MLKP Turkey / Kurdistan
March 2024
After the world economic crisis of 1974-75, global capitalism entered a qualitatively new phase: imperialist globalization (IG). The main features of this new stage are the offshoring of labor-intensive parts of production to the cheap labor force hells and in parallel creation of an integrated world market in which money and commodity capital circulate much more freely across borders. The emergence of a new type of colonialism is a characteristic feature of imperialist globalization. Today’s financial-economic colonialism is characterized by the restructuring of old and new colonies, i.e. weakening of state controls over economy, lifting of currency restrictions, minimization of the price of labour, promotion of privatization.
By reducing the Rate of Exploitation (s/v) by almost 30 times and selling at monopoly prices at home thanks to the overabundance of financial credits, imperialism has managed to create a tendency against the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF) and has thus attempted to find a way to supersede the structural crisis. In other words, seperating the geographies of production and its realization provides the opportunity of surplus-value transfer from financial-economic colonies to imperialist countries.
Since LTRPF is inevitable in the long run, The Great Recession of 2008-9 signaled the general crisis of IG. World capitalism has been in a depression with ups and downs for 15 years. Since then, profit rates have never been as high as before the crisis. Low rates of profit have led to a decline in the growth of investment and trade, and the growth rate of the profit mass has been stuck in the 2-3% band with no positive forecasts.
In the same period we are witnessing the extraordinary development of Chinese capitalism. Once the largest production manufacturer of world capitalism, China has now also become one of the technological and financial superpowers threatening the US/EU hegemony in the markets. After the 2008-9 crisis, China has become less dependent on the export market and
focused more on its domestic market. Rising wages make it no longer as cheap for US/EU imperialism to offshore the production.
The crisis of IG, together with the growing imperialist rivalry between US/EU and Chinese imperialism, is now creating a counter-current to the era of globalization and forcing protectionist tendencies, where offshoring tendencies are being partly replaced by cost- cutting reshoring and near-shoring strategies, aided by developments in artificial intelligence and robotics. This situation is pregnant with further tensions and contradictions with different political and economic consequences in the imperialist globalization phase.
Theoretically, a higher level of socialization of production than globalization requires an unprecedented degree of automatization (with AI and robotics), which implies an enormous increase in the organic composition of capital (c/v). But since the only source of profit is living labor (v), such a relative increase in constant capital (c) ultimately weakens the basis for creating and realizing surplus value. This is, in fact, why the imperialists have for decades refrained from adopting new technologies and using cheap labor. Protectionism must therefore be perceived today as a reactionary, short-term and ultimately hopeless countermeasure for the capitalists. This contradiction can only be resolved under socialism.
What seems more likely in the near future is an intensifying economic (near-shoring) and extra-economic (imperialist war) competition between the US/EU and China/Russia imperialist blocs to increase the transfer of net surplus value. This polarization leads to changeable relations and alliances among countries and affects the struggles. But in the long run the previous advantage of the financial-economic colonies to take advantage of the contradictions between the imperialist blocs may reduce, and there may come a moment of decision on which side to cooperate with, both economically and extra-economically. Due to this polarizing trend, the most visible change in the world economy in recent years has been the increase in militarism and armaments. The effects on the world economy of the arms race, which accelerated after the war in Ukraine, have been fully exposed and have added an important element to our tasks of struggle in connection with the economic crisis.
In terms of domestic politics, fascism is still an “effective” tool for the bourgeoisies of both imperialist and financial-economic colonies. It allows the monopoly bourgeoisie to embrace both globalization and protectionism at the same time by casting the real enemy as a vague, ambiguous “global elites/powers” instead of repressive states or imperialist capitalism.
Accordingly, neofascist currents do not expel migrant workers from society, but threaten them as internal enemies and work for the overexploitation of both. In this way, the wage levels of native workers are kept dramatically low.
The hybrid of economic protectionism and globalization (near-shoring competition), the possibility of imperialist war and neofascism can only be defeated through internationalism, but internationalism requires prior working class movement and politics.
To summarize, fascism is a great threat to the working class and toilers and is increasingly determining the subject of struggle. As a result of the development of capitalism in the world and the limits it has reached, under conditions where the rich-poor cleavage increases, the contradiction between the people and the state sharpens, in which the welfare state has been eliminated, the production of consent for the bourgeoisie has become extremely narrow, and social democracy has lost ground, the life of the working class and laborers is shaped by worries such as further impoverishment, inflation, rising cost of living. Women will be polarized in the struggle since the gender contradiction cannot be carried on and gender liberation required social upheaval as a whole. In this sense, it is among the main tasks of the Communist Parties to put the aspirations and problems of the broad masses for a dignified life on the agenda, to make them the subject of struggle and to polarize them, both to revive the historically retreating working class movement and to wage war on xenophobic/anti- immigrant/misogynist movements.
In addition, the workers and oppressed of all countries united have the task of building anti- imperialist fronts in the struggle against imperialism, uniting forces, building international cooperation, coordination and solidarity, and developing the international struggle at the political level. The workers and oppressed of the world can respond to the danger of a 3rd imperialist war of division, which is growing with the increasing crises of imperialism, by taking advantage of the inter-imperialist contradictions, and turn them into an opportunity for revolutionary tactics, provided that they do not engage in any bourgeois pole.