Athens Meeting 18-20 November 2005, Contribution of CP of
Denmark
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From: SolidNet, Monday, November 28, 2005
http://www.dkp.dk , mailto:dkp@dkp.dk
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International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties
"Current Trends In Capitalism: Economic, Social And
Political Impact. The Communists' Alternative"
Athens, 18-20 November, 2005

Intervention by the Communist Party of Denmark (DKP)
Henrik Stamer Hedin

"Current trends in capitalism" is a very wide topic indeed.
I shall try to say a few words about our perception of some
of the basic economic and political trends affecting the
conditions of class struggle.

The basic fact underlying the current development of
capitalism seems to be that monopolies have so to speak
outgrown the states. The largest of today's monopolies
produce and accumulate more wealth than many states. Also,
their spheres of interest are international, indeed global.
Not only do they cater to a global market; their production
facilities are scattered all over the world; their work
force is multinational; even their administrations are not
confined to a single headquarters within the borders of a
particular nation, but form global networks or may be
shifted suddenly from one hemisphere to the other according
to the company's needs, as was the case with the Danish
East Asian Company some years ago. They moved their
headquarters from Copenhagen to Singapore, and now they are
moving it back again, because they are turning their Asian
assets into hard cash, into liquid capital, which flows
back to Denmark. And that may not even be typical anymore,
because the circles of owners behind the big companies tend
to be internationalized as well and, at the same time,
anonymized. The individual capitalist with a distinct
nationality and bonds of loyalty to some community of
living people is almost history. He still exists we have a
famous specimen in Denmark, Mr. Maersk McKinney Moeller
but he is getting rarer.

Of course, this process is what has been termed
globalization. Globalization does possess a class-neutral
side you might talk of a "productive force side" as
opposed to "production relations side": we are getting
closer to one another, we are to a growing extent sharing
in production and consumption all across humanity. But what
we are witnessing is more than that: it is capitalist
globalization. In fact, it is capitalism pure as analyzed
by Marx, unmitigated by remains of feudal responsibility,
community loyalties, or indeed any other human
considerations the "sentimental bonds" about which Marx
writes in the Manifesto. This is the stage of capitalism
creating the immediate conditions for socialism.

And at the same time, it is hampering the coherence and
solidarity among working people necessary to the victory of
socialism. This is one of the most important trends in
contemporary capitalism.

The working class of today is global in any conceivable
sense of the word. Any one transnational company may have
workers employed in many different countries; other workers
are migrating to countries very strange to them, so that
the national work forces of the imperialist countries
themselves are being so to speak transnationalized. Another
trend: To work for wage is increasingly the normal
condition for working people. This, too, is a kind of
globalization of the working class, which grows to comprise
almost all of working humanity, including intermediate
strata that were formerly close to the capitalists.

What concerns me here, however, is working class
globalization in the straightforward sense of the word. It
gives little meaning today to speak of a national working
class. The Danish gross national product, for instance, is
being produced not only by Danish workers, but also by
Polish, Portuguese, and Chinese workers, who do not enjoy
the rights of Danish workers, or by Turkish or Pakistani
migrant workers, who live in Denmark, but are marginalized
and often do not enjoy citizen rights. It may sound like a
paradox, but capitalist globalization implies that we are
living increasingly under a system of global apartheid: The
working class is fundamentally one, but it is divided by
the system into sectors that do not enjoy the same rights
and who can be raised one against the other. The
Nationalist Danish Party, and through it the Government,
exploits the fact that many Danish workers do not feel a
common interest with the immigrants, but actually fear
them.

Similarly, the workers working for Danish companies abroad,
generally for a much lower wage than Danish workers, are
not considered comrades or colleagues, but competitors.

Of course, this means that the global working class
organization so urgently needed precisely under the
conditions of capitalist globalization, is hampered by
these same conditions. This is a very serious challenge for
the Communist and labour movement of today.

These trends connected to capitalist globalization have a
profound significance for the conditions of political
struggle.

In my reasoning, I picked as point of departure the fact
that monopolies are growing essentially the fact of
capital concentration. It is possible to distinguish three
phases of development: Initially, the capitalist companies
were small compared to the states inside which they were
working. The nation state offered them all the space they
needed for their activities and their expansion. This gave
rise to the system of classical liberalism, with the state
securing the overall framework inside which competition
took place, but not interfering with the working of
competition itself or of capitalist enterprise.

As capital was concentrated, the individual companies
growing and merging into monopolies, a stage was reached
where one could speak of congruence between monopolies and
state. They matched each other, as it were, and state and
monopolies entered the phase of cooperation and merger
known as State Monopoly Capitalism. The state became a tool
of the dominant monopolies, not just providing a framework,
and on the other hand the state regulated the working of
capitalism, in some cases very strictly. Also, the sphere
of possible expansion for the monopolies was abroad, so the
needs of their development dictated an aggressive policy of
national expansion. This was the era of classical
imperialism with its mutually isolated colonial empires, of
fascism and other varieties of aggressive nationalism, and
of two world wars.

The third phase corresponds to a situation where, as I
started by saying, the monopolies have outgrown the states.
The situation of small and middle-sized metropolic
countries like my own is that state and monopolies are no
longer on an equal footing. The state is increasingly
becoming a nuisance to the monopolies and can only be of
use to them by stepping out of the way hence
deregulations, privatizations, opening of borders to the
monopolies and by fulfilling the classical oppressive
state functions of protecting property and privilege
against the people, perhaps engaging in a profitable war
hence terror legislation, war against terror, you name it.
This, of course, is the system of neoliberalism; it
reiterates some of the traits of classical liberalism, but
on a higher level of society's development.

This is the era of capitalist globalization, and it is the
era of the EU, by which European monopoly capital is
striving to build a state more at a par with its own
strength and needs than the old nation states of Europe.

One might say, perhaps, that whereas Europe finds itself in
the third phase, the USA, a larger economy, is only just
entering the second one, the US federal state merging with
the most reactionary and aggressive factions of national
monopoly capital, as Dimitrov put it, serving as an
immediate tool to the interests of national monopolies, and
conducting itself in the world much in the way in which
Germany conducted itself in Europe 70 years ago.

Such a parallel may be superficial. Anyway, an analysis of
these complex developments compressed into a speech of
twelve minutes has to be grossly over-simplified.
Nevertheless, I believe that the trends I have highlighted
here are essential to the development of modern capitalism
and of the world in which we live.

I have not mentioned the European Counterrevolution at all.
There is no doubt that the downfall of socialism in Europe
is connected to these current trends that I have tried to
outline, especially to the rise and expansion of the EU,
but in what way exactly? Cause or effect?

This is among the questions we are currently discussing in
our party as part of our endeavour to write a new party
program. We believe that profound analysis of problems such
as those I have raised here is necessary if we want to give
adequate answers to the questions of our time and present a
credible communists' alternative.

Several documents have already issued from this process. In
one of them, this small pamphlet called A Communist Vision
for the Class Struggle of the 21st Century, we sketch a few
key targets essential to the struggle of the Communists and
the organized working class to build a set of
anti-monopolist positions. They all follow from the
analysis I have just outlined, so I am going to list them
only briefly:

It is necessary to fight globalization and transnational
monopoly capitalism. This means also to fight
privatizations and neoliberalism in general. We should put
forward a de-privatization program, by which we mean that
it is not enough to denounce privatizations, we must also
indicate the way in which privatizations can be reversed.

It is necessary to fight for peace and against US war
policy, which means in our case to combat Danish
participation in US wars.

It is necessary to fight for national independence, thus
also against the EU, a struggle in which we have already
noted crucial victories. With the defeat of the EU
Constitution, a new question poses itself: Should Danish
secession from the EU be put on the agenda now?

I should like to conclude by commenting briefly on a
question that has aroused widespread public attention
lately: The incidents of unrest among young immigrant
workers in France. Actually there were a few incidents in
Denmark as well, albeit on a much smaller scale. These
incidents have been explained away as cultural conflicts or
effects of poor integration and so on. But it is clear that
this is a social phenomenon closely related to the working
of globalized capitalism: The angry young people are
victims of what I just termed global apartheid. So, in a
way, their reaction is justified; only, they do not know
the reasons of their misery and they are unable to put a
name on their enemy. One French participant in the unrests
said, "There is no respect." And a Danish participant said,
"There is nothing to do in the suburbs."

To explain the cause of the misery, to put a name on the
enemy, to give these blind reactions of justified anger a
target, a goal, and a meaning, should be task of the
Communists. That the misery experienced by these young
people is not just a case of individual bad luck or "lack
of respect", but enters into a meaningful context this
understanding is the foundation of any Communist
alternative.