Dimitrios Patelis: The Three Component Parts And Three Driving Forces Of The Global Revolutionary Movement

November 2023

Introduction

Not many people nowadays question the fact that humanity is either on the brink of, or on the path towards World War III (WWIII). The escalation of this war already includes a few open fronts involving several dozen states and coalitions, while new fronts, theaters of operations and flashpoints are erupting in strategically important regions of the world. After the Ukrainian front, with its turning points being the Nazi coup in Kiev in 2014, the armed rebellion in Donbass and Russia’s special military operation in 2022, we had tensions rising once again in the Balkans (Kosovo) and a new escalation in the Caucasus (Nagorno Karabakh).

An additional front is re-ignited in Palestine, dramatically integrating a vast area involved in the Arab Israeli conflict, which now takes on the characteristics of a religious war (a wider Islam-Jewish war and a ‘war of civilisations: Christian-Jewish civilisation versus the Islamic one’). The artificial formation of the racist theocratic terrorist state of Israel constitutes an imperialist military base and an advanced offensive outpost of the imperialist axis in the greater strategic region of the Near and Middle East. With such a massive concentration of firepower, the danger of immediate generalized outbreak of armed conflict in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole is immense.

At the same time, the imperialist aggression of the US-led axis on the Korean Peninsula-Taiwan front is escalating.

The intensification of this war at all levels and its consequences cannot leave progressive people, those who are concerned about the fate of humanity, indifferent. For us in the World Anti-Imperialist Platform (WAP), it is imperative to develop a conscious attitude towards this war if we are to expect a positive outcome.

As we have shown in previous writings, it is impossible to achieve a scientific understanding of the character and scale of the ongoing WWIII without a clear scientific characterisation of the historical stage of the world capitalist system, of socialism, anti-imperialism and humanity as a whole, without a definition of the historical epoch, its content and context.

On the current stage, the times and the circumstances.

Presently, humanity is in the stage of the decay and decline of capitalism, which in turn is in the modern stage of imperialism, the defining characteristic of which is the attempt to subordinate humanity to the interests of the most powerful multinational monopoly groups and the imperialist powers that serve as the main headquarters of these groups.

At the same time, beginning with the victory of the October Revolution and the other early socialist revolutions, the era of humanity’s global historical transition to communism has already begun. The era of the structural crises of the world capitalist system and the wars under imperialism now bear the stigma of the general crisis of the capitalist system, a system which has accomplished its historical mission, and therefore, it does not constitute only a barrier, an obstacle to the further development of humanity, but also the greatest reactionary and regressive force, a threat to the very existence of humanity and all life on planet Earth. This era marks the passage of the socialist perspective from the abstract possibility to actual historical process, to the law governed, necessary and attainable active process of revolutionary transformations.

From the beginning of the 20th century, with the First World War, it became clear that, in the monopoly stage of capitalism, the periodic long-term structural crises of the system do not only incubate fiercly imminent scientific and technological revolutions (only partially and distortedly attainable under capitalism), but also waves of early socialist revolutions. Of the number of armed insurrections and revolutions that erupted in Europe after World War I, the Great October Socialist Revolution, which took place in Russia and its adjacent colonies, was victorious.

Since then, capitalist development cannot be viewed in isolation from the course of early socialism. Similarly, early socialism cannot be viewed as detached from the course of the rest of the world, which is no longer under complete, structurally homogeneous and uninterrupted domination of imperialism.

As a result of the USSR and the world anti-fascist movement (spearheaded by the communists), crushing the axis of the ‘anti-Comintern’ pact, the camp of socialist countries in Eastern Europe in Asia and later in the Americas (Cuba) emerged after World War II.

Alongside the victories of the early socialist revolutions and with their internationalist support, a wave of anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and national independence movements emerged, which led to uprisings and revolutions of national liberation.

Thus, from the 20th century onwards, it became clear that the global development of humanity, pioneered through the global revolutionary process, arises as a result of an extremely contradictory and imbalanced, unified globally and historically significant law governed process.

Scientific research in the field of Marxist political economy, beginning with Lenin’s work, has shown that the very development of capitalism, the accumulation of capital, leads inexorably to the monopoly, through the processes of concentration and centralisation of production. On this basis, from the beginning of the 20th century, the transition to the new stage of development of capitalism towards imperialism takes place. This transition is not a merely quantitative expansion of the capitalist production infrastructure, but constitutes a qualitative and substantial, extensive and intensive change in the world capitalist system.

The character and manifestation of the very nature of the fundamental contradiction of capital, the contradiction between wage labour and capital, between living and dead labour, is radically transformed. Initially through the displacement of the export of commodities by the export of capital, and later, through processes which jump from the sphere of circulation (of commodities and capital) to the sphere of production itself, an extremely unequal division of labour is established within the world capitalist system.

Imperialism is rooted on increasing inequality, siphoning from it, developing it, manipulating it and consolidating it further, as the foundation of the mechanisms of overexploitation through its globalised relations of production (multiply mediated forms of property, titles, bonds, derivatives, etc.). Inequality, in turn, does not constitute a ‘natural’ state of being for the racist justification of overexploitation, through the ahistorical and static identification of differences as a supposedly insurmountable ‘gap’ between ‘naturally developed and underdeveloped, superior and inferior peoples, between humans and subhumans’. It is the result of unequal global historical development, at different degrees, rates, specificities (including physical, geographical, climatic, environmental, etc.) and levels of engagement or withdrawal from such an engagement of countries and peoples in law governed historical stages. Under imperialism, capitalist relations of production were imposed on various peoples mainly as a colonially imposed superstructure from outside and by force, having as their broader basis a diversity of inherited legacies, not only of pre capitalist, but even predating class society, communities of clans and tribes. Legacies which dependent colonial-neocolonial development partially transforms, to the extent that it renders them ‘functional’ for the reproduction of the structures and mechanisms of dependency and overexploitation necessary for imperialism.

It is only as a result of these mechanisms that the expansion and intensification of the mechanism of surplus value extraction from the scale of individual national economies to the scale of the global system occurs. This does not mean that the law of surplus value ceases to apply. It does mean though, that it is radically modified: the extraction of surplus value now takes place on a global scale, with the extraction of surplus value in the form of monopoly super-profits by the most powerful multinational monopoly groups based in a small group of countries, former colonial powers, which to this day function as the main imperialist states, as the centres of the imperialist system. They form subsystems of regional integrations, coalitions, their satellite states and transnational organs of enforcement of their interests with international claims and have global reach.

With the beginning of the widespread crisis of the world capitalist system, with the emergence of the first early socialist countries, another type of development of countries and regions of the world is initiated.

Socialism is established and developed through revolutionary transformations, the working class and its allies holding power being sole condition of their emergence, on the basis of social-state ownership mainly of the strategic means and sectors of the economy, the development of which is achieved mainly through scientific planning. Precisely because of the fact that the era of socialist revolutions begins in the imperialist stage, these revolutions arise from revolutionary situations, which in turn manifest themselves according to dialectical law in the ‘weak links’ of the global imperialist system, in those countries or groups of countries where internal contradictions are intertwined with regional and global ones in a complex volatile node.

Thus, we can see that the revolutionary situation – as a necessary condition for the socialist revolution – erupts in countries where the level of development of the productive forces is not the highest possible within the capitalist system. This is because, due to competition within the world capitalist system at its imperialist stage, this system does not in any way ensure ‘equal conditions of development and prosperity for all’, it does not allow for the equal and homogeneous development of the countries, regions and populations of the world. On the contrary, it is precisely because of the imposition by default of conditions of predatory imperialist overexploitation (in the form of colonialism, neo-colonialism, through many types and levels of economic, financial, fiscal, political, military, cultural, etc. dependency) under imperialism that inequality is exacerbated, as the root of its increasingly parasitic character. In this way, under imperialism, the capitalist system expands and deepens the loop of parasitic hyperaccumulation, using fictitious capital for financial leverage, entering into successive vicious cycles of intensification of its fundamental contradiction (between capital and labour) within every capitalist national economy, every regional integration and at the global level. The basic aim of the financial oligarchy is to impose, consolidate and maintain its sources of parasitism at all costs, in the form of the extraction of monopoly super-profits from countries with an average and below-average level of development.

From the above it becomes clear that victorious socialist revolutions take place at the monopoly stage. The revolutionary process of transition to socialism concerns primarily those countries and groups of countries which are at or near the intermediate level of development of their productive forces. All the countries of early socialism, historically, have been at such a level.

Please Download for Full Text