REVIEW BY RICHARD INGRAM
A new edition of Links has just appeared. This is the 16th issue of the "international journal of socialist renewal".
The very topical theme of this issue is alternatives to globalisation. The introductory editorial notes that the protests against globalisation "reflect ... the discrediting of the ideology of neo-liberalism among ever widening sectors". But, it continues, there is considerable disagreement on what should replace neo-liberalism and how that replacement can be brought about.
Is the most we can hope for some variety of neo-Keynesianism, a renewed version of the "welfare state"? Not in the view of the Communist Party of Cuba, whose paper from the February 2000 meeting of the Sao Paolo Forum is the feature article in this Links.
First of all, the article points out, the "welfare state" was always limited to a small minority of countries, and the amount of real welfare it provided has been exaggerated.
More importantly, it argues that the development of capitalist economy and world politics since World War II have brought about a three-pronged crisis of overproduction of commodities, overproduction of capital and overproduction "of the population with respect to the demands of capital". This third aspect it calls capitalism's tendency to increase "social exclusion".
"If we start", write the Cuban Communists, "from the Marxist premise that capitalism consolidates its rule over society to the extent that the population is drawn into the capital-labour relationship, we can conclude that the tendency to social exclusion, which is one of the basic features of capitalism today, points towards the historical exhaustion of the capitalist mode of production".
The article notes further indications of the "parasitism and decomposition of imperialism", such as the phenomenal growth of speculation and the tendency towards ever larger mergers of existing capitals. In this context, the passage from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism was not arbitrary, but a reflection of capital's needs in a new economic and political environment:
"... if neo-liberalism were only a 'political evil' or a 'failed economic policy', the 'solution' to the problems of contemporary capitalism would solely depend on a 'change of policy'. That mode of production could return to being 'democratic' and 'redistributive', as it was in a limited number of developed countries in the postwar period. [But] in essence ... neo-liberalism is the necessary policy for the reproduction of transnational finance capital in this senile phase of capitalism."
Marta Harnecker, well-known for her writings on the Latin American left, takes up a closely related theme in an extract from her latest book. How, she asks, should the left relate to its traditional goals in this "ultraconservative period"?
"Unfortunately, given today's unfavourable correlation of forces, some sectors on the left, arguing that politics is the art of the possible and, seeing that it is impossible to change things immediately, have decided that they must be 'realistic' and recognise this impossibility by adapting themselves opportunistically to the current situation."
"The left, if it wants to be that", she counters, "can't define politics as the art of the possible. It has to counterpose to 'realpolitik' a policy that, without ceasing to be realistic and without denying reality, seeks to create the conditions to change that reality."
Regular 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly readers will be aware that South African correspondent Dale McKinley has recently been expelled from the SA Communist Party because of his criticisms of the course of the African National Congress government.
In this Links, McKinley writes of relations within the Alliance between the ANC, the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The goal of the ANC government, he writes, has been to create a liberal bourgeois democracy, a non-racial capitalism. This goal, to which the SACP and COSATU have allowed themselves to be subordinated, has required increasing restriction of democratic discussion within the Alliance itself.
A special feature of this issue is a debate on Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Phil Hearse defends Trotsky's theory against the criticisms put forward by Doug Lorimer in the pamphlet Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution: A Leninist critique, and Lorimer in turn replies to Hearse.
Links number 16 contains still more of interest to revolutionary activists: a discussion of the state of the international struggle for abortion rights, a review of a new biography of Karl Marx, a draft "international left platform" put forward by leaders of the South African Communist Party, and news about recent and upcoming conferences and meetings of the international left.
Links is available from Resistance Bookshops (addresses on page 2) or by subscription. Send a cheque, money order or your credit card details for $21 for 3 issues (1 year) or $39 for 6 issues (2 years) to PO Box 515, Broadway NSW 2007. Phone (02) 9690 1230, fax (02) 9690 1381 or email <links@dsp.org.au>.