All History is the History of Class Struggle
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history
of class struggles,” Marx and Engels proclaimed in The Communist Manifesto. All
of their work was designed to elaborate on the meaning of this one sentence.
Under capitalism, one class, the capitalists, own and/or control the means of
production and the other class, the workers, produce goods and services that
maintain the conditions for human survival. What workers produce becomes
commodities for sale in the marketplace. And the capitalists then appropriate
the lion’s share of the value produced by workers. The more the capitalists
expropriate the value of what is produced by workers, the more profits they acquire
and the greater the human misery workers experience. In contemporary societies
and in the global economy this process is clearly seen as the gaps between rich
and poor grow exponentially only to be mitigated from time to time when workers
rise up to challenge the capitalist class, and sometimes the capitalist system
itself.
Usually this narrative is discussed about exploitation and
struggle within states. But one can apply the basic insights of Marx and Engels
to relations between states and societies. For example, the modern nation-state
system emerged in the seventeenth century, primarily in Europe, to facilitate
the expansion of capitalism on the world stage. With technology, shipping and
armaments, capitalism spread across the globe. Capitalist imperialism and
globalization emerged together.
The Global North Versus the Global South as Class StruggleLooking at the history of what is called international relations, the world has experienced various stages of development (or underdevelopment). First, in the era of primitive accumulation, as Marx described, rising military powers in Europe traversed the globe. They occupied land inhabited by various peoples and kidnapped laborers from one part of the world and transported them to another as forced laborers. They developed trade, invested in profitable overseas production, and expropriated vital natural resources to facilitate their own economic development. Killing the occupants of the land and kidnapping Africans to become slaves in the Western Hemisphere, Marx said, signaled the dawn of “civilization.” Thus, we can speak of class struggle whether the topic for discussion is land grabbing, enslavement, extracting resources, or transforming local economies to fit the needs of the colonial powers. Andre Gunter Frank suggests that looking back at the birth of capitalism as a world system, we see the seeds planted for “the development of underdevelopment.” The economic circumstance of what would become the Global North is growing riches and for the Global South deepening poverty and immiseration.
But what dependency theorists, scholar/activists such as
Walter Rodney and Frantz Fanon, and Marxists from Latin America add to the
narrative is the fact that capitalist imperialism periodically generates
resistance and rebellion, sometimes class struggle, on a global basis.
Contemporary theorist, Vijay Prashad (The
Darker Nations: A People’s History of
the Third World, New Press, 2008) reminds us that the globalization of
capitalism from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries generated
resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Haiti, for example, represented a
paradigmatic revolution to overthrow French colonial control. And during the
nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century anti-colonial
campaigns spread throughout the world. In 1945 there were 51 nations in the new
United Nations organization and by 1970 there were 170. People had liberated
themselves from the formal bonds of colonialism. Along the way anti-colonial
campaigns gained support and solidarity from people of color within colonial
countries and national liberation movements across state boundaries in the
struggle for independence. In addition, revolutionaries overthrew colonial
and/or neo-colonial powers in Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua.
Once independence was achieved, “new” nations began to
collaborate around an anti-colonial, anti-neo-colonial agenda. Many met in
Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 and formed a Non-Aligned movement in 1961, expanding
its membership and loyalties to 120 countries today. Its motivation was to
break the traditional bonds of colonial control, to reduce the continuing
relationships between the former colonial powers and “their” colonies, and to
rectify historic forms of exploitation and expropriation of value. This,
dependency theorists suggest, included challenging indigenous ruling classes in
poor countries who owed their allegiance to collaboration with the former
colonial powers. The bottom line for newly independent countries was to rectify
the grotesque economic inequalities that were the legacy of colonialism and to
achieve national sovereignty.
Along with the creation of a non-aligned movement, leaders
of the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s campaigned for global adoption of a
New International Economic Order (NIEO). This program was introduced in the
United Nations. It called for the creation of rules and regulations that would
regulate global capitalism so that it was not so disadvantageous to countries
of the Global South. Proposals involved facilitating technology transfer from
the Global North to the Global South, reducing onerous rules about
“intellectual property rights,” hiring corporate executives from the host
country, and establishing requirements that minimal amounts of profits derived
from foreign investments stay in the host countries where production occurred.
These and other proposals were designed to “reform” global capitalism such that
the growing economic inequalities between rich and poor would decline. And to
cap off the demands for global reform, spokespersons from the Global South
introduced a plan for a New World Information Order (NWIO). This plan was
designed to increase the amount of input citizens of the Global South could
have in the production and dissemination of information about their own
countries. This was needed because monopoly media organizations from the Global
North controlled and framed most of the information about the world, including
the Global South.
The response of western imperial powers to the NIEO and the
NWIO was to inalterably oppose virtually every proposal made. They objected to any
restraints on the complete autonomy of international corporate and financial
capitalists operating in the Global South. In addition, they resisted the right
of countries of the Global South to have any control over the production of
narratives about their countries. And in response to growing mobilizations of
countries and peoples of the Global South, financier David Rockefeller from the
then Chase Manhattan Bank, called together 200 bankers, corporate CEOs, a few
trade union leaders and politicians from Europe and North America to establish
The Trilateral Commission in 1973. The founding documents warned of the greater
dangers to global capitalism from unrest in the Global South then from the
Soviet Bloc. They hired Zbigniew Brzezinski to administer the new organization
and they commissioned scholars such as distinguished US political scientist
Samuel Huntington to draft position papers for the organization. In one paper
Huntington warned of the “excess of democracy.” In other words, the increased
activism within societies and between societies constituted a threat to
stability and the global status quo.
By the 1980s, the Soviet Bloc weakened, collapsing in 1989.
The countries of the Global South became entrapped in a debt system that
required them to adopt new austerity policies that worsened the conditions of
life of their citizens. The policies, known as “neoliberalism,” spread across
the globe. Many leaders of formerly anti-colonial regimes, including some
independence leaders, began to collaborate with the international overseers at
the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Economic inequality on the
world stage grew. At various times 10-20 percent of the world’s population
lived in abject poverty and another 20-30 percent at living standards below a
livable income. As the living conditions for the world’s citizens worsened, the
globalization of production increased and smaller numbers of huge banks began
to control more and more of the world’s economic life.
Twenty-first Century Resistance to Neo-liberal Globalization GrowsAn upsurge of resistance to the worsening plight of much of the Global South began to occur in the 1990s. The day the new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went in effect in January, 1994, Sub-Commander Marcos of the Zapatista Movement (EZLN) in Mexico announced a new campaign against neoliberalism. In addition, the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and the spread of neoliberal policies spurred growing resistance to globalization as citizens demanded their countries reject IMF imposed austerity programs. The anti-globalization campaign, based on grassroots movements from the North and South, gained worldwide attention during the founding meeting of the WTO in Seattle, Washington in December, 1999. The “Battle of Seattle,” signaled a global recognition that neoliberal globalization was bringing together activists from everywhere to challenge the globalization of capitalism. A World Social Forum assembled in Porte Allegre, Brazil, in 2001 with thousands of people from women’s, labor, indigenous peoples and other organizations. Their rallying cry was “Another World is Possible.”
In 2011, Arab Spring signaled another form of grassroots
opposition to the further exacerbation of capitalism both within and between
countries. Over the next several years, protests were initiated by various
sectors of the working class, such as the precariat and “yellow vests,”
indigenous peoples, women, people of color, gays and lesbians. These campaigns
often generated expressions of international solidarity.
And it is in this emerging global class struggle that the
Bolivarian Revolution emerged. Army officer Hugo Chavez was elected President
of Venezuela in 1998. Subsequently he initiated changes and responded to demands for change from Venezuelan workers to
build grassroots political institutions, form workers cooperatives, and to redistribute
some of Venezuela’s oil wealth. Venezuelan policies significantly reduced the
number of citizens living in poverty, increased access to health care and
education, and encouraged the building of grassroots political
organizations. The Bolivarian Revolution,
as it was called, borrowed from nineteenth century Latin American leader Simon
Bolivar who struggled to achieve national sovereign control for the peoples of
the region. The twenty-first century variant, led by Chavez, included
initiating a regional Latin American bank, expanding trade agreements, and
inspiring grassroots mobilizations in countries in Latin American and the
Caribbean. Some variants of economic populism and grassroots political
institution-building occurred in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El
Salvador, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. In addition, some
Latin American countries began to collaborate worldwide to challenge the power
and prerogatives of global capitalism. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China,
and South Africa), for a time, discussed ways to challenge the economic and
political hegemony of the traditional great powers. Much of the Bolivarian
Revolution was inspired by the Cuban revolutionary model of economic
distribution, health care and education programs, and international solidarity.
The Global North Launches a Counter-Offensive
The United States and its allies in the capitalist world
have based their foreign policies on resistance to reformist and revolutionary
ferment in the Global South. Efforts to forestall dramatic historical change
have sometimes been based on efforts to accommodate or channel ferment from the
Global South in directions that were less threatening to global capitalism. For
example, President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress program, a $20 billion
economic assistance program announced in 1961, promised US support for economic
development and social change in Latin America. An alternative and more common
approach, military force, is illustrated by President Johnson’s sending 24,000
marines to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to forestall a nationalist, Juan
Bosch, from returning to power in his country.
Between 1965 and today, the United States has used the
carrot and the stick to challenge resistance from the Global South,
particularly in the Western Hemisphere: using military invasion and covert
operations; identifying and working with economic and military elites in
“enemy” countries, enacting economic sanctions, and even poisoning crops in
countries defined as the enemy.
Today, the United States is seeking to crush the Venezuelan
experiment and to destroy all vestiges of the Bolivarian Revolution in the
Hemisphere. The project includes securing complete control of Venezuela’s oil
resources. But, in addition, the United States is committed to turning back
history; decades of resistance from the Global South. Following the inspiration
of the Cuban Revolution, the Bolivarian Revolution has constituted the most
sustained threat to US global hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and hence the
international system. History has shown that John Bolton’s “troika of tyranny”
is just the latest conceptualization coming from the Global North; a
conceptualization that Professor Huntington warned of in 1976, as the “crisis
of democracy;” that is, there was too much of it.In sum, human history in the capitalist era is about the drive for power and profit on the one hand and resistance and rebellion on the other. The outcome of this struggle is still to be determined.
(For a parallel historical analysis see Vijay Prashad, “12-Step American Method for Regime Change, Alternet, February 9, 2019 and “Blood for Oil in Venezuela?” an interview on The Real News, February 10, 2019 https://therealnews.com/series/venezuela-coverage-and-analysis )
