October 19, 2023
Class struggles interact
with but are different from power struggles. The ancient conflicts between
city-states Athens and Sparta were power struggles, while within each, slaves
and enslavers engaged in class struggles. Britain and France were absolute
monarchies in late European feudalism fully engaged in power struggles.
At the
same time, class struggles between lords and serfs internally agitated both
“great” powers. Now, after slavery and feudalism have largely ended and
capitalism prevails globally, great power struggles exist between the G7 and
BRICS and among their member nations, as well as other nations. At the same
time, class struggles exist between employers and employees in all nations.
Power and class struggles condition and shape one another. Both have been and
remain core aspects of history; so too have ideological habits of confusing and
conflating them.
Kaiser Wilhelm II,
Germany’s monarch, said in 1914 as World War I began, “I no longer recognize
[political] parties, I recognize only Germans.” He used nationalism to unify a
class-divided Germany to help win the war. The Kaiser had been shaken by more than
the increasingly serious struggles among world powers over colonies, world
trade, and foreign investment. He was stunned too by the rise of Germany’s
Marx-inspired Socialist Party across the decades before the war. Germany’s
class of capitalist employers had been similarly shaken and stunned. For a
country increasingly and deeply split between labor and capital, German
nationalism was the employer class’s strategy both to thwart socialism and win
the war. Key to that strategy was getting people to think (and self-identify)
in terms of national and ultimately military struggles, and not class
struggles.
Germany’s strategy failed.
It lost World War I, the monarchy ended, and its Socialist Party became
Germany’s postwar government. Socialism emerged from the war far stronger in
Germany than it had ever been. Much the same was true for World War I’s other
combatant nations. More or less all of them had used nationalism to mobilize
their war efforts and to undermine and displace class consciousness. For the war’s
winners, nationalism may have served its purpose for them to achieve victory.
Yet, it did not vanquish or banish socialism. Instead, socialism captured its
first government (Russia) and split into socialist and communist wings that
each drew mass attention and engagement. Both wings spread globally and quickly
in the 1920s and even more in the 1930s as capitalism imposed its worst crash
ever on most nations across the world.
Now, a century later, power
struggles intensify and sharpen across global capitalism. The power of the
United States, hegemonic during the Cold War, is now declining. The earlier
decline of Europe, punctuated by the loss of its colonies and two deeply
destructive world wars, continues. Both Europe and the United States face the
stunning, unprecedented speed of China’s economic growth and concomitant rise
to global power status. Already, China’s network of alliances, especially the
BRICS, confronts the United States and its alliances, especially the G7. The
rise of China and the BRICS adds to their power struggles with the United
States and the G7. That rise is also realigning power relations between the
Global North and Global South and, in one way or another, among all nations and
within international organizations.
Class struggles have
likewise continued in all societies, thereby evolving in different forms and
foci. Most importantly, socialists now focus decreasingly on the struggle
between private property and free markets as capitalism, versus state property
and state planning as socialism. Many socialists reacted to 20th-century
experiences with state power in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China by
shifting their focus. State power and planning, while not dismissed as
socialist goals, were seen increasingly as insufficient by themselves.
Something more or different was needed to yield the post-capitalist system that
socialists could and would embrace. Socialists refocused their priorities on
the transformation of workplaces. Based on a critique of the capitalist
hierarchy inside factories, offices, and stores—and its social
effects—socialists increasingly stress proposals to democratically reorganize
production there. Each worker in an enterprise will have an equal vote to
decide what, where, and how to produce as well as how to dispose of the product
(or net revenues where the product is marketed). The democratization of all
workplaces (households as well as enterprises) becomes a central thrust of what
socialism has come to mean.
This kind of socialism grew
out of but also challenged the macro, state-focused socialisms of the 19th and
20th centuries. Thus, where state-owned-and-operated enterprises continue to
organize production around the employer-employee dichotomy, they invite
socialists’ criticisms much as private-owned-and-operated enterprises do. The
same applies to democratic socialisms or social democracies where enterprises
remain privately owned and operated but are subject, along with markets, to
heavy state supervision, taxation, and controls. Enterprises’ private versus
state forms, important as their differences are for other reasons, often do not
differ in class terms. Both typically display the employer/employee internal
organization of production. If going beyond capitalism to socialism means a
transition to micro-level workplace organizations that are democratic, then
such transitions apply to both public as well as private enterprises.
This newly emerging
socialist focus challenges both the United States and China, the G7 and BRICS,
despite the different balances of state and private enterprises among them.
Further, the now fast (and thus dramatically) changing power relations among
them have impacts on every nation’s class struggles. For example, G7 sanctions
against Russia over the Ukraine war, and their inflationary impacts on Europe
and the United States, have sharpened employer versus employee struggles as a
result of those inflationary and anti-inflationary policies in many nations
across the world. One of those policies—sharp interest rate rises by the U.S.
Federal Reserve—is squeezing nations with large dollar-denominated external
debts. The squeezed nations’ employers and employees react in ways that often
intensify their class struggles.
One major past and present
problem has been the widespread tendency to confuse or conflate power and class
struggles or else to see one and be blind to the other. Partly, these problems
resulted from nationalist efforts, like Kaiser Wilhelm II’s, to repress class
consciousness. While other problems emerged when cultures refused or rejected
class consciousness perhaps because of their mass media’s dependence on
capitalist owners and advertisers. Often both socialists and anti-socialists
contributed to the confusion and blindness. That happened when the Cold War
(1945-1990) and its lasting legacy effectively persuaded many on both sides to
equate socialism, communism, and the USSR as one pole versus capitalism,
democracy, the United States, and the “West” as the other pole.
In today’s newly emerging
international economic order, contending nationalisms are again strong. Power
struggles once again capture headlines: U.S. versus Russia and China, the G7
versus BRICS, and the Global South versus Global North. Power categories not
only displace class categories from analytical debates about major world
affairs but that displacement also invades discussions about nations’ internal
affairs. Power struggles are routinely mistaken for class struggles. Or class
and class struggles disappear altogether from discourses.
The rise and struggles of
the BRICS against the G7 should not be confused with class struggles. No
government among them is committed to replacing capitalism with socialism in
the sense of transition beyond the employer-employee mode of internal workplace
organization. Nor is any government among them committed to replacing
capitalism in the older senses of moving systemically from private to public
enterprise ownership and from markets to planning. Yet within all of them,
there are groups and movements that are committed to replacing capitalism with
socialism in accordance with one of its definitions.
Karl Marx and others saw
the conflict between the British Empire and its North American colony,
culminating in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, as primarily a power
struggle, and not a class struggle. Those wars did not pit slaves against
enslavers, nor serfs against lords, nor employees against employers; they were
power struggles. However, within them, moments of such class struggles did
occur. The Napoleonic wars were power struggles, yet within them too, struggles
of serfs against lords often occurred. The Napoleonic wars among feudal powers
both weakened them all and stimulated capitalist classes to push for an end to
feudalism across Europe. In the last two centuries of wars against colonialism
and neocolonialism—power struggles—there were many class struggles interwoven
with them.
The power struggles now
between the G7 and BRICS will interact with the class struggles going on within
both blocs. The leaders, ideologues, and mass media of both blocs focus chiefly
on those power struggles. The advocates of class change must clearly
differentiate power from class struggles if they are to focus mass
consciousness and activism on the latter. Thus, the BRICS bloc is surely
challenging the G7’s and the U.S.’s hegemony in the world economy. The power
struggle of competing blocs is not, however, a socialist movement challenging
capitalism. Nor is China or the Global South now mounting such a challenge. The
power struggles of China, BRICS, and the Global South against the U.S., the G7,
and the Global North may provoke new class struggles as well as influence all
those already underway. How they do so will depend in part on how we understand
and engage with the difference between power and class struggles.
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