Microsoft's monopoly and control of the Internet
WW Party Conference: Excerpts from a talk by Fred
Goldstein
As we approach the millennium and U.S. capitalism continues
to avoid a collapse, with the stock market continuing to rise
and profit levels increasing, there is more and more
speculation on the networks and in the capitalist press about
the so-called New Era. They claim the free market will work its
magic and the automatic result will be a flow of enormous
wealth that will bring humanity to new levels of affluence and
prosperity.
This is a capitalist fairy tale meant for the gullible. The
underlying truth is that we are living in the late stage of
post-Soviet imperialist expansion. We have lived through a
decade in which the giant monopolies created by capitalism have
been relatively free to roam the globe and impose their will
upon the oppressed and the working class.
And what state have they left the world in? They have
ravaged the globe. One can get some sense of the wonders of
capitalist globalization by reading through the United Nations
Human Development Report for 1999.
There has been untold wealth created, but not for the
masses. The world's 200 richest people more than doubled their
wealth in the four years prior to 1998 to more than a trillion
dollars. The assets of the three top billionaires in the world
(whom the study does not name) are more than the gross national
product of the 48 least developed nations--with a population of
600 million people.
A WORLD OF MASS POVERTY
The other side of this enormous accumulation of wealth is
mass poverty. Some 1.3 billion people live on a dollar a day or
less--which is what the World Bank defines as the poverty
level. Some 880 million people have no access to any medical
services. For them a simple infection can result in death.
In the age of super profits and corporations that spend tens
of billions of dollars just to buy each other up, 1.3 billion
people lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion people have
no access to basic sanitation. Some 850 million are illiterate
in the oppressed countries and even in the imperialist
countries 100 million are functionally illiterate--that is,
they cannot fill out a job application form.
Another 250 million children work in the sweatshops of the
corporations world-wide and 27 million workers work in special
export zones where they are not allowed to join unions.
The most telling condemnation of capitalism is what it has
done to the former socialist countries. Where socialism had
guaranteed jobs, health care, vacations, pensions and nutrition
as basic political rights of the working class, there is now
mass unemployment, homelessness, begging in the streets,
prostitution, gangsterism and all the ills of capitalism. They
quickly developed after the counterrevolution--in a
concentrated form and at an accelerated rate.
Since modern records have been kept, there has not been such
a rapid decline in economic existence as has resulted from the
devastation of the changeover from socialism to capitalism.
In Eastern Europe there is a new slave trade in women. It is
estimated that 500,000 East European women and girls are
brought to Western Europe for sexual exploitation every year
and the business is estimated at $7 billion annually.
This is the grim truth behind the endlessly repeated phrase
"globalization." It is a phrase that under capitalism means
global conquest, global exploitation and global plunder by
modern means.
How do we, as revolutionary Marxists, view these recent
developments? Marxism is the ideology of the working class
precisely because it is a tool to unearth the revolutionary
possibilities beneath the surface of bourgeois society, even in
reactionary times of great setbacks.
Where the bourgeoisie sees the wonder of globalized
capitalist production, complete with low wages and no unions,
we see that the Indonesian workers have begun to organize, even
under the fascist military dictatorship. We see the south
Korean working class developing powerful, militant unions. We
see independent unions in Mexico. We see the working class in
Colombia coming out in a general strike against austerity
during a civil war. We see that the workers in Puerto Rico
conducted a general strike against Yankee privatization.
ENORMOUS GROWTH OF WORKING CLASS
In fact, in the oppressed countries as a whole, between the
years 1980 and 1994, the industrial working class went from 285
million to 400 million--and the subsequent years saw even
greater industrialization. One hundred and fifteen million new
workers and almost half of them women. This is a mighty
proletarian army in the making.
And what of the capitalist boom at home? Where the
bourgeoisie see a glorious prosperity, we see that this
so-called prosperity has a class character. While many workers
have jobs, the prosperity is for the rich, the upper layers of
society.
Where bourgeois commentators see the wondrous new age of the
endlessly rising stock market and the end of the business
cycle, we see a system perched on the precipice of a crisis.
And this is not artificially made up to fit into a theory.
It is no surprise to us that U.S. imperialism could have an
extended upswing in production at this juncture. After all,
they reconquered one-sixth of the earth's surface and added 300
million people to their sphere of exploitation. And equally
important, they gained a free hand to greatly intensify their
plunder in the oppressed world, which had been partially
protected by the existence of the USSR.
This is the first true imperialist expansion in the last 75
years. Up until the destruction of the USSR, the global sphere
of exploitation had been steadily shrinking for
imperialism--since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The
extended capitalist upturn does nothing to negate Marxist
economic theory. On the contrary, where bourgeois theorists are
at a loss, Marxism alone has the explanation.
GLOBAL EXPANSION LED TO REVOLUTION
The working class has been through similar periods, the most
protracted of which was the period after the defeat of the
Paris Commune in 1871 when imperialism really began to carve up
the globe. This expansion pushed proletarian revolution off the
agenda for over four decades, but ultimately ended up in
revolution and national liberation struggles on a world
scale.
The present-day expansion is infinitesimal compared to that
period. Furthermore, the productive forces are so much more
powerful that no contemporary expansion of capitalist markets
and super-exploitation can overcome capitalist overproduction
for very long.
But even with the expansion the money managers of capitalism
have had to resort to interest rate cuts and vast extensions of
consumer credit to keep the upturn going and stave off the
crisis of overproduction.
In fact, the first quarter of this year was the first time
since the great depression of the 1930s that the population as
a whole borrowed more than its income. What the bankers and
financiers are doing is trying to postpone the inevitable. And
there is nothing new about the enormous stock market run-up.
The same mania overtook the bourgeoisie in the 1920s. No one
knows this more than Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve. No
serious bourgeois financial official takes the new-era
propaganda seriously.
And finally, where the bourgeoisie sees the great
significance of the twentieth century as the defeat of the
USSR, we say that the historic significance of the 20th century
was that the Bolshevik revolution took place. That a
downtrodden working class in a peasant country in the throes of
feudalism, 85-percent illiterate, was able to seize and hold
the power. That they built up the USSR into the second-greatest
economic power in the world. That they defeated the Nazis and
launched the space age. That they made great strides in solving
the problem of national oppression. And did it all without
bosses, without slave drivers and exploiters.
It had great flaws, which helped imperialism to overcome it.
But it is the accomplishments, not the flaws, that are of
lasting significance. It showed that a new, superior form of
planned human society, free of exploitation, is not just
theoretically possible but could exist and develop under the
most unfavorable conditions imaginable.
What makes the ruling class seem insurmountable is not its
military or police or its media, but the passivity of the
working class. But capitalist exploitation and crisis will
destroy this passivity and regenerate struggle. The working
class and oppressed people must ultimately struggle because
they have no choice but to do otherwise. As Marx said,
capitalism creates its own gravediggers.
The 21st century will build on the Bolshevik revolution, the
Chinese revolution, the Cuban revolution, the Korean revolution
and many others. Given the insoluble contradictions of
capitalism and the enormous growth in the working class,
Marxists have every reason to see the 21st century as the one
in which the communist revolution will be brought to fruition
worldwide.
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