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Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Nuclear energy will play a vital role in Europe’s clean energy mix

Nuclear energy can reduce the need for costly power grid expansions and energy storage

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

New nuclear plants being built — image:
Europe isn't the only place in the world that is considering investments in nuclear energy. The photo shows a US Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector at the Vogtle Unit 4 plant on the Savannah River in Georgia, as it generated just enough electricity to connect to the grid for the first time. Vogtle Unit 4 came on line in late April 2024. The four units are now the single largest source of nuclear energy in the United States. Photo: Nuclear Regulatory Commission, CC By 2.0

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Credit: Photo: Nuclear Regulatory Commission, CC By 2.0

We are now witnessing an energy revolution. We live in an age of electrification amid a climate crisis that demands clean energy solutions. Nuclear energy, an energy source that has faced skepticism for decades, might be key in solving this issue in conjunction with renewable energy sources.

The growing interest in nuclear energy signals a clear shift in the energy sector.

For instance, Microsoft is exploring a deal to reopen Unit 1 at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant at a price of around $100 per megawatt-hour for its electricity. While this price is higher than the levelized costs of solar and wind, it underscores the growing value of stable, year-round power.

This follows a trend among tech giants entering the nuclear energy space, driven by the desire for stable, emission-free power year-round.

A bigger role than previously anticipated

In a recent study of the European Power system to 2050, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) found that even costly nuclear energy can lead to a more affordable energy system overall. Most importantly, nuclear energy can reduce the need for costly power grid expansions and energy storage.

Moreover, it would lower environmental impacts, by reducing the amount of land needed for wind farms and solar energy farms, and can reduce air pollution. At the same time, nuclear energy can increase the value of renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

With more nuclear energy in the system, wind and solar resources are better utilized, reducing the share of renewable energy lost through curtailment. Moreover, solar power reaps higher returns on its electricity. Essentially, nuclear energy increases the value of installed renewables.

Toward the cheapest energy mix

Based on projected energy demand for achieving net-zero emissions through electrification, the NTNU researchers identified the optimal mix of technologies to minimize energy costs through 2050. They found that it didn't matter if Europe successfully builds cheap, standardized nuclear energy, or if Europe continues on a path of sluggish nuclear power plant construction because in both scenarios, nuclear energy will grow and play a crucial role in the green transition.

"A consumption pattern that requires increasing amounts of stable power will make nuclear energy more valuable as a part of the energy mix," the researchers said.

Standard reactor designs can reduce costs

Affordable nuclear energy means Europe succeeds with the kind of development seen in Abu Dhabi (Barakah).

Costs were minimized by selecting a standard reactor design before construction to prevent cost and schedule overruns. Additionally, building multiple reactors at the same site further reduced costs by leveraging significant learning gains between the first and fourth unit

If Europe could learn to deploy nuclear in this way, nuclear energy can continue to be the largest single source of zero-emission energy in Europe for years to come.

Learn from earlier mistakes

"Expensive nuclear energy will result if society fails to learn from recent projects like the Olkiluoto 3 project in Finland, which took 18 years to construct and bring on line," said Martin Hjelmeland, a postdoctoral fellow in NTNU's Department of Electric Energy and first author of the study. "It also cost significantly more than anticipated."

In this first-of-a-kind project, only half of the design was completed before construction began, as well as regulatory intervention during construction that contributed to cost and time overruns. In the conservative scenario, where Europe does not manage to achieve the typical 6 to 8 years construction time, large volumes of nuclear energy will be outcompeted by onshore wind power, Hjelmeland said. However, nuclear energy will still maintain a prominent role in Europe’s energy landscape.

"Our research also shows that nuclear energy could even become relevant in hydropower-abundant countries like Norway," said Jonas Kristiansen Nøland, an associate professor in NTNU's Department of Electric Energy and a co-author of the paper. "This will depend on several uncertain factors. Cost levels will be critical, but it also hinges on the extent of onshore wind development and the need for stable power driven by the electrification of heavy industry or the establishment of energy-intensive data centers for artificial intelligence."

Europe faces significant energy challenges, and nuclear energy may play an important role in solving many of these issues, the researchers say. For this to happen, Europe must reconsider its approach to nuclear energy, learn from past mistakes, and adopt a balanced energy policy that treats nuclear energy on par with other low-carbon energy sources. By doing so, we can ensure we have the tools necessary to tackle the challenges that lie ahead effectively.

Reference: Martin Hjelmeland, Jonas Kristiansen Nøland, Stian Backe, Magnus Korpås. The role of nuclear energy and baseload demand in capacity expansion planning for low-carbon power systems, Applied Energy, Vol. 377, Part A, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.124366.

The Barakah nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates, under construction in 2017. Photo: Wikiemirati. CC BY-SA 4.0

Journal

Applied Energy

DOI

10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.124366

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Article Title

The role of nuclear energy and baseload demand in capacity expansion planning for low-carbon power systems

The Future of Nuclear Power is Wrought with Challenges

By Gail Tverberg - Nov 12, 2024

The world is facing a growing shortage of uranium, the essential fuel for nuclear power plants.

The US is heavily reliant on Russia and its allies for enriched uranium, creating geopolitical risks.

Recycling spent nuclear fuel is expensive, complex, and faces significant environmental and security challenges.

It is easy to get the impression that proposed new modular nuclear generating units will solve the problems of nuclear generation. Perhaps they will allow more nuclear electricity to be generated at a low cost and with much less of a problem with spent fuel.

As I analyze the situation, however, the problems associated with nuclear electricity generation are more complex and immediate than most people perceive. My analysis shows that the world is already dealing with “not enough uranium from mines to go around.” In particular, US production of uranium “peaked”about 1980 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Chart prepared by the US Energy Information Administration showing US production of uranium oxide.

For many years, the US was able to down-blend nuclear warheads (both purchased from Russia and from its own supply) to get around its uranium supply deficit.

Figure 2. Chart from ArmsControl.org showing estimated global nuclear warhead inventories, 1945 to 2023.

Today, the inventory of nuclear warheads has dropped quite low. There are few warheads available for down-blending. This is creating a limit on uranium supply that is only now starting to hit.

Nuclear warheads, besides providing uranium in general, are important for the fact that they provide a concentrated source of uranium-235, which is the isotope of uranium that can sustain a nuclear reaction. With the warhead supply depleting, the US has a second huge problem: developing a way to produce nuclear fuel, probably mostly from spent fuel, with the desired high concentration of uranium-235. Today, Russia is the primary supplier of enriched uranium.

The plan of the US is to use government research grants to kickstart work on new small modular nuclear reactors that will be more efficient than current nuclear plants. These reactors will use a new fuel with a higher concentration of uranium-235 than is available today, except through purchase from Russia. Grants are also being given to start work on US production of the more highly enriched uranium fuel within the US. It is hoped that most of this highly enriched uranium can come from recycling spent nuclear fuel, thus helping to solve the problem of what to do with the supply of spent fuel.

My analysis indicates that while advanced modular nuclear reactors might theoretically be helpful for the very long term, they cannot fix the problems of the US, and other countries in the West, nearly quickly enough. I expect that the Trump administration, which will start in January 2025, will see this program as a boondoggle.
[1] Current problems with nuclear electricity generation are surprisingly hidden. World electricity generation from nuclear has been close to flat since 2004.

Figure 3. World Nuclear Electricity Generation based on data of the 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute.

Although there was a dip in world generation of nuclear electricity after the tsunami that affected nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, otherwise world production of nuclear electricity has been nearly flat since 2004 (Figure 3).

Figure 4. US Nuclear Electricity Generation based on data of the 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute.

US nuclear electricity production (Figure 4) shows a similar pattern, except that production since 2021 is down.
[2] The total amount of electricity generated by nuclear power plants is limited by the amount of uranium fuel available to them.

I believe that a major reason why the electricity supply from nuclear has been quite flat since 2004 is because total nuclear electricity generation is limited by the quantity of uranium fuel that is available for the nuclear reactors that have been built.

The price of uranium can perhaps rise, but this doesn’t necessarily add much (or any) supply very quickly. It takes several years to develop a new uranium mine.

In theory, reprocessing of spent fuel to produce uranium and plutonium is also possible, but the amount of that has been performed to date is small. (See Section [6].)
[3] The World Nuclear Association (WNA) published Figure 5 that hints at the world’s uranium supply problem:

Figure 5. World uranium production and reactor requirements (metric tons of uranium) in a chart by the World Nuclear Association.

The black line showing “reactor requirements” (Figure 5) is in some sense comparable to world generation of nuclear electricity (Figure 3). Both figures show fairly flat lines since about 2004. This relationship hints that there has not been a significant improvement in the efficiency of electricity generation using uranium fuel in the past 20 years.

Figure 5 shows a huge gap between the production of uranium from the various countries and “reactor requirements.” The single largest source of additional supply has been down-blended uranium from nuclear bombs. The EIA reports that the US purchased a large number of nuclear warheads from Russia between 1995 and 2013 for this purpose under the Megatons to Megawatts program. The EIA also reports that for the period 2013 to 2022, a purchase agreement was put in place allowing the US to purchase commercial origin low-enriched uranium from Russia to replace some of down-blended nuclear warhead material. In addition, the US had some of its own nuclear warheads that it could blend down. It was the availability of uranium supply from these various sources that allowed US nuclear electricity generation to remain relatively flat in the 2004 to 2023 period, as shown on Figure 4.

The US’s own uranium extraction reached a peak about 1980 and is now close to zero (Figure 1). The world’s supply of warheads is now over 85% depleted, leaving very little stored-away, highly enriched uranium to blend down (Figure 2)

A hidden problem is the fact that uranium production available today is largely from Russia and its close affiliates. The data underlying Figure 5 shows that uranium production in 2022 is dominated by close allies of Russia (55% of the total coming from Kazakhstan (43% of total), Uzbekistan (7% of total), and Russia (5% of total)). The US (at almost 0%), plus production of its close affiliates, Canada and Australia, provided only 24% of world uranium. This imbalance between Russia and its affiliates, and the US and its affiliates, should be of concern.
[4] The current conflict between the US and Russia adds to nuclear problems.

The US is trying to impose sanctions on Russia. The EIA reports:

“The origin of uranium used in U.S. reactors will likely change in the coming years. In May [2024], the United States banned imports of uranium products from Russia beginning in August [2024], although companies may apply for waivers through January 1, 2028.”

This seems to imply that a transition away from Russian uranium dependence must be made in only a little over three years. This is a short time frame, given the difficulty in making such a transition.

EIA data show that in the year 2023, the US sourced only 4.6% of uranium supplies from the US. (This could be partly or mostly down-blended nuclear warheads). Material purchased from Russia comprised 11.7% of uranium. Kazakhstan provided 20.6% of uranium purchased, and Uzbekistan provided 9.5%. Among US allies, Canada provided 14.9%, and Australia 9.2%.
[5] The WNA does not hint at any uranium supply problems.

The WNA is an advocate for nuclear energy; it cannot suggest that there is any problem with uranium supplies. WNA has the opinion that if there is a shortage of uranium, prices will rise, and more will become available. But even if prices rise, it takes several years to bring new mines into operation. Prices need to stay high, or companies will not pursue what appear to be opportunities.

Figure 6. Historical uranium prices in chart by Trading Economics.

Readers of OurFiniteWorld.com have seen that oil prices tend to spike and collapse. They don’t stay high for very long because if prices stay high, the end products made with oil tend to become unaffordable. I expect a similar problem occurs with uranium.

The necessary price threshold for high uranium extraction that is mentioned by the WNA is $130/kg in 2021. By coincidence, when a translation is made to dollars per pound using 2024$, this corresponds quite closely to the current price line on Figure 6. Indeed, prices do sometimes bounce high. The problem is getting them to stay as high as the dotted line for long enough to support the multi-decade life of a mine. Economists were forecasting a price of $300 per barrel oil a few years ago, but they have been disappointed. The price is under $75 per barrel now.

The country with the most potentially recoverable uranium is Australia. It produced only 9% of the world’s uranium in 2022, but is reported to have 28% of the world’s remaining reserve. Consistently higher prices would be needed for Australia to start opening new mines.

It is also possible that more uranium supply might become available if improved extraction techniques are developed.

The world seems to be past peak crude oil. By itself, the peak oil issue could limit new uranium extraction and transport.
[6] Recycling of spent fuel to recover usable uranium and plutonium has been accomplished only to a limited extent. Experience to date suggests that recycling has many issues.

It is possible to make an estimate of the amount of recycling of spent fuel that is currently being performed. Figure 3 in Section [1] shows about 65,000 metric tons of uranium are required to meet the demands of existing nuclear power generation, and that as of 2022, there was about an annual shortfall in supply of about 26%. Based on what information I have been able to gather, existing recycling of uranium and plutonium amounts to perhaps 6% of the overall fuel requirement. Thus, as of 2022, today’s recycling of spent fuel could perhaps shave this shortfall in uranium supply to “only” 20% of annual nuclear fuel requirements. There is some recycling of spent fuel, but it is small in relation to the amount needed.

There seem to be several issues with building units to recover uranium from spent fuel:Higher cost than simply mining more uranium
Pollution problems from the recycling plants
Potential for use of the output to make nuclear warheads
Potential for nuclear accidents within the plants
Remaining radioactivity at the site at the end of the reprocessing plant’s life, and thus the need to decommission such plants
Potential for many protestors disrupting construction and operation because of issues (2), (3), (4), and (5)

The US outlawed recycling of spent fuel in 1977, after a few not-very-successful attempts. Once the purchase of Russian warheads was arranged, down-blending of warheads was a much less expensive approach than reprocessing spent fuel. Physics Today recently reported the following regarding US reprocessing:

“A plant in West Valley, New York, reprocessed spent fuel for six years before closing in 1972. Looking to expand the plant, the owners balked at the costs required for upgrades needed to meet new regulatory standards. Construction of a reprocessing plant in Barnwell, South Carolina, was halted in 1977 following the Carter administration’s ban.”

Japan has been trying to build a commercial spent fuel reprocessing plant at Rokkasho since 1993, but it has had huge problems with cost overruns and protests by many groups. The latest estimate of when the plant will actually be completed is fiscal year 2026 or 2027. The plant would process 800 metric tons of fuel per year.

The largest commercial spent fuel reprocessing plant in operation is in La Hague, France. It has been in place long enough (since 1966) that it has run into the issue of decommissioning an old unit, which was started as a French military project. The first processing unit was shut down in 2003. The International Atomic Energy Administration says, “The UP2-400 decommissioning project began some 20 years ago and may be expected to continue for several more years.” It talks about the huge cost and number of people involved. It says, “Decommissioning activities represent roughly 20 per cent of the overall activity and socio-economic impact of the La Hague site, which also hosts two operating spent fuel recycling plants.”

The cost of the La Hague reprocessing units is probably not fully known. They were built by government agencies. They have gone through various owners including AREVA. AREVA has had huge financial problems. The successor company is Orano. The currently operating units have the capacity to process about 1,700 metric tons of fuel per year. The 1700 metric tons of reprocessing of spent fuel from La Hague is reported to be nearly half of the world’s operating capacity for recycling spent fuel.

I understand that Russia is working on approaches that quite possibly are not included in my figures. If so, this may add to world uranium supply, but Russia is not likely to want to share the benefits with the West if there is not enough to go around.
[7] The concentration of the isotope uranium-235 is very important in making fuel for the proposed new modular nuclear reactors.

Uranium-235 makes up 0.72% of natural uranium. Wikipedia says, “Unlike the predominant isotope uranium-238, it [uranium-235] is fissile, i. e., it can sustain a nuclear reaction.” In most reactors used today, the concentration of uranium-235 is 3% to 5%.

According to CNN, the plan in building advanced modular small reactors is to use fuel with a 5% to 20% concentration of uranium-235. Fuel at this concentration is called high assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. The expectation is that power plants with this type of fuel will be more efficient to operate.

Producing higher concentrations of uranium-235 tends to be problematic unless nuclear weapons are available for down-blending; warheads use high concentrations of uranium-235. Now, with reduced availability of nuclear warheads for down-blending, other sources are needed in addition. CNN reports that the only commercial source of HALEU is Russia. The EIA reports that the Inflation Reduction Act invested $700 million to support the development of a domestic supply chain for HALEU.
[8] The US is trying to implement many new ideas at one time with virtually no successful working models to smooth the transition.

Strangely enough, the US has no working model of a small-scale nuclear reactor, even one operating on conventional fuel. A CNBC article from September 2024 says, Small nuclear reactors could power the world, the challenge is building the first one in the US.

The new small-scale nuclear projects we do have are still at a very preliminary stage. In June 2024, Bill Gates wrote, “We just broke ground on America’s first next-gen nuclear facility. Kemmerer, Wyoming will soon be home to the most advanced nuclear facility in the world.” The plan is for it is to become operational by 2030, if it has access to HALEU fuel.

With respect to how far along the ability to make HALEU from spent fuel is, an October 2024 article in Interesting Engineering says, “US approves new facility design concept to turn nuclear waste into reactor fuel:”

“The facility whose conceptual design has been approved will be located at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). It will help turn used material recovered from DOE’s former Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II reactor) into usable fuel for its advanced nuclear power plant. . . The plan is to recover approximately 10 metric tons of HALEU from EBR-II fuel by December 2028 using an electrochemical process that was perfected over the years at Idaho National Laboratory (INL).”

Assuming this can be done, it will be a step forward, but it is nowhere near being an at-scale, commercial project that can be done economically by other companies. The volume of 10 metric tons is tiny.

Starting at this level, it is difficult to see how reactors with the new technology and the HALEU fuel to feed them can possibly be available in quantity before 2050.
[9] It is difficult to see how the cost of electricity generated using the new advanced modular nuclear reactors and the new HALEU fuel, created by reprocessing spent fuel, could be low.

As far as I can see, the main argument that these new modular electricity generation plants will be affordable is that they will only generate a relatively small amount of electricity at once —about 300 megawatts or less, or about one third of the average of conventional nuclear reactors in the US. Because of the smaller electricity output, the hope is that they will be affordable by more buyers, such as utility companies.

The issue that is often overlooked by economists is that electricity generated using these new techniques needs to be low cost, per kilowatt-hour, to be helpful. High-cost electricity is not affordable. Keeping costs down when many new approaches are being tried for the first time is likely to be a huge hurdle. I look through the long list of problems encountered in recycling spent fuel mentioned in Section [6] and wonder whether these issues can be inexpensively worked around. There are also issues with adopting and installing the proposed new advanced modular reactors, such as security, that I have not even tried to address.

The hope is that somehow, the whole process of building the advanced modular nuclear reactors and creating the HALEU fuel can be standardized and can be organized in such a way that economies of scale will set in. It seems to me that reaching this goal will be difficult. In theory, perhaps such a goal can be reached in 2060 or 2070, but this is not nearly soon enough, given the world’s current shortage of uranium from mines.
[10] The Trump administration will likely drop or substantially change the current program for advanced modular nuclear reactors.

The US plan that is discussed in this post has been developed under the Biden administration. This group was voted out of power on November 5. The Democratic administration will be replaced by a new Republican administration, headed by Donald Trump, on January 20, 2025.

I would not be surprised if the advanced modular nuclear generation plan disappears, almost as quickly as the currently subsidized offshore wind program, which Trump has vowed to end. The two programs have many things in common: Both programs provide an excuse for more US debt; they provide many jobs for researchers; and the devices that they relate to can be purchased in fairly small increments. But the cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity is likely to be high with either program. In some sense, as they are currently envisioned, they will not efficient ways to produce electricity. A major problem is the lack of fuel for the new modular reactors, and the slow ramp-up time to obtain this fuel.

I expect that under Trump, the sanction against purchasing HALEU from Russia might be replaced with a tariff. That way the US could have the benefit of HALEU, purchased from Russia, but at a higher price. This would allow research to continue, if desired.
[11] If solutions cannot be found, electricity generation from nuclear is likely to gradually disappear.

Over time, the world’s self-organizing economy tends to eliminate its more inefficient parts. When I look at the past experience with nuclear, what I see seems to be another example of the self-organizing economy squeezing out the inefficient parts of the economy (Figure 8):

Figure 7. Nuclear electricity generation by part of the world, based on data of the 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the Energy Institute.

In this chart, “Advanced Economies, ex US” are defined as members of the Organization for Economic Development (OECD), excluding the US. “Later Entrants” are non-OECD members, excluding Russia and Ukraine. They include China, India, Indonesia, and many other lower-income countries. Many of these countries are in East Asia.

What I see is that the relatively “flat” overall nuclear electricity production has been accomplished, to a significant extent, by the “Advanced Economies, ex US” dropping back in their use of nuclear electricity at close to the same time the “Later Entrants” have rapidly been increasing their use of nuclear electricity. The Later Entrants can make goods for sale in international markets much more cheaply than the Advanced Economies, ex US through their efficient use of cheap energy (often from coal) and their lower wages. This more efficient approach gives the Later Entrants an “edge” in buying the uranium that is available.

I expect to see more of this pattern of squeezing out in the future. In fact, new and recently re-opened nuclear plants will need to compete existing nuclear generation units for available uranium.

Given the way squeezing out takes place, very few people will realize that there is a problem with uranium fuel. It will just be that leaders of some parts of the world, as well as some parts of the US, will start emphasizing stories about how dangerous nuclear energy is. Instead of nuclear, they will emphasize electricity generation from wind and solar and allow these approaches to “go first” when they are available. The result will be wholesale electricity prices that will be far too low for nuclear power plants, much of the time. It will be these low wholesale electricity prices that push nuclear power out.

Thus, unless there truly are breakthroughs in recycling spent fuels, or in uranium mining, electricity generation using nuclear energy may gradually slip away from many parts of the world currently using it.

By Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World

Monday, October 28, 2024

Left Voice Magazine: The Struggle to Re-Create Revolutionary Internationalism

The October 2024 issue of Left Voice Magazine collects documents published as contributions to the thirteenth conference of the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International that took place in March 2024. The debates and discussions contain valuable analyses of the world situation and proposals for the advance of socialist ideas among working people and all those fighting against capitalist exploitation and oppression.

Left Voice October 27, 2024

The following articles were produced as contributions to the Thirteenth Conference of the Trotskyist Fraction (known as the TF-FI), the international tendency to which Left Voice and 14 other revolutionary socialist organizations around the world adhere, held in March 2024. Among the contributors are leading members of our Argentinian, Spanish, and French sections; the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), Corriente Revolucionaria de los Trabajadores y Trabajadoras (CRT), and Révolution Permanente (RP), respectively.

Delegates to the Conference debated a wide range of strategic questions around the construction of a revolutionary party, the promotion of organs for the self-organization of the working class, and the role of ideology. These were contextualized within the historical conjuncture that includes Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza; a major war in Ukraine and the re-armament of Europe; the rise of a new Far Right around the world; growing austerity, especially in the world’s peripheral countries, encouraged by the institutions of international finance capital like the IMF; a climate emergency; and other devastating ecological consequences of capitalism.

We are publishing them in English in order to further these debates in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world. Since the Conference, a number of events have taken place that socialists and the Left — especially in the United States — cannot ignore, including the construction of student encampments to protest the genocide in Gaza proliferating across the United States and internationally, reinvigorating a student movement, despite violent repression; Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 elections in the United States and his replacement by Kamala Harris; the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and his nomination of the far-right populist J.D. Vance as his vice presidential candidate; and the Republican National Convention, addressed by the president of the Teamsters Union for the first time in history. We encourage readers to refer to the numerous articles published by Left Voice on these topics over the past several months. With these developments, we believe the following articles to contain valuable analyses of the world situation and proposals for the advance of socialist ideas among working people. We hope to receive reflections and criticisms from socialists and socialist organizations, especially those committed to the construction of an international and revolutionary party of the working class.

***
Overview of the Thirteenth Conference of the TF-FI: The Struggle to Re-create Revolutionary Internationalism

In March 2024, delegations from the groups that form the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International met to discuss and debate the challenges facing revolutionaries today. The discussions centered on the convulsive world scenario — with tendencies toward polarization and increasing militarism — and the vanguard sectors mobilizing across the world, from the movement for Palestine to the movement against the Far Right and austerity in Argentina.
Three Axes of Socialist Internationalism Today: Against Genocide, Militarism, and Imperialist Plunder

From the Trotskyist Fraction — Fourth International, we are undertaking three political campaigns that we consider central to internationalist and anti-imperialist struggle today.
The Convulsive Interregnum of the International Situation

The capitalist world is in a “permacrisis” — a prolonged period of instability which may lead to catastrophic events. The ongoing struggles for hegemony could lead to open military conflicts.

By Claudia Cinatti
The Struggle of Ideologies and the Battle for a Socialist Imaginary

The capitalist consensus is starting to break apart. A key task for socialists today, in conjunction with debates over strategy, is to fight to reconstruct a socialist horizon — that starts with council democracy and socialist planning.

By Matías Maiello
Growing Chaos in the World Situation

The world is racked by war and increasing militarism against the backdrop of U.S. imperialist fatigue. The ruling class inches it ever closer to more destructive conflicts. This forms the basis for a new internationalism.

By Juan Chingo
Reclaiming the Theory of Permanent Revolution Today

Beyond various theories now in vogue — like postcolonialism — we must reclaim the validity of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.

By Josefina L. Martínez
The Figure in the Mirror: The Ideology of “Common Sense” and the Fight for Socialism

Notes on the recomposition of Marxism and the possible futures of socialism

By Juan Dal Maso
The Struggle Has Just Begun: The Argentinian Crisis and the Tasks of Revolutionaries

The first year of far-right “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei’s presidency has exacerbated a severe crisis that touches nearly every sector of Argentinian society. The working class, students, and retirees are rising up to fight these attacks.

By Emilio Albamonte

Reclaiming the Theory of Permanent Revolution Today

Beyond various theories now in vogue — like postcolonialism — we must reclaim the validity of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.

Josefina L. Martínez

Josefina L. Martínez
Josefina is a historian from Madrid and an editor of our sister site in the Spanish State, IzquierdaDiario.es.

The Struggle of Ideologies and the Battle for a Socialist Imaginary

The capitalist consensus is starting to break apart. A key task for socialists today, in conjunction with debates over strategy, is to fight to reconstruct a socialist horizon — that starts with council democracy and socialist planning.

Matías Maiello October 27, 2024

The following is a contribution to the debates for the recent conference of the Trotskyist Fraction — Fourth International, which publishes the International Network of La Izquierda Diario. It was published on January 14, 2024.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many pundits and analysts concluded that the “era of extremes,” of intense political confrontations, had been definitively overcome. Thereafter, neoliberal democracies came to be governed by the “extreme center,” as Tariq Ali calls it. Neoliberalism, with all of its particularities, had emerged amid a patchwork of political parties reduced to the status of “living dead,” among them many social reformist or bourgeois nationalist parties in the peripheral countries. At the time, Chantal Mouffe, inspired by Carl Schmitt, called for reclaiming the idea of “antagonism” to revitalize these ailing democracies. She argued that with the disappearance of the oppositional dynamic between totalitarianism and democracy, Western societies could become deeply destabilized. But this was a limited understanding of political antagonism in bourgeois democracy. Political enemies became adversaries who shared a common framework.

A critical overview of the previous period resists this domestication of the political. On the one hand, we have the global emergence of a so-called new Right. In response, the term fascism has been used and abused in political discourse. Authors such as Enzo Traverso refer to the new Right as “post-fascism”; others, such as Maurizio Lazzarato, have characterized it as a “new fascism.” On the other hand, since the Arab Spring of 2011, we have seen a proliferation of broad processes of mobilization, with varying degrees of violence in a diverse set of countries. These revolts have become an undeniable part of the global situation. At the same time, with the onset of the war in Ukraine, the role that war plays in the global scenario has changed from that of previous decades, giving way to a new level of confrontation between world powers. The open genocide perpetuated by the state of Israel against Gaza is the most recent expression of this, and it could destabilize the Middle East. In turn, a broad movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people has emerged internationally. Intense political confrontation seems to have returned to the world stage without asking permission.

In reality, the profound tendencies of the imperialist epoch of “wars, crisis, and revolutions,” as Lenin called it, have come to the fore. At the same time, as Fredric Jameson once remarked, it seems that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This is largely because the revolutionary socialist project is in crisis. We can identify three main causes for this crisis. First, revolutionary socialism was discredited by Stalinism, or the emergence of parasitic bureaucratic dictatorships in the former workers states, which ultimately passed over to capitalist restoration. Second, social democracy and various bourgeois nationalist movements used the name of socialism to advance neoliberal policies. Added to this are phenomena like Chavismo in Venezuela, which defined itself as “socialism for the 21st century,” but in reality amounted to a bourgeois statist current that, in certain moments, clashed with imperialist powers while advancing aggressive neoliberal policies. Third, four decades of neoliberal domination have had a profound impact on the consciousness of most people.

The recomposition of the socialist project in the 21st century has many different aspects. There is a tactical dimension (regarding the course of individual instances of class struggle) and a strategic one (drawing conclusions from those battles — whether they are victories or defeats — for socialist ends and objectives). Socialist goals are condensed in a revolutionary socialist program, but not necessarily all of them. For example, The Transitional Program, written by Leon Trotsky and adopted by the Fourth International, covers only the period just until the start of the socialist revolution.1

There is also an ideological dimension, which involves re-creating a socialist imaginary, one of a society that can overcome the horizon of barbarism that capitalism promises. This requires a review of the past, an understanding of the present, and a projection into the future. In what follows, we attempt to develop some aspects of the ideological dimension, centering on two themes that we consider fundamental: council democracy and socialist planning. Before we develop these elements, however, we will describe how we got to where we are today and the conditions — which differ from those of the 20th century — in which the struggle to re-create the socialist project takes place today.
Clashing Hegemonies and Clashing Ideologies

In his interpretation of the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci, Nicola Badaloni discusses the “clash of hegemonies,” which takes place when social relations collide with new ones that have emerged and become historically visible. With this idea, Badaloni covers the specific clash of hegemonies that arose in the 20th century after the triumph of the Russian Revolution.

This revolution refuted the universalist pretensions of the bourgeoisie, which posed its particular interests as the interests of “all of humanity.” It exposed in reality Marx’s observation that, under capitalism, “the practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right to private property.” This universalism was fueled by the exploitation and oppression of the rest of the world’s peoples; under the banner of “civilization,” it led to World War I. Bourgeois individualism, which for Marx was the ideological expression of an unconscious collective base (capital), would come to be measured against the regulatory capacity of a collectivism consciously assumed and therefore capable of becoming institutionalized.2

The interwar period was marked by revolutions whose defeats confirmed the isolation of the Russian Revolution. The Stalinist bureaucratization of the USSR, and with it the Third Communist International, fed back into this cycle of isolation and defeats. But capitalism was far from being stabilized, and bourgeois individualism continued to be challenged far and wide. Gramsci and Trotsky analyzed capital’s need for a large-scale reconfiguration to counter its crisis. They saw in the emergence of fascism and “Americanism” two different answers to this problem; ultimately, the alternative was resolved in favor of the latter. This was only possible, as Trotsky foresaw, through a new world war. Gramsci observed that it was relatively easier for the United States to rationalize production and labor as a result of the particularities of its historical development. This gave rise to a particular combination of force and persuasion in which high wages based on a large increase in productivity and mass consumption were key. In this process of Americanism, “hegemony is born in the factory,” with less need for professional political and ideological intermediaries to impose it.

In a near mirror image of Gramsci’s theory, Trotsky pointed out, in reference to proletarian hegemony in the USSR, that ultimately, “the working class can retain and strengthen its role as leader, not through the State apparatus or the army, but by means of the industry which gives rise to the proletariat.” But the Stalinist leadership adopted the opposite course of action. As Trotsky notes in The Revolution Betrayed, the liquidation of the soviets and the entrenchment of a new bureaucratic caste marked the emergence of a dictatorship imposed on the proletariat. The question of hegemony over the peasantry was “solved,” at the end of the 1920s, through the coercive power of the state. In one fell swoop, the bureaucracy undermined both economic planning and the consciousness of the collective; with this, it also undermined the necessary development of a new individualism in the framework of collective action and the revitalization of civil society in the workers state. Trotsky closely links this revitalization with the revival of the soviets as organizations of self-determination of the masses.

After World War II, the contrasts between Western capitalism and bureaucratic workers states became deeper. In Europe important revolutionary processes were diverted or defeated, such as those in France, Italy, and Greece; the new successful revolutions — in China and Indochina — occurred in developing peripheral countries, where new bureaucracies controlled the state from the start. Having configured themselves in the image and likeness of the Stalinist USSR, they imposed new social relations within their borders, but they did not try to extend the international revolution. All this contributed to a gradual process of identifying collectivism with bureaucratic totalitarianism. The clash of hegemonies continued, but each time in a more degraded form. The capitalist world — in the wake of a global massacre crowned by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — responded to the challenges posed by these revolutions by developing the “welfare state.” On the basis of the war’s destruction, it experienced a three-decade economic boom; states adopted elements of state planning in the capitalist economy and introduced a series of labor and social rights in a context of full employment. In the peripheral countries, as part of so-called decolonization, imperialist states agreed to formal independence for several countries to quell the rebellions against their domination.

By the end of the 1960s, the experiment of a capitalism “regulated” by the state had failed. The economic crisis exacerbated the fiscal crisis and redoubled the pressure on the rate of profit. The combination of global crisis and class struggle broke the relative equilibrium that had characterized the previous stage of the Cold War. Class struggle extended across both the capitalist centers and periphery as well as to the other side of the Iron Curtain. The defeat of this cycle was followed by the definitive crisis of the USSR and the rise of neoliberalism, embodied by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. The restoration of capitalism by the bureaucracy in the USSR, China, and the states where the bourgeoisie had been expropriated would give rise to a global stage of bourgeois restoration. Capitalism emerged triumphant from the clash of hegemonies that marked the 20th century. In this new context, faced with the terminal crisis of the previous scheme of capitalist accumulation and the fall of the rate of profit, the retaining walls of the old welfare state would be dismantled and the chains of the peripheral countries would be readjusted to comply with the so-called Washington consensus.

The end of that clash of hegemonies did not mean — nor could it — a return to the moment before the Russian Revolution. Rather, what emerged was a new “consensus”: “there is no alternative” to capitalism.3 As Perry Anderson pointed out in his classic essay “Renewals,” what resulted was the consolidation — together with the universal diffusion — of neoliberalism as a political current, which had been developing behind the scenes since the 1930s. Beyond the limitations that prevented — and still prevent — its full realization as a complete system, neoliberalism as a set of principles managed to impose itself globally. In Anderson’s words, it was the “most successful ideology in world history.” Bourgeois individualism found a clear terrain to advance to unprecedented levels.

Neoliberalism became associated with a notion of democracy defined by its mere opposition to totalitarianism. It identified the idea of freedom with the free-market model, and counterposed it to any kind of collectivism conceived of as “statism.” The idea of globalization functionally became the unchallenged dominance of U.S. imperialism.

Today, these three pillars are in crisis. First, neoliberal democracies are becoming increasingly authoritarian and seem to have no answers to the contradictions that contemporary societies experience. These regimes are being questioned mostly from the right — the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was a particularly significant symptom of this — but they are also challenged by revolts in various countries in the last decade. Second, “harmonious” globalization has come to an end. There is a clash between the crisis-stricken global integration established under U.S. hegemony, on one side, and the redoubled challenge to this world order by “revisionist” powers, such as Russia and China, on the other. The war in Ukraine indicates the return of interstate warfare with the involvement of world powers on both sides (although the United States and NATO act by proxy). The trade war and growing military tensions with China are another expression of this trend, as is the genocide being committed by the state of Israel in Gaza. Third, market freedom suffered a severe blow as a result of the 2008 crisis and the subsequent massive bailout of banks and corporations, along with an exponential increase in global inequality — this amounted to a kind of “fall” of the Wall Street “wall.”

It is important not to confuse these elements of crisis with an outright retreat of neoliberalism. Of course, its viability is directly linked to U.S. hegemony, which is in decline. Today, capitalism lacks an alternative hegemonic project, like fascism or Americanism, which played this role in their time, but neoliberalism is not facing a clash of hegemonies such as the one that marked the 20th century. Consequently, neoliberalism stumbles along in its decline. The so-called new Right is advancing its authoritarian measures and wielding nationalist discourses; in peripheral countries, its program is a radical form of neoliberalism. The rhetoric against “socialism” and “communism,” identifying these systems with authoritarian capitalist regimes such as those of China or Venezuela, attempts to revitalize enthusiasm for neoliberalism by reviving a caricature of the Cold War, mimicking the clash of hegemonies. This rhetoric does have a certain ideological influence, but it is based on the lack of alternatives to neoliberalism — above all the prolonged crisis of the revolutionary socialist project.

Today, there is no clash of hegemonies as there was in the 20th century. The most salient characteristic of the current age is the absence of hegemonies; this applies to socialism as much as to capitalism itself. But the terrain for a struggle of ideologies has been reopened, and with it, the possibility of transforming the socialist project into a material force. This does not mean rehashing the struggle of ideologies that took place before the Russian Revolution, as sectors of the U.S. Left attempt to do, advocating a kind of “return” to old-school social democracy.4 We have to start from an appraisal of the 20th century and take up the most advanced aspects of those experiences. Reconstructing the perspective of a socialism from below for the 21st century — as opposed to the Stalinist experience — implies starting from the current realities of capitalism, of the working class and the oppressed, so that socialism can be seen as a real alternative to the crisis of civilization imposed on us by the capitalist system.

In what follows we attempt to elucidate the elements that we consider foundational to this perspective, articulated through the themes of council democracy and socialist planning. Both have been struck from the record of the 20th century and obscured by a common sense that creates an unbridgeable antagonism between political democracy and socioeconomic emancipation. We argue, however, that these remain fundamental questions for re-creating the project of socialism from below.
Council Democracy and Constituent Power in Our Time

Though traditionally at odds with each other, liberalism and democracy began a rapprochement in the last decades of the 19th century. At the time, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed the mutual distrust between them: democracy could lead either to the independence and freedom of citizens or to their servitude. Democracy was the specter of the masses and the full imposition of their will. Thus, he ended Democracy in America, the second part of which was originally published in 1840, by pointing out that “the nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism.” After the cycle of revolutions of 1848, it was the Paris Commune of 1871 that forced liberal parliamentarism to definitively widen its electoral base, which was previously limited by different requirements of property, education, etc. These requirements guaranteed that parliament would represent only a certain homogeneous set of interests. At the time, rational discussion legitimized the law as expressing a “general interest,” one that was in actuality limited to the interests of the bourgeoisie. With the arrival of mass politics, however, that legitimacy would be thrown into crisis.

The idea of popular sovereignty became entrenched as a means of legitimizing democracy, bringing with it a contradiction that the ruling classes have been unable to resolve to this day. An unmitigated popular sovereignty was always potentially dangerous for bourgeois society, since in theory it could call into question capitalism’s fundamental pillar: the private ownership of the means of production. The emergence of mass politics, with the widespread development of workers’ parties and trade unions, raised the problem of how to deal with the working masses. As Gramsci pointed out, the social sectors that previously had no dog in this race changed the political structure of society by the mere act of coming together.5 The bourgeoisie responded by occupying the space in civil society that had been left unguarded by classical liberalism, giving rise to an “integral state” (dictatorship plus hegemony).6 It was no longer a matter of waiting for consensus but of organizing that consensus through the “statization” of the organizations of the working class and mass movements, developing bureaucracies within them and ensuring that their leaders collaborated in maintaining order (either by conviction or corruption). Gramsci called this trasformismo.

The eruption of the Russian Revolution and its influence on western Europe brought the orchestration of mass politics to new heights. Carl Schmitt was one of the bourgeois ideologists who most vividly articulated this problem. Using the concept of “sovereign dictatorship,” he described the passage from popular sovereignty to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The soviets or councils emerged as the political form of a new constituent power. They expressed a popular sovereignty that broke the bourgeois structure of “the People,” instead placing the working class at the center. Organisms of this type developed not only in Russia but also in Germany with the development of the räte (workers’ councils) during the 1918 revolution. In Italy, a similar phenomenon emerged in the form of the factory councils during the Red Biennium. In the United Kingdom, the working class organized itself in similar structures with the development of stewards’ committees. Bodies of self-organization, with the working class at the center, would continue to develop in the main processes of class struggle that took place in the 20th century.

Two divergent tendencies emerge from these developments. The first is working-class autonomy, while the second is the statization of workers’ organizations. A true “war of positions” develops between the two, including actions typical of a “war of maneuver.” This precedes decisive clashes between the classes, in which the bourgeoisie seeks to integrate the mass movement into the bounds of the state and co-opt its leaders; meanwhile, the working class constantly struggles to develop independently of the capitalist state and to fight the process of trasformismo. In this framework, the struggle to develop councils as independent organizations becomes more complex — in other words, to keep them from being controlled by the bureaucracies of the established organizations, and to maintain their capacity to represent different sectors of the working class and its allies, and to link social and political demands. This struggle must be undertaken to prevent the movement from being diverted into partial struggles and electoralism. For this, it is indispensable to develop currents within mass organizations that have the perspective of building a revolutionary party.

Councils are not a mysterious entity; they are mass united-front organizations. In other words, they are the product of the unity of the working class and its allies in the struggle against capital. They are institutions that can harmonize the struggle’s various demands and forms. They bring together representatives of all the groups active in the fight without being bound to any program a priori. They open their doors to all the exploited and oppressed, and their organization is constantly renewed as the movement develops. All the political tendencies of the working class have the right to dispute the leadership of these councils on the basis of the broadest democracy. During a good part of the 20th century, the councils were opposed by the main organizations of the workers movement; they were suppressed by the forces of social democracy in all countries, beginning with Germany. The Stalinist bureaucracy crushed them in the USSR; outside the USSR, it suppressed this self-organization by enforcing an alternative strategy, first with the ultra-left policy of “class against class” — which denied any form of unity with social-democratic workers’ organizations — and then later with the policy of the Popular Front, which subordinated workers’ organizations to the bourgeoisie. During the second half of the 20th century, the militarist strategies of Maoism and guerrilla warfare replaced self-organization with parties organized in the form of “people’s” armies.

Even in this scenario, however, councils far from disappeared. For example, during the Spanish Revolution, after Franco’s rise to power and at the height of the USSR’s imposition of the Popular Front policy, the working class created multiple organizations — local committees and patrols, supply committees, and revolutionary tribunals — that took control of public order, the distribution of supplies, and workplaces.7 Although they were eventually defeated, for a moment they expressed a new way of organizing society that ran parallel to the republican state. These tendencies reemerged in other revolutionary processes as well. In the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, workers developed bodies of self-organization that went on to form the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB, or Bolivian Workers’ Center), and again in the Popular Assembly which took place two decades later. In the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, an entire network of workers and peasant councils developed to resist the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 workers formed factory, tenant, and soldiers’ committees. Workers formed the shoras during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In Chile in 1972, the cordones industriales played a crucial role in organizing the working class. All these revolutionary processes expressed the tendency to working-class self-organization, even if, without being taken up strategically by political currents with mass influence, these phenomena did not develop to their most advanced form.

With the advent of bourgeois restoration, the powerful bureaucratic socialist, communist, and bourgeois nationalist apparatuses — the enemies of these tendencies to self-organization — left the scene or became mere shadows of what they were in the 20th century. But this stage also marked the historic defeat of the working class, which destroyed the environment necessary for the development of councils. It opened a period of decades without revolutions. In this period the physiognomy of the working class changed enormously. It underwent a profound process of fragmentation crossed by multiple forms of labor precarization. The trade unions, though still powerful, regressed and reached new levels of statization. The bureaucracies of these unions left important sectors of the working class (the precarious and unemployed) unorganized. Meanwhile, the “new social movements” emerged, which also underwent a wide-reaching process of statization through the NGOs, with their direct links to the state apparatus. In other words, the “integral state” may have changed its appearance, but it maintained its essential function of organizing consensus for the ruling class.

Parallel to this process, however, the working class expanded globally as never before, incorporating hundreds of millions of wage earners into its ranks. The industrial working class regressed in relation to services, but at the same time it consolidated in other sectors (logistics, transport, etc.), multiplying its “strategic positions.”8 It became more heterogeneous, much more feminized, immigrant, and multiethnic, giving the working class a much greater potential for hegemonic articulation in the face of important social movements, including the feminist and LGBTQ movement, as well as the anti-racist movement and the environmental movement. The fact that as a class its members are at the intersection of many of these movements gives it significant potential to become hegemonic. At the same time, the process of urbanization brought many of its allies closer together. The current challenge is how to articulate this multiplicity of forms of struggle and movements so that they do not blur into individual struggles or end up being co-opted by the “integral state” itself.

For all these reasons, we must interrogate whether capitalist development in the last several decades — which has changed and shaped the working class and the development of social movements — means that the perspective of councils is no longer relevant. We argue that this is not the case. On the contrary, the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the working class, as well as the multiplicity of movements and forms of struggle, corresponds to the very essence of the councils as a political form. It is exactly the absence of a perspective of uniting heterogeneous forces around a class-based nucleus like the councils that led to the energy of the mass movements of dozens of uprisings in the past decade being exhausted or channeled back into bourgeois regimes, preventing the development of new revolutionary situations. The greater complexity and diversity of sociopolitical structures and of the class framework are precisely what makes councils so crucially relevant — not only because they are instruments of struggle, but also because they represent institutions of a new type of democracy, a genuine alternative to bourgeois democracy.
Councils as an Alternative to Both Statism and Capitalist Democracy

In his analysis of Thatcherism’s emergence in the 1980s, Stuart Hall argues that the power of the neoliberal Right’s anti-statist discourse was based on two phenomena: on the one hand, the assimilation of the Labour Party and sectors of the British Left into the integral state; on the other, the experience of “really existing socialism,” in which the state, instead of gradually disappearing, had become a gigantic, bureaucratic, and totalitarian force, swallowing up civil society in the name of the people. Reformists had counterposed the market and the (bourgeois) state as guarantor of certain social needs and rights, but this had exhausted itself with the decadence of the welfare state. Citizens had been turned into passive clients, dependent on state to grant them rights.9 The neoliberal Right thus opposed the idea of freedom, understood as “market freedom,” to statism, identifying the latter with “the collective” in general.

This scheme proposed by Hall is easy to apply to more current experiences. The absence of a clear left alternative to this dilemma, from our point of view, is closely linked to the near disappearance of the subject of “councils” from discussions of revolutionary strategy. This has a key theoretical dimension for revolutionary Marxism — it refers to the political forms that make possible the passage from capitalist to socialist society. After the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels had already considered “correcting” the Communist Manifesto to state that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” It was not simply a question of replacing one statism with another, but of putting in place a particular type of state, or “semi-state,” as Engels put it, that would strive for its own extinction — that is to say, a state that would be progressively reabsorbed by civil society as class divisions disappeared, a process of transition to socialism.

Councils are the political form or institution that can enable civil society to reabsorb the state in the transitional period from capitalism to socialism; they are the way to overcome the division between the rulers and the ruled. They represent transitory forms of political power that can pave the way for the state’s extinction.

In general terms, the subject of councils goes beyond Marxism itself. Even liberal theorist Hannah Arendt points out that

since the revolutions of the eighteenth century, every great upheaval has developed the rudiments of an entirely new form of government, which arose independently of all previous revolutionary theories, directly from the course of the revolution itself, that is, from the experiences of the action and the resulting willingness of the performers to participate in the further development of public affairs. This new form of government is the council system.10

What is distinctive about the theme of councils in Marxism, which differentiates it from elaborations like Arendt’s, is that for Marxists, councils posit the combination of “freedom” with “necessity.” In other words, the realm of public affairs includes the rational planning of economic resources for the satisfaction of social needs. We will return to this later.

When comparing the democracy expressed in the councils to bourgeois democracy, we have to start from two essential differences that go beyond the political regime and are related to the class character of the state — that is to say, it is the differences between a workers state and a capitalist state. The first difference is that in a workers state, the “special bodies of armed men” with which the bourgeoisie guarantees a “monopoly on violence” — the army, the police, etc. — is replaced by the arming of the people. The question of arming the people arose with the first bourgeois revolutions, but it acquires a special meaning in the context of socialist revolution; in this case, the “people” refers to a monopoly of force by the working class and the exploited. The second essential difference is linked to changes in property relations. The new workers’ state is based on the social ownership of the means of production.

Keeping these two differences in mind, it is useful to compare the political forms of bourgeois-democratic regimes with those of council democracy in order to better identify what makes them distinct.

One of the most well-known aspects of Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune is his criticism of the bourgeois state’s division of powers — the executive, legislative, and judicial. He attributed to it a fictitious character of the state that, historically, led to the progressive concentration of power in the hands of the executive, a process that was accelerated in moments of crisis. In presidentialist regimes, the president virtually becomes a substitute for the constitutional monarch. In the case of the United States, Alexander Hamilton defended having a strong presidency, in which only one person carries the title, by looking to the example of the Roman Republic’s dictators.11 The “upper chamber,” or Senate, on the other hand, would act as a check on the presidency, vis-à-vis parliaments with a broader electoral base. They would represent a safeguard against the popular will in the legislative field. The judiciary proclaims its true “independence” from the popular vote. It is conceived as a “counter-majoritarian” power. The whole system of “checks and balances” is meant to prevent taking decisions that could harm the interests of the ruling classes. In classical terms: it serves to limit popular sovereignty.

About the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx wrote neither a treatise on constitutional law nor a history of public law; he was interested in opposing the bourgeois republic to the commune as a political form. To the division of powers he opposes a “working body” — one that is executive and legislative at the same time. This is central to understanding what we mean when we say “councils.” The notion of “working body” implies that the same assembly, as in the case of the commune, is elected not only to discuss resolutions but also to carry them out. This is an indispensable principle for council democracy, since it has much broader functions of government than any bourgeois democracy. It is not limited to defining the political guidelines of the state but includes the democratic planning of the economy. In the bourgeois republic, the economy is arbitrarily controlled and organized by the owners of the means of production; the portion of it that depends on elected representatives is, at best, limited to the projections of the state budget. As for the judiciary, in a system of council democracy it remains separate but loses its independence with respect to the vote and popular participation.

Another central issue is accountability to the electorate and the recallability of all public officials at any time. This fact alone makes this a very different scheme than that of bourgeois democracy. In bourgeois democracy, at least in theory, legitimate authority arises from the general consent of those over whom it is to be exercised. This principle ran through the bourgeois revolutions, including the English, French, and American revolutions. The mass of citizens is, above all, a source of political legitimacy rather than a body of persons called on to take part in government. Its right is the right to consent to power. Freedom of opinion so that the voice of the people can reach those who govern appears as a poor substitute for the absence of a right to give instructions, a counterpart to the independence of the representatives with respect to the represented. Through the vote, one can only sanction or repudiate a measure that has already been carried out. The principle of responsible and revocable representatives at all times, which constitutes council democracy, implies extending the influence of the represented beyond retrospective judgment, empowering them to determine the course of action. In other words, it aims to limit the separation between the representatives and the represented, and to chart a way to overcome it. Consistent with this, the councils take up the egalitarian principle of eliminating the privileges of public officials with a salary equal to that of any worker.

In 1934 Leon Trotsky wrote a critique of the institutional structure of the French Third Republic on the basis of these differences. He redefines some of Marx’s observations in order to outline an alternative regime through a series of programmatic proposals. Namely: the suppression of both the Senate and the presidency, and the constitution of a single assembly that would combine the legislative and executive powers, in which “its members would be elected for two years, by universal suffrage of all those over eighteen years of age, without discrimination of sex or nationality. The deputies would be elected on the basis of local assemblies, constantly revocable by their constituents and would receive the salary of a skilled worker.” It was not the program of a republic of councils but a transitional democratic-radical program to unite with the reformist workers against the Bonapartist tendencies of the regime, on the premise that “a more generous democracy would facilitate the struggle for workers’ power.”12

Trotsky’s view references the model of the Jacobin Convention of 1793 in arguing for the election of deputies on the basis of local assemblies. At that time, many of these assemblies did not dissolve after the election, and they took an active role in the political process. Here we have outlined another central feature of council democracy: establishing the means for facilitating the active and direct participation of workers and popular sectors in public affairs. As Lenin pointed out in State and Revolution, the goal of council democracy is that a majority of workers will at some point become public officials. Or as Gramsci pointed out, “Consensus is supposed to be permanently active, to the point that the consenters could be considered as ‘functionaries’ of the State and the elections a mode of voluntary enlistment of state functionaries of a certain type, which in a certain sense could be related (on different planes) to self-government.”13 In other words, this democracy is not limited to obtaining majority consent, nor to the right to revoke representatives; it also depends on the capacity of the democratic institutions of the workers’ state to promote the alternation of the positions of “ruler” and “ruled” of the largest possible contingents of the mass movement. Ultimately, the boundaries between these two roles would disappear.

In other words, it is a matter of tracing a path of deprofessionalization and diffusion of political activity. If we were to relate it to any of the classical democratic principles, it would be above all to that of isegoria, which was the equal right of citizens to speak in assembly. Of course, unlike ancient democracy, Marxism establishes this principle as directly linked to the propagation of material conditions for its exercise. A fundamental guarantee for this type of isegoria in a workers’ state would be given, as Lenin points out, “by the fact that socialism will reduce the working day, will raise the masses to a new life, will place the majority of the population in conditions that will allow everyone, without exception, to exercise the ‘functions of the state,’ and this will lead to the complete extinction of all state in general.”14

Through these mechanisms as a whole, council democracy seeks to establish an infinitely closer, more organic, more honest contact with the majority of working people than any other parliamentary institution. Its most important characteristic is never to statically reflect a majority that is ratified every two, four, or even more years, but to formulate it dynamically. For this reason it is can overcome juridical and parliamentary mechanisms, allowing majorities’ constituent power to be expressed in moments of revolutionary changes. Trotsky formulated this organic and dynamic relationship in the following terms:

The Soviet includes the workers of all industries, of all professions, whatever the degree of their intellectual development or the level of their political instruction. … The Soviets are an instrument of proletarian domination which cannot be replaced by anything, precisely because their cadres are flexible and elastic and all the modifications not only social, but also political which take place in the relative position of the classes, can immediately find their expression in the soviet mechanism. Beginning with the big factories, the soviets then bring into their organization the workshop workers and trade employees; from there they move to the villages, organize the struggle of the peasants against the landlords, and later raise up the lower and middle strata of the peasant world.15

Beyond the specific historical context of revolutionary Russia, we are interested in highlighting the concept he expresses here. This “flexible and elastic” structure allows the system of the councils to widen or reduce according to the extension or diminution of the social positions conquered by the proletariat and the mass movement. They are the most apt institutions for democratically achieving the social revolution in its internal dynamics, in its errors, and in its successes. Now, when the transition to socialism is advanced and consolidated — a stage that was blocked in the USSR by the emergence of Stalinist bureaucratization — soviet democracy can extend to the whole population, losing for that very reason its strictly governmental character and, in this way, transforming itself into a powerful tool for the cooperation of producers and consumers.

All these characteristics make the contrast between council democracy and bourgeois democracy, with its institutions that are based on universal suffrage and that appeal exclusively to the formal equality of atomized citizens. As synthesized by Ellen Meiksins Wood, in capitalist democracy, the separation between civil status and class position operates in two directions:

Socio-economic position does not determine the right to citizenship — and that is precisely what democratic means in capitalist democracy — but, because the power of the capitalist to appropriate the surplus labor of the workers does not depend on a privileged juridical or civic status, civil equality does not directly affect or significantly modify class inequality; and precisely this limits democracy under capitalism. Class relations between capital and labor can survive even with legal equality and universal suffrage. In that sense, political equality in capitalist democracy not only coexists with economic inequality, but leaves it fundamentally intact.16

This is the insurmountable limit of institutions based on formal citizen equality for any kind of transition to socialism. And here it is important to clarify a very common misunderstanding. The difference between the electoral mechanisms of bourgeois democracy and those of council democracy does not consist in the fact that one expresses the “universal” vote and the other does not. All democracy, as a regime of class domination, is based on exclusion. In bourgeois democracy, the person who is typically excluded is “the foreigner,” since it is based on a nationalist conception of democracy. Look at the United States. Millions of immigrants who are workers on U.S. soil are excluded from voting and citizenship for this reason. To this we could add that U.S. federalism allows electoral rights to be curtailed at the level of each state, and elections to be organized arbitrarily (arbitrary distribution of polling places, “suppression” of votes, arbitrary design of districts) and leaves more than 21 million citizens (nonforeigners) excluded from “universal suffrage” because they do not have the documents required for voting. The difference with council democracy is that in it, the exclusion is class based. Since it is a workers’ republic, the councils can pose — though this depends on the relation of forces — the limiting of political rights for the former class of exploiters. In the case of a socialist revolution in the United States, surely, it would affect an infinitely smaller proportion than those now excluded.

There is, then, a very important difference between bourgeois and council democracy in how they determine the electoral base. In bourgeois democracy, elections are carried out on an exclusively territorial scheme, which, as such, has its decisive feature in the more or less arbitrary determination of constituencies and electoral districts linked to the internal political subdivisions of each state. If in general the “citizen vote” is characterized by diluting the working class in the population as a whole, in particular, the territorial constituencies of bourgeois-democratic regimes are usually shaped to further dilute the political weight of urban workers. This type of organization of representation is consistent with the separation between civil status and class position. But, above all, it is consistent with the fact that the sphere of social production — in its broad sense — is excluded from democracy. Bourgeois democracy coexists with “factory despotism,” through which capital directs the production process and profits from the exploitation of collective labor power. This is essentially a dictatorship of the bosses within the work establishments, one that, at most, is moderated by legislation to protects the worker from pure arbitrariness.

In contrast, council democracy extends democratic principles to the whole of social life. Frédéric Lordon formulates an interesting idea in this sense under the notion of recomuna. With this expression he invokes the “republic,” but extends “the public thing,” arguing that radical democracy should be applied to any enterprise in which powers both coexist and compete. To illustrate this, he gives the example of industrial production, rightly pointing out that there is no reason it should be exempted from a democratic form, considering that those who participate in it put part of their lives in common there. The volume of employment, what is to be manufactured, quantities, rhythms, etc., should not escape common deliberation, since they have common consequences. “The simple recommunist principle,” he says, “is then that what affects all, must be the object of all — the word recomuna itself says it! — that is to say, constitutionally and equally debated by all.”17

The broadening of the “public thing” is at the core of how the electoral base is constituted in councilist democracy. Of course, this does not escape the territorial substratum, but it is not limited to it. The notion of “public space” goes beyond the bourgeois-democratic limits to become intertwined with the substratum that makes up the production and reproduction of society. Work establishments, such as factories, enterprises, offices, fields, hospitals, as well as schools and universities — with their teachers, their nonteaching workers, their students — among others, become the basic “constituencies” of councilist democracy as places of deliberation and election of representatives. These, in turn, retain a territorial dimension in which they are grouped and linked to the territory, forming local, regional, or national councils. This type of political organization, which roughly approximately with the organization of society itself for its production and reproduction, has several virtues that make up the essence of this type of democracy. On the one hand, it coheres the working people, as sovereign, preventing them from dissolving after each election. On the other hand, it makes it possible to connect deliberation with execution at all levels.

But is this type of democratic organization viable in contemporary complex societies? There is a traditional criticism of the council system, according to which it would represent a historically outdated experience incapable of adapting to the complexities of today’s societies. The background to this criticism, however, is that the more complex societies are, the more difficult democracy in general tends to be. If we situate ourselves from the point of view of capitalism, this is largely true. As Perry Anderson points out, “The freedom of a bourgeois democracy seems to set the limits of what is socially possible for the collective will of a people, and can therefore make the limits of its powerlessness tolerable.”18

But the key to council democracy is that it goes beyond capitalism, starting with the possibilities for democracy that would be raised by a drastic reduction in the working day, enabled by the rational planning of the economy and of labor, and, more generally, by the fact that, as Marx said, it is no longer working time that is the measure of wealth, but available time.19

The question is whether the idea of council democracy, and its implicit criticism of bourgeois delegative democracy, have lost or increased their value in our current moment. For us, the answer is clearly the latter. The conditions of contemporary societies, the greater complexity of social and political-cultural structures, the exponential extension of the working class and its greater heterogeneity, the multiplicity of “movements,” mass immigration — an irreconcilable enemy of nationalist notions of democracy — among other characteristics, make the idea of council democracy fully mature. The most developed experience in this respect, which was that of the Russian soviets during the first years of the revolution, is already more than a century old. To update the idea of the councils, it is not possible to stay there. To paraphrase Trotsky, the council democracy of the 21st century will be as different from that of the Russian soviets as our contemporary societies are from that of semifeudal czarist Russia.

The theories of the “combined state,” which sought to amalgamate bourgeois democracy with council democracy — from the original approach of Rudolf Hilferding to later versions such as those of Nicos Poulantzas or Antoine Artous, among others — have presented the councils as a kind of “social chamber,” or as an expression of a complementary corporative institutionality.20 Far from these caricatures, councilist forms of democracy for have the great potential to bring out the substantial heterogeneity and vitality of the subaltern classes, which today have been atomized and homogenized in bourgeois democracies. The single-party regime, which has sought to identify itself with “the soviets,” was established as a rule by Stalinism in the framework of the USSR’s bureaucratization, besieged by the exceptional difficulties it had to face in constructing socialism in an isolated, poor, and backward country with the means available a century ago. In this sense, it is of the first order to revalue the battle faced at the time by Trotsky and the Left Opposition to establish a plurality of soviet parties, since it represents a fundamental thread of continuity to re-create the ideas of the councilist democracy today.21 The struggle of interests, groups, and ideas between different parties and movements, the electoral struggles and heated debates are at the origin and in the very essence of the council system, so akin to the maelstrom of political passions, as opposed to bureaucratic coldness.

The identification of councils with the USSR’s totalitarian drift under Stalinism, when in fact this was its worst enemy, is one of the increasingly outdated ways of justifying the decadence of the really existing bourgeois delegative democracies. Today, these are steadily advancing toward an increasingly totalitarian authoritarianism, crushing democratic freedoms. Periodic elections have become a kind of symbolic ritual in which the voter is summoned only to formally select candidates who are discursively opposed to each other, but whose programs are centrally related and that, as everyone knows, do not count when it comes to governing. The new communication and information technologies have widened the space for public opinion, but as a rule they can do no more than reproduce the basic tendencies of current democracies. They serve as a poor substitute for the narrowing of their social base, limited to sectors of the urban middle classes and the upper strata of the working classes — a phenomenon that has always accompanied neoliberalism.

Conditions have changed considerably since Giovanni Sartori began to analyze the “video politics” under which the sovereign people “give their opinion,” to a large extent, on the basis of what the mass media induce them to think.22 The new communication and information technologies have amplified this thesis. Controlled by a small number of mega-corporations, they have been used by the ruling classes to develop typically totalitarian mechanisms. A linking of political leaders with an atomized mass beyond political mediations, parallel to the transformation of political parties into living dead. The new forms of conducting public opinion have strengthened its coercive function toward the opposing classes through the consent of allied social groups, as defined by Peter Thomas.23 These processes have gone hand in hand with the practical degradation of any substantial incidence of the popular will in defining the concrete action of governments that are increasingly independent of the “represented.”

This is not, however, the fatal destiny of the new communication and information technologies. As the revolt processes of the last decade around the world have shown, the new technologies also have a very important democratic potential. Undoubtedly, the reformulation of the theme of councils for the 21st century also implies exploring the democratic potentialities of the new technologies, removing them from the despotic control of corporations. One way of doing this would be to establish democratic control of the councils, in proportion to the votes obtained by each group in the council elections. The new technologies would have enormous potential in a council democracy for democratizing information, broadening democratic channels of discussion, and, above all, including ever-broader sectors in (strategic and daily) decision-making — that is, broadening participation and the democratic prerogative of giving government instructions.

Of course, the council system cannot work miracles; its function is to reflect the will of the people in the most dynamic, democratic, and broad way possible. The power of a council democracy will always depend on the vitality and conviction of the great majorities to advance toward socialism. Contructing a socialist society can only be the fruit of conscious activity. What we can affirm is that council democracy, based on the impulse of self-organization, is the only political form — of those we know today — to in which we can undertake a transition toward socialism and make viable the perspective of abolishing the state.
Planning, Collectivism, and the New Individualism

The question of councils is linked to another question that is fundamental to the relationship between “freedom” and “need,” and between political democracy and economic and social emancipation in the socialist project. This is the question of how to rationally and democratically plan the economy in order to satisfy the needs of the vast majority of people. Put another way, this is the question of how to do away with the guiding principle of profit, which is functional to the domination of a small sector of the population that concentrates our societies’ means for their production and reproduction.

The “economy” has a determining weight in capitalism’s discourse. Marx knew how to analyze it in depth in Capital and determine its real causes and effects. He showed how the fixing of practices — through their generalization and persistence — translates into a certain (fetishistic) way of perceiving existing relations. The classical bourgeois theory of society is based on the immediate hegemony of the economic. From the 19th century, according to Foucault’s analysis, a crucial transformation of modern governmentality took place through the introduction of political economy as a principle that limited government action: the government could carry out its duties only if it respected the “natural” laws of the economy. A great turning point, from 1870 onward, is the passage from the “classical” conceptions — which still relied on the labor theory of value to explain surplus and profit — to the school of marginal utility, for which the value of a good depends on the utility it has for economic agents. From then on, the emphasis would be on subjective desire.24 With the subjective theory of value, irrationalism is imposed on bourgeois economic thought.

The rise of neoliberalism develops these old tendencies in all their dimensions and generalizes them. Individuals become rational subjects by recognizing the possibility of maximizing their capacities and managing their behavior in order to achieve the greatest benefit at the lowest cost. Here, says Foucault, one internalizes obedience, subjection to an external power, in the belief that one is exercising one’s own singular freedom. Thus, neoliberalism takes the logic of liberalism much further. It is not only a matter of imposing limits on state action, but free-market economic policy comes to regulate government action. In turn, US neoliberalism sought to extend market rationality, its schemes of analysis and its decision-making criteria, even to areas that are not primarily economic, such as the family, demographics, crime, penal policy, etc.

The “neoliberal social contract” came to replace the welfare contract that followed World War II. Its constitution was much more elitist. Its social base was narrower. It exalted the individual and personal fulfillment though consumption even as it increased exploitation, the social degradation of the majority of the working class, unemployment, and poverty. “Clientelism” and criminalization became the fundamental neoliberal policies for these sectors. Since 2008, with the increase in inequality at a global level and, more recently, with a world crossed by growing military and commercial tensions between powers, those technologies of power proper to neoliberalism have become linked to consumption, credit, etc., and they are in a deep structural crisis.25 This is genuinely expressed by the popular revolts that have appeared on the political landscape over the last decade.

The underlying problem is the absence of new engines of capital accumulation. The profitability of investment in the main value-creating sectors is close to post-1945 lows.26 The neoliberal cycle has counteracted the fall in the rate of profit with certain measures, but it has not solved the problem of falling productivity. Since the restoration of capitalism in the former USSR, in eastern Europe, and above all in China, capitalism has found new terrain — that “outside” territory in which to accumulate capital that Rosa Luxemburg spoke about. It was able to enormously expand the law of value and massively incorporate new labor power (increasing absolute surplus value throughout the world). But what has set the tone of the last few years is that these counter-trends are losing steam. China has been transformed from a poor country, a destination for capital accumulation by the imperialist powers, into one that competes on the world market for opportunities to accumulate capital. The financialization of the economy, which has served until now as a pressure valve, is also reaching its limits.

The crisis of neoliberalism, however, has not reversed its consequences. Under the welfare state, the ideology of full employment, and the political practices it brought with it, extraordinarily reinforced the subordination of the working class. Through the statism linked to the idea of production and labor protection, the image of the worker as producer was replaced by that of the worker as only a “subject with rights.” Then, under neoliberalism, the worker as a producer was invisibilized, represented instead as a wage-earner-consumer or mere citizen. Based on the theory of “human capital,” workers appeared as the entrepreneurs of themselves. Society now came to be understood as a group of individuals who are active and free “economic agents,” guided by selfishness, who manage their behavior to achieve the greatest benefit.

Behind the theory of “human capital” hides the creative potential of the working class. Pertinent here, then, is Gramsci’s work in which he emphasizes the worker not only as a wage earner but also as a producer.27 This has been radically denied to the worker under neoliberalism. Workers appear as mere representatives of a corporate interest while, as producers, they are the potential bearers of new social relations of cooperation, of a social and productive force that can open the way to a new civilization. This creative potential of working men and women, both in the economic and political fields, is an indispensable starting point for re-creating the socialist project. Without it, the working class — and with it, of the mass movement — cannot take charge of production.

Socialism is, on the one hand, the real movement that, as Marx and Engels said, overcomes and ends the current state of affairs, in which workers struggle to regain their free time, their time for living. On the other hand, it is also the goal of a new society in which producers associate freely, work with collective means of production, and unite their individual forces into a great social labor force. From both points of view, socialism is opposed to the abstraction of economic society as pure automatism put forward by neoliberal ideology, the core of which is the attempt to subsume civil society under economic society, reduced to supply and demand. This notion of “economic society” in bourgeois terms is presented as indistinguishable from the property relations arising in civil society. Meanwhile, the state, which in fact supports and defends these property relations, presents itself as external to them.28

The productive consumption of abstract labor, that is, of labor in its purely social form, need not necessarily give rise to capitalist exploitation. It can form the basis of a social organization that takes the collective as a starting point and makes it a normal condition from which can emerge the consciousness of individuals who manage their own lives. It is a matter of making conscious people’s interdependence, of making visible the cooperation that appears to be “spontaneous” and that the “invisible hand” of the market seeks to hide. Individuality is the set of relationships of which each individual is a part. The question is whether individuals conceive of themselves as isolated monads or as rich in the possibilities offered by other individuals and society. The conscious reconstruction of cooperation, which is denied as such under capitalism, forms the basis economic planning as a social necessity. The absence of this principle finds catastrophic expression in capitalist crises.

Socialist economic planning is the organizing principle that can best respond to the crisis of capitalism. The idea that any kind of planning necessarily leads to bureaucratization is based on a unilateral reading of the experience of the USSR under Stalinism. This “common sense” has long been used by the bourgeoisie to undermine the socialist perspective. The truth is that Stalinism was an enemy of council democracy and, therefore, an enemy of democratic economic planning. This should be the starting point of any serious assessment of the matter, even abstracting from the backwardness and isolation of the USSR. For a socialist project from below, the issues of planning and workers’ councils are inextricably linked. In this perspective, plan and freedom do not contradict each other. This does not mean that there are no tensions between centralization — which is necessary to consider the totality of social needs and resources — and constructing the plan “from below.”

The plan must take the form of a set of options from which individual wills, channeled into new council-like institutions, can choose. It is a matter of converting need into freedom. That is to say, of overcoming the post facto confirmation of social needs — and the irrationality this implies, from the point of view of production and consumption — so that needs can be expressed by producers/consumers themselves, who can, on this basis, adopt a certain course of action among available alternatives. The goal is to make social management collective and to overcome capitalism as a system of private appropriation of the fruits of labor. The Stalinist counterrevolution left truncated the project embodied by Lenin in State and Revolution and later taken up by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed, a project for which the reappropriation of the collective went hand in hand with the rebirth of the individual within the “collectivity.”

As Gramsci pointed out, the individualism that has become anti-historical manifests itself in the individual appropriation of wealth, while the production of wealth has become increasingly socialized.29 To this he contrasts a new individualism, one that presents itself as a contest of wills but of a different type — utilitarian but disinterested. This, he posits, determines the individual’s rebirth within the “collectivity.” That is to say, a new individualism developed from within the collective, or more precisely, from the articulation of the self-management of collective life. In this case, individuals do not limit themselves to passively accepting what is imposed on them, from the outside, by unconsciously established social relations, but become conscious protagonists of the government and of collective planning. The qualitative economic shift from the private to the collective is the framework in which civil society can be revitalized as a place of self-government and the development of individual freedom (as discussed by Trotsky in his writings on the transition to socialism). It is also the prerequisite for developing that new individualism amid the conditions given by a society that is self-managed through the planning of its organic relationship with nature and with its own forms of life. In this way, necessity can be transformed into greater freedom, but not into omnipotence; its possibilities depend on the level reached by civilization at a given moment.
Socialist Planning in the 21st Century

As we know, Marx and Engels were very cautious about outlining the contours of a future socialist society. Critics of utopian socialism as they were, their work was based mainly conclusions drawn from historical experiences — in particular, of the Paris Commune. They nevertheless had some very relevant intuitions, such as the considerations on the “phases” of communism expressed by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Program. There, he describes a first phase in which there is still no abundance of resources and some norm of distribution is necessary; here everyone receives from society according to their work. To sustain this distribution method, the state must still exist in some form. In contrast, the higher phase of communism would have as its motto “to each according to their need, from each according to their ability.” That is to say, each individual contributes to society according to their capacity and receives according to what they need. Beyond these general terms, the founders of Marxism had little to say about the planning of production.

The experience of the USSR in the 20th century created new terms for this debate. Unlike the previous stage of ideological struggle, the clash of hegemonies expressed the issue of planning not only in theoretical but also in historical terms. No revision of this theme in the 21st century can succeed without drawing conclusions from that experience. Yet there is an additional difficulty in doing so. When Marx formulated his scheme of the “phases” of communism, he did not have in mind that the revolution would triumph in a backward country and remain isolated internationally. The USSR did not reach either of those two phases described by Marx. It was not a socialist society. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky states, “It would be truer, therefore, to name the present Soviet regime in all its contradictoriness, not a socialist regime, but a preparatory regime transitional from capitalism to socialism.”30 This definition is the starting point for a critical approach to that experience.

That said, the subject of socialist planning cannot be the same today as it was half a century ago, when the USSR collapsed and capitalism was restored in the countries where the bourgeoisie had been expropriated. Today, our discussion of this topic must take into account the advances in technological development, which would have fundamental consequences if applied to socialist planning. Of course, technology alone never resolves the essential contradictions of a society, but it creates new alternatives and much broader possibilities for political proposals on various problems. The starting point, then as now, remains socializing the means of production and building a workers’ state based on council democracy, but the means have changed, and it is necessary to take note of this.

The last century was marked by multiple debates on the possibilities of socialist planning: on its feasibility; on calculating values in a planned economy; on the compatibility between centralized planning to understand the whole of social needs and the decentralization required to incorporate individual preferences and democratization; on the question of quality and innovation in an economy not ruled by capitalist profit; among others. So far in the 21st century, these debates have been given a relative new impetus by the great advances in computer science, cybernetics, and communication technologies. Authors such as Evgeny Morozov, Daniel Saros, Paul Cockshott, Maxi Nieto, among others, have exposed different angles of the problematic of planning linked to new technologies, not necessarily associated with a revolutionary socialist perspective, but with bold formulations that show the vitality of the subject.

One of the classic debates on planning was about so-called socialist calculation. It was driven by figures of the Austrian school — enemies of socialism — such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, from the 1920s to the 1940s. The argument was that the only form of rational economic calculation is provided spontaneously by the market through money and competition. This made socialism an inherently inefficient economic system. According to Mises, to prove that economic calculation is impossible in a socialist economy is to also prove that socialism is impracticable. There was no way to calculate the volume of information needed to assess alternative uses of labor power and available resources, no way to account for the complex pattern of demand for final and intermediate goods needed for planning at a large scale. In contrast, capitalism allegedly allowed much broader participation in decision-making through the market.

These arguments, however, refer to a utopian capitalism that not only never existed, but also clashes head-on with the most basic characteristics of the imperialist epoch, marked by military confrontation between powers to dominate markets and by the system’s profound oligopolistic and monopolistic tendencies. At present, these characteristics, in many cases exacerbated, together with the fabulous accumulation of fictitious capital in the world economy and its respective “bubbles,” make the transparency of the price system even more utopian. Mises and Hayek’s arguments received different responses, but here we are interested in those that take into account the most recent transformations.

In his classic essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek states that “we must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function — a function which, of course, it fulfils less perfectly as prices grow more rigid.”31 Paul Cockshott and Maxi Nieto highlight this definition of the price system as a “mechanism for communicating information,” that is, of prices not as information in themselves but as a means of transmitting it. So, if the price system is a communication system, it can be replaced by another. The only limitation would be technical one, that is, the data processing capacity needed to handle in real time the volume of information in a given economy. The authors’ conclusion is clear on this point: the computational requirements for genuine large-scale socialist planning are already available.32 In the same vein, Daniel Saros argues that the arguments of the Austrian school in relation to socialist computation have been superseded by the development of modern computer technology.33

In the decades after World War II, there were several attempts in the USSR to use advanced information technologies for planning, but none of them were successful. One of the best known deployments in this sense took place in Chile, under the government of Salvador Allende, with the Cybersyn system under the British cyberneticist Stafford Beer, who aimed to centrally coordinate all state-owned industries. Today, we are light years away from the technologies on which those experiments were based. In our era of big data, the technology for planning production and product flow already exists thanks to barcode and inventory-management software. In contrast, for example, Viktor Gluschkov’s great project in the 1960s in the USSR was to digitize telephone communications to transmit more information for planning purposes. Today, information technologies and computing capacity, as well as developments in artificial intelligence, open up a totally new field for socialist planning compared to what it was in the 20th century.

These technologies are already being used on a large scale by large capitalist corporations for intra-firm planning, which coexists with capitalist anarchy at the global level as a result of competition to maximize profits. As Nieto points out,

All these possibilities can already be seen in the operation of some of today’s leading companies in the application of new information technologies, such as Wal-Mart. This retail giant operates as a networked system that connects in real time the “core” with stores, warehouses and suppliers, all through satellite communication using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagging that allows tracking the exact location of any product throughout the supply chain. Amazon, a leader in smart logistics, is a similar case. It makes a myriad of products available to consumers and, to this end, it modifies stocks and makes requests to suppliers based on real-time sales. In addition, it assigns locations, routes and warehouses using algorithms. These companies, and many others equally advanced in other fields, prefigure the type of operation of a planned socialist economy oriented towards satisfying consumer preferences.34

There is another great problem whose coordinates currently being redefined: that of the contradiction between centralized planning — which must take into account the whole economy — and the plan’s democratic aims and the decentralized character of individual preferences. Hayek argued that, since the values of the factors of production depend not only on the valuation of consumer goods but also on supply conditions for the various factors of production, only a mind that simultaneously knows all these facts could lead the planning of the economy. Historically, developments in the USSR showed planning as a reality, even under the boot of a totalitarian bureaucracy that constantly undermined the plan while dictating it. A backward country with semifeudal remnants, devastated by a bloody civil war, by two world wars, and an extensive bureaucratic counterrevolution, managed to become the second-largest economic power on the planet thanks to its expropriation of the means of production from the bourgeoisie and its (bureaucratic) planning. It even came to vie for technological leadership in the military and aerospace fields. Despite Hayek — and the Stalinist bureaucracy itself — it demonstrated the viability of planning.

Now, centralized planning with bureaucratic methods makes it possible to concentrate resources for global objectives defined as priorities, for example, the arms and aerospace race in the USSR.35 But in a diverse economy of consumer goods, production goals can multiply exponentially, making planning much more disaggregated, detailed, and complex. The volume of information required grows along with the economy’s diversification. As Trotsky notes,

If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace — a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions — such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy.36

Through this lens, Trotsky addressed in the 1930s the question of what kind of organization can elaborate and apply the plan. What are the methods to control and regulate it, and what are the conditions for its success? Here, he was not referring to a socialist society, but, as we said before, to a preparatory or transitional regime from capitalism to socialism, which was what actually existed in the USSR. To answer these questions, he analyzed three systems: (1) the system of planning commissions, both central and local; (2) the system of market regulation; and (3) the system of regulation by the masses through Soviet democracy. The first one expressed the element of centralization. The preliminary projects elaborated by those commissions had to prove their economic efficiency through commercial calculation, since it was through the second system — through the pressure of supply and demand — that the innumerable protagonists of the economy, state and private, collective and individual, made their needs and their relative strength matter. As long as the transitional stage was not overcome, economic control was inconceivable without accounting for market relations, which emerged de facto. In turn, Soviet democracy — liquidated by the bureaucracy — was the only system capable of controlling the first two.

Having eliminated all control mechanisms, bureaucratic planning exponentially increased one of the basic problems of all planning, which is the imbalance among the different branches of the economy. As Trotsky points out, it is one thing to cut shoe production in half and quite another to build only half a shoe factory. “The laws that govern the transitional society,” he asserts,

are very different from the laws that govern capitalism. But they differ in no lesser degree from the future laws of socialism, that is to say, from a harmonious economy based on a proven, secure and guaranteed dynamic equilibrium. The productive advantages of socialism, of centralization, of concentration, of unified administration are incalculable. But misapplication, particularly bureaucratic abuse, can turn them into their opposites.37

The key to the whole matter for Trotsky was that the absolute priority in planning should be to improve the living conditions of the workers and their families. Guaranteeing good food, clothing, housing, and everything that makes for the welfare of the working people was the essence of the plan’s success, or, rather, the very condition for any planning of the economy from the perspective of a transition to socialism.

Now, it is also possible to think of those three levels that Trotsky spoke ab(of drafting the plan, of control in terms of the market, of democratic control of the councils) in new terms on the basis of current conditions. In the first place, the elaboration of the plan itself. The necessarily global character of the plan marks a tension between the centralized plan and its construction from below. Yet today’s computer resources and capacity to manage information in real time would greatly facilitate the creation of several alternative plans based on democratically elected councils, with the participation of trade unions, social movements, universities, environmental organizations, etc. The general macroeconomic plans should describe the economy’s different alternative future structures as well as choices on issues such as the rate of accumulation, size of different sectors (education, health, etc.), environmental considerations, length of the working day, allocation of labor force and resources by sector, etc. The different plans could be made available to everyone and be the basis for a broad discussion, including popularization of their fundamental points. The choice between the proposed plans could be debated publicly in the councils, in the mass media, and submitted to some kind of general referendum.

In itself, this type of approach to decisions in the economic field would contrast with the way decisions are made in any capitalist country, however democratic it may be. Not only because most of the fundamental decisions under capitalism (investment, distribution of labor, accumulation, etc.) are taken in a fragmentary, incoherent, and anarchic way, without considering social needs and the global proportions across different branches of the economy, but also because they are taken in a despotic way, since it is the owners of the means of production who decide, at their own discretion. Even under bourgeois democracies, the state’s annual budget — which covers, for example, global issues such as the public debt — is decided in the parliaments, if not directly by the executive powers, behind the backs of the great majority of the population. The people, voting every two or four years, can challenge those decisions only post festum, in the next election, when the consequences for the economy and society have already unfolded. The possibility of globally discussing the destiny of economic resources through a democratically decided plan marks, in itself, a qualitative improvement from the democratic point of view with respect to any capitalist political regime.

This democratic approach is also fundamental to confronting the dislocation that capitalism has provoked in the socionatural metabolism, raising the urgency of overcoming this mode of production. In the field of ecosocialism, two broad trends coexist. On the one hand, there are those who point toward degrowth and propose a drastic planned reduction of social production in order to reduce the pressure on the planet’s resources. On the other hand, there are the ecomodernists, who find the answer to this problem in accelerating technological development. Arguments such as Aaron Bastani’s case for a “fully automated luxury communism” fetishize technological development itself as a solution to a wide range of critical issues, including the response to the ecological crisis. As Esteban Mercatante points out in “Ecology and Communism,”38 technology — which is never neutral but depends on the social relations in which it is embedded — cannot be trusted on its own to solve the upheavals that any socialist planning will inherit from capitalism. At the same time, dictating beforehand that communism must commit to degrowth ends up cutting off alternatives that a society based on the socialization of the means of production could consider in order to make the welfare of society as a whole compatible with a balanced social-natural metabolism. In this regard, Mercatante takes up some of Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass’s proposals in Half-Earth Socialism, which seek to move away from the binarism of degrowth and ecomodernism. The authors posit that if the goal of socialism is to enable humanity to consciously regulate itself and its exchange with nature, the best way to achieve this is to choose among alternative plans that represent different visions of how society’s productive capacity can be deployed. They even show how more recent developments, such as the integrated assessment models used by climate scientists, can enrich planning mechanisms.39 Planning on a socialist basis can trace various paths toward a balance with the socionatural metabolism. The democratic elaboration and discussion of alternative economic plans, with the new possibilities that exist for this, could also play a very important role here.

At the same time, new technologies would also make it possible to amplify, in a way impossible in the 20th century, the other pole of planning: creating the plan from below. That is to say, it would facilitate not only the choice between alternative global plans but also the elaboration of the inputs (information) used to make the plan and thus better express individual preferences. As Daniel Saros points out, information technology today makes it possible to communicate individual valuation scales in a much more effective and reflective manner than market mechanisms, which leave unsatisfied all the needs that the great majority cannot afford. Saros proposes a preference-ranking mechanism formulated through “needs profiles” that would allow consumers themselves to establish which products (generic and specific) are most in demand by entering a ranking scale.40 This would mean requesting products through an electronic platform similar to those used by large online stores. Beyond the concrete terms of his approach — debatable in many aspects and elaborated at a level of detail that we cannot address here — this type of approach helps us reflect on how workers and consumers could directly intervene elaborating a draft plan. Saros thinks this scheme can be adjusted almost in real time. The concept is that, by indicating their individual preferences and needs, workers and consumers would contribute to overall planning based on a certain level of individual planning, which is not too different from what many families do today.

Today’s technology would make it possible to move away from the bureaucratic idea of the “universal mind” criticized by Trotsky, and, at the same time, to coordinate innumerable macroeconomic processes with the microeconomic level through a constant flow of information far superior to that of any market. As Morozov points out, there is no longer any need to compress a large number of heterogeneous facts into the price straitjacket, when computer chips can communicate those facts directly.41 Of course all this would imply that the means for creating alternative modes of social coordination, the so-called feedback infrastructure, would have to be socialized, wrested from the hands of the technological giants that currently monopolize it. In this way, planning in a transitional economy could preempt the market-regulation system by efficiently activating the collective and individual, state and private actors of the economy, by plausibly anticipating supply and demand. And among the different branches of the economy, it could prevent imbalances. It could address the quality problems that Trotsky warned about, as well as increase the durability of products against programmed obsolescence, which is so irrational and costly in ecological terms. A bureaucratic (workers’) state is intrinsically unable to resolve problems like this, inasmuch as quality presupposes the democracy of producers and consumers, as well as freedom of criticism and initiative.

Of course, all these schemes have only an approximate value today to fire the political imagination. Many of the authors we have cited hold evolutionary visions of the advance toward socialism and overestimate the virtues of technology itself to solve problems that, in the final analysis, are political, and depend on revolutionary methods. At the same time, in the concrete analysis, specific historical determinations will pose diverse scenarios. Besides, planning implies central issues such as the existence of a strong currency — in the case of a transitional economy or set of economies in the framework of the capitalist world market — without which all calculations could be wrecked in an inflationary tide. But, above all, it will be the system of regulation by the masses through council democracy that will define whether planning will be democratically controlled as a whole and with it, the vitality of an economy based on the truly social ownership of the means of production. Hence the indissoluble linkage of the thematic of planning with that of the councils and of both with the socialist perspective. The incorporation of new conditions for thinking about all these problems is also connected to the struggle of ideologies today, and our capacity to re-create a socialist imaginary in the 21st century. Its fate will be linked, in the first place, to the political evolution of the working class and to the possibility of new socialist revolutions yet to come.
The Struggle of Ideologies and Political Practices

So far we have concentrated on council democracy and socialist planning. Of course, the current struggle of ideologies does not end there. Yet, these are two central issues for reestablishing the link between freedom and necessity, for re-creating the socialist project in the 21st century. Both questions, far from expressing arbitrary speculations on the future of humanity, are rooted in the organic crises of contemporary capitalism. Under their influence, there is a more or less generalized disarticulation of the hegemonic structure that sustained the neoliberal cycle. The crisis of bourgeois democracy and the narrowing of the neoliberal social contract could prompt people to envision alternative ways of resolving old problems, both on the left and on the right. In this context, the prospects of a clash of ideologies are rekindled and, with them, the need to deploy the socialist project in its different dimensions.

The development of a new ideology — “new” not in the sense of mere novelty but as a factor operating at some level in real life — is a necessary but insufficient condition for displacing beliefs crystallized as common sense. A revolutionary approach, which aspires to engage in a true struggle of hegemonies, implies that the struggle of ideologies unfolds hand in hand with specific practices. When the soviets first emerged in 1905, both Trotsky and Lenin — the latter in polemic with most Bolsheviks — saw in them a new political practice developed by the mass movement, antagonistic to the bourgeois practice of politics, which made it possible to articulate the various demands and forms of struggle in new institutions of self-organization to create an alternative power. This type of approach is very relevant when we think about recoving the idea of councils today.

The problem implies a correspondence between council democracy in its ideological dimension and a certain practice of politics. This link implies the establishment of a specific form of intervention in class struggle, closely linked to the development of the working class and the mass movement’s own institutions. It begins with the vanguard and the sectors of the masses that first mobilize, even at the molecular level, through institutions of unification and coordination of struggles. Given the greater heterogeneity and fragmentation of the working class, policies such as Trotsky’s “action committees,” which we have dealt with more specifically in other articles, will be useful to consider.42 This type of institution is an indispensable building block for making united-front policies effective and, therefore, for developing councils as such. At the same time, they can empower the forces of revolutionaries as organizers of the most advanced sectors of the workers and mass movement.

The same happens with the issue of socialist planning. It presupposes the conquest of a workers’ state, but just like council democracy, it has broader meaning as an ideological manifestation, as a collective mobilizing idea. The capitalist crises, with their disorganizing effect on the relations of production, make it possible to emphasize the need for planning and the collective. In the face of these crises, the perspective of planning is linked in the first instance to the notion of “workers’ control” of production, an idea that questions capital’s command in companies while seeking to introduce an elementary idea of rational planning of resources. It is an appeal to the knowledge and creativity of workers as producers, to unmask capitalists’ robbery, and to expose the waste and arbitrariness of production imposed by capitalism in the pursuit of profit.

That is how Trotsky presents it in the Transitional Program. As a transitional slogan, “workers’ control and management” is linked to challenging the problems in workers’ own experiences, such as bosses’ despotism, privileges, and arbitrariness in the capitalist organization of production, as well as the appropriation of its fruits.43 In the Transitional Program, two dimensions of workers’ control and management coexist. One is linked to partial actions, such as workers’ occupation and direct management of companies that close, in order to transform them into public service companies. Another broader one, linked more directly to the conquest of a workers’ state, is the expropriation of private banks and the nationalization of the credit system, as well as the expropriation of strategic sectors of the economy. In both cases, implementing these measures paves the way for new practices, such as developing factory and enterprise committees, and coordinating these at local, regional, and national levels.

Taken as a whole, creating institutions of self-organization and establishing workers’ control amount to a politics that seeks allow the working class to emerge as a hegemonic subject. It transcends the routine imposed by the bourgeois regime, limited to the interpellation of workers as wage earners who fight for the price of labor power, or as atomized citizens who vote every so many years for the politician of their choice. It poses a certain type of intervention in labor unions that involves, apart from the struggles for wages, the struggle for the unity of the different sectors of the labor and mass movements, a unity that the union bureaucracy prevents. The same is true in the electoral and parliamentary terrain, where this political practice involves an intervention that goes hand in hand with the development of the extra-parliamentary struggle.

This approach is important because ideologies are also practices that conform to a certain conception of the world. They acquire consistency and become incarnated in mass sectors not by chance, but because they in some way express deep structural needs. Of course, this does not happen mechanically or automatically. For this to happen, they must participate in a struggle of ideologies that can lastingly influence practices and crystallize in a contest between alternative hegemonies. This involves constituting independent institutions proper to the mass movement. This is the “war of position” that the working class must wage for its autonomy in the face of the incorporation of its organizations to the state. This preparatory “war of position” includes moments of “war of maneuver,” but it finds its final meaning in the “war of maneuver” for the conquest of power.44

In this “war of position,” the struggle to build revolutionary parties on national and international terrains seeks to condense the will that drives the struggle of ideologies and the development of new practices that can materialize in a true hegemonic alternative. It does so by deploying a whole series of gears and cogs that sink their roots in the working class, in the social and democratic movements, and in sectors of the intelligentsia. As Gramsci said,

The decisive element in every situation is the permanently organized and long prepared force which can be put into the field when it is judged that a situation is favorable (and it can be favorable only insofar as such a force exists, and is full of fighting spirit). Therefore the essential task is that of systematically and patiently ensuring that this force is formed, developed and rendered ever more homogeneous, compact, and self-aware.45

In times like ours, when the intensity of the political returns and the terrain for the struggle of ideologies reopens, the rebuilding of the socialist project and the horizon of its transformation into a material force are increasingly intertwined. The notes we have presented herein have the double goal of rethinking two central problems for the struggle of ideologies, council democracy and socialist planning, accounting for new historical circumstances and, at the same time, assessing their link to the development of new practices and the emergence of new institutions in the mass movement and from revolutionary organizations. Beyond the aspects that we have very partially addressed, the intention of this article is, above all, to promote a debate that we believe indispensable for reconstructing revolutionary Marxism in the 21st century. We hope to have contributed to it.

Translation by Juan Cruz Ferre and Madeleine Freeman

Notes

Notes↑1 Leon Trotsky, “Completar el programa y ponerlo en marcha,” in El Programa de Transición y la fundación de la IV Internacional, vol. 10 of Obras escogidas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS–CEIP León Trotsky; Mexico City: Museo Casa León Trotsky, 2017), 163.
↑2 Nicola Badaloni, “Libertà individuale e uomo collettivo in Gramsci,” in Politica e storia in Gramsci, edited by Franco Ferri (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1977).
↑3 Contrary to any nostalgia for the Cold War, the clash of hegemonies progressively degraded, in parallel to the bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR and the bureaucratic deformations that characterized the new states that emerged from the postwar revolutions. This trend could have been reversed by the processes of “political revolution” (Berlin, 1953; Hungary, 1956; Czechoslovakia, 1968; Poland, 1980–81, etc.), but they were defeated. This hegemonic hollowing out, so to speak, made it much easier for the anti-bureaucratic uprisings of 1989–91 to be diverted toward restorationist goals.
↑4 Matías Maiello, De la movilización a la revolución (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS, 2022).
↑5 Antonio Gramsci, “Maquiavelo,” in Cuadernos de la cárcel, vol. 5 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1999), 220.
↑6 Antonio Gramsci, “Pasado y presente: Política y arte militar,” in Cuadernos de la cárcel, vol. 3 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1984), 112.
↑7 Santiago Lupe, prologue to Leon Trotsky, La victoria era posible: Escritos sobre la revolución española (1930-1940) (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS–CEIP León Trotsky, 2014).
↑8 John Womack Jr., Posición estratégica y fuerza obrera (Mexico City: FCE, 2007), 50 and ff.
↑9 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso Books, 2021).
↑10 Hannah Arendt, Crisis de la república (Madrid: Taurus, 1999), 232. For a critical discussion, see Claudia Cinatti and Emilio Albamonte, “Más allá de la democracia liberal y el totalitarismo: Trotsky y la democracia soviética”
↑11 Alexander Hamilton, John Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), 374.
↑12 Leon Trotsky, “Un programa de acción para Francia,” in ¿Adónde va Francia/Diario del exilio, vol. 5 of Obras escogidas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS–CEIP León Trotsky; Mexico City: Museo Casa León Trotsky, 2013), 34.
↑13 Antonio Gramsci, “El número y la calidad en los regímenes representativos,” in Cuadernos de la Cárcel, vol. 5, 70–71.
↑14 V. I. Lenin, The State and the Revolution, in Collected Works, T. XXV (Buenos Aires: Cartago, 1958), 483.
↑15 Leon Trotsky, Terrorismo y comunismo (Madrid: Fundación Federico Engels, 2005), 121.
↑16 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracia contra capitalismo (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2000), 248.
↑17 Frédéric Lordon, Capitalismo, deseo y servidumbre: Marx y Spinoza (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2014), 147.
↑18 Perry Anderson, Las antinomias de Antonio Gramsci (Barcelona: Fontamara, 1981), 53.
↑19 Karl Marx, Elementos fundamentales para la crítica de la economía política (Grundrisse) 1857–1858, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1997), 231.
↑20 According to Hilferding, the councils of the German revolution of 1918–19 were absorbed by the bourgeois state in the form of a kind of labor chambers, sterilized of their revolutionary content. On the relation between bourgeois democracy and councils in Poulantzas, see Nicos Poulantzas, Estado, poder y socialismo (Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1980). For Artous’s approach, see Antoine Artous, “Democracy and social emancipation (II),” in Marx, l’État et la politique (Paris: Syllepse, 1999).
↑21 Leon Trotsky, “La revolución traicionada,” in La revolución traicionada y otros escritos, vol. 6 of Obras escogidas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS–CEIP León Trotsky; Mexico City: Museo Casa León Trotsky, 2014).
↑22 Giovanni Sartori, Homo videns (Madrid: Taurus, 1998).
↑23 Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 165.
↑24 Michel Foucault, Nacimiento de la biopolítica (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007).
↑25 In this regard, see Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, “Más allá de la ‘Restauración burguesa’: 15 tesis sobre la nueva etapa internacional en contrapunto con Maurizio Lazzarato.”
↑26 Juan Chingo, “El fin de los ‘vientos de cola’ de la globalización neoliberal desde fines de 1970.”
↑27 Badaloni, “Libertà individuale e uomo collettivo in Gramsci.”
↑28 Badaloni, “Libertà individuale e uomo collettivo in Gramsci.”
↑29 Antonio Gramsci, “Introduction to the Study of Philosophy,” in Cuadernos de la Cárcel, vol. 5, 201.
↑30 Trotsky, “Revolution Betrayed,” 68.
↑31 Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”
↑32 Paul Cockshott and Maxi Nieto, Cibercomunismo (Madrid: Trotta, 2017).
↑33 Daniel Saros, Information Technology and Socialist Construction (London: Routledge, 2004), 99.
↑34 Cockshott and Nieto, Cibercomunismo, 36.
↑35 The priority given to these objectives was directly linked to the bureaucracy’s Cold War strategy of geopolitical competition with U.S. imperialism (which was the one that imposed these terms). It thus resignified the theory of “socialism in one country” through so-called peaceful coexistence after Stalin’s death.
↑36 Leon Trotsky, “The Soviet Economy in Danger.”
↑37 Trotsky, “Soviet Economy in Danger.”
↑38 Esteban Mercatante, “Ecology and Communism.”
↑39 In their book Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis, Paul Cockshott, Allin Cottrell, and Jan Philipp Dapprich also discuss how socialist planning can help us avoid the climate catastrophe to which capitalism is leading us. Martín Schapiro, “La planificación económica en tiempos de cambio climático.”
↑40 Saros, Information Technology and Socialist Construction.
↑41 Evgeny Morozov, “Digital Socialism?”
↑42 Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, “Trotsky, Gramsci and the Emergence of the Working Class as Hegemonic Subject.”
↑43 Trotsky, “Transitional Program.”
↑44 Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, Estrategia socialista y arte militar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS, 2017), chaps. 3 and 4.
↑45 Antonio Gramsci, “Análisis de situaciones: Relaciones de fuerzas,” in Cuadernos de la cárcel, vol. 5, 40.

Matías Maiello
Matías is a sociologist at the University of Buenos Aires and a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (PTS) in Argentina. He is co-author, together with Emilio Albamonte, of the book Estrategia socialista y arte militar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS, 2018).

Growing Chaos in the World Situation

The world is racked by war and increasing militarism against the backdrop of U.S. imperialist fatigue. The ruling class inches it ever closer to more destructive conflicts. This forms the basis for a new internationalism.

Juan Chingo

October 27, 2024

The following is a contribution to the debates for the recent conference of the Trotskyist Fraction — Fourth International, which publishes the International Network of La Izquierda Diario. It was published on March 3, 2024.

***

How developed are the tendencies toward war?

In other articles, we have explained that the world is entering a new stage, one in which the general tendencies of the imperialist epoch are reemerging: an epoch of crises, wars, and revolutions, in Lenin’s phrase. This is confirmed by the continuation for more than two years of war between Ukraine and Russia — the first major war on European territory since the end of the Second World War. The winds of war are gaining force day by day. “European countries now spend $380 billion on defense: it was $230 billion in 2014, the year of the invasion of Crimea.” British and German politicians, experts from the Atlantic Council, the Institute for the Study of War, and other think tanks speak openly about a possible confrontation between Moscow and NATO. The British minister of defence, Grant Shapps, stated that we no longer live in a postwar world but in a prewar world.

For its part, the United States, the center of the world imperialist system, faces great difficulties. It is tired of handling two hot conflicts (Ukraine and Palestine) and one potentially hot one (Taiwan) — a sign of the overextension of its military apparatus. This, along with the potential return of Trump to the presidency, and concerns about the possible failure of the “US guarantee,” is worrying the European capitals. We are not there yet, however. This ominous prospect for “the West” means the possibility of major ruptures in Europe: some countries are seeking an alliance with Russia or China, while others align themselves more firmly with the United States. In other words, we are facing the prospect of a return to the world before 1914 and the interwar period — open confrontation between great powers, even a Third World War.

In the immediate future, the most likely scenarios are crises below the threshold represented by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, that is, without the immediate prospect of war between superpowers. In other words, we are heading toward an immediate future of increasingly dangerous local and regional wars. Further, since the United States now refuses to play the role of the world’s gendarme, it will increasingly look to its allies to play do so in their own backyards.

For example, Britain has considerably increased its military presence in the North Atlantic. This redistribution of roles generates tensions and creates difficulties of readjustment in countries such as Italy, which is still unprepared for instability in the south, especially in Africa, which shakes its zone of influence in the Mediterranean. Similar destabilizing tendencies arise in Germany with the fault line opened with Russia in eastern Europe and the Baltic countries. In this context, Poland stands out as an anti-Russian outpost ready to play the role of NATO gendarme in this hot zone. At the same time, as the influence of the United States as a hegemonic power among the Western bloc diminishes, and tensions within that bloc will multiply, as illustrated by Turkey’s moves within NATO.

There are even more such tensions in the case of the “anti-Western bloc” led by China and Russia, due to its much more heterogeneous character. This is evident in the mutual distrust of its two main pillars. Moscow is afraid of being overdependent on China, as well as China’s growing influence in central Asia. Russia has recently thawed relations with North Korea, motivated by its need for armaments for the Ukrainian war and labor power for Russian industry.

More generally, “the West” is still processing the shock war having returned to Europe. Despite many differences, there are certain striking parallels with the situation in Europe at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a period that was marked by two antagonistic blocs. At that time, French general Ferdinand Foch — who would go on to become the commander in chief of the Allied armies in 1918 and lead the final offensive against Germany — wrote,

Today’s armies are condemned to long periods of peace. Suddenly, Europe is shaken: it is war, of titanic proportions. Faced with this new situation, public opinion is confused. They demand victory from their officers. But were they really prepared?1

From a class perspective, from a revolutionary socialist perspective, it is clear that we must make every effort to ensure that the answer to this question is no, that we must help the masses mobilize to stop the ongoing warmongering escalation. But for that to be effective, we must assess the actual strength of our class enemies and the obstacles they face in their endeavor to impose such a tragic destiny on humanity as a whole.
U.S. Imperialist Fatigue and International Politics

The deep foundations of US imperialist fatigue come from the very exercise of its imperialist supremacy, pushed to its limits during the neoliberal offensive and the “harmonious” advance of globalization. Post–Cold War unipolarity was supposed to bring the world into closer alignment with the United States through the market, democracy, and military might. Instead, the last 30 years have seen military defeats, severe economic inequalities at home, and heavy international burdens. In particular, the neocon-driven “attempt to redefine imperialist hegemony” in the early 2000s turned into its opposite with the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet US interventionism has only grown (if we take into consideration invasions and other military involvements, only Andorra, Bhutan, and Liechtenstein have not seen US armed forces on their territory). This, together with the relative deindustrialization generated by “globalization” at home, led to the emergence of a new isolationist sentiment: the feeling that the United States is doing too much abroad rather than tackling economic and social challenges at home. First Trump and then Biden put forward the idea that the priority is to rebuild America. In other words, the attempt to “Americanize the world” has ended in great disillusionment, weakening the United States internally.

There is no more important element to understand the dynamics of the international situation than the state of US imperialist fatigue. This is first and foremost a question of resolve. As Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy columnist and Harvard University professor, puts it, “America is suffering from a resolve gap.”

US citizens are increasingly unwilling to bear the indefinite costs of defending their country’s global hegemony; a growing number of people contest the use of force abroad, refuse to serve in the military, demand limits on spending for allied support, and so on. This refusal to make sacrifices for US imperialism is linked to increasing social suffering: daily shootings, declining life expectancy, widespread depression among young people, plummeting quality of education, and the opioid epidemic (which is among the leading causes of death among adults under 50). The formerly strong labor aristocracy (misnamed the “middle class”) has seen the erosion of its living conditions, as showed by the UAW strike in 2023.

This decline results from globalization, or in Marxist terms, the internationalization of productive capital and the creation of value chains controlled by large multinationals. These processes have destroyed a great deal of domestic manufacturing capacity, causing relative deindustrialization, to which the Biden administration has tried to respond with its the “reindustrialization” measures. Thus, while the numbers show a booming economy, economic dissatisfaction continues to grow: the service sector cannot compensate for the level of employment among the “losers” of industrial relocation and the rationalization of the production process. In other words, the so-called American dream is stuck.

This situation is complemented by an institutional crisis, in which reaching compromises is practically impossible, as shown by the successive failures in the renewal of arms supplies to Ukraine due to sharp political polarization. Or, in a less visible but nevertheless serious example, planning long-term military spending has become impossible due to horizontal cuts and bureaucracies’ refusal to eliminate unnecessary programs, resulting in a war industry that has atrophied; one expression of this is that the navy has fewer and fewer ships, meaning that such vital functions as ensuring freedom of navigation can be severely compromised by even one of the poorest states in the world, Yemen. The inability of Congress to make decisions fuels the already-rampant distrust in federal institutions.

This institutional crisis has eroded certain pillars of US power. Above all, it has eaten away at the ability to wage a protracted war against an enemy of equal stature. On the one hand, the vast majority of young Americans are unwilling or unfit to serve in the military. In 2023, much of the armed forces missed their recruiting targets by 25 percent. This meant that the crisis of youth recruitment that hit the army in 2022 (with the lowest rates since voluntary conscription was introduced in 1973) has now extended to the rest of the military. Likewise, the US population is becoming less and less fit to serve in the armed forces. Factors such as obesity, physical and mental health problems, and even drug and opioid use mean that many young people are disqualified from military employment before they even apply.

But there are deeper problems: the military is less revered than in the past. Compared to institutions such as public education, public health care, and Congress, the military remains quite popular. Historically, however, public opinion about the military is clearly declining. According to a survey by the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Institute, from 2018 to 2022, confidence in the uniformed services fell from 70 percent to 48 percent. By 2021, in parallel with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, approval fell to 45 percent. Such a sudden plummet has not been noted for any other national institution. Finally, as we shall see below, the new wave of competition between the major powers does not particularly excite young people.

In addition to this problem of public enthusiasm, the United States faces another issue. The armed forces were subjected to the same rules of the neoliberal wave. Thus, in the United States’ “unipolar moment,” the war industry entered a period of low production intensity. Precise budgetary decisions systematically reduced munitions production. Entire industries were kept to a minimum for decades so as not to dismantle them. In some cases, it was only orders from foreign countries that kept certain capacities alive. The need today to produce ammunition in large quantities in a relatively short time collides with structural factors.2

On the one hand, US economic primacy is no longer based, as it was in the 20th century, on manufacturing industry, but on high technology and finance. As a consequence, the United States has managed to develop the most sophisticated weapons in the world, but at the price of being unable to produce them on a large scale.3 Along with this, as in the economy as a whole, there is a troublesome shortage of the skilled labor that such production requires, which severely limits the United States’ ability to fill the many orders received by arms manufacturers. Finally, the growing concentration of the defense industry is beginning to worry the Pentagon, as it creates bottlenecks, undermines incentives for innovation, and reduces its bargaining power (for example, the managers of these companies do not agree with increasing ammunition production without multiyear contracts, normally stipulated for ships and aircraft).4

Consequently, the greatest limit on the United States’ international power is on its domestic front. The diagnosis of Robert Gates, former head of the CIA and the Pentagon, is ruthless:

The domestic scene today is far from orderly: the American public has turned inward; Congress has descended into bickering, incivility, and brinkmanship; and successive presidents have either disavowed or done a poor job explaining America’s global role.

How, then, can we understand the significant changes in the United States’ management of the world (dis)order? There are many conflicting factors at play: the United States is forced to increasing chaos, giving priority to both the domestic front and the international front in its competition with China; at the same time, it must continue to affirm that the decline of its hegemony is relative — not absolute — given that the United States is still the dominant power and is likely to remain so in the near future.

First, the crisis of US hegemony is challenged amid an accelerating international situation in which great power rivalry has reappeared and US domination has been contested; in addition, this opens up the possibility for leaps in the class struggle as a consequence of wars and the unprecedented suffering of the masses.

Second, the United States is reaching the increasingly visible limit of its imperialist overextension. During the first phase of the Ukrainian war, the United States managed to regain some of its influence on the international scene after the debacle in Afghanistan, recomposing and extending NATO and an “extended Western” front, which includes Asian powers such as Japan and South Korea. Some of these conquests continue, as shown by the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO, which definitively transforms the Baltic Sea into an “Atlantic lake,” adding pressure on St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad. But the opening of a third, unexpected front in the Middle East touches a limit of the United States’ imperialist reach. It is caught in the middle of interventions in two hot fronts while keeping an ever-watchful eye on Taiwan. Meanwhile, the United States’ decisive support for Israel destroyed the last bit of political capital it had left in the so-called Global South, which was already largely reluctant to line up behind the hegemonic power against Russia. Similarly, the United States’ post-Ukrainian rhetoric has also been damaged in the “public opinion” of the imperialist countries and especially in the United States itself, as evidenced by Biden’s difficulties with the youth in the streets protesting for Palestine, who may not vote in the next presidential election.

Finally, and perhaps the most important change with continental consequences, concerns the relationship between the United States and Europe. The United States, which has guaranteed the security of the Old Continent since the end of the Second World War (while maintaining political control over it, especially over Germany), is leaving the European powers increasingly on their own, giving them the heavy burden of managing the Ukrainian crisis. The latter is no longer a US priority; taken with the deep crisis facing the main — albeit limited — European hegemony, Germany, this opens a period of strong instability and possible danger in one of the main imperialist centers. There is also the possibility of new tensions if Trump wins the election, since he does not abide by the old postwar alliances as Biden and the Democrats do.
Germany’s Strategic Backtracking and Disorientation Poses a Danger to European Stability

If there is one country that has been hit hard by the changes in the international situation, it is Germany. Before the Ukrainian war, Germany had made up for its lack of geopolitical power with economic success. It benefited from — and at the same time was subdued by — the US nuclear umbrella, Germany excelled in geoeconomics. Thanks to the stable supply of cheap energy from Moscow and the growing interconnection with the Chinese market, Germany revived its manufacturing power and protected its export companies against international competition while profiting from the European market. In turn, Berlin was at the forefront of changes in manufacturing thanks to digitalization: its famous “Industry 4.0” plan, drawn up by German industrialists and consulting firms, was later copied more or less all over the world. This Germany, a bastion of stability, certainly acted as an undisputed hegemon in Europe, not only because of the absolute centrality of the German economic core but also because of its proven capabilities within European institutions.

Today, in the face of strong shocks to Pax Americana, which are beginning to be seen both in the conflicts in Ukraine and in Gaza, Berlin finds itself geopolitically disarmed. Worse, it fears entering a disordered world in which Germany must rely on itself for security. The most remarkable result is that the debate about the bomb has been reignited; however, unlike in those years, this is no longer a fringe issue situated at the political extremes. It is openly talked about in the pages of Spiegel, one of the most widely read magazines in Germany.

On the other hand, the US has used the proxy war against Russia more or less explicitly to strike a blow at Germany. The same is the case with China. In other articles we have already explained the strong geopolitical tensions between the United States and the main European imperialist power, tensions that preexisted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; Germany is increasingly perceived by the US as a latent enemy. For the United States to maintain the hegemony it established after the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, it was vital to block Germany’s eastward path.

The sabotage of the Nord Stream, a direct maritime pipeline between the Russian exporter and the German consumer that bypassed Poland and the Baltic countries, is the most illustrative example of this ominous outcome for German power. This is a resounding blow to the Russian-German energy link, once a pillar of the special relationship between Berlin and the Kremlin. Whether it was carried out by the US directly or through third parties or the most anti-Russian countries to please the United States, it is clear that no one in Washington was outraged by it.

This is just one in a series of catastrophes that have struck Berlin since the start of the Ukrainian war. The loss of cheap Russian gas meant replacing it with much more expensive Norwegian gas. This was followed by the contraction of trade with China, from which the automobile industry in particular is suffering, unprepared for the electric car offensive in the Chinese market and beyond. Added to this is the serious loss of control of Germany’s informal economic hinterland, which stretches from eastern France and northern Italy to eastern Europe; it is the domain of the German geo-economy par excellence, from which Poland is claiming a whopping 1.3 billion euros in reparations for the treatment it suffered under the Nazis. Although Warsaw will never see this sum, the claim expresses Poland’s emergence and new geopolitical confidence as Washington’s privileged anti-Russian (and anti-German) European partner. At the same time, the United States is trying to offload on Germany — and therefore on the other European imperialist powers — the billions that will be required for reconstructing Ukraine.

Economically, this is reflected in a structural crisis. The so far modest recession in Germany conceals its depth; it expresses stagnation in the continent’s economic engine, whose growth model (which was very successful in previous moments) needs a restructuring that will take many years. Several companies in the real estate, engineering, and healthcare sectors (traditionally considered crisis-proof) are at risk of insolvency. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung puts it, “The growing number of insolvencies is not only due to the usual ups and downs. The difficulties have deeper causes.”

Of particular concern is the automotive sector, which is increasingly under pressure from competition by Chinese start-ups, which have mockingly benefited from the high level of Teutonic technology transfer. Volkswagen CEO Thomas Schäfer issued a cry of alarm: “The future of the VW brand is at stake,” he said. “High costs, falling demand, growing competition … The list goes on. … The roof is on fire.” In response to these remarks, the Economist suggested that the auto giant could have the same fate as Nokia.5 The French employers’ daily Les Echos states,

The chemical industry, at the beginning of the value chain, has also been devastated since BASF announced the closure of part of its production. With rising energy costs, more and more companies are announcing relocations, as in the case of household appliance manufacturer Miele, which plans to manufacture its washing machines in Poland in the future. This is a “structural, almost tectonic upheaval,” commented Jochen Schönfelder, an expert at the Boston Consulting Group, in the magazine WirtschaftsWoche.

For its part, the board of ThyssenKrupp, Germany’s largest steelmaker, expects to lose about 20 percent of its workforce after closing a large steel furnace, two rolling mills, and the processing plants that create steel products. This is the biggest restructuring of the German steel industry since the merger of Thyssen and Krupp in 1999.

While at the economic level Germany may face significant changes, it does so from a position of relative strength; in contrast, in the military domain — where it has been historically weak — it faces a more complicated scenario. As a Financial Times special report on the German Army puts it,

At the end of the cold war, the Bundeswehr had a troop strength of half a million, making it one of Europe’s most formidable fighting forces. But between 1990 and 2019, manpower fell by 60 per cent. The army became a kind of orphaned child, starved of funds. Military hardware was either mothballed, sold off or scrapped. One study by the German Economic Institute (IW) found the army had been underfunded relative to Nato standards by at least €394bn between 1990 and the early 2020s.

For the first time in at least 30 years, war is no longer unthinkable in Germany. In November, the popular defense minister, Boris Pistorius, sounded the alarm, saying that the world should be prepared for the “worst-case scenario” in which Russia attacks Europe, forcing it to carry out a defensive war. It is true that this rhetorical escalation is linked to maintaining Germany’s vastly increased military spending — guaranteed until 2027 by the €100 billion fund established thanks to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s “Zeitenwende” (turning point) policy. But Pistorius himself admits that such warnings are also designed to “wake up the Germans.”

Yet, despite the German government’s new rhetoric and declared intentions, for the time being, rearmament faces difficulties: the Bundeswehr remains the least effective of the armies among Europe’s most powerful countries. Worse still, according to the same Financial Times (FT) report, “despite all the new money, the Bundeswehr is in many ways even less well equipped than it was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany has given a lot of its best kit to Kyiv. And it is still not clear how and when the gaps will be filled again.”6

As we have already argued, the greatest shift has been Germany’s increasingly warlike rhetoric. In the past, politicians who advocated an increase in the defense budget were relegated to the background. Today, those who try to warn against militarism are on the defensive. Again, according to the FT, the defense minister has gone so far as to state in an interview,

Germany must become “kriegstüchtig” — a word that means “ready to wage war and capable of doing so.” It drew howls of protest from the pacifist wing of his Social Democratic party. The shift in rhetoric has been astonishing to some. “Five years ago, people would have called Pistorius crazy for using that word,” says [foreign policy advisor Christoph] Heusgen. “Now he’s Germany’s most popular politician.”

Above all, Berlin is trying to find a narrative to persuade the public to accept rearmament without producing terrifying convulsions in society. Central to the message is convincing Germans that Germany is worth defending. The effects on public opinion are still ambiguous. While percentages of support for defense spending are rising and confidence in the military is growing strongly — and the main concern of young people is no longer climate change but war — more than half of Germans are cautious about Berlin’s foreign policy; almost 70 percent do not want Germany to assume a military leadership role in Europe.

In conclusion, the end of Germany’s economic, social, security, and geopolitical stability is opening up a crisis of consensus unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic. One pollster claims that Germany’s political fragmentation is “frighteningly similar” to that of the 1930s, drawing a comparison with the “Weimar” period before the Nazis took power. The most overt evidence of the new political climate is the brutal rise in influence of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right formation created in 2013. AfD is the second-most popular party in the country; it follows the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), and comes ahead of the three forces that make up the Ampel-Koalition (consisting of the Social Democrats, the Democratic Party, and the Greens). According to polls, its coleader Alice Weidel is more popular than Chancellor Scholz.

Although anti-immigration policies and economic difficulties account for much of the AfD’s meteoric rise in recent months, geopolitical issues are now playing a greater role. More and more openly, the “anti-system forces” are demanding a revision of the conditions that allowed Germany’s integration into the US-led system. Weidel wants to hold a “referendum on Germany’s exit from the EU” and argues that Brexit should be a “model” for Germans. Sahra Wagenknecht, a former Die Linke MP who has just founded her own party, calls for restoring the energy link with Moscow, certain that Berlin is “waging an economic war against itself.” The leader of the AfD’s Thuringia branch, Björn Höcke, quotes Putin as saying that Germany and Russia together would be “unbeatable” and argues that “the interests of the United States are not the interests of Europe.”

All this is combined on the social level with growing “French-style” tendencies in the field of class struggle, as shown by the logistical and administrative paralysis caused by the recent wave of strikes by train drivers and farmers, as well as by massive demonstrations against the growth of the Far Right, combined with elements of sharp internal division, “American-style.” In this context Minister of Agriculture Cem Özdemir warned about the social climate in Germany, pointing out that “this is a dangerous division that can lead to conditions like those we see in the United States: people no longer speak to each other, no longer believe in each other and accuse each other of all the evils of the world.”

All the above leads us to say that Germany will emerge defeated from the Ukrainian war, whatever its outcome. Berlin sees how its image abroad is gradually eroding and is forced to focus on the imbalances on the internal front. Germany is entering a period of profound strategic disorientation that, given the country’s undeniable centrality, is having an impact on European politics and stability. The icy coldness in Berlin and other European capitals toward French president Emmanuel Macron’s statements leaving the door open to sending European troops to Ukraine is only one of the serious dissidences that could fracture Europe. The fact is that while the French president has affirmed that “Russia’s defeat is indispensable for the security and stability of Europe” — though it is not clear how he backs up these statements — the German chancellor is more realistic. Scholz is betting on a draw in the war; he does not want Putin to occupy more Ukrainian territory. But neither is he willing to support Ukraine in the struggle to liberate Russian-occupied territory.
Turkey Takes Advantage of the Weakness of the Major Powers

If there is any power that is making the most of the greater chaos in the international situation — generated by the weakness of the United States on the international scene, as well as the weakness of Russia in the USSR’s former area of influence as it exhausts its capacities in war — it is Turkey, which is positioned as an essential player in the different crisis scenarios.

As a member of NATO and in the face of Russian fears, Ankara is increasingly gaining geopolitical importance, thanks to the war in Ukraine. Turkey, taking advantage of its long-conquered military strength,7 is positioned as the only regional actor that can curb Russian expansionism while maintaining a tactical agreement with Moscow, despite the countries’ conflicting interests on several issues.8 This skillful geopolitical scheme allows it to oscillate between the needs of the United States and its main regional opponent. Thus, during the war, Turkey demonstrated to the world its mediating role as the only NATO country still in talks with Putin, which enabled Turkish president Recep Erdoğan to arrange for the safe passage of Ukrainian grain ships through the Black Sea during much of the conflict.9 Moreover, the possibility of a new US capitulation after Afghanistan, leaving Ukraine on its own, would amplify Turkey’s role in containing Russia in the face of Washington’s growing credibility crisis; at the same time, Ankara would improve its balance of power in the relationship with Moscow due to the heavy attrition the Russians will have suffered from the war. The fruits of Turkey’s newfound geopolitical significance are already in sight: in the end, Ankara got its way in the F-16 tug-of-war with the United States,10 or, through its military and political support to Azerbaijan in its recent war with Armenia over control of Nagorno Karabakh, Ankara has risen to hegemony in the Caucasus to the detriment of Moscow.

In relation to the Middle East, Erdoğan intends to place himself at the center of the chaos. His bet is that, at the end of the war in Gaza, the United States will be forced to allow other geopolitical coordinates than those of recent years. Israel has been the United States’ undisputed priority, while Iran was growing stronger as a regional power; this combination made it possible to contain Turkish expansionism, through a balance of power that would prevent the emergence of a regional hegemon and perpetuate a remotely manageable chaos. Let us not forget that from 2011 to 2016 in Syria, Turkey was crushed in the confrontation between the United States and Russia; on the US side, Obama made the key calculation to refuse to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime, sided with the PKK east of the Euphrates, and legitimized Iran’s regional ambitions to contain Turkey.

With Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, this regional scheme blew up, due to Israel’s strategic blindness. This is made clear by the increasing risk of regional conflict, which is what Washington wants to avoid at all costs. Erdoğan believes that after the current disaster in the Middle East, the need for a new regional arrangement will allow him to take his revenge: growing US weakness and, at the same time, the need to manage this dangerous region from a distance, enhances Turkey’s position of strength. For someone will have to guarantee the security of Saudi Arabia, contain Iran, and manage the recurrent quarrels between the various local actors in a region where anti-Zionism will strengthen, further isolating the racist state of Israel. Again, Turkey, unlike Iran or other regional powers that openly confront the US, is willing to take advantage of the imperialist powers’ weakness as a part of the NATO bloc led by Washington. Turkey will offer its services to the hegemon as it pulls the rope of that cooperation as much as possible without breaking it.

Erdoğan’s recent trip to Cairo, which definitively closes the wound opened in 2013 by the violent overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, implies a leap in collaboration with the al-Sīsī dictatorship, to which Turkey will supply the powerful combat drones, while both countries intend to coproduce different types of ammunition used in new-generation drones. This important partnership with Egypt would greatly increase Turkey’s weight in the regional equation, giving it a considerable competitive advantage over Israel and Iran.

With its strengthened position in the region and by making itself indispensable to the United States in western Eurasia, Ankara intends to make strategic gains in the eastern Mediterranean, taking advantage of Israel’s difficulties and, more problematically, reinforcing itself against Greece, its historical enemy (and contradictorily, fellow NATO member). Although Turkey will not want to miss this opportunity as in the past (Erdoğan came out heavily at a loss from his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in June 2012), the road is by no means easy. It is full of obstacles: instability means that a bad geopolitical and/or military move can bring down the whole edifice; Turkey’s economy, even if the country now counts on the financing of the Gulf countries with which it has reconciled, remains flimsy. Above all, the ups and downs of revolution and counterrevolution, as was seen in Egypt after the fall of Mubarak, can wreck the best neoimperial plans. In particular, the Egypt of Al Sisi, which Erdoğan is approaching, is a social bomb; it evokes the specter of the serious crisis that Lebanon went through after 2019. A crisis of that proportion can undermine the plans of the “new sultan of Anatolia” — as well as those of all the reactionary bourgeoisies of the Middle East.
Resistance to Militarism and the Possible Awakening of Proletarian Internationalism

The linchpin in the current militarist turn will be the masses, or “public opinion.” This is by far — and fortunately — the most backward element in the preparation or readiness for war.

As we have argued above, in the United States — the dominant hegemonic power — fewer and fewer people are willing or able to enlist, and there has been a sharp decline in the popularity of the armed forces. More interesting are some of the reasons for these trends. Unlike previous generations, especially those born after Pearl Harbor and particularly during the Cold War, young Americans have no special attachment to “American exceptionalism,” have not experienced real risk from foreign aggression, and look askance at their country’s global position. These conditions make them unlikely to risk their lives for “the homeland.” This is a matter that unnerves geopoliticians, who fear the growing slide of a significant part of the United States toward the ethereal softness of posthistory, or, to use a sexist stereotype, the “feminization” of future soldiers and the “wokeness” that is reducing military recruitment and retention, in the view of some Republican politicians.

But behind these attitudes are not only changes in lifestyles or politics, but fundamentally an awareness of the horrific traumas that wars have left behind. Thus, according to US Army marketing director Alex Fink, “the top three reasons young people cite for rejecting military enlistment are the same across all the services: fear of death, worries about post-traumatic stress disorder and leaving friends and family — in that order.” Young people find military careers too stressful. They have no intention of “putting their life on pause.” And, according to one officer, “they are convinced that serving under arms will cause them physical or emotional trauma.” This is the living legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan: by 2021, 75 percent of veterans reported suffering from mental disorders. Commenting on why military recruitment is in crisis, Ryan McMaken, executive director at the Mises Institute, says,

It’s easy to see why many young people don’t find military service especially enticing. The U.S. military lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hasn’t won a major war since 1945. More clever potential recruits are likely to notice that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was no more morally justified than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Potential recruits with critical thinking skills might also notice the military is itching to turn American soldiers into fodder for Russian artillery. In previous ages, the usual regime propaganda might have worked to convince potential recruits that “we’re fighting the Russians in Ukraine so we don’t have to fight them in Kansas City.” It’s a variation on a common lie that warmongers tell Americans. But now, the military can’t even take for granted that conservatives — historically a key demographic for recruiters — will believe it anymore. Thanks to a shift in foreign policy views among conservative populists, many young men in middle America see a disconnect between the regime’s latest wars and actual defense of the “homeland.”

If these motives are perhaps most acute in the United States, as shown by the phenomenal movement in support of Gaza and most dramatically by the tragic immolation of an American soldier shouting “Free Palestine,” they are not unique to the leading superpower. For example, more than a third of British young people under the age of 40 would refuse military conscription in the event of a new world war, a figure higher than the number of people who say they would volunteer for or accept compulsory military service.11

These elements show how public opinion in the “West” is little prepared for the new era of high-intensity wars, a euphemism for wars between powers. As this complaint of two Marine chaplains writing in the official journals of the main institutions of the armed forces shows: “Young service members (and potential service members) are confused about what ‘great power competition’ is … Gen-Z can and will fight. But first, they need to understand why that fight is necessary.”

The major states have not yet won the hearts of the new generations. The bourgeoisie will try to use the growing misery and the poison of protectionism and patriotism to break the more tolerant, open, and peaceful way of thinking of the new generations. This may change the equation in terms of the significance of the nation-state for the masses. We are just beginning to see the social, political, and ideological consequences of the Pandemic, which showed the essential role of workers. In the wake of the wave of globalization, the nation-state appeared — beyond its central character as a fundamental and indispensable instrument of globalization — as a refuge from the voracity of capital and transnationals. This appearance inverted the terms of the slogans of the Communist Manifesto of the 19th century — contradictorily, the bourgeoisie appeared internationalist and the proletariat more nationalist.

The growing turn to militarization and rivalry between great powers shows the most abject face of the nation-state’s return to the foreground. These are the objective conditions that make it possible for proletarian internationalism to revive, if we revolutionaries know how to win the hearts and minds of the new generations. In fighting for the hearts of the new generations of workers, the future of the coming decades is possibly at stake. The need for an open ideological and political struggle against the tendencies to war ceases to be propagandistic and acquires a new vitality. In the imperialist countries, it is perhaps one of the main levers for reviving class consciousness, as the international movement in support of the Palestinians is incipiently showing. Recall that the young activists of the late 1960s and 1970s carried their defiance of the ruling class over the Vietnam War into the workplace, helping radicalize it. Possibly the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are reverberating or will reverberate in the workplaces as well. That is why the strong capitulation of much of the Left to NATO in the Ukrainian war is serious, at a time when new political generations are awakening to the horrors of the foreign policies of their governments. The Leninist teaching that our main enemy is at home has a renewed relevance.

Translation by Madeleine Freeman

Notes

Notes↑1 Jean-Dominique Merchet, Sommes-nous prêts pour la guerre? (Groupe Robert Laffont, 2024).
↑2 The US war machine took about two years after Pearl Harbor to reach its industrial boom, which is not at all comparable to the situation today.
↑3 The example of World War II is instructive, as shown by journalist Jean-Dominique Merchet: “Nazi Germany was in the race for its technological performance, while the United States relied above all on its industrial performance, i.e., its ability to mass-produce at lower cost. The German Tiger tank was far ahead of the American Sherman, but almost 50,000 of the latter were produced, compared to less than 1,800 Tiger I and II. The German V1 and V2 missiles explored the ways of the future, but did not have the same strategic impact as the B-17 or B-24 four-engine bombers. The same was true of fighter aircraft: the Americans did not use any jet aircraft during the conflict, unlike the Germans, who had no less than four different models (Me-262, Ar-234, He-162 and Me-263). As for the German Type XXI submarines, their revolutionary technology made no difference. Although 118 of them were built starting in 1943, only two were able to enter operational service due to their complexity. By contrast, the 2.710 American Liberty, built simultaneously in 18 shipyards in a standardized fashion, at a rate of three ships every two days, was an essential element in the Allied victory.” Sommes-nous prêts pour la guerre?
↑4 Since the 1990s, major defense companies have consolidated from 51 to five (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman). By 2020, they shared 36 percent of all Pentagon contracts, a growth of 71 percent from 2015.
↑5 A few years later, Nokia was dismantled and its cell phone business was sold to Microsoft, which has since closed it down. “What if Germany stopped making cars?” the Economist.
↑6 In the war of attrition in Ukraine, first the old armored vehicles inherited from the former GDR were sent to Kyiv, then the obsolete versions of the Leopard-2 tanks, and finally the scarce and expensive state-of-the-art systems vital for any army were demanded. The quoted article says, “For example, Germany donated 14 2000 armored howitzers, one of the most advanced systems of its kind in the world. But under current contracts, only 10 of them will be replaced. A Defense Ministry spokesman stated that there is an option to buy 18 more for the army, ‘if funding allows.’ Meanwhile, plans to swap the five Mars II rocket artillery systems supplied to Ukraine for five Israeli-made “Puls” multiple rocket launchers are proceeding at a snail’s pace, as the Bundestag has yet to approve the purchase. It could also take years before the Bundeswehr manages to replace the 18 Leopard 2 A6 battle tanks it delivered to Kiev.”
↑7 Turkey’s defense industry is increasingly becoming a serious exporter. Faced with the United States’ decision in the 1980s to refuse to sell arms to Turkey after it occupied northern Cyprus, Turkey set out to become more militarily self-sufficient, developing its own missiles and other military equipment. Today, it is a leading developer and producer of drones. Its Bayraktar TB2 model was used by the Ukrainians in the early days of combat with great success. The success of the drones and their high profile during the Ukrainian war created a new demand. Currently, 24 countries have already contracted this model.
↑8 On the one hand, Ankara provides military and diplomatic support to Kyiv, and its president vowed never to accept Moscow’s seizure of Ukrainian territory. Turkey no longer recognizes Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. On the other hand, however, it never joined “the West” in imposing sanctions on Russia; rather, it became one of the main buyers of Russian crude oil, behind only China and India. Moreover, Istanbul’s airport remains a hub for flights to and from major Russian cities.
↑9 Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of the world, is among the world’s 10 largest suppliers of barley, corn, and wheat, according to European Union data.
↑10 After months of negotiations, in early February the US Congress approved a nearly $23 billion sale to Turkey of 40 new Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 70s and almost 80 modernization kits for its existing fleet. The deal came shortly after the Turkish Parliament approved Sweden’s NATO membership. Turkey needs these aircraft to offset its expulsion from the international consortium that builds the F-35 fighter, a punishment that came due to Ankara’s 2019 purchase of Russian-made S400 surface-to-air missiles.
↑11 The YouGov survey “show[s] that 38 percent of under-40s say they would refuse to serve in the armed forces in the event of a new world war, and 30 percent say they would not serve even if Britain was facing imminent invasion. The 18-40 age range is similar to that which the British government initially used for conscription in both the first and second world wars. One in fourteen (7 percent) say they would volunteer for the armed forces if a world war broke out, rising to 11 percent in the event that the British mainland itself was under threat. Others say that although they would not serve, they would not resist conscription if the time came — 21 percent in the case of a world war, and 23 percent in the specific case that Britain faces invasion.”

Juan Chingo
Juan is an editor of our French sister site Révolution Permanente.

Three Axes of Socialist Internationalism Today: Against Genocide, Militarism, and Imperialist Plunder

Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International October 27, 2024

From the Trotskyist Fraction — Fourth International, we are undertaking three political campaigns that we consider central to internationalist and anti-imperialist struggle today.

The following is a contribution to the debates for the recent conference of the Trotskyist Fraction — Fourth International, which publishes the International Network of La Izquierda Diario. It was published on March 24, 2024.

***

Today’s world is marked by multiple crises and abrupt changes. The capitalist triumphalism and the illusions in a “harmonious globalization” that marked the neoliberal boom period are over. The capitalist crisis of 2008 opened the way for trends towards organic crises in different countries, crisis of the “extreme center” parties, political polarization, new cycles of class struggle, and neo-reformism. We also see the growth of the extreme Right, both in the periphery — Milei in Argentina and Bukele in El Salvador, for example — and in the capitalist centers — the strengthening of Trump in the U.S. and the electoral growth of extreme right-wing parties with racist and xenophobic discourses in Europe.

Capitalism has only more suffering and misery to offer the working class and oppressed peoples around the world. While a handful of billionaires amass immeasurable fortunes, more than a billion people survive on less than a dollar a day. The capitalists have transformed the world into an uninhabitable place for the majority of humanity, and even threaten to destroy the planet. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine two years ago, and now with the genocide in Palestine, war and militarism have reappeared in the limelight. Within the framework of the beginning of an increasingly open questioning, even in the military field, of the world order commanded by the U.S., a new stage is opening. This stage is characterized by the reactivation of the more general tendencies of the imperialist epoch, defined by Lenin as one of crisis, wars, and revolutions.

From the Trotskyist Fraction — Fourth International we fight to build a world party of socialist revolution — the reconstruction of the Fourth International — because there is no other progressive solution to the catastrophe toward which capitalism is dragging us. We are an international current, with organizations in 14 countries across Latin America, Europe and the U.S., and we promote the International Network of Newspapers — La Izquierda Diario, which currently has 15 newspapers in 7 languages.

In this statement, we put forward three political campaigns that we consider key to internationalist and anti-imperialist struggle today. We extend this proposal to all organizations, militants, and individuals who share this perspective, to fight for blocs and coalitions in different countries that can express a socialist and class-independent viewpoint in the face of the most pressing challenges of the moment.
Stop the Israeli genocide and military intervention against the Palestinian people! For the right to resistance and national self-determination of the Palestinian people!

The genocide perpetrated by the Zionist state of Israel against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is the most heinous symbol of imperialist oppression of our time. More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, 13,000 of them children. In the West Bank, the Zionist army has killed hundreds of Palestinians in the last two months alone. Eighty-five percent of Gaza’s population has been displaced from their homes by the bombardment, with 1.3 million Palestinians crowded into the border town of Rafah. International organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Oxfam state that Israel is using starvation as a tactic of war, destroying Gaza’s agricultural and food distribution systems. Blocking access to vital resources, such as electricity, fuel, and food is accompanied by bombarding civilians awaiting the entry of scarce humanitarian aid. This veritable campaign of extermination against the Palestinians and the eradication of Gaza is yet another chapter in the long process of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948, the root of which is the colonial and racist character of the State of Israel, the vanguard of today’s global counterrevolution. As part of the anti-imperialist struggle of the oppressed peoples of the world, it is urgent to mobilize: Stop the genocide of the Palestinian people by the racist colonialism of Israel!

Benjamin Netanyahu has powerful accomplices in carrying out genocide against the Palestinians. In the U.S., the Biden administration has financed and given diplomatic cover to the Zionist regime, in a policy shared by both the Democratic and Republican establishment. In Europe, the imperialist governments of Olaf Scholz in Germany, Emmanuel Macron in France, Rishi Sunak in England, and Pedro Sanchez in Spain justify Israel’s offensive. Behind their cynical calls for a ceasefire, these powers not only persecute the young students and workers who demonstrate in the streets in defense of the Palestinian people, but continue to sell the weapons used by the Netanyahu government in the massacre. According to the UN itself, the U.S. and Germany are the main suppliers of arms to Israel, followed by France, England, Canada, and Australia. We are facing the fusion of Israel’s colonial and genocidal violence with state-of-the-art heavy weaponry.

This armed assistance from the imperialist powers has brought the Middle East to the brink of a regional war. Virtually all of Iran’s allies in the so-called “Axis of Resistance” have already engaged in military action on different scales: Hezbollah in Lebanon and militias linked to the Iranian regime in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. The Houthis have been using drones to intercept and attack commercial vessels with links to Israel or its allies in the Red Sea; in response, the U.S. and Britain have bombed Yemen. The State of Israel’s brutal attack against the Palestinian people could ultimately lead to a war between the U.S. and Iran. After the devastation caused in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. military occupation, the Middle East is once again under siege by the imperialist powers.

While we do not share Hamas’ methods or strategy, its actions have brought the historic struggle of the Palestinian people against the oppression of the State of Israel back into the world spotlight. For seven decades, the Zionists have been building — with the help of Western imperialism and post-World War II Stalinism — an extremely racist social apartheid regime. Settler colonialism is a type of domination that depends on the continuous occupation of the oppressed territory, the super-exploitation of indigenous labor power, and the dehumanization of the population subjected to a permanent state of terror. For this reason alone the “two-state” policy has proven to be a false promise, since the existence of an independent Palestinian state is unfeasible within the framework of the architecture of imperialist domination in the Middle East.

The brutality of the genocide has unleashed an enormous anti-war movement in the imperialist countries, the likes of which have not been seen since the mobilizations against the Iraq War or the Vietnam War in the 1970s. Mass demonstrations have occurred in the main capitals of the West, such as New York City, Washington, London, Paris, Madrid, and Berlin, in which hundreds of thousands of people have participated. In many universities such as Harvard, Oxford, and others, there have been actions of support, questioning the pacts of the academic authorities with companies that finance the State of Israel. Some militant unions or platforms of workers in support of Palestine in various countries have carried out “blockade” actions against companies that sell arms to Israel. These actions, while still isolated, show the potential that the working class has if the unions take up this struggle in a decisive way to stop the genocide.

In several countries, important sectors of the Jewish population have also mobilized to reject Zionist policies. In the Middle East, millions of people defied complicit regional governments and took to the streets in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon to repudiate the genocide and defend the Palestinian people. This is a huge fulcrum for an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist politics in the current stage of exhaustion of the neoliberal cycle, which can galvanize a new class consciousness to oppose capitalist barbarism and fight to reorganize society on new foundations.

The organizations that make up the Trotskyist Fraction — Fourth International are part and promoters of these mobilizations in all our countries and at the international level. As we say in our declaration of the Trotskyist Fraction, it is necessary to promote a great international campaign of solidarity with the Palestinian people, to organize the struggle among the oppressed peoples of the world to put an end to this genocide and confront imperialism, and to promote working class intervention with its own methods of struggle, through strikes and blockades, against the shipment of arms and the imperialist companies that support the Zionist State of Israel. In particular, we consider it key to multiply the efforts in the imperialist countries that have played key roles in sustaining the genocide in Palestine. The youth who are taking to the streets and organizing in schools, universities, and workplaces are not only key to the struggle against genocide and for the liberation of Palestine, but also to continue developing an anti-imperialist movement that puts the brakes on the rearmament of the world powers and the growing tendencies towards military conflicts. Faced with the failure of the “two state” policy and the new offensive of the ultra-Right, a massive struggle of all the Palestinian people is necessary, together with the entire Arab working class of the region, and the Jewish working class in Israel who have broken from Zionism. It is also key that an alliance is built between the workers, youth, and women who have engaged in struggle in the Middle East, like the Iranian youth, against the gendarme state of Israel and imperialism. To end the apartheid regime, it is necessary to dismantle the Zionist State of Israel. Against Zionist colonialism and imperialism, we stand unconditionally with the resistance of the Palestinian people, with a program of political independence from all the bourgeois sectors in the region.

We defend the right to national self-determination of the Palestinian people and fight for a workers’ and socialist Palestine, within the framework of a socialist federation in the Middle East. Only a state that aims to put an end to all oppression, exploitation, and imperialist reaction will be able to guarantee the territorial recovery of historic Palestine, the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, and a democratic and peaceful coexistence between Arab and Jewish people. The Arab bourgeois nationalisms of yesterday and today have shown their incapacity to carry out these tasks. The Arab bourgeoisies and monarchies, which exploit and oppress their peoples, are not allies for the liberation of the Palestinian people. Liberation is a task that will have to be undertaken by the working class and the peoples of the entire region. The unity of the Palestinian masses and the Arab masses whose governments have normalized relations with the Zionist state or those who are preparing to do so is key on this road.

Stop the genocide of the Palestinian people! Down with the Israeli military intervention and the financial and military aid of U.S. and European imperialism! Break all political and military agreements with Israel. For a major international campaign in defense of the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination. For a workers’ and socialist Palestine!
Against imperialist militarism and the militarization of borders

Within the context of the breakdown of the U.S.-led “(neo)liberal order” that has governed post-Cold War geopolitics, loud drums of war are resounding in the world. The brutal genocide in Palestine occurs alongside the war in Ukraine, which has been raging for more than two years now. Trends toward greater military clashes are also emerging in regional conflicts that are taking on global dimensions. The U.S. and UK responded to Houthi militia attacks on ships in the Red Sea by carrying out bombing raids in Yemen. And while a leap towards open warfare in the Middle East cannot be ruled out, a third front threatens to open up in Asia, where the conflict between China and Taiwan is heading for a major collision.

The war in Ukraine has so far left hundreds of thousands of people dead and wounded, and millions of people have been displaced or become refugees. This is the first major war on European soil since the end of World War II. Russia’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine was the greatest challenge to the world order and to the crisis of American hegemony of the last 30 years. NATO powers intervened in the war through financial and military support to Zelenskyy. According to Ukraine Support Tracker sources, the U.S. has so far provided more than $37 billion in direct aid, and the EU has pledged more than 144 billion euros in aid. From a military point of view, the war has been stalled for months, and has become a “black hole” for Western aid. In this framework, the Trumpist sector in the U.S. Congress has blocked the new aid package to Ukraine. A possible Trump presidency would mean leaving the EU in charge of support for the Ukrainian army and post-war financing.

The groups that make up the Trotskyist Fraction have maintained a position of class independence in the face of this reactionary war, in which both Putin and Zelenskyy, subordinated to NATO, seek to subjugate Ukraine according to their geostrategic interests. We raise the need for an international movement against the war, for the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, and against NATO’s military interventionism in Eastern Europe and imperialist rearmament. With this independent position to confront the Russian occupation and imperialist domination, we have participated in mobilizations and actions against the war, especially in Europe and the U.S. We have also proposed the formation of blocs and unitary platforms to fight for this perspective, appealing to the international unity of the working class.

In recent months, heads of state and ministers of the imperialist powers have been increasingly raising the specter of war, including the danger of nuclear war. They call on populations to make “sacrifices” today to prepare for the wars of tomorrow. In the new global scenario, the world powers are increasing their defense spending and preparing a new war industry. In 2022, with the increased budgets of NATO countries, global military spending reached a record $2.2 trillion — a figure that has continued to grow since then. The arms and military equipment companies with the highest sales in the world are the American companies Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. They are followed in the ranking by Chinese, British, French, and German companies. While geopolitical tensions combine with the risk of economic recession in several countries, one of the ways out of this recession that capitalism proposes is to develop a war economy that allows for the expansion of public spending and increase in demand in arms-producing countries. These nations are preparing for major geopolitical and military clashes. They are also preparing for a more open dispute for resources and zones of influence, at the expense of the oppressed peoples, which will transform the world into a scenario of new wars and plundering.

The other face of this militarist offensive is the reactionary nationalist discourse, the militarization of borders, and the hardening of repressive policies against migrants — the very people forced to leave their homes as a result of the plundering of their own countries by imperialist wars and occupations. In other words, the same imperialism that provokes displacements then, internally, attacks the migrants fleeing the disaster. As the Far Right grows in several countries — such as the strengthening of Trump towards the U.S. presidential elections, or Alternative for Germany (AfD) — the “Far Center” parties are adopting much of the far-right racist agenda, including anti-immigration laws, “express” deportations, and the construction of new internment centers for undocumented foreigners. In this breeding ground, racist discourses against migrant populations — who constitute a large part of the most precarious working class — are growing. Migrants are accused of using up public funds (to justify the lack of funds for education or health care), violence against women, drug trafficking in neighborhoods, and more. These reactionary policies are also sustained thanks to the role of the trade union bureaucracies, which defend corporatist positions. They refuse to fight for a program that unifies the working class in order to overcome divisions between permanent and contract workers, gender division, and racism.

In some countries, this reactionary offensive against migrants is being met with pushback. France was the scene of an impressive demonstration of more than 150,000 people in January 2024 against the Immigration Law. In Germany, in the same month, important mobilizations took place against the AfD and anti-immigration policies. In many countries, there are vanguard sectors in mobilizations that defend the idea that “native or foreigner, we are the same working class.”

To fight against militarism and the reactionary nationalism of the imperialist powers, it is urgent to fight for the union of the workers of the entire world — together with the oppressed — against imperialism. In the imperialist countries, we take up the banners of internationalists like Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky who said, “No to war, the enemy is at home!”

We seek to develop, in unity with the workers and peoples of the colonial and semi colonial countries, a true proletarian internationalism.

At the same time, we warn against the deception of those who propose false alternatives to achieve a supposed “multilateralism” in the world order. Some place illusions in the “regulatory” role of international institutions such as the UN (which has once again shown its resounding failure to prevent the genocide in Palestine), while others subordinate themselves to the imperial aspirations of reactionary powers such as Russia or China. The proposals of European reformists like La France Insoumise or Podemos — who defend a “democratic Europe of the peoples” against warmongering tendencies — are also reactionary pacifist utopias. Europe has in its history the largest number of genocides and massacres against the colonial peoples of the world, in addition to two world wars. Militarism and wars are direct children of capitalism and imperialism, in Europe and all over the world.

The third aspect is the development of a spiral of violence and poverty as a consequence of the application of neoliberal plans and odious foreign debts in Latin America. Members of the police and military corps trained at the School of the Americas — where those who carried out coups d’état orchestrated in Washington were trained — were later counted among the founders of drug trafficking “cartels.” Imperialism’s response was to impose, through local governments, internal security policies involving the financing and training of military corporations, the sale and trafficking of arms, and the participation of the armed forces in “public security” tasks.

This led to militarization, which, together with state, para-state, and narco violence, are mechanisms of social control and pave the way for a new period of plundering of natural resources in the region, along with forced displacement of communities, disappearances, executions, and femicides. This is what happened with Plan Colombia and with the Merida Initiative — in Mexico and Central America, these have been converted into the Bicentennial Framework — at the bilateral level between Mexico and the U.S. This is also the case in El Salvador, with the right-wing Nayib Bukele, who decreed a state of emergency, inaugurated mega-prisons, and is moving forward with the criminalization of poverty. This is a model copied by Daniel Noboa, president of Ecuador, and Xiomara Castro, president of Honduras. Ultra-right Argentinian president Javier Milei also intends to impose this model by giving “free rein to the police” in poor neighborhoods and sending the military to areas where strong drug trafficking networks operate. But this model is not limited to right-wing governments. In Chile, the government of Gabriel Boric also proposes the use of the military for public security, reviving proposals such as the “Critical Infrastructure Law,” which was used by conservative sectors against the working class. These sectors sought to strengthen the repressive apparatus in order to prevent new popular rebellions in the continent. In Venezuela, the regime that expresses the decadence and degeneration of the false “socialism” of Chavism, took advantage of the different reactionary attempts promoted by imperialism to militarize to the extreme the management and logic of “citizen security.” This militarization has risen to such a point that the armed intervention of the State is responsible for a third of the homicides in the country. Haiti is living in social chaos with the advance of criminal gangs promoted by the puppet government and the U.S., and will now face a new military-police intervention of a securitarian nature. At the same time, a sector of the Republican Party is fighting to designate drug trafficking as terrorism in order to pave the way for direct military interference.

Faced with this situation, a solution in favor of the working classes and the popular sectors is to break the subordination of Latin America to the designs of U.S. imperialism and international organizations. It is necessary to put a stop to militarization, and the budgets assigned to these repressive forces must be allocated to health and education. Only the working class and the popular sectors can guarantee the security of communities and cities, because they have no common interests with organized crime, the military, or the police.

We must confront the whole reactionary campaign of the world powers to make us accept their militaristic arms race. New generations do not have to be sacrificed on the altar of capitalist military catastrophes for the sake of profits; however, that may be the future if we do not fight back with all possible force. Throughout the world, the international clashes and antagonisms between the capitalist states are the complement of class antagonisms, alongside militarization and criminalization of the poor, oppressed people and migrants, and can only be overcome from an internationalist and socialist point of view.No to war and imperialist militarism! Not one euro, not one dollar more to finance arms shipments. No Putin, no NATO! For an independent position in the war in Ukraine.
Stop militarization of the borders! Immediate regularization of all migrants. For the international unity of the working class of all countries, against imperialism.
For the cancellation of the foreign debts of the oppressed countries. Enough of imperialist plunder!

Global debt has been breaking historical records. Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, it has continued to increase, with the so-called “emerging countries” experiencing the greatest debt growth. Their debt rose from 10% of the world total before the crisis to 25% in 2019, and a new leap occurred during the pandemic. In 2021, global debt, as reported by the IMF, reached $303 trillion. Studies calculate that in the period since 2000 alone, the net financial transfers from the so-called “emerging and developing countries” to the imperialist countries represented, on average, more than 8% of the annual GDP of the affected countries.

The history of sovereign debt is one of plundering for the benefit of financial centers. All nations issue debt to support the development of the State, and debt crises occur everywhere. But what characterizes dependent economies is that a significant portion of public debt (historically the overwhelming majority) is external debt (i.e. with foreign creditors) and in international reserve currency (dollar, euro, yen). This differentiates them from rich economies with significant external debt that accumulates liabilities in their own currency. The paradigmatic case is the United States, a power par excellence that uses this mechanism of indebtedness to capture wealth worldwide thanks to the dominance of the dollar.

In dependent countries, the flow is the opposite. Due to their weak economic structure and the heavy influence of foreign capital within it, money capital circulates internationally as a privileged source of financing. External debt not only finances the treasury but also compensates for deficits in foreign currency caused by a trade imbalance, or the outflow of remittances by foreign companies or the local bourgeoisie. This creates a new drainage linked to debt services, making these attempts ultimately unsustainable. The debt, which generates extraordinary profits for financial capital, translates into attacks on the living conditions of the working people in oppressed countries: brutal adjustment plans, impoverishment, budget cuts in public services, privatizations, and so on. This is the story of a large number of oppressed countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

External public debt securities are a means by which the great financial centers obtain an influx of wealth from the oppressed countries to the imperialist countries. For the imperialist economies, this debt generates, together with the rents obtained by transnational corporations, important flows of wealth. The cycles of external indebtedness in the dependent economies arise from the decision of governments as much as from the need of global capital to dump its liquidity and guarantee itself good business by charging high rates. The massive quantitative easing during the 2008 crisis meant a huge flow of U.S. dollars to the dependent economies. Debt issuance, as well as restructuring after each crisis, opens up an opportunity to big business for international finance capital in association with local intermediaries.

These are debts that fit the broad jurisprudence which uses the concept of “odious debt.” That is to say, these debts are taken by governments or regimes against the will of the people, and this situation is known in advance by the creditors. These debts trample on the “popular sovereignty” of these peoples at will: while they vote for rulers every so many years, the real decisions are taken in the imperialist countries, in the offices of creditor organizations and governments, with the local bourgeoisies as partners, conditioning and imposing the economic decisions that affect the lives of millions. This gives rise to political regimes which are nominally “sovereign,” but in reality, are subject to the tutelage of international finance capital.

For the imperialist powers, foreign debt and crises are vehicles for aggressively pushing the agenda of transnational capital. Creditors present a unified front. The IMF acts as a kind of collective creditor. In this, there are no differences between the U.S. and China. China, far from being a “benign power,” enforces IMF policy: “bailout” loans act to impose the discipline of capital; “structural adjustment” plans strive for the opening up of the economy, financial liberalization and capital exports, privatizations, flexibilization of the labor force, and enabling large-scale plundering of natural resources.

Under this umbrella, the imperialist multinationals have made progress in appropriating public utilities, transportation and energy companies, as well as the natural resources and even extraterritorial assets of the debtor countries. Examples abound. The Spanish multinational Telefónica, with its holding company Telefónica Latinoamérica, has monopolized a large part of the telecommunications services in the region. In the case of China, its loans are linked to political agreements that facilitate the entry of its companies to exploit natural resources in Latin America and Africa. This is one of the major mechanisms for plundering oppressed countries. In Africa, international organizations such as the IMF own about 35% of the debt, China owns 20%, and private entities — including banks, commodity trading companies, and investment funds — own another third. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the IMF opened new debt programs for African countries. These programs include austerity measures, taxes on food and fuel, and cuts in public spending. Currently, 60% of African countries spend more on debt repayment than on healthcare. Fourteen African countries — all former French colonies — still use the CFA franc as their currency, which France takes advantage of to plunder their resources. Multinationals established in Africa, Asia, and Latin America also take advantage of cheaper labor and the benefits of “environmental dumping” by producing in countries with less environmental regulation or for extractivist activities.

The ruling classes and their political regimes in the debtor countries are fully adapted to this customary mechanism of plundering — they actively participate in it. Often, these debts also function to subsidize the profits of local capital and leverage cycles of capital flight, signifying enormous transfers of public resources to the local bourgeoisies, which move abroad — to the imperialist countries, once again — considerable portions of the potential “national savings.” These are debts against the peoples in which the bourgeoisies of the imperialist countries and the bourgeoisies of the debtor countries join hands, although the latter are a sort of “voluntary hostage” in the situation.

Today, Argentina has become a laboratory for the application of IMF plans, which only benefit financial capital, multinationals, and the richest capitalists in the country. Poverty rates have reached nearly 60%. Wages have lost 25% of their purchasing power in only three months. Utility bills have already increased and will soon be prohibitively high, while the cuts to public services such as healthcare and education continue. Milei wants to deepen the adjustment with layoffs, privatizations, and labor reforms — a war plan against the working people. He aims to continue paying Argentina’s national debt with the hunger of the people. Since he took office, however, resistance has begun to organize. Neighborhood assemblies arose where sectors of workers and students are democratically organized. The union bureaucracy was forced to call a national strike on January 24th. The repressive protocol has been challenged several times in the streets, and already had a first defeat with the fall of its Omnibus Law, which was repudiated after three days of combative demonstrations. On March 8th, important women’s mobilizations all over the country made clear that they will not back down on the rights they have won. Different sectors of workers are facing attempts of closures or layoffs. There are tendencies towards struggle and organization from below, which clash with the passivity and divisions imposed by the union bureaucracies and Peronism. In the Trotskyist Fraction, in all nations where we have groups, we have organized actions of solidarity with the Argentine people. We have participated in united platforms with Argentines living abroad and with sectors of the political and trade union left. We support the struggle of our comrades of the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS) to develop the independent mobilization of the working class, women, and youth, against Milei and the plundering economic power. We defend the broadest united front of the working and oppressed masses to defeat Milei and his adjustments.

It is necessary to cut the transmission belts of the debt discipline and put an end to the imperialist plunder supported by all the capitalist governments. We need to develop the broadest mobilization for:Abolition of the external public debts on the oppressed countries by the imperialist states and international finance capital! Sovereign recognition of the same in the dependent countries!
Down with the IMF and all the global financial institutions at the service of international finance capital! Expropriate the imperialist companies that plunder the economic and natural resources in the oppressed countries without compensation and place them under workers’ control!
For socialist internationalism

In the Trotskyist Fraction — Fourth International, we consider it urgent to put all possible forces toward the development of a great internationalist and anti-imperialist movement, which we consider today to be concentrated in the campaigns we have proposed.

For this, it is key to fight in our places of work and study, in unions and social movements, against the pacifying and divisive influence of the different bureaucracies that collaborate with the capitalist governments. In all the countries where we are active, with all of our strength, we intend to promote the tendencies towards self-organization and coordination of grassroots struggles.

As we wrote in the beginning, through this declaration, we want to extend the proposal to carry forward these internationalist campaigns to all organizations, militants, and individuals who share these perspectives. We seek to develop blocs and coalitions in different countries that can express a class independent and socialist point of view.

We are fighting this fight as part of the struggle to build revolutionary vanguard parties and a world party of socialist revolution, which, for us, implies the refoundation of the Fourth International on a revolutionary basis. This is the great challenge ahead of us in the face of an imperialist capitalism that seeks to plunge us ever deeper into barbarism.

Translation by Charlotte White

Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International
The Fracción Trotskista—Cuarta Internacional (FT-CI) / Trotskyist Fraction—Fourth International (TF-FI) is an international tendency of revolutionary organizations.

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