CUBA SOCIALISTA.Theoretical and Political Magazine.
Edited by:  Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba

The Social and Political Aspects of the People's Struggles*

Robert Regalado Alvarez, Official of the Department of International Relations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba

Introduction

Since it is a well known idea, defended by some, rejected by others, and accepted – with scepticism or ambivalence by a broad intermediate spectrum – I prefer to begin with the conclusion of this work, which is that the key to the success of the people's struggles is achievement of the broadest, firmest and deepest democratic and multifaceted unity between the left political parties and the social movements. Instead of presuming to have found a new perspective, which would justify writing many pages but in the end repeat the same thing, I prefer to express some thoughts on a series of themes included in the debate about the relationship between the political and social aspects of the people's struggles, including the effects of the concentration of transnational political and economic power, the deactivation of the mechanisms to assimilate social demands, social fragmentation and polarization, the relation between class struggle and other social struggles, and especially the consequences of the direct or indirect ideological domination of imperialism, which constitutes the basic threat to the unity of the peoples.

The Transnational Concentration of Political and Economic Power

The denationalization of the State, the atrophy of its national functions and acquisition of subordinate transnational functions, constitute the basis of what has come to be called the "crisis of politics," one of the main manifestations of which is the "crisis of the political parties."

The nation-state, with its institutions and the system of political parties we are familiar with today is a typical product of the capitalist system of production. When referring to the passage from feudalism to capitalism in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels declared:

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff.1

In virtue of the continuity of the process of population agglomeration, centralization of the means of production and the concentration of property, which leads to the universalization of capitalist relations of production also analyzed by Marx and Engels2, after more than one hundred and fifty years since publication of the Manifesto capital, the main content of bourgeois society, goes far beyond the dimensions and form of the pre-monopolistic "big industry" of time past and its need of a corresponding national political space, the space for the circulation of capital, within which the nation-state was called upon to maintain the class domination that would guarantee the conditions for its continuous expansion.

Bourgeois society has come a long way since then. In the first place, during the last third of the 19th century the monopoly appeared, an economic category studied by Engels and capable of eliminating free competition within the national space of capital circulation. Secondly, with the outbreak of the First World War Lenin concluded that monopoly capital had fused with the state and transformed into state monopoly capitalism, in which it was no longer the whole bourgeois class that wields the reins of political power within the confines of the nation-state but only its monopolist elite. Finally, beginning with the last three decades of the 20th century, it can be confirmed that it has transformed from national monopoly to transnational monopoly and that the national cycles of capital circulation have fused into a single transnational cycle in which the monopoly is able to eliminate free competition and exercise economic domination on a universal scale.

The necessary consequence of the process of the transnational concentration of production and property is the rise of the capitalist system to a higher plane of political centralization that goes beyond the frontiers of the nation-state. In other words, transnational capital needs to put the world under "one government," "one code of laws," "one interest" – now transnational – and "one customs-tariff." Thus arises transnational monopoly capitalism.

The imperialist tendency toward formation of a "single trust" and a single "world state" was already discussed at the beginning of the 20th century. In his polemic against Kautsky's theory of "ultra-imperialism" and the "inter-imperialism" of Hobson, who claimed that monopolistic development would attenuate the contradictions of the capitalist system of production on the world scale, Lenin said that the process of absorption of "all the enterprises without exception" and of "all the states without exception" would be interrupted by the explosion of imperialist contradictions. In his own words:

There is no doubt that the development is going in the direction of a single world trust that will swallow up all enterprises and all states without exception. But the development in this direction is proceeding under such stress, with such a tempo, with such contradictions, conflicts, and convulsions – not only economical, but also political, national, etc., etc. – that before a single world trust will be reached, before the respective national finance capitals will have formed a world union of "ultra-imperialism," imperialism will inevitably explode, capitalism will turn into its opposite.3

The concept of transnational monopoly capitalism does not presuppose that monopoly has broken from its symbiosis with the imperialist state, nor that – as many authors claim – the former is "globalizing" while the latter remains "anchored" within national frontiers: it is a process in which the projection of political and economic power on the transnational scale becomes a principal function of both. The symbiosis between the imperialist state and transnational monopoly turns into the fundamental nucleus of transnational concentration of property, production and political power, which constitutes the distinctive feature of contemporary imperialism. The function of that nucleus of transnational political power is to impose norms and mechanisms that would guarantee the broadened reproduction of capital anywhere on the planet, as much through the direct action of the monopolies and imperialist states tied to them, as through the supranational agencies in their service, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB).

The transnational concentration of political power in the hands of the principal centres of imperialist power, especially U.S. imperialism, has as its counterpart the de-nationalization of political power in the weakest imperialist states and in an even sharper and more accelerated manner in the underdeveloped and dependent countries. This involves a process of devaluation of the state and its institutions, the atrophy of its national functions and acquisition of subordinate transnational functions. The weakest imperialist states and, in particular, the underdeveloped and dependent states become organic appendices of the imperialist mega-machinery of transnational power, which imposes upon them obligatory patterns and codes. Of course, it is not a uniform process; rather, it meets with a degree of resistance depending on each case.4

The Deactivation of the Mechanisms to Assimilate Social Demands

The transnational concentration of wealth and political and economic power tends to eliminate the ability of the national state to assimilate social demands. This objective tendency, derived from the conditions and contradictions of the process of capital accumulation at the present stage of imperialist development, is complemented, legitimized and re-enforced in the sphere of subjectivity by the neo-liberal doctrine.

The neo-liberal doctrine characterizes the state as a neutral entity, for whose allocation of resources various "interest groups" compete. According to this thesis, the problem of capitalist society is the "excess of democracy," understood as the increase of social pressures for allocation of state resources beyond their availability. As such, neo-liberalism starts from the premise that the state does not affect the accumulation of capital in any way – including its aversion to collecting taxes from the capitalist class – and the "solution" is to "isolate" and "protect" the state from the "super-saturation" of social demands. This is one of the main conclusions of the Trilateral Commission, which achieved notoriety in the middle of the 1970's for its recommendations on how to halt and turn back the erosion of imperialist power.

In her book, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, Holly Sklar affirms:

The 1960s are the point of departure for the trilateral analysis. J. Samuel Huntington, author of the chapter on the United States, describes this period as the "decade of democratic surge and of the reassertion of democratic egalitarianism." What must follow, as the trilateralists see it, is the reassertion of elite rule and decades of public apathy. Thus, domestic items on the trilateral agenda include: reducing the expectations of the poor and middle class, increasing presidential authority, strengthening business-government cooperation in economic planning, stricter press self-regulation and government oversight, and pacification of rank and file labour...5

In Huntington's words:

Effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups. In the past, every democratic society has had a marginal population, of greater or lesser size, which has not actively participated in politics. In itself, this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic, but it has also been one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively.6

The theme of assimilation, or not, of the social demands by the capitalist state is presented as the measure of the extent to which a political system is or is not "democratic" and "redistributive." The paradigm of bourgeois democracy we are familiar with today is influenced by: 1. the need the then emerging bourgeois class had to use parliamentarianism as an instrument in order to contend with the feudal aristocracy for political power; 2. the concessions extracted from capital by the socialist and feminist movements of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, and especially 3. the need to introduce political, economic and social reforms conceived to counteract the ideological influence of socialism, first arising from the victory of the October Revolution of 1917 and with much greater dimensions and intensity during the post Second World War period, that is, starting with the emergence of the system of socialist countries.

The history of the 19th century bourgeois revolutions shows how the bourgeoisie adapted to its own interests the system of political parties, suffrage, parliamentarianism and division of powers we know today as liberal democracy. In its origins, this system had the following objectives: first, to impose limits on absolutism through the election of a parliament and, later, to suppress the monarchy, or convert it into a figure deprived of power, through election of an executive power and the division of powers between that executive, the legislative and the judicial. That democratizing process had strict class limits: it displaced the power of the feudal aristocracy and built a "neutral" state, with respect to the struggle between factions of the bourgeoisie, but called for repression when the proletariat – which had served as "cannon fodder" against absolutism – attempted to benefit from the "democratization."

A second stage of "democratization" took place in the last third of the 19th century. This was the apogee of some European social democratic parties, especially in Germany, who were able to use, to the benefit of the proletariat, the mechanisms of participation and representation the bourgeoisie had designed and installed. The struggle for freedom of expression, political pluralism and universal suffrage constituted means for achieving popular demands like the shortening of the work day, increase of wages, workers' security, the end of discrimination against women and opposition to imperialist war.

Bourgeois democratic parliamentarianism achieved its highest expression in the so-called Welfare State, established in a large part of Western Europe during the years after the Second World War. This was a political, economic, social and ideological edifice that, even in the present stage of its dismantlement, continues to be used as the paradigm of capitalist society. The motive of the "Welfare State" was not philanthropy; rather, it was a combination of political and economic factors:

- On the economic level, the massive destruction of productive forces caused by the Second World War established the basis for two decades of almost uninterrupted expansive economic growth, without the threat of an imminent onset of a major crisis of overproduction. In such conditions, the constant growth of demand for labour power caused a rise of wages, the optimal condition for the unfolding of the Keynesian model of stimulation of economic growth by means of the increase of demand. In a prolonged and intense period of constant increase in the value of labour power, it was logical that the private monopolies, which had been fused to the state since the First World War, would have the latter shoulder a large part of the costs of their reproduction, that is, for training, education, health care, housing and other things, using the taxes collected from the whole society. Finally, starting from a certain stage of the development of capitalism, even the laws imposing on owners the payment of relatively high wage levels and other social benefits for their workers, also constitutes a means for the concentration of capital since they are requirements small and medium enterprises cannot meet, thus contributing to their absorption or destruction.7

- In the political sphere, as a result of the anti-fascist victories of the Red Army, Soviet socialism had expanded through eastern and central Europe, a fact that consolidated, for the first time in history, the existence of an alternative pole to capitalism. This new challenge, qualitatively superior to the triumph of the October Revolution of 1917, imposed the necessity to put the inter-imperialist rivalries in second place and unite efforts to carry out the policy of "Cold War," characterized by the systematic increase of the military threat, political hostility, economic boycott and the propaganda campaign attempting to disparage the recently initiated socialist system.

Among the ideological objectives of the Cold War, the domination and subordination of the peoples of Western Europe, the cradle of the ideas of socialism and communism, stands out. They were going through the consequences of the Second World War and constituted the "western frontier" of the "socialist camp." In such conditions the capitalist system needed to present in that region, and shown to the rest of the world, a "democratic" and "redistributive" face. For this, it was essential: 1) to establish a system of political parties, unions and people's organizations able to assimilate an array of demands of the lower social class sectors and 2) to maintain high wage levels accompanied with the development of a vast network of social programmes in order to complement the income of workers and provide social assistance to those who for various reasons remained outside the labour market. The third "democratization" of the capitalist system – circumscribed in a handful of industrial powers, but presented as a universal historical tendency – entered into a terminal crisis at the end of the decade of the sixties, due to the exhaustion of the period of expansive economic growth opened by the Second World War.

With the over-saturation of the goods, capital and labour power markets, the end of the economic conditions that sustained the "Welfare State" was in sight. If during the postwar period, wage growth had been the motor of the economy – through stimulation of demand –, now it became the target of the need to increase the rate of surplus value. Parallel to this, as demand decreased for the commodity that is labour power, the capitalists no longer had the previous incentive to have the state take on the costs of its reproduction through "generous" social programmes. Rather, they needed that resources be transferred to the private sector, through tax cuts, privatizations, credits and subsidies. In this way, the economic and to a large extent the political conditions for passage from the "Welfare State" to neo-liberalism were created.

It is no accident that the decade of the 1970's was the period in when the Trilateral Commission formulated its theories of governance, the essence of which is the transformation of liberal democracy into neo-liberal democracy. The difference consists in exacerbating the cult of the "democratic form," in other words, the cult of "free" elections, the multi-party system, "freedom" of expression, and of association, etc., but empty of real content, that is, of the effective decision-making power over fundamental matters of political, economic and social character. It is a matter of preventing the mechanisms of the capitalist political system from being used to impose upon the state the assimilation of social demands.8 No one better than Samuel Huntington himself to synthesize the ideas contained in this thinking:

Elections, open, free, and fair are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non. Although the governments produced by such elections may be corrupt and irresponsible, their bad qualities only make them undesirable; they do not make them undemocratic.9

Fragmentation and Social Polarization: Only of the Working Classes?

To the vicious circle of the devaluation and re-functionalization of the nation-state and the imposition of the scheme of neo-liberal democracy – which rejects the assimilation of social demands –, are added the effects of the fragmentation and polarization of social classes caused by this process, which undermine the ability of the unions and the parties and movements of the left to organize and lead the struggle of the working class and other oppressed, exploited and marginalized sectors of social classes. Nevertheless, it is suspicious that the immense majority of the concepts in vogue about these themes focus only on the fragmentation and polarization of the working class and other sections of the people, while they hide the consequences of the fragmentation and polarization of the bourgeoisie itself, and the fact that this social decomposition constitutes a symptom of the sharpening of the overall crisis of the capitalist system of production.

The idea that competition between workers – and of each worker with her/himself – undermines the unity of the proletariat and becomes an obstacle for the organization and struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie – something that more than a few, out of ignorance, attribute to "globalization" and the "scientific-technical revolution" –, was analyzed by Marx and Engels. "Competition," they state, "separates individuals from one another, not only the bourgeois but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings them together."10 In Wage Labour and Capital, Marx explains how the introduction of new machinery causes a greater division of labour, which, in turn, increases the competition between workers:

The greater division of labour enables one worker to do the work of five, ten or twenty; it therefore multiplies competition among the workers fivefold, tenfold and twentyfold. The workers do not only compete by one selling himself cheaper than another; they compete by one doing the work of five, ten, twenty; and the division of labour, introduced by capital and continually increased, compels the workers to compete among themselves in this way.11

The consequence of this process is clear: the "organization of the proletariat into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves."12

While the introduction of new machinery, the continual division of labour and the increase of competition between workers – their negative effects on class organization and struggle – are new elements, none of them constitute a peculiarity of the present stage of development of the capitalist system. However, it is certain that, in virtue of the process of transnational concentration of property and production, contemporary imperialism introduces the transnational division of labour, that is, now workers of one factory, enterprise, region, country or even continent not only compete among each other – or with themselves –, but with the whole world, because at present capital moves around the entire planet in pursuit of the highest rate of surplus value. This process is reaching its climax, having started in the 70's when the super-saturation of the markets impeded compensation for the decreasing rate of profit through the constant growth of production. This forced capital to turn to an unprecedented extent to recourses like the intensification of productive processes, and financial speculation.

The intensification of the productive processes – with its result in the increase of structural unemployment and decrease of total wages – as well as financial speculation – as capital increases in value artificially, without passing through the productive process, generating employment or creating new social wealth – create problem such as: 1) the reduction, fragmentation and polarization of the working class and other sectors of formal wage earners; 2) the creation of new semi-proletarian categories, like underemployment and the informal sector; 3) conceptualization of exclusion and marginalization – that is no longer just the "reserve army" of which Marx spoke, but entire populations that will never be incorporated into the formal relations between capital and labour; 4) the exacerbation of other social class contradictions, including those involving gender, race, culture, creed or spiritualism. However, it is not only the popular sectors that suffer the effects of social fragmentation and polarization.

As part of the worsening of the parasitism and decay of the capitalist system of production in its imperialist stage, the historical tendency that forces the absorption or destruction of the weaker bodies of capital by the stronger ones, becomes stronger and turns into the fundamental factor determining the whole process of capital accumulation on the global scale.

This unusual contradiction had already been announced by Marx when he outlined the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation: the "expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers." With the development of imperialism, this process of expropriation displaces its centre of gravity from the sphere of competition between capitalists who have recourse to the market under equal conditions, to the sphere of financial speculation, which has become the most effective means of monopolistic centralization of the social wealth, of absorption on the part of the most concentrated bodies of capital, of the wealth in any of its manifestations: living labour, past labour, surplus value, functioning capital and fictitious capital.13

The increase of the cannibalism of the capitalist class is part of a process of fragmentation and polarization, in virtue of which a dominant elite arises and consolidates itself – the transnational speculative financial oligarchy, owner of the most concentrated transnational monopolies that exercise political control over the states of the principal imperialist powers and supranational financial agencies, whose interests not only are different from those of other social classes and sectors, but also those of the lower strata of the bourgeoisie itself, which finds themselves in a process of expulsion from that class. This contradiction manifests itself 1) in inter-monopoly competition (through mega-mergers or bankruptcies; 2) in the absorption and destruction of non-monopoly enterprises of the so-called First World and; 3) in the avalanche of expropriation of the capitals of the so-called Third World, facilitated by the neo-liberal programmes of opening, deregulation, privatization, reform and restructuring, as has been happening in Latin America since the end of the 70's.

Although analysis of the metamorphosis of social classes in Latin America and the evaluation of its consequences constitute pending areas of study, it is obvious that this process not only affects the popular sectors – as has often been stated – but also the dominant classes. Facts show that the Latin American elites are experiencing a polarization between the sectors dedicated to finances, services and international trade – who manage to turn themselves into local appendices and agents of transnational finance capital, and the productive sectors and those of services oriented toward the internal market, which in some countries are already true "endangered species," remnants of developmentalism. On top of this, the relatively privileged position occupied by the urban middle strata of professionals and public employees during the period of developmentalism, is now reserved to a small group of technocrats, white collar employees of the transnational monopolies. As for the popular sectors, the workers feed the lines of unemployed, underemployed, informal workers and the marginalized, while the small and middle peasants tend to disappear and the mass of landless rural workers increases.

In conclusion, the metamorphosis of contemporary capitalism does not necessarily create a "better" or "worse" scenario for the people's struggles, but a qualitatively different scenario from the previous one, in that all that new power – objective, real evident power capital possesses in order to strengthen its domination – has its counterpart in the extraordinary sharpening of its antagonistic and insoluble contradictions, which are also objective, real and evident, but to which we usually pay much less attention.

Class Struggle and Other Social Struggles

There has been a lot of speculation in recent years about the disappearance of classes and the emergence of other social groups, with demands, needs, interests, aims and forms of struggle distinct from those of the unions and traditional political parties. With reference to an historical moment that, in any case, is not the beginning of a period of boom but the sharpening of the capitalist system's contradictions, the ideologies of contemporary capitalism use figures, data, polls and literature from the 1960's to "demonstrate" that the affluence of the developed societies causes a decline of interest in issues of material existence and an increase in concerns about "new forms" of individual liberty. Does this premise continue to be valid in the conditions of falling wages, reduction of public services and increase in unemployment that have prevailed since the 70's? Does the average European citizen continue to be so unconcerned about material existence? Nevertheless, it is certain that today there is a new interrelationship between what are strictly class struggles and other social struggles such as those concerning gender, race, culture, creed or spiritualism, the objective and subjective causes of which need to be analyzed.

The postwar period was the scenario for the spreading, through all the developed capitalist countries, of that social product Marx and Engels called "labour aristocracy," – that part of the working class "content with forging for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train"14 – which in the United States consolidated the fusion of the union bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO with the section of the bourgeoisie assembled in the Democratic Party, while in Western Europe the consequences were a change in the social class composition and ideology of the social democratic parties – that had already abandoned their own programmatic platforms in order to manage the bourgeois "Welfare State." There was a decrease of worker composition and union influence, and a growth of the so-called white collars, and the appearance of a party technocracy whose priority was to broaden and consolidate its space for participation in the parliament and government.

The relatively high level of fulfilment of the material necessities of the majority of the population of the imperialist nations, which moved the intensification of other contradictions inherent to bourgeois society to the forefront, resulted in the majority of the protest movements that broke out in the United States and Western Europe in the 1960's not being directly motivated by the contradiction between labour and capital, although all of them, without exception, originated and were conditioned by the contradictions inherent to that historical moment of the development of capitalist society.

The movement for the civil rights of Afro-Americans not only awakened the anti-racist consciousness of the Afro-American community – together with that of other national minorities like the Native peoples, Asian-Americans and the Hispanics – but also of many young white, middle class students of both sexes, who went to the south to support the "freedom riders." The movement against the Vietnam war, initiated by the refusal of the military draft and the deaths of American soldiers in the conflict, became opposition to the imperialist nature of that war, and a school for solidarity with the revolutionary and national liberation struggles in the so-called third world. The student movement and the counter-culture movement, related in their rejection of the alienation caused by individualism, consumerism, intolerance and professional idiocy and other evils inherent to the capitalist system, achieved unprecedented levels of mobilization. The feminist movement, as old as the labour and socialist movement15, acquired a new dimension with incorporation of the struggle against sexism and other form of gender oppression and discrimination. In addition, there was the then incipient movement in defense of the natural environment.16

The protest movements of the sixties and seventies constituted a starting point – in some cases a restarting point – for the social and popular movements that orient their activity toward the struggle related to themes of gender, ethnicity, culture, spiritualism, sexual preference, environment, human rights and many others, the influence of which extends to the middle and upper urban strata of Latin America. Many of these movements sowed the seeds of a link articulating the struggles of the oppressed, exploited and marginalized sectors of the developed countries, and the struggles of the "Third World." The relationship between the class struggle and other social struggles in Latin America is not, however, a mere extension of the influence of the social struggles in the United States and Western Europe. Referring to the characteristics of our region, Carlos Vilas states that,

the identity of the collective subject people is heterogeneous in its constituent elements and homogeneous in its inclusion in the world of poverty and its confrontation with exploitation and oppression – although the manifestations of that confrontation have wide variation. The plurality of constituent elements makes it necessary to refer to the "popular classes" as a doubly collective subject – due to the heterogeneousness of their ingredients and expressions –, wherein the concept of class abandons its narrow reference to the worker: 1) productive, 2) wage earning, 3) of the formal market, in order to include all those who participate as exploited and oppressed in the relations of power – political, economic, gender, cultural, ethnic... – institutionalized in the state, its mechanisms and policies.17

The author sums up by saying that, "the conclusion to be drawn from this is that the subject of class must not be seen as the past of a popular present."18

In short, the universalization of capitalist relations of production, a differentiation of the proletariat is taking place: the workers of the main industrialized powers, who as producers of the fundamental mass of social wealth, are called upon to play a decisive role in the anti-capitalist struggle, are suffering the effects of the spread of the "labour aristocracy," while the workers of the underdeveloped countries, victims of the most brutal conditions of super-exploitation, occupy less central positions for the subsistence of capitalism, at the same time as they form part of a more heterogeneous popular block. Similarly, the motivations and conditions of the struggles of the so-called new social subjects and actors can be differentiated. In the developed world, the relatively higher levels of fulfilment of material necessities have pushed other contradictions of the bourgeois society to the fore, while the "Third World" is responding to the incorporation into the cycle of capital circulation of a broad geographical, political, economic, ethnical, cultural, religious and social diversity.

Perhaps time will tell whether it was an irony of life or an anticipation of the sprouting of sharpening contradiction that caused the explosion of protest movements in the United States and Western Europe in the 1960's and the beginning of the 70's – on which the pseudo theories about the obsolescence of class struggles and the arrival of the era of "post-materialist" struggles are based – that they would occur precisely as a preamble to the unprecedented sharpening of class antagonisms.

Ideological Penetration: Neo-Liberalism and the "Third Way"

The transnational concentration of wealth and political power – with its related denationalization and refunctionalization of the state –, the deactivation of the mechanisms to assimilate social demands, the social fragmentation and polarization and the changes in the relationship between the class struggles and other social struggles, can be read two ways; it involves processes with consequences as much negative as positive. Consequently, the ideological and political perspective used to evaluate them plays a decisive role in the conclusions derived from them and the stances that the left political parties and the people's movements take starting from such conclusions.

Since "the dominant ideas are the ideas of the dominant class," a first problem is to what extent the neo-liberal doctrine, which has saturated the communications media and global theoretical production over the last two decades, has penetrated and conditioned the outlook with which the left political parties and people's movements carry out their analysis and elaborate their strategy and tactics, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, an event that not only caused a crisis of credibility for the socialist ideal, but also created conditions facilitating for imperialism the imposition of that dogma on an almost universal scale.19

In virtue of the collapse of Soviet socialism, neo-liberalism, a doctrine conceived at the end of the Second World War for the purpose of legitimizing the deepening of the economic and social inequality caused by the destruction in Europe –that was to be revived during the 70's to sanctify the concentration of wealth and massification of poverty caused by the sharpening of the capitalist crisis – went to the extreme of "putting on the clothes of others," by presenting itself as a so-called economic development programme.20 The commotion was brutal: it is still possible to remember how at the Gathering of Parties and Political Movements of Latin America and the Caribbean held in Sao Paulo in July of 1990 (what is today the Sao Paulo Forum), some political leaders stated that the left would have to provide itself with its own neo-liberalism, "more human" than the neo-liberalism of the right, that is, succumb in the face of the "end of history," and they adopted the policy of fighting for the lesser evil as their main objective. Consistent with their logic, those who continued to think that way stop attending the Gatherings of the Sao Paulo Forum and those who continued to attend realized long ago the error and carried out the exorcism.

After more than two decades of its application, neo-liberalism is a discredited but not defeated doctrine. That is, it is discredited among the peoples, but continues to be the official policy of the transnational monopolies, the imperialist powers and the supranational organizations in the service of both. It is possible to state that imperialist ideology is in a period of transit: of finding a "post neo-liberal" paradigm, a point of equilibrium between the concentration of wealth and the revitalization of some compensatory social programmes. In this sense, the "third way" of Tony Blair and the documents of the Global Progress commission – headed by Felipe Gonzalez – constitute variants of the search for an alternative that would make it possible to contain the political consequences of more than two decades of neo-liberalism, and at the same time reestablish the legitimacy of the prevailing pattern of concentration of wealth and massification of social exclusion.

The parties of European social democracy, which renounced social transformation during the post war period – in order to administer the bourgeois project called the Welfare State21 – and which after its dismantlement – when it was no longer a necessity for the ideological assault against socialism or a successful means of reproduction of capital –, now justify their convergence with liberalism, the ideological current they were born to combat, with phrases about the need to harmonize social and individual interests – something no one argues with –, but with the addition that contemporary capitalism creates the material and spiritual conditions to achieve that, as if the concentration of wealth and the massification of poverty, reaching unprecedented levels, were not the principal obstacles for doing so.

In spite of certain differences between the two, the procedure Blair and Gonzalez are using to "re-situate" themselves within the political spectrum is the same: 1) they emphasize the extreme, anti-social and inhuman nature of neo-liberalism; 2) they explain that, nevertheless, the neo-liberals are right when they speak of "objective" conditions that are impelling toward the reduction of the social functions of the state and redistribution of wealth and; 3) defend an "intermediate" position, which promotes the understanding and support of the citizens for such reductions, in return for them not being as drastic or rapid. This policy, which satisfies the interests of capital, with less social cost, allows social democracy to move toward the right in absolute terms and keep "to the left" in relative terms.

The convergence with neo-liberalism is the only road available to European social democracy. After having bet everything on the "Welfare State," the bankruptcy of that ideological edifice puts it on the public pillory today. Therefore its alternatives would be: to recognize its historical error and return to the necessity of going beyond capitalism historically, – something its nature shall never permit –, or do what it is doing, that is , pretend that it did not commit a mistake – or a betrayal –, but that "phenomena" labelled as "supernatural" changed the world in a sudden and radical way, so that now it is not possible to lead the whole society toward the "promised land," but, at the most, to the "land (of lesser evil) that is possible".

Left Political Parties and Social Movements

The influence of bourgeois ideology has put in style the analysis of concepts like politics, state, democracy, party or union in such a way that each person can love them or hate them according to her/his preference. Such Manichaeism concludes that "politics" is or is not "in crisis"; the state is God or the devil; democracy is a juridical arrangement above human beings; the party is the problem or the solution; or the labour union is friend or enemy. Frequently it ignores that there are imperialist and anti-imperialist policies; capitalist and socialist states; neo-liberal and popular "democracies"; left and right parties; and official and class labour unions. Thus, it is not a matter of implementing just any policy, participating in just any state; rejoicing with just any democracy; militating in whatever party or affiliating with whatever labour union. Nor is it a matter of promoting the unity of just any party with whatever social movement, or visa versa.

The transnational concentration of wealth and political power, the deactivation of the mechanisms to assimilate social demands and the social fragmentation and polarization make the bourgeois state incapable of fulfilling two basic functions to guarantee domination and class subordination:

1. the constant redistribution of forces of political and economic power within the national bourgeoisie, and

2. the cooption of a part of the subordinate social class groups, for the purpose of facilitating the marginalization and repression of the rest.

The incapacity of the bourgeois state to fulfil basic functions of domination and subordination of social classes causes the sharpening of the political, economic, social and moral crisis of the capitalist system of production on the global scale and, with greater intensity, in regions of the so-called Third World like Latin America. It is a matter of the creation of objective conditions for the revolutionary transformation of society, which go beyond the present level of consciousness, organization, mobilization and political struggle of the left. This leads to the situation where, for the moment, all that popular transforming energy pours out into social explosions lacking leadership and political orientation, whose outcome, in general, is the recycling of the neo-liberal system of domination itself.

What impedes the unity of the popular block, organized as a flourishing and solid network of left parties and social movements, as much on the national as regional and universal scale, capable of bringing about the revolutionary transformation of society, is the pernicious effect of the penetration of imperialist ideology in its sweetened versions of the "third way," within the left political parties as well as the social movements. This is the reason for the rejection by the most radical sections of the popular movement of the political trends of the "possiblist" left, and visa versa. It is also the reason for the European social democratic parties' fears of the "social movements" interacting with and being "contaminated" by the political parties of the left.

Notes

1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, vol. 6 pp. 488-489.

2. "The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionarists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature." ibid. p. 488.

3. V.I. Lenin, Preface to Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy, International Publishers, 1929.

4. See: Transnacionalización y desnacionalización: ensayos sobre el capitalismo contemporáneo, ob. cit., pp. 220-221

5. Holly Sklar, "Trilateralism: managing dependence and democracy – an overview," in: Holly Sklar (editor) Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, South End Press, Boston, 1980, p. 38.

6. Samuel Huntington, cited by Holly Sklar, ibid.

7. See: Frederick Engels, "Preface to Condition of the Working Class in England," Marx Engels Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, vol. 3, p. 442.

8. Another angle of analysis of this process of exacerbation of the formal aspects of the democracy and the loss of any vestige of a real content is contributed by Hugo Zemelman who emphasizes the alternatives within the project: "What we are seeing at this time in Latin America is that open democracy to the alternation of projects, of which Allende was a example, is closing. On the contrary, a democratic system exists spearheaded by the same transnational institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, not to speak of the State Department, which are interested in an alternative; as such it is a game of majority and minority within the parameters of a single and non-negotiable project and which is identified with democracy; such that, all ideas of alternative projects are called anti-democratic no matter how democratic they are." Hugo Zemelman, "Lessons on the Government of Popular Unity in Chile," in: Left Governments in Latin America: The Challenge of Change, Beatriz Stolowicz, coordinator, Plaza y Valdés, Mexico, D.F., 1999, pp. 35-36.

9. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave Democratization in the Late 20th Century, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, pp. 22 and 23.

10. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Feuerbach, Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks," Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, vol. 5, p. 75.

11. Karl Marx, "Wage Labour and Capital," Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, vol. 9, p. 225.

12. Manifesto of the Communist Party, op. cit., p. 493.

13. See: Transnacionalización y desnacionalización: ensayos sobre el capitalismo contemporáneo, ob. cit. p.185. See also: Karl Marx, Capital, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p. 714.

14. "Wage Labour and Capital," op. cit., p. 221.

15. "One hundred and fifty years ago two manifestos were published, one in February and one in July. One, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, is well-known. The other, The Declaration of Sentiments, was not known by the large majority of people at that time and unfortunately it has also been ignored on this anniversary. The Statement of the women gathered in Seneca Falls represents the elaboration of the first political points of another social movement which throughout the century and a half continues to attempt, also with ebbs and flows, with unifying proposals and divisions, to be recognized as the bearer of the voices of the excluded and repeatedly forgotten in the proposals of political and social organizations. A fine and sinuous thread, sometimes hidden for years, ties the political proposals from the past with the present debate and objectives of the movement. When New York was a mere village, a group of some 300 women and men met to draft the manifesto in 12 points entitled Declaration of Sentiments. That was on July 19-20, 1848." Lucía González Alonso, "Cuestión social, cuestión de géneros: Del 'olvido' al diálogo," Papeles de la FIM," No. 10, 2ª. Época, Fundación de Investigaciones Marxistas, Madrid, 1998, p. 131.

16. The class determination of these movements is, furthermore, obvious: the composition and demands of the black movement and those of other ethnic minorities maintain a direct relation with poverty, while the movements such as the feminist or ecological have mainly a middle class composition.

17. Carlos Vilas, "Actores, sujetos, movimientos: ¿Dónde quedaron las clases?," Nuestra Bandera No. 176/177, Vol. 2, Madrid, 1998, p. 34.

18. Ibid.

19. When speaking of neo-liberalism as a universal dogma we have in mind that this doctrine was not implied in such an important imperialist country as Japan, nor in the exporting platforms of the Pacific Basin known as the "Asian Tigers." We also recognize that the application of the "model" has had variations in accordance with whether a country is developed or undeveloped, the degree of foreign dependence, the correlation of political forces and many other things.

20. In its origins, neo-liberalism was a reelaboration of the classical theory in order to bring it in line with the development experienced by capitalist society, with the objective of promoting individualism and inequality, as the basis for the reconstruction of Europe – and Great Britain in particular – in the period following World War I. Its original text, The Road of Serfdom written by Fredrich Hayek in 1944, is a defense of the concentration of capital aimed at putting a brake on the popular demands in what was predicted to be a difficult postwar adjustment. Nonetheless, it was not neo-liberalism but the so-called welfare state which responded to the needs of state monopoly capitalism in the postwar conditions. As a result, during a long period, that doctrine was confined to ultra-conservative circles until, in the 1970's, the return of capitalist economic crises recreated the scene foreseen by Hayek, who in the three volumes, Law, Legislation and Freedom, develops the general ideas that he had merely sketched out three decades prior. The difference between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism is that the former advocated no state intervention in the economy and society, while the latter advocates state intervention in the economy and society when the aim increases the value of capital, but not to compensate the social effects. See: Fredrich Hayek, Camino de Servidumbre, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1976, p. 65.

21. Social democracy has had moments of culmination, identifiable with the periods of extensive growth of the economy of the main capitalist countries: 1) the period of monopoly concentration at the end of the 19th century, during which it manages to use the parliament as a space to obtain the demands of the working class; 2) the brief period of open stability as a result of the destruction of the productive forces by World War I (1924-1929); and 3) the most important and prolonged of all, the two decades which immediately followed World War II, which conclude at the end of the 1970's, during which it appropriates the bourgeois project known as the Welfare State and converts it into its identity card.

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* The ideas and conceptions expressed in this paper on the transformations taking place in the capitalist system of production are the result of research work done by a collective of Cuban writers. See: Transnationalization and Denationalization: Essays on Contemporary Capitalism, Rafael Cervantes Martínez, Felipe Gil Chamizo, Roberto Regalado Álvarez and Rubén Zardoya Loureda, Tribuna Latinoamericana, Buenos Aires, 2000.

September/2003