Socialism and the Next Century As the twentieth century ebbs away, there is a concerted campaign to present the century's history as the culmination of the final triumph of capitalism over socialism. The 20th Century: A journey with Surjeet In the history of mankind, every century has its own significance as many changes can be wrought in a hundred years. The Century of Imperialism The century that is drawing to a close has pre-eminently been a century of imperialism.

The century that is drawing to a close has pre-eminently been a century of imperialism. To be sure, the phenomenon of domination by capitalism over the "outlying regions" of the world existed even before. Indeed the nineteenth century was marked by the triumph of colonialism; and this entire system of colonialism provided the substructure for the imperialist edifice of the current century. But what was specific about this imperialist edifice was two particular characteristics: first, the emergence of monopoly in the spheres of industry and finance in each metropolitan country, the coalescence of the capitals of these two spheres to form a fluid form of capital ("finance capital") and the consequent transformation of capitalism into monopoly capitalism dominated by a financial oligarchy that straddled the economy and controlled the State apparatus; second, the rivalry between the different finance capitals belonging to different advanced countries for grabbing "economic territory," in a situation where the partitioning of the world had been already completed and only re-partitioning was possible.

UNPRECEDENTED CRISIS FOR SURVIVAL OF CAPITALISM

Wars for repartitioning the world were therefore inevitable. These wars for repartitioning were not like the old colonial wars which were waged against the "natives" or against the other colonial powers in the land of the "natives." The new wars had to be wars against other imperialist powers all over the globe, including within the metropolis itself. In the nineteenth century, after the Napoleonic wars, the only significant wars between major powers that the heartland of Europe had seen were the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War. By contrast, the current century, the century of imperialism, saw two World Wars, with Europe as its main theatre, where the loss of lives was on a scale unprecedented till then.
Imperialism created therefore an unprecedented crisis for the survival of capitalism. It pushed the workers of one imperialist country into fighting against fellow workers, belonging to another imperialist country, across trenches. It thus offered the workers in the imperialist world only one choice: either fight against fellow workers on behalf of capital or turn your guns against "your own" capital. Likewise it used the colonial people too as cannon fodder in imperialist wars; in the process it trained them in fighting, raised their level of consciousness immensely, and made them see the ugliness of capitalism which until then had pretended to be a "civilising force." In short, imperialism brought before mankind only one choice: destruction, or revolution to overthrow the entire system of capitalism. Imperialism brought revolution on the agenda, not just proletarian revolution in the metropolis but national liberation of the oppressed and colonised people.
The person who saw the emerging conjuncture with the greatest clarity was Lenin, who not only led the first proletarian revolution but who actually set up the Communist International to coordinate the activities of proletarian revolutionaries everywhere including where it was only national liberation that was on the agenda.
The reaction of finance capital to this revolutionary threat was a heightening of the scale of barbarism to unprecedented levels, namely the unleashing of fascism, which represented the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary sections of finance capital. The tendency towards fascism was universal across the imperialist world and the immediate provocation behind its emergence was the Great Depression of the inter-war period, which also owed its origin, among other things, to inter-imperialist rivalry. The massive unemployment that this Depression, the worst ever in the history of capitalism, generated, provided fertile ground for the spread of the fascist ideology. But fascism, notwithstanding its pervasiveness, emerged triumphant only in a few of the imperialist countries, namely Germany, Japan and Italy. The fascist forces unleashed the second world war not only against the old "liberal bourgeois" imperialist countries against whom they had to carry their inter-imperialist conflicts to a successful conclusion, but above all against the Soviet Union.

FOUR TYPES OF WAR ROLLED INTO ONE

The second world war was actually four different kinds of war rolled into one. Each of these four different kinds of war, namely, civil wars, inter-imperialist wars, wars between socialism and capitalism, and wars of national liberation, was an inevitable product of the era of imperialism. Imperialism which, to start with, is characterised by inter-imperialist wars, gives rise to revolutionary upsurges where all these other kinds of war follow as the inevitable sequel. And all of them appeared during the second world war. The second world war began with the Spanish Civil War, developed into an inter-imperialist war between the axis powers and the allies, and reached its climax in the war between fascism and socialism, while all along there was the most momentous war of national liberation of this century that was going on in China against Japanese imperialism.
Of all these different kinds of war, however, the most decisive was the war between socialism and fascism, in which the Battle of Stalingrad was the decisive moment. If mankind was saved the horrors of fascism, it was mainly because of the incredible heroism displayed, and sacrifices made, by the people of the Soviet Union during the war, and especially during the Battle of Stalingrad, the victory in which turned the whole course of the war.

(Today when it has become fashionable in many circles to debunk the Soviet Union, it is absolutely necessary to remember that but for the Soviet Union mankind would have been pushed into the worst kind of barbarism for centuries to come.)

The post-second world war period saw important changes in the texture of imperialism. It is essential to appreciate these changes in order to understand why the revolutionary threat to capitalism seems to have receded somewhat.

CLIMAX OF CRISIS OF CAPITALISM

The second world war represented the climax of the crisis of capitalism. The immediate aftermath of the war saw an enormous expansion of the socialist world which now incorporated, apart from the Soviet Union, China and several countries of Eastern Europe. It also saw a huge spread of the influence of the Communist Parties, both in metropolitan countries like France, Italy and Greece where the communists had been in the forefront of the anti-fascist struggle, and in many third world countries where they had made immense sacrifices in the course of the national liberation struggle. It saw within the metropolis a working class that was unwilling, after its sacrifices during the war, to go back to the old ways of capitalism. And it saw all over the third world a veritable upsurge of the movement for national liberation.
On the other hand, however, capitalism emerged from the war with one undisputed leader, namely the United States. Inter-imperialist conflicts were kept in check (the threat of socialism contributed to this muting of inter-imperialist conflicts); and an international economic order (the Bretton Woods system) could be put in place to overcome the chaos witnessed in the economic relations between capitalist countries during the inter-war period. In the new situation capitalism began stabilising itself by adopting a two-fold strategy. On the one hand, it tried to placate the various opponents it faced: it placated the domestic working class by adopting Keynesian measures for maintaining high employment and by providing a degree of social security, and it yielded to the demand for decolonisation in the third world. On the other hand, however, it moved ruthlessly to fight the communists: British imperialism fought wars against them in Greece and Malaya, The Americans in Korea, the French and the Americans in Vietnam, and the American CIA all over the world (including in particular Cuba which was a late entrant to the socialist camp after a Quixotic guerilla struggle); above all, however, it encircled the Soviet Union with military bases, threatened it with nuclear destruction, and unleashed against it what came to be known as the "cold war."
Capitalism was remarkably successful in stabilising itself. The establishment of a new international order under the Bretton Woods system and the expectation of the persistence of high demand, thanks to Keynesian policies, provided the setting where a host of technological innovations (including the backlog that had not been adopted during the years of inter-war stagnation) was adopted; the consequence was the most pronounced boom in the history of capitalism, from which the metropolitan working class benefited. Decolonisation meant that the stigma of being colonial "exploiters" was removed even though the basic system of unequal interdependence persisted. At the same time the immediacy of the socialist appeal dimmed for two reasons: first, as labour reserves got used up, the dramatic growth rates experienced by the socialist countries could no longer be sustained; and secondly, these countries were unable to make in time the transition from a dictatorship of the Party to revived institutions of Soviet democracy.

FEATURES OF CAPITALISM TODAY

The compromises made by capitalism when it had its back to the wall gave a false impression to many, namely that its nature had changed for ever, that this "compromising" form of capitalism was in fact the new capitalism. What has happened in the last two decades of this century establishes once again the vicious, predatory as well as moribund nature of capitalism in its imperialist phase. Though the imperialism we see today is different in many respects from imperialism in Lenin's time, its aggression, its striving for domination, its desire for subjugating the globe, and its total and callous disregard for human life, is exactly as Lenin had written about.
The main difference in the texture of imperialism today compared to Lenin's time consists in the fact that inter-imperialist rivalry continues to remain muted, and certainly nowhere near bursting into armed conflicts between imperialist powers. Among the many reasons for this, an important one relates to the emergence of finance capital of a new form: instead of fragmented finance capitals belonging to different countries we have today an international finance capital of which the different countries' finance capitals constitute aliquot parts and which moves around all over the globe in quest of quick speculative profits.
One consequence of the emergence of this finance capital is the end of Keynesianism, of the so-called "welfare capitalism," and the precipitation of stagnation and high unemployment in the advanced capitalist world. The other consequence, following both from this finance capital's own drive as well as the desire of metropolitan capitalism to "export unemployment" to third world countries, is an attempt to re-impose colonial-style domination over the third world. This entails "rolling back" the third world State where it acted as a bulwark against metropolitan capital, opening up third world markets to metropolitan products, re-imposing a colonial division of labour, grabbing third world resources and assets (especially public sector assets) "for a song," and moulding the political situation in the third world countries (through a curtailment of democracy in the latter) in such a way that all this becomes possible without permanent armed imperialist control. Towards this end, apart from the usual instruments of the leading imperialist State (such as the CIA, State Department etc.) a trinity of economic institutions -- the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO -- are used with vigour. They push the imperialist agenda under the euphemistic title of "globalisation".
From the fact that socialism had collapsed in Russia and the East European countries, and that inter-imperialist rivalries seemed muted, many (rather in the manner of Karl Kautsky,leader of the Second International whom Lenin had critiqued) had held the view that mankind would be embarking on an era of peace. This view has been belied, and not surprisingly. Imperialism implies domination, which brings forth opposition, though often wrapped in false consciousness. This provides the basis for new wars. And these precisely are the wars we have been witnessing during the nineties. Today, as in Lenin's time, imperialism is once again offering mankind a choice between destruction and revolution.