Abstract
In the late summer of 1914 Karl Kautsky, the chief theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the largest formal Marxist party in the world, predicted three possible outcomes of the war that had just begun: the rise of the USA to global domination; the launch of a great anticolonial struggle and the transformation of tsarist Russia (Kautsky, 1914a, p. 845; 1914b, pp. 973–4). In time all three forecasts proved correct, although the first two needed another global conflict a generation later to realise them fully. In combination, they would contribute after 1945 to the impetus that would give birth, not to the Europe of fraternal workers’ states that Kautsky sought, but a European Union of European capitalist states. This study will focus on the period from 1914 to the coming to power of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement in 1933, and then unevenly, but its perspective and rationale extend to the present.
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Notes and References
In particular, I am concerned with necessary theory, which is notably lacking in Hobsbawm’s treatment; for example he speaks of general prediction of the collapse of the tsarist empire ‘since the 1870s’, but does not attempt any general explanation except general war-weariness (Hobsbawm, 1994, pp. 55–60).
Kennedy, 1989, p. 191; Bairoch, 1981, 1991. ‘Peripheral’ is used here not in terms of certain formations’ importance to capital as a whole, which was basic, but in the sense of distribution of global power and control of their inhabitants over their own lives.
Mandel, 1978, p. 27. It is necessary to assume a degree of familiarity with such basic Marxist concepts as ‘organic composition of capital’.
On this see Mandel, 1978, pp. 25–8.
Further on this, and on the implications of multiple forms of surplus labour — including women’s domestic work — for the labour theory of value, see Post, 1996, pp. 137–44, 207–18.
Later ‘stamocap’ (state monopoly capitalist) theorists went beyond Lenin and the others in seeing state intervention as creating a new capitalist form; a relevant example is Sohn-Rethel, 1978. For a critical discussion see Mandel, 1978, pp. 513–22. Again, I believe that the theorisation here is of an organisational form, rather than of what lies behind it.
For Preobrazhenskii, see Day, 1981, p. 231. For a useful discussion, see Fine and Harris, 1979, pp. 76–80, and for a review of basic Marxist theories, see Day 1981, Chapter 1. For more on the problems of single factor explanations, see Mandel, 1978, pp. 34–9.
See Day, 1981, pp. 81–3.
As theorised by Keynes, state intervention may also play a part in restoring social capital, which is what it is really doing by increasing commodity demand (including for capital). See Fine and Harris, 1979, pp. 133–4.
For these points, see Day, 1981, pp. 22–4. It should be noted that I have not actually seen Preobrazhenskii’s book and rely for basic discussion on ibid., pp. 229–47.
Mandel, 1978, p. 37, emphasis in original.
On this, see Day, 1981, pp. 48–51.
Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, quoted in Mandel, 1978, n. 58, p. 39.
For theorisation of that process of ‘discourse interpellation’, which needs to begin even before the prerevolutionary situation, see Post, 1996, pp. 278–86.
The concept of a revolutionary terrain that has to be consciously created by a ‘war of position’ and then used in a ‘war of manoeuvre’ runs through my entire analysis of the Vietnamese Revolution; see Post, 1989, 1990 and 1994 passim, and for a general statement, Post and Wright, 1989, pp. 49–64. As detailed there, it derives from Gramsci.
In socialist revolutions, the key class elements come from the workers, peasants and middle strata. By the last I mean Lenin’s ‘new’ petty bourgeoisie, the employed professional and white collar groups essential to modern capitalism. See Post, 1996, pp. 188–90.
It should be noted that the discussion that follows in effect represents my alternative to Gramsci’s conceptualisation of the ‘hegemony’ of the bourgeoisie, which has dominated the relevant literature, including by Marxists. (See Gramsci, 1971, especially ‘Notes on Italian History’ and ‘State and Society’, passim.) The major Italian theorist was careful to point out that the capitalists’ hegemony over the workers is maintained by both the persuasive power of their ideology and the use of coercion, and the latter must also be borne in mind in terms of my discussion.
This point is argued in detail in Post, 1996, pp. 170–83. Necessary reference must also be made to Chapter 7 of that work.
Data from Kennedy, 1989, p. 340; Roberts, 1980, p. 833. For a general summary of the impact of war conditions on civilians see Wrigley, 1993, pp. 4–13.
Farman, 1991, pp. 119, 124; Roberts, 1980, p. 831.
This and the next two paragraphs are based on Farman, 1991, pp. 115, 126; Kennedy, 1989, pp. 359, 360 and Table 26.
Quoted in Draper, 1978, p. 244.
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© 1997 K. W. J. Post
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Post, K. (1997). Crisis and Revolution. In: Communists and National Socialists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14514-0_1
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