continued in June 2013 when the “June Days” broke out in Brazil against the adjustment measures, which led to the fall of the capitalist government of Dilma Roussef in 2016, and opened the crisis of the Workers’ Party (PT). ). In November 2013, the Ukrainian Revolution broke out, which overthrew the dictatorship of Victor Yanukovych, and opened the struggle for the national liberation of Ukraine, and the republics oppressed by Russia against the capitalist oligarchy headed by Vladimir Putin with barricades in Independence Square in Kiev, in the events known as the “EuroMaidan”. From there, one of the most important revolutions of the 21st century began.
In the US in 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman who shot and killed the young black man Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matters movement was born in the US ( “Black lives matter”), ratifying the rise of the fight of the blacks began in the fight against the PNAC after Hurricane Katrina, which continued on August 9, 2014 when a popular insurrection broke out in Ferguson, Missouri over the murder of the young black man Michael Brown and on April 25, 2015 another insurrection in Baltimore that forced Governor Larry Hogan to declare a curfew, and Obama to deploy the National Guard.
In September 2014, the “Umbrella Revolution” or “Asian Spring” broke out in Hong Kong organized by “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” and the student movement “Scholarism”. “ I took to the streets of central Hong Kong for more than 10 days with 100 barricades and a national student strike. On November 9, 2014, the proposal for the independence of Catalonia against the Spanish State and the monarchy triumphed, although the movement was brutally repressed by the government of Madrid. After this first revolutionary shock wave, the world movement of women exploded, as part of the “Fourth Wave” . of the feminist movement that had already been anticipated in the first revolutionary wave, the Arab Spring, with the movement of the Kurdish guerrillas in Rojava. But it spread like wildfire with the Ni Una Menos Movement in Argentina, the struggles of women in Spain for abolitionism, in Chile, the mobilizations in Mexico against femicides, in Ireland for legal abortion, the Me Too Movement in USA etc
The entire complex of revolutions unleashed in 2011, as is logical and natural, alternated triumphs and defeats, advances and setbacks, promotions and descents. The revolution in Egypt toppled the government but suffered a severe blow with the Morsi government as the rise of the Islamists to power consolidated the Bonapartist regime and the role of the Armed Forces as its backbone. In Syria the revolution got bogged down in a bloody Civil War that is witnessing today the intervention of Russia, and Iran in favor of Al-Assad. The revolutionary process gave rise to both progressive processes and reactionary directions.
A case of the latter is ISIS (Islamic State and the Levant), a fascist counterrevolutionary guerrilla that emerged as a product of the decomposition of Islamic groups, lumpen sectors of the Arab bourgeoisie fed by the oil business and mercenaries from all over the world. But other progressive phenomena also emerged, such as the Free Syrian Army, and the Kurdish guerrillas with young leaders and female guerrillas emerging from the working class and the people who take up arms to combat dictatorships and imperialist armies.
As the revolutionary wave spread globally, the crisis of capitalism continued to worsen. The injection of the bailouts, called QE (in English “Quantitative Easing”) sought to prevent Global Corporations from going bankrupt, prevent the collapse of capitalism by resuming the circulation of money, and prevent the world economy from entering into recession. The first tranche of bailouts was called QE1, and it began in September 2008, until 3/31/10. When the world economy again showed signs of recession, the second round of bailouts began on 11/3/10 called QE2 until 6/30/11. But it failed to avert the danger of a crisis, which led to a third round of bailouts called QE3, which began on 9/13/12 until 10/29/14, when it stopped in the US.
Over 10 years the super rich owners of JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, etc. they received around 30 billion dollars, at an average of 3 billion US$ per year, figures that any normal human being can hardly comprehend. Official analysts, economists and defenders of capitalism argued that they had to carry out the bailouts because these companies were “ Too big to fail” (in English, “Too big to fail” ). The mass of banknotes that imperialism injected is fictitious capital without gold backing, which was granted to the rich with an interest rate of 0%, when any citizen must pay interest.
In order to carry out all this illegal fraud, the laws of capitalism itself had to be violated, as well as a whole complex system of fraud. As the QE had avoided bankruptcy, revived circulation and avoided recession, by 2015 all the economic authorities, analysts and officials of capitalism assured that the crisis had been overcome. Janet Yellen, chair of the Fed, went so far as to say that there would be no more crisis “for many years, and perhaps never again.” A whole chorus of charlatans argued that the “worst was over.” However, the reality was the opposite, and what produced 10 years of injection of trillions of dollars was a true disaster that pushed capitalism into greater and more serious dangers.
The QE not only did not save capitalism, but they sank it even more. If what had caused the outbreak was a US mortgage crisis, now that mortgage crisis had multiplied by 12 and spread to 11 countries. If the companies that generated the crisis by over-accumulating capital were “Too Big to Fail” they were now bigger and more dangerous. If those enormous financial parasites had developed old speculative maneuvers such as share buybacks, and all kinds of fraudulent activities, now all those criminal activities defined by the capitalist analysts themselves as “weapons of mass destruction” had multiplied.
If risky speculative plays had developed speculative “bubbles ,” now they were bigger and more dangerous as financier Jared Dillian explains: “…In 2000, we had the dot-com bubble. In 2007 we had the housing bubble… In 2017, we have the bubble of everything…” (Capital Stock Market 6/29/17). And in China a gigantic bubble was formed which is called “the mother of all bubbles”. The bosses of capitalism faithful to their belief that “the worst of the crisis is over” began in November 2017 an economic operation called Quantitative Adjustment (QT, Quantitative Tightening), with the aim of dismantling the monstrous “global bubble”that they had created, and in a reverse process to QE, instead of printing money to circulate it, with QT they began to withdraw money from circulation.
The QT implied five increases in the interest rate, after which, contrary to everything that the officials raised, the QT led to the collapse of capitalism. The Fall of the Berlin Wall had precipitated the world crisis of capitalism, and the defeat of imperialism in Iraq led to a new irruption of the masses of the world that had staged an extraordinary revolutionary wave in the 20th century, they returned to repeat the revolutionary waves in the 21st century, which, as in the 20th century, carried out the political revolution, sank capitalism, and led the bourgeois democratic regime towards a historical crisis.
XX- Collapse of capitalism, and crisis of the bourgeois democratic regime
In the first decades of the 21st century, the word “capitalism”, which had achieved a certain shine after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was once again being rejected by millions. The events of the first decades of the 21st century placed the word “capitalism” as a synonym for poverty, misery, environmental disaster, and a black future. Millions began to lean and look for answers in Marxism, contrary to what Fukuyama had predicted. But those millions who turned their eyes towards Marxism ran into a problem: The parties and organizations that supposedly claim Marxism are no longer Marxists.
The world political revolution had destroyed Stalinism, had destroyed its regimes, and had provoked an acute crisis in the entire world left. In this way, in the 21st century, all the left-wing organizations in the world that shared the politics, the theoretical-political formulations of Stalinism, and its strategy, also entered into a situation of crisis and collapse. The crisis of Stalinism dragged with it all the parties and mass leaderships of the entire world, whose solidity and stability was directly related to the solidity and stability of Stalinism, as Nahuel Moreno explained: “Stalinism…with its sinister politics , threw into the arms of the bourgeois apparatuses, orsocialists, or other trade union bureaucracies, to other sectors of the labor movement and the colonial masses… This means that on a world scale, the solidity of the apparatuses that stop, betray and divert the revolutionary movements of the masses, be they social democrats , bourgeois, bureaucratic or Stalinist nationalist parties, is directly related to the solidity of Kremlin Stalinism” (Nahuel Moreno- Leeds Thesis. 1958)
By bringing down the Berlin Wall, the masses of Russia and Eastern Europe began to bring down all the apparatuses and counterrevolutionary leaderships of the entire world. The entry of the global rise of the masses with the waves that emerged after the outbreak of the crisis of capitalism continued to collapse all the old mass organizations, which had been the direction of the mass movement for years, as Nahuel Moreno explained: “At the beginning of the process of revolution in Russia and …the satellite countries of Eastern Europe, the massesThe Soviet Unions find their immediate, direct enemy, not an enemy class or an imperialist metropolis, but their own superstructure which is, at the same time, the base of support for all the bureaucratic apparatuses in the entire world. That is why their struggle moves and initiates the crisis of all the counterrevolutionary apparatuses of the mass movement and qualitatively changes the character of the world revolutionary rise. This does not mean that the counterrevolutionary apparatuses will immediately disappear or be swept away by the masses, but rather that their crisis has begun and that it will accelerate.” (Nahuel Moreno- Leeds Thesis. 1958)
As Nahuel Moreno explained, the crisis of the counterrevolutionary apparatuses and leaderships began to accelerate. The social democratic, Stalinist, guerrilla, nationalist leaderships, etc. began to collapse, and as their crisis worsened, their leaders turned more and more to the right, towards openly reactionary positions, in support of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois democratic regime. . Even, as in the case of the Communist Party of China, Cuba, or North Korea, in their need to defend capitalism they lead capitalist dictatorships that directly suppress the bourgeois democratic regime.
To the extent that the global crisis of capitalism deepened, the break of the leaders of these organizations with Marxism was more and more evident, and undeniable. In this way the “Political Revolution” is not only the change of a political regime, but the change in the directions of the world’s mass movements. And at the same time a revolution within Marxism, which liquidates all the revisionist, traitorous, reformist sectors that claim to be Marxists, and strengthens the revolutionary sectors, which consequently defend the principles of Marxism. The Fall of the Berlin Wall opened the world stage of political revolution.
As Nahuel Moreno explains: “It is necessary to pause to better specify the phenomenon that characterizes the new stage: the crisis of the traditional apparatuses. Our characterization is that the crisis is revolutionary, not reformist. We do not believe that the old apparatuses will be reformed , neither will they peacefully change their programs and leaders, nor will they smoothly modify their right-wing or counter-revolutionary course… The crisis of the apparatuses releases unconscious revolutionary tendencies…responding mainly to the most urgent, concrete and peremptory questions. We call these tendencies ” unconsciously revolutionary” but their emergence has a deep objective meaning:” (Nahuel Moreno- Leeds Thesis. 1958)
The crisis of capitalism worsened as the successive revolutionary waves developed. Wall Street collapsed on September 17, 2019 when the “Repo” rate for loans between banks jumped 10%, with which the circulation of money disappeared, which endangered world capitalism because, like the blood circulation process in the human body, if the circulation of money stops, capitalism goes bankrupt globally. The burst of the “Repo” marketthreatened 4 of the large corporations that dominate the world economy: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America (BofA), Citibank, and Wells Fargo, especially JP Morgan Chase, which is the largest Global Corporation in the world. This forced imperialism to suspend the QT, and replenish the bailouts.
But this did not resolve the crisis, which led to another severe downturn with the US Treasury market crash in March 2020, and the subsequent collapse of Wall Street. After that, the governments and Central Banks had to carry out another round of bailouts that we call QE4, which spanned all of 2020, 2021, until March 2022. Throughout this period, central banks injected the monstrous amount of 33 trillion dollars (U$S) destined to rescue the corporations that dominate the global economy, surpassing what was injected in the previous 10 years. If with QE1, QE2, and QE3, 30 trillion dollars had been injected between 2009 and 2019, now with QE4 33 trillion U$S were injected in just three years, a demonstration in itself of the magnitude and the speed that the global crisis of capitalism is undergoing.
For the first months of 2020, the global pandemic of the Coronavirus, COVID-, began. 19, originated in China. Between the years 2020 and 2021, the crisis of the capitalist mode of production presented a gruesome aspect with all these disasters developing simultaneously: On the one hand the pandemic, on the other hand the recession, or global depression, on the other hand the cutting of the chain of supplies or “global gridlock” , on the other hand the growing inequality between rich and poor, the growth of hunger, and poverty for billions of people, while “bubbles” and speculative maneuvers develop, the “crack” of cryptocurrencies, and climate change, caused by Global Corporations. etc All these indicators as an expression of the collapse of the capitalist mode of production.
To all this disastrous panorama was added that in the year 2021 inflation skyrocketed in all the countries of the world, a jump that was the product of the enormous printing, and issuance of money, and fictitious capital that the central banks of the capitalist countries most important carried out with the QE4. This rescue operation has become the largest in history so far. The brutal massive injection of fictitious capital into the global economy triggered inflation and food prices around the world, which then provoked a new global wave of struggles and revolutions to confront capitalism.
The 2nd world revolutionary wave began with the uprising of the yellow vests in France in 2019. Unlike the 1st wave, it had an essentially urban character, which began to place the working class at the center of the struggle, developing the elements and methods of the proletariat. The 2nd wave had as fundamental milestones the revolution in Chile, known as “Chile Despertó” of 2019 , the National Strike in Colombia in 2019 an uprising that lasted practically 7 months, the revolution that caused the fall of Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019, the new Black Lives Matter mobilizations in the US in 2020 that were triggered by the murder of George Floyd, a movement to fight that spread to all the continents of the world.
In this second wave there was also the general strike in Belgium, the Amazon strike in Germany, the miners’ strike in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the general strike in India in 2020, which was the largest general strike in history. In the second wave there was also the Second Arab Spring with the uprisings in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, as well as the third Intifada, this time of the Palestinians who live inside the cities of Israel. This entire process suffered the successive paralysis caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, but as a whole it meant maturation and progress in relation to the first wave, because this second wave witnessed a combination of the actions of the working class with the oppressed sectors like never before. like women, oppressed races, oppressed nationalities like Catalonia, Palestine, and the Ukraine,
On February 24, 2022, a central event of the world situation occurred: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s dictatorship tried with an invasion of tanks and thousands of soldiers to take the capital kyiv, and depose the Ukrainian government in mid-March 2022. But after the defeats in the battles of kyiv, Summy, and Kharkiv, the troops of the oligarchy headed by Putin were completely defeated. The invading armies had to retreat and try to consolidate their control of the Donbass region of Ukraine, where they have been acting as an occupation army since 2014.
However, Putin’s defeat opened a second stage of the war, characterized by armed resistance against the occupation led by thousands of partisans. The struggle of the Ukrainian people is no longer about rejecting the irruption and invasion of Putin’s troops in the main cities of the country, but about the expulsion of an occupying army that has been usurping and attacking the country for 6 years. The partisans are guerrillas for freedom: peasants, women, workers, young people who take up arms fighting to liberate their land, and families who take up the European tradition of French, Italian and Yugoslav partisans against the fascist occupation. Ukrainian partisans organize attacks, ambushes, surveillance, and intelligence, a resistance with thousands of fighters.
The people’s revolution in Ukraine is a revolutionary war, just like the war in Iraq against NATO where the invader finds himself in an urban guerrilla war, of armed self-organization in the cities, a process typical of the 21st century. The Ukrainian partisans are a mass resistance organization, in which each fighter has millions behind them, friends, relatives, neighbors who equip and provide all kinds of support to each partisan, which has allowed the Ukrainian troops to liberate areas, which that opened a political crisis in the Putin government. These gains by the Ukrainian people are carried out at a high cost of thousands dead, millions displaced, and destruction of the country’s vital infrastructure due to the brutal fascist attack by the capitalist oligarchy headed by Putin.
The victories of the Ukrainian people have been supported by a worldwide mass mobilization, which opened a third global revolutionary wave. This wave included Sri Lanka, in Southeast Asia, going through general strikes, railway workers, metalworkers and dockers in Europe, such as the strike in Great Britain on June 23, 2022 by railway workers, and maritime workers, the most important strike in 30 years, the strikes in Germany on June 23, 2022 by dock workers in Hamburg, Emden, Bremer, Bremerhaven, Brake and Wilhelmshaven, or the general strike in Belgium on June 20, 2022.
Also the strikes in France, in Italy, in Spain, in Norway the oil and gas workers, and in Denmark the aeronautical workers. The 3rd wave uprisings traversed Iraq, and Palestine in the Middle East, or the massive protests in Latin America by the peoples of Haiti, Venezuela, Peru, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Ecuador, Panama. In Africa, the demonstrations in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, South Africa, and Sudan, and the general strike in Tunisia on July 16, 2022. In all this extraordinary process, a new union activism emerged globally, but above all in the United States, that fights to unionize, and defeat the union bureaucracy in the labor organizations.
Together with the development of these revolutionary waves, and the emergence of new waves, the central element of the last few years has become the crisis of the bourgeois democratic regime. The peoples began to express their rejection of bourgeois democracy, in the elections with high percentages of the population that did not turn out to vote, added to those who voted blank, or null, a percentage that was growing in the elections in Venezuela, Italy, Brazil, Peru, Iraq, Chile, etc. or like the cases of the US and Mexico where abstention reached almost 50%.
The masses no longer believe in the institutions of the bourgeoisie, nor in the capitalist political parties, and express their rejection through the attitude of abstaining from voting, an “abstentionist wave” that began to travel the world. The result of the “global political revolution” is the collapse of the political parties, and organizations that were the leadership of the mass movement for decades. And that has an impact on bourgeois democracy, because the bourgeois democratic regime is based on the bourgeois political parties. If those pillars collapse, the entire political regime collapses.
The fact that the masses of the world began to turn their backs on the propaganda of the bourgeoisie and of the reformist organizations is an advance of consciousness that puts the bourgeois democratic regime in crisis, and hits all the political organizations that defend the capitalism, especially to the reformist organizations. Some elections, such as the regional ones in France, abstention reached levels of 66.7% abstention in the first round on June 20, 2021, and 65.3% in the second round on June 27, 2021, historical ranges since In 1958 General Charles de Gaulle founded the V Republic.
In no election has the percentage of abstention been so high in a country that is the cradle of bourgeois democracy, where two out of three voters decided not to exercise their right to vote. The drop in participation in France coincided with other elections such as in Chile, where six out of ten voters abstained in the constituent elections, or in the election of regional governors, where abstention was 80%. And in the June 18, 2021 elections in Iran, 52% of the population did not go to vote. This crisis of bourgeois democracy causes the emergence of very weak capitalist governments, elected by a very minority percentage of the population, which must govern in the midst of a brutal crisis of capitalism, which causes a permanent fall of governments.
We are not only talking about governments of poor countries. England, one of the strongest imperialist countries in the world, with one of the oldest and most stable bourgeois democracies in history, in the year 2022 had 3 governments, in the midst of a brutal crisis in its economy, crisscrossed by strikes and worker mobilizations. The drop in participation and disinterest in bourgeois democracy of the masses is already the subject of analysis by all the political and social leaders of the world.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), whose officials monitor the situation of bourgeois democracy globally in its report states the following: ” World opinion polls show that this period has coincided with declining public faith in the value of democracy itself… Even countries that were previously considered ‘established’ democracies have vulnerabilities that cannot be ignored. At the same time, democratic regimes have not convincingly demonstrated that they can provide what people need. Today’s challenges, such as a looming recession, the rising cost of living, and the increasingly severe effects of climate change, highlight this weakness. People’s faith in the importance and effectiveness of democratic institutions is waning worryingly.” ( “World State of Democracy Report 2022: Forging Social Contracts in a Time of Discontent”)
This process of rejection of bourgeois democracy has a central component in the youth, who most reject capitalism. The peoples of the world begin to perceive bourgeois democracy as a farce. The crisis of bourgeois democracy lies in the fact that the masses no longer believe in this political regime, nor in its political parties and candidates. In this way, Fukuyama’s forecasts were never fulfilled: Capitalism, far from its absolute triumph, is in collapse. Bourgeois democracy, far from having become the definitive political regime, is rejected by millions. And Marxism, far from being dead, is being attractive to millions of people, especially to the youngest.
XXI- Marxism and the bourgeois democratic regime
We have made a historical journey from the birth of bourgeois democracy, in the stage of the rise of capitalism to the current collapse of capitalism in its imperialist stage, of decadence where the global crisis of the bourgeois democratic regime opens. What must be delimited then from now on is what strategy and policy we Marxists have against the bourgeois democratic regime. The bourgeois democratic regime is not our regime, our strategy is the abolition of the bourgeois democratic regime, and its replacement by the regime of workers’ democracy. The bourgeois democratic regime is the political regime of a minority of owners of capital that does not mean “Democracy” in any way but rather dictatorship of capital for the workers and the people.
The regime of workers’ democracy is our regime, it is the one we fight to impose by bringing to power the self-organization organizations of the masses, whatever they may be. History has given us infinite examples of these organisms from the Paris Commune in France, or Morelos in Mexico; the soviets in Russia, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, or Poland, the Räte or councils in Germany, the Shop Stewards Movement in England, the committees in Bolivia, the revolutionary councils in Hungary, the industrial cordons in Chile, the shoras in Iran, the assemblies worker-popular in Tahrir Square in Egypt, or the Maidan in Ukraine, etc. Whatever the form that the self-organization of the masses assumes, we are about to impose the power of these organisms to abolish the bourgeois democratic regime.
The power of any of these organisms is a thousand times more democratic than the bourgeois democratic regime, because it consists in the imposition of the rights of the overwhelming majority of the population against the minority of the exploiters. This is the deep meaning of the formula of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” that so frightens the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois social democrats, as Lenin explains it: “The radical difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the other classes –the dictatorship of the landlords in the Middle Ages, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in all civilized capitalist countries–consists in the fact that the dictatorship of the landlords and the bourgeoisie has been the crushing by violence of the resistance offered by the immense majority of the population, specifically by workers. The dictatorship of the proletariat, on the contrary, is the crushing by violence of the resistance offered by the exploiters, that is, the tiny minority of the population, the landlords and the capitalists.” (Thesis and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the proletariat- Vladimir Lenin. 1919)
The democratic freedoms achieved by peoples over the centuries such as the rights to assembly, freedom of the press, petition, expression, etc. have in the regime of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat the possibility of expanding deeply, because it is the regime of a social class that is not exploitative, as Lenin explains it: “The equality of citizens regardless of their sex, religion, race and nationality , which bourgeois democracy has always promisedand everywhere, but which has not given anywhere and has not been able to give due to the domination of capitalism, is immediately and fully carried out by the Soviet power, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat, since that can only be done by the power of the workers, who are not interested in private ownership of the means of production or in the struggle to distribute them over and over again” . (Idem-Vladimir Lenin. 1919)
In order to carry out our strategy of abolition of the bourgeois democratic regime, and its replacement by the regime of workers’ democracy, we promote and support any initiative of self-organization of the masses, whatever form it takes. We do not impose these organisms, they arise naturally in each revolutionary process, and their development can assume the most varied forms, we do not set ourselves a certain type of organizational form as a scheme, but rather we open ourselves to accept any organizational form that the masses impose in their struggle .
It can be through a union like Solidarity in Poland, or the COB in Bolivia, it can emerge in the poorest neighborhoods as autonomous Communes to supply food and water, it can be a small self-defense committee against a fascist attack, or repression. Whatever forms it takes, it is our duty to support, encourage, and strengthen those organizations. In turn, the drive for all forms of self-organization must be combined with a permanent, relentless, and systematic denunciation of the bourgeois democratic regime. Without a denunciation of the bourgeois democratic regime, the battle becomes very difficult, because the ruling classes make a permanent and systematic campaign against the peoples, lying about the fact that capitalist democracy is “democracy” .
As Lenin explains: “The development of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat in all countries has caused the bourgeoisie and its agents in the workers’ organizations to struggle convulsively in order to find ideological-political arguments to defend the domination of the exploiters. Among those Among the arguments, the condemnation of the dictatorship and the defense of democracy are used in particular. The falsity and hypocrisy of this argument, repeated in a thousand variations by the capitalist press…are evident to all those who do not want to betray elementary principles of socialism” (Idem-Vladimir Lenin. 1919). Precisely, it is about permanently denouncing bourgeois democracy, clarifying to the people that it is not“democracy”.
We must permanently denounce bourgeois democracy, taking as a daily example all the frauds, tricks, and traps that bourgeois democracy uses to deceive the people. Every time Parliament passes a law against the people, we denounce it as a den of robbers. Every time the president issues a decree, we denounce bourgeois democracy as Bonapartist. Every time a referendum is called, we denounce it as undemocratic. Every time a call for elections is announced, we denounce the call, and bourgeois democracy for its system of cheating. Every time there is a primary election, we denounce it as undemocratic, we denounce the waste of money that bourgeois democratic elections imply, we denounce the intervention of big business,
We Marxists do not submit to the regulations, schedules, and regulations of bourgeois democracy. It is not the axis of the actions of our organizations to condition our policies and orientations to the duties imposed by the bourgeoisie, in all political circumstances. We use all the loopholes in the laws, codes, and norms to denounce the bourgeois democratic regime, and demonstrate that it is undemocratic. We take refuge in their own laws, to go against them. The same with respect to holding the elections, we can participate in them or not, it is a tactical decision at every moment of the class struggle, but the Marxists, whether they participate in the elections or not, systematically denounce the bourgeois democratic regime, before, during, and after the elections.
Marxists do not enter Parliament to vote on laws. If a candidate from our organization enters Parliament as a legislator, he does not vote or approve any law of the bourgeoisie, on the contrary, he implacably denounces them, as the Third International affirmed: “For the communists, parliament cannot currently be, in In any case, the theater of a struggle for reforms and for the improvement of the situation of the working class, as happened at certain moments in the previous era.The center of gravity of current political life is definitely outside the framework of parliament … .The Communist Party enters it not to engage in organic action but to sabotage the government machinery and parliament from within…” (The Communist Party and Parliamentarianism- II Congress of the Communist International. 1920)
For Marxism, Marxist and revolutionary parliamentarians never approve a bourgeois bill. For more “progressive” appearance that this project may have, the role of the Marxist parliamentarians is the implacable and systematic denunciation of all that cave of thieves, and of all the institutions of the bourgeois democracy regime, to unmask them before the people. . The role of Marxist parliamentarians is to use the platform that parliament means to denounce it, not to vote on laws. “This parliamentary action, which consists above all in using the parliamentary platform for the purpose of revolutionary agitation, in denouncing the maneuvers of the adversary… The communist deputies are obliged to use the parliamentary platform to unmask not only the bourgeoisie and its official lackeys, but also the social-patriots, the reformists, the centrist politicians and, in general, the adversaries of communism, and also to widely propagate the ideas of the Third International” (The Communist Party and Parliamentarianism- II Congress of the Communist International. 1920)
Any leftist organization that stands for elections and does not denounce the bourgeois democratic regime, is a traitorous organization of Marxism, and the working class. Any left-wing organization that stands for elections under the norms established by the bourgeois democratic regime, be it elections, primary elections, constituent assemblies, plebiscites, etc., and does not denounce them, is a treasonous organization. Any left-wing organization that accepts positions, ministries, secretaries, from any capitalist government, is a treasonous organization. Any left-wing organization that integrates coalitions of capitalist governments is a treasonous organization. Any left-wing organization that integrates parties that, in turn, integrates into coalitions of capitalist governments, is a treasonous organization.
The organizations whose deputies go to Congress to vote for bourgeois laws are treasonous organizations. The crisis of the world left, provoked by the global Political Revolution, has caused innumerable leftist organizations to betray their principles and access positions in capitalist governments, what Stalinism called “Popular Front” governments. But precisely, the attitude towards bourgeois democracy and its institutions is what distinguishes Marxists from reformists, what differentiates revolutionaries from traitors. It is also necessary to clearly establish when Marxists defend the bourgeois democratic regime, in what exceptional circumstances, and under what policy.
We defend the bourgeois democratic regime under the exceptional circumstances of an army coup, or an attack by fascism. But even in that case, we defend the bourgeois democratic regime by making it clear that it is not our regime, and that we rely on it, and use it, to defeat fascism. Currently, opportunists invent all the time alleged “coups” and “fascist dangers”to support the bourgeois democratic regime, therefore, it must be specifically clear what we mean by coups d’état or fascist advances. Only when fascism seizes an important portion of the mass movement, places important detachments of gangs of thugs in the streets that attack the workers and the people, and curtails all kinds of freedoms, is it when we must defend the bourgeois democratic regime. Otherwise, your defense is pure opportunism.
In turn, when an army advances with its troops through the streets, represses the population, and suppresses liberties to seize power, that is when we must defend the bourgeois democratic regime. If none of that happens, it’s not a coup. The military coup d’état, or the attack of fascism seek to suppress the bourgeois democratic regime, only if the case happens that the bourgeois democratic regime is at risk of disappearing to be replaced by another, more regressive regime, is that we must defend it, as is It happened in World War II against the Nazis, and the Fascists. But even in all these cases it is necessary to make clear what kind of agreements and alliances we can make with the bourgeois and reformist parties.
The agreement with the bourgeois and reformist parties is episodic, and it never supposes that we should support them, we only make unity of action to defeat the reaction. In this sense, Marxists do not behave like reformists , as George Novack explains: . “The conflict between diametrically opposed programs to defend and extend democracyUnder capitalism they propose liberalism and Marxism has been reflected within the labor and socialist movements. On this issue, the revolutionaries have been delimited from the reformists ever since the French socialist deputy Alexandre Millerand entered a coalition cabinet in 1898. He accepted a portfolio as trade minister alongside General Galliffet, butcher of the Paris Commune, to save, or at least that is what Millerand said, the republican institutions with respect to the monarchists or nationalists.” (George Novack- “Democracy and Revolution”)
The reformist and treacherous organizations stir up the specter of the “coup d’etat” to carry out their policy of support for the “lesser evil” that they constantly agitate to justify their betrayals, as George Novack explains: “…the Communist Party supported de Gaulle from 1944 to 1946, enabling French capitalism to stabilize again. The same “lesser evil” policy led right-wing socialists and Stalinists in the US to endorse Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson as protectors of democracy and peace against the danger of war and reaction that They represented the Republican candidates. Although the rhetoric may change from one occasion to the next, the political line remains unchanged: the political independence of the workers and their action in the factories is sabotaged or suspended to support one wing of the capitalist ruling class against the other. The inevitable and predictable result has been the weakening of democracy and the strengthening of capitalist reaction…” (George Novack-“Democracy and Revolution”)
Maintaining these principles is fundamental, because capitulating to the bourgeoisie prevents us from fighting for the regime of workers’ democracy, which ultimately constitutes our objective. One thing should be clear in all our exposition: Marxists are for the regime of workers’ democracy, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and we declare war on all other political regimes. As Nahuel Moreno explains: “Do you know what Trotskyism is? …the only organization that is in favor of a regime of workers’ democracy .Therefore: regimen, regimen, regimen. Workers’ democracy regime. Where?. In the unions, and in the state…those who fight for a regime have to unite…there is only one organization in the world that is for the regime of worker democracy” (Nahuel Moreno- Escuela de cadres, 1984)
If the working-class and popular sectors that still believe in bourgeois democracy ask us to propose reforms, we will propose a series of measures that tend to abolish the bourgeois democratic regime completely. We will propose that there be a Single Chamber, with representatives elected proportionally, taking the national territory as the single electoral district, which combines the exercise of legislative and executive powers. That he eliminate the bonapartism of “Presidentialism” , that he succeed in abolishing the reactionary and useless class of the Chamber of Senators. That ending with the “devaluation” of the worker and popular vote of the large urban concentrations.
We will propose that the mandates of those who make up the comrades and officials can be revoked by following certain steps. That the allowances received will be equivalent to the salary of a specialized worker. We will propose the right to vote and be elected from the age of 16 and extended to foreign workers residing in the country. We will propose the separation of the Church from the State. And the Monarchy wherever it exists, let it be abolished. We will propose the prohibition of all public subsidy to religious cults, and a Judicial Power through the election and revocability of magistrates, the recourse to Popular Juries and the abolition of jurisdiction and military justice. We will propose the democratization of the Armed Forces, and Security, recognizing political and union rights to non-commissioned officers and troops.
We are going to fight for the political regime for which the workers of the Paris Commune fought, and from then on, the masses of the world in the successive revolutions that have confronted capitalism. We end this treatise with the words of George Novack who explains in great detail in his monumental work “Democracy and Revolution” which is the political regime that we defend: “… Lenin proposed the measures that could keep the new regime authentically democratic, under in control of the workers, accountable to them and responsive to their requests. He was seriously concerned about the dangers of a regression to a militarized, bureaucratic and authoritarian state apparatus…”
“…He proposed to limit the repressive and reactionary role of these parasitic organisms of the old state, handing over their functions to the people themselves or, at the very least, placing them under the jealous surveillance of the masses during the transition period. The professional army was to be replaced by a popular militia, the people in arms The police would be stripped of all political functions and would answer for their conduct before the workers’ councils All state support for the clergy would be eliminated, although believers of any denomination would have the full right to voluntarily support their churches and pastors. Judges appointed for long terms or for life would be replaced by elected judges…”
“Juries and courts would be made up of neighbors of individuals accused of criminal offenses and would be inspected by the neighbors themselves. Full-time officials at all levels were to be true servants of the people and not act like bossy bosses, disconnected from sentiment and popular problems.The objective was to give workers permanent control over all elements of the state apparatus, until such time as the development of socialism made it possible for the functions exercised by full-time professionals to be assumed by rotation among the set of the citizens…”
“…He likewise proposed numerous safeguards against the divorce of officials from the people and their elevation above it. All public officials would be elected and subject to recall periodically or in case of emergency for any breach of their duties, equally that bonds are revocable today where the rank-and-file workers have a democratic union. To avoid careerism and corruption, no public official would receive more than the highest paid worker. More and more officials would be chosen from among the working masses and, when their special assignments in the state apparatus were fulfilled, they would return to their previous occupations and situations…”
“…Proletarian power would have to make a conscious break with the evils of parliamentarism, “congressional jargon” as it is called in the United States, narrowing as much as possible the gap between the executive and legislative branches. All representative institutions they would be transformed from debating societies, conceived to deceive the people while carrying out the dictates of the rich, into labor organizations.The workers’ delegates would not only dictate laws and issue edicts, but would personally verify that their proposals would be carried out to practice…”
“…the Councils of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers,…These bodies, directly elected, were not created by the foresight or prescription of any political party…Such councils are anathema for the possessing classes and for all bureaucratic formations, precisely because they give political expression and independent executive power to the most advanced elements of the working class and are the most flexible means of mobilizing the broadest layers of the masses behind revolutionary objectives. a system of workers councils or action committees is the best antidote against bureaucratism…”
“…The councils do not have to be solely administrative bodies that carry out the directives that come from above. To serve the interests of popular democracy, they must be an arena in which all tendencies and currents of revolutionary opinion from all over the world are represented. the working class, representation commensurate with its strength, through freely elected delegates in workplaces and neighborhoods, who can present their proposals and argue for their adoption The council forum, which retains and exercises power supreme and makes decisions in all vital matters, can constitute the surest guarantee of political democracy during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism…”.
Republished From: https://www.revolucion.org.es/en/bourgeois-democracy-its-democracy/
