Internationalist Perspective and other followers of Minassian cum suis

Misguiding theses and their political consequences

By Aníbal and Fredo Corvo

Spanish

Internationalist Perspective (IP) has published an internal debate on the IP leaflet on Gaza. More precisely than ‘internal debate’, we should say a sectarian debate. This debate started January 2nd, 2024, with a contribution by its member Marlowe, as we are told, “after its [the leaflet] publication on our website, it drew criticism from some voices in our milieu. Some of the critiques have found resonance with a few members of IP.” In the best of sectarian habits, IP, or Marlowe, gives no reference to these criticism. Well, for the readers of IP, here are some critiques we published on Minassian theses, from which IP takes its inspiration for ‘something new’:

• Aníbal, Desbarres, ambiguedades, doctrinarismo. Crítica de un texto de Internationalist Perpective muy fundamentado en otro de Emilio Minassian.
• English translation in New 2023: see “updated 4-12-2023”.
• Aníbal, ‘Proletarios revolucionarios’ on war and class struggle in Gaza – West Bank – Israel.
• Fredo Corvo, Comments to the English translation of Minassians interview, in New 2023, see “updated 17-12-2023”

The main approaches in dispute among IP members

Marlowe disagrees with the following ideas in the IP leaflet:

1) that the war in the Gaza strip “ is primarily a maneuver by the Israeli government to deal with its uniquely substantial ‘surplus population.'”

2) “the conflict as an ‘asymmetric war’ (…) which leftists use to justify support for the ‘lesser evil’.”

3) “To promote the idea that the various factions of capital listen to ‘calls’ is to reinforce illusions promulgated by liberals and leftists.”

Marlowe’s critique is correct. However, he avoids probing the cause of IP’s echoing Emilio Minassian’s rantings and the media that harbors and praises him, opening to petty-bourgeois, opportunistic, confused, rambling leftist viewpoints.

SY, another member of IP, refutes the idea that the existence of ‘excess population’ is the cause, let alone the sole cause, of the war. However, he disagrees that it is an irrelevant factor. He still adheres to the theses of autonomists, communicators and the like who have echoed Emilio Minassian.[1]

We have invalidated Minassian’s fallacious scheme in a short contribution to the Prague internationalist conference ‘Together against capitalist wars and capitalist peace’ in May 2024. This fragment is reproduced below.

In short: surplus population and devaluation of capital

In capitalism, the devaluation of capital is expressed in three fundamental ways:

1. In developing productivity generated by exploiting proletarian labor, constant capital (especially machinery) becomes relatively larger than variable capital (workers’ wages).
2. In overproduction crises, where a percentage of constant and variable capital is notoriously devalued, and with growing exploitation, surplus value grows to devalued capital. This allows the rate of profit to rise.
3. Inter-imperialist war, as an unintended consequence, brings about the destruction of the constant capital and proletarians on an even accelerated scale as in crisis. However, this is a consequence of world wars, regional wars and local wars, as understood by Marxists, and not a consciously intended goal of the bourgeoisie to raise its profit rate, as the CWO sometimes suggests. Imperialist war demands a war economy that ties the two essential classes to the States, favoring the exploitation rate of the proletariat.

War and peace imply harsh consequences and pressures for the working class — likewise, periods of expansion and economic crisis. No capitalism can develop without attacking the proletariat, but war obeys determinant impulses of an imperialist type, not a strategy by a national bourgeoisie or that of a bloc to destroy ‘its’ proletariat active in war production or military service. On the contrary, each large-scale inter-imperialist war leads to enormous shortages of workers and soldiers. Of course, each bloc tries to destroy the war industry and the armies of the enemy bloc.

The warmongering militarism is generated to develop the imperialist war of the concurrent capitals in acute internationalized competition. It serves at the same time to lash out against the proletarian danger and to launch daily repression when they need it even without direct revolutionary dynamics of the proletariat, and as a support of the counterrevolutionary offensives. This is self-evident.

Herman Gorter stated that the First World War opposed imperialism as a whole against the proletariat as a whole. Therefore, imperialism made the world revolution necessary. Indeed, the imperialist capitalist war as a whole, or imperialism as a whole, brings with it the terrible consequence of eliminating numerous proletarian lives. Still, it is not launched by an individual bourgeois state or a bloc of states to “destroy the proletariat.” Each national capital needs an “industrial reserve army” as a constant pressure on the working parts of the proletariat. A national capital only wants to destroy segments of this “surplus population” when they are mobilized in war by its imperialist enemies, and it wants to maintain its eventual unemployed in uniform in the best shape for fighting. All efforts to destroy a whole people or nation, f.e. the Nazi program for the destruction of Jews, were the result of both lunatic racism and nationalist propaganda. It contradicted the urgent need for labor in the war industry. And it failed.

In the same way, the efforts of the present government in Israel in its lunatic ideology of a Greater Israel – and Netanyahu’s desperate effort to escape from the trial for corruption – to eliminate or chase away the population of the Gaza Strip by destroying its infrastructure, will not only fail because it only drives the Palestine youth by hatred to terrorist organizations. This policy is also in contraction with the interests of the American bloc. To conclude, from this localized episode to a general effort of the world bourgeoisie to a global destruction of the “surplus population” is misleading regarding the intentions of our class enemies and, in its exaggeration, undermining anti-war propaganda.[2]

Old hat: the bourgeoisie engages in imperialist war to solve a ‘permanent crisis’?

SY believes that in the 1980s, Fordism was already incapable of increasing productivity. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the crisis of capitalism would have become permanent. This is false because lacking empirical support. For Chinese capital, was “Fordism” incapable of increasing productivity? Or is China in “permanent crisis”? As shown in following graph, productivity at a world scale has grown, although at lower rates than in previous periods of peak growth. See for more data  and explanations than we can give here: Aníbal, Productividad y momento histórico del capitalismo and Dinámica internacional de la productividad laboral. Discusión sobre la decadencia del capitalismo.

Sources: Penn World Table, The Conference Board and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

However, all decadence theories are in flagrant contradiction to the facts. Neither is the approach by IP is not new or unique. As in other cases, Controversies, for example, a restrictive and non-globalized approach is taken. Another author, Marcel Roelandts, leans on economic data on the UK because Marx did in his time.[3] Indeed, in Marx’ time, the UK was a model for the future. However, after losing its colonies in two World Wars and after Brexit, the UK is only a model for its own British ‘decadence.’ Against this, we should consider whole-world data because it is the scale on which capitalism exists and essential for an internationalist approach. When we look at a global scale for the alleged “inability of capitalism to increase productivity,” these claims of the decadence of capitalism or permanent crisis are revealed as fallacious.

New hat: nationalist ideology need a surplus population

Let’s see how SY argues: “Now, to be clear, I would not argue that the capitalists have found the ‘solution’ to their ‘surplus population problem’ in war. This would be to misplace of the role of ‘surplus population’ in analysis. However, I will argue that the presence of a ‘surplus population’ represents a unique condition that acts as an expedient for the way in which the capitalist state steps in to interpret social crises and thus assert its logic in the midst of the insecurity (and despair) that capitalism creates.”

That is to say that from a cause of war “together” with the imperialist cause, ‘surplus population’ as a second rated cause behind imperialism, acts as a support of the bourgeois state to “interpret the social crises”. This stream of empty words creates an inconsistent smokescreen, leading only to confusion. SY follows explaining in complex language how ‘surplus population’ is used for creating nationalism. In the Ukraine war, the Russian and Ukrainian bourgeoisie didn’t need a surplus proletariat to generate nationalism. What SY only believes to be a condition of the Gaza war becomes “a central part of capitalist warfare.” Nationalism always has been used as an ideological justification of inter-imperialist war for the re-division of capitalist spheres of influence. Now people like SY state that this justification has become ‘a central part’ of war by linking it to ‘surplus population’: “In my opinion, to ignore the role of a ‘surplus population’ in the context of capitalist war is, a. to have an incomplete picture of the causal-conditions in which capitalist war unfolds; and b. to fail to understand war as the most radical form of state-oppression and therefore to interrogate the tactics with which the ruling class subjects the collective-worker to ‘imperialism’ thereby forming significant obstacles to proletarian self-awareness.”

First, no one who criticizes Emilio Minassian and IP ignores the existence of this surplus population. Second, SY puts “imperialism” in quotation marks, hastily followed by “Although inter-imperialism represents the framework within which every war should be understood“. But the aim is clear, SY is looking for something new and unique. This type of group and media needs novel rhetoric that avoids going deeper into explaining what happens and favors avoiding or loathing what was valid in the past. In the Italian communist left they were called, appropriately, updating opportunists. This type of speeches is pleasant in university circles and the like, but they bore those of us who walk on the suffering earth’s crust.

There is also an echo of the old theses of the war against the proletariat. The imperialist war of the confronted capitals obeys the characteristics of capitalist imperialism, not an intention to destroy the proletariat or to attack it mercilessly. In war, the bourgeoisie needs the proletariat, in enormous masses, both as soldiers or as workers in production. When the bourgeoisie launch wars, there are numerous proletarian victims. However, that is a consequence, not the cause.

The bourgeoisie does not need to launch harsh inter-imperialist wars to attack the proletariat. However, in a war they need the effective framing of the proletariat in the respective nationalist and militarist fronts. They need abundant labor, poor proletarian and peasant masses to maneuver, and millions of elements of the exploited class to be cannon fodder, cannons, rifles and machine guns, missiles and assorted bombs. 

Marx on ‘surplus population’, ‘industrial reserve army’ and ‘lumpenproletariat’

In the next chapter, we will see that bourgeois sociology has brought forward several different definitions of surplus population. How does IP relate this ‘new’ concept to Marx’s definition of the industrial reserve army and lumpenproletariat?

Sanderr, another member of IP, states: “This surplus population cannot be equated with a lumpenproletariat surviving at the margins of society, but neither is it an ‘industrial reserve army’ since there is no perspective of them being integrated in the global capitalist chain of production in a new phase of expansion, which will not come.“

To investigate this definition, let’s first see what Marx in Capital called “the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army”. The lumpen is part of this “industrial reserve army,” but not the only one. Marx describes the three categories of “the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army” as:

1. The floating form, in centers of modern industry, where the numbers of these unemployed go up and down with the changing phases of the industrial cycle.
2. The latent form, “in the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops, where machinery enters as a factor, or where only the modern division of labor is carried out, large numbers of boys are employed up to the age of maturity”, where “the female population grows more rapidly than the male”.
3. The stagnant form is that part of the active labor army with highly irregular employment, characterized by maximum working time and minimum wages.

After this description, Marx defined the lumpen: “The lowest sediment of the relative surplus population finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes“ [4] So, besides the lumpen as part of the stagnant form of the industrial reserve army, he distinguished between a floating and a latent form. Moreover, Marx described how its floating, latent and stagnant forms are interconnected in many ways, for instance as individual paths of workers generally going down during their lives, and how the three forms change with the industrial cycle, with developments in agriculture and technology (organic composition of capital or formal and real submission). In understanding the development of capitalism in parts of the world other than that of the old Great Britain, we can easily understand how the dynamic of the relative surplus population has repeated itself in new and old forms. We recall the recent history since the industrial development in China from the ‘sweatshop of the world’ to the high-tech hotspots and the departure of, e.g., Chinese garment industry away from overpriced labor in the Pearl River Delta to Ethiopia. However, those who – like Sanderr – believe that “a new phase of expansion, (…) will not come” and therefore the actual surplus population has “no perspective of (…) being integrated in the global capitalist chain of production ” probably prefer the example of the decadence of Great-Britain or the United States to the rise of China or even Ethiopia. We admit that there are many parts of the world where masses of peasants and other working parts of the population have become unemployed proletarians, being violently dispossessed from their means of production or because these have become worthless by capitalist competition. In some regions, parts of this surplus population, contrary to the expectations of Sanderr, will be integrated into the industry. In other areas, they will rot away and sink into the lumpen.

Other sectors will flow through the waters of unemployment and the so-called informal economy (according to the International Labor Organization in the year 2020, about 2 billion workers, or 60 percent of the world’s employed population aged 15 and over, work in the informal sector).[5]

What is the sense of the mere decadentist-dogmatic statement that a new expansion phase will not come? Does IP expect these masses to rise to a final showdown with world capitalism? Or do these masses need the prophecy that capital is planning to exterminate them by what is, in fact, the old familiar inter-imperialist war or simply by starvation, diseases, and drugs, as the story goes in Latin America? Of course, it is sadly true that in more extensive parts of the world, the surplus population is rotting away by starvation, diseases, and drugs. However, it is nothing new nor intended by a bourgeoisie not interested in its population’s lower layers.

Against the dogmatic theories that have been formulated since the beginning of the 20th century, the ideas of decadence of capitalism, of permanent crisis, of death crisis of capitalism, we see following realities:

• With the capitalist conquest of the Earth, inter-imperialist wars have opened in which capitalist nations (and would-be nations) fight each other for a re-division of spheres of influence.
• Within this phase of imperialism, besides the relatively steady continuation of industrial cycle, there is a longer cycle of crisis-world war-reconstruction in which war(production) unintendedly leads to the physical destruction of constant capital (machines, etc.) and variable capital (proletarians).
• Capitalism continues to find means of extorsion of surplus labor, accumulation, economic growth and development of both technical and human means of production. And in doing so, as always, at the expense of the global proletariat, capital is moving to other technologies, other parts of the world, allowing certain parts of the proletariat for a temporal acceptable standard of living and depriving other of their relative welfare, and pushing more and more segments of the world population into the active proletariat or even surplus population.

Bourgeois sociology on ‘surplus population’

The International Labor Organization (ILO) already in its 2012 World of Work Report, presented in Japan during the annual meeting of the Monetary Fund and the World Bank, stated that “the labor crisis has entered a “new phase of a more structural nature” and therefore difficult to eradicate. In other words, the Marxian concept of surplus population, implicating that capital cannot do without, although the dominant economic science does not use the concept, shines in all its splendor. The surplus population can “escape” through black and informal work, with a rate of over 40 percent in more than two-thirds of the “developing” countries. Worried about its political consequences, the ILO prepared a Social Discontent Index for this report: “Society,” – it says – “is becoming increasingly anxious about the lack of decent jobs.” In 57 of 106 countries surveyed, this index rose in 2011 compared to 2010. Europe, the Middle East, North and Central Africa scored the highest rates of risk of social unrest. Latin America, China and South Africa, on the other hand, improved. [6]

These figures reflect what we stated above: in some regions, unemployment rises, but in other areas of the world, unemployment relatively decreases. All these phenomena can be explained with Marx’ economic concepts and that of imperialism as developed by internationalist Marxists from before Word War till today.

The tremendous amount of proletariat in the industrial reserve army remains a powerful lever of pressure against the proletariat in general, a brutal force to degrade its labor and social conditions, to maintain, in short, the capacity of exploitation and domination of the bourgeois class, which manages the competition among the members of the proletarian class functionally and positively for its interests and capitalist class processes.

‘Surplus population’ is a bourgeois ideological concept that has been in vogue since the second decade of the 21st century, following the capitalist economic crisis at the end of the first decade. Some define it as an impoverished working-class sector that uses credit to survive. We see this in an interview with Susanne Soederberg, Professor at Queen’s University, Canada: “the surplus population refers to those workers who are poor enough to qualify for these consumer loans and poor enough to be unable to live without them. This includes informal and formal workers in Mexico, as well as welfare recipients and the US middle class.” Another example and a predecessor of Minassian is William I. Robinson, Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, with works such as “Gaza: A ghastly window into the crisis of global capitalism” and “Can global capitalism endure?” It is the same that Emilio Minassian affirms and develops. It is a line of approach of the far-left university media of which IP and others echo uncritically, complacent and disseminating, in the Spanish-speaking media ideologues like Iñaki Gil de San Vicente, Andrés Piqueras, Santiago Niño Becerra, Eduardo Sartelli, José Luis Sampedro some time ago, disseminate similar or coinciding theorizations. Elsewhere, Yanis Varoufakis, Wolfgang Streetck, etc.

For some time, a sector of the most extremist petty-bourgeois leftism, for example, Emilio Minassian, has been saying that the surplus population is that which can never be integrated into the circuits of capitalist accumulation. It is a description spread by autonomist, communization, anarcho-communist, and similar media, echoed by IP. They always wish to disseminate ultra-radical versions at the expository level. However, as we have indicated above, these assertions lack empirical verification in the ever-changing reality of world capitalism, always looking for new regions to exploit labor power and new techniques, leaving other areas and sectors of the class in misery or plunging them into unemployment for generations. Above, we have seen that Marx distinguished three forms of relative overpopulation: the fluctuating, the latent, and the stagnant. By stating that the surplus population can never be integrated into production, Minassian, IP and others limit this population as a whole to what Marx characterized as its third, the stagnant part. Or, they may assume that the whole relative overpopulation is stagnant. And why? Because no new cycle of accumulation of capital would be possible, or in other words the crisis has become permanent, capitalism in decadence, in its death crisis. Wertktitik exposes this repeatedly, for example through statements and texts of Anselm Jappe. Emilio Minassian and others have theorized that capital and its states have no choice but to eliminate this part of the reserve army of labor.

A group like Oveja Negra (Argentina) echoes favorably the thesis of Emilio Minassian and says that Emilio Minassian points out that in Gaza there is not simply a war but a management of the ‘surplus’ proletariat with military means by a democratic, civilized state belonging to the central bloc of accumulation. And applying this idea to Argentina, Oveja Negra states that precarious work in an unproductive or low productivity sector, or to receive social assistance financed with rent or surplus value extracted from other sectors, are indications of surplus population. Of course they are, in the sense of the third and lowest form of surplus population, the stagnant form, as explained by Marx. But it is wrong to identify this stagnant form in Argentina with the present massacres of inter-imperialist war in the Gaza Strip, to label both as a policy of bourgeois handling of surplus population. This mistaken identification is suggested to the reader by exalted formulations like “… addition to the merciless massacre, the open advance on the ‘territories’ and the industry of the killing machines, it is necessary to stop this silent war: of hunger, the disease provoked by its other industries, the ‘labor accidents’, the macho terror, misery and suicide (one of the main causes of death in the whole world)”.[7] It is no coincidence that formulations like “democratic, civilized state belonging to the central bloc of accumulation” as indication of Israel and the USA, are very close to the bourgeois left idea (based on Lenin) that only the USA, as the most powerful, is ‘imperialist’, and that weaker states like Iran and would-be states like Hamas or the PLO are ‘oppressed nations’ to be defended by the proletariat.

Struggle against war!

IP may pretend that his internal discussion takes place in an etheric sublime vacuum of ideas; in reality, their publications affect a whole of groups and individuals who want to fight against imperialist war and often do so. Therefore, any theoretical discussion should contribute to clarifying the class character of current wars and how the proletariat around the world can defend itself against the attacks of imperialism:

• Instead of Minassian’s novelties and peculiarities leading to concessions to Lenin’s theory of imperialism and the right of nations to self-determination, it is the imperialism conception of the German-Dutch and French Communist Left,[8] well known to IP, that enables proletarian struggle against ALL fractions of capital.
• Instead of the endless, false, academic questions of value, decadence, and permanent crisis, only the theoretical clarification from the standpoint of the working class advances its struggle. Without sectarianism, without exclusion, in all openness, i.e., with the name and internet address of internationalist groups, especially those of “opponents.”
• Instead of the modern versions of the ‘spontaneism’ of the anarcho-syndicalist Le Bon, who wanted to limit Marx’s conception of revolution to “a myth whose sole significance is limited to determine the current action of the working class,” we argue with Karl Korsch:

“The materialist stance rather believes that certain, if only always limited, prognostic statements sufficient for practical action can be made on the basis of always, more exact and thorough empirical investigation of the present capitalist mode of production and its recognizable immanent tendencies of development. The materialist therefore investigates thoroughly the given situation of capitalist production including the contradictions found therein, among which are also the situation, the level of consciousness, the organization, and the readiness for struggle of the working class and all the various levels of the working class in order to determine its action.” [9]

Aníbal and Fredo Corvo (March-2024)

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[1] For example in Spanish: http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/535766, English: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/field-notes/Gaza-An-Extreme-Militarization-of-the-Class-War, Portuguese: https://criticadesapiedada.com.br/2024/01/21/gaza-uma-militarizacao-extrema-da-guerra-de-classes-emilio-minassian/

[2] Reproduced from Aníbal and Fredo Corvo, On the announcement of the Prague internationalist conference ‘Together against capitalist wars and capitalist peace’ May 2024

[3] Marcel Roelandts, 250 ans de capitalisme, Introduction. English: 250 years of modern Capitalism: A reconstruction of its dynamics.

[4] Marx, Capital, Vol. One, Ch. 25 The general law of capitalist accumulation. Section 4. Different Forms of the Relative surplus population (…).

[5] IMF, Deléchat and Medina, What is the informal economy?

[6] ILO, World of Work Report 2012. As of 2015 the World of Work Report has been replaced by a new annual ILO flagship series, the World Employment and Social Outlook (WESO). The latest report is on 2022.

[7] It is not “Palestinian conflict”, it is a massacre.

[8] See one overview and seven historical texts:

• Fredo Covo, The inter-imperialist war in Ukraine – From Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter, and Lenin to “Council-Communism”
• L’Ouvrier Communiste, Imperialism and the National Question (1929)
• Paul Mattick, Luxemburg versus Lenin (1935)
• Internationalisme (GCF), On the National and Colonial Question (1945/1946)
• Anton Pannekoek, Class Struggle and Nation (1912)
• Herman Gorter, Imperialism, the World War and Social Democracy (1914)
• Anton Pannekoek, The economic necessity of imperialism (1916)
• Rosa Luxemburg, fragmentos sobre la guerra, la cuestión nacional y la revolución

[9] Karl Korsch, Über Einige Grundsätzliche Voraussetzungen Für Eine Materialistische Diskussion Der Krisentheorie published: in Proletarier 1933, no. 1, Transcription: Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009