Paper presented by Robert Griffiths, Communist Party of Britain general secretary, to the seminar for European Communist and left parties on 'Popular sovereignty, globalisation and the new European Constitution', London, October 16, 2004

Marxist Approaches to Globalisation and Imperialism

Like other communist and workers' parties, the Communist Party of Britain has been developing its analysis of what is called 'globalisation'. We seek to deepen our understanding of it not least because globalisation provides much of the context within which the domestic and foreign policies of Britain's New Labour government are formulated.

This context is dominated by the drive of US imperialism - using its now unrivalled economic, political and military power - to impose a 'new world order' on the peoples of our planet. In pursuit of its own world-wide economic interests, British imperialism has aligned itself even more closely with US imperialism as a junior and largely compliant ally.

Our 46th and 48th congresses identified in these developments what it characterised as a new 'emerging phase' of imperialism. This phase germinated in the anti-working class onslaught led by the ruling classes of Britain and the US in the 1980s, before taking the world stage with the collapse of the international socialist system in the 1990s.

Its chief features are, firstly, to assert the superiority of the ethical and cultural values of the 'civilised' West; secondly, to claim on the basis of this supposed superiority the right to intervene politically and militarily in the internal affairs of any country in the world, regardless of the United Nations Charter and international law; thirdly, to use new and existing global agencies such as the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank to enforce economic regimes which benefit Western transnational corporations in general and those based in the US in particular; fourth, to orchestrate a process of global exploitation and concentration of economic resources on an unprecedented scale; fifth, to extend Western military power across the world and into space under the hegemony of the US; and sixth, to undermine and subvert national cultures in order to establish the supremacy of an Anglo-American mass 'culture' which incorporates and prjoects the values of US-led imperialism.

On all these fronts today, we are witnessing the ruthless use of neo-colonial methods to subvert, undermine and disregard the sovereign institutions of existing states.

For some, the term 'globalisation' is used to conceal or misrepresent what is actually this new emerging phase of imperialism. 'Globalisation' is presented as a mainly technologically-driven process which, we are told, is inevitable. Often allied to this approach is a tendency to see so-called globalisation as a predominantly economic process.

As Marxists, we do not disregard the dynamic of technological development as one of the forces of production with all its economic, social and cultural ramifications. Nor should we underestimate the significance of the economic base which underpins what is, after all, capitalist or - more accurately - imperialist globalisation.

Nevertheless, as our 48th congress resolution points out, 'developments that have been described as 'globalisation' are in reality primarily the result of political processes'. Economically, capitalism has involved movements of commodities, capital and labour across the globe for the past 400 years. From the East India Company and Barclays coffee house merchants of the 17th century to Exxon and Citibank today, almost all the major transnational corporations are based within one or other of the leading imperialist states. Politically, the capitalist state power which protects and promotes their interests has always been organised first and foremost at the level of the national or multinational state - and remains so.

It is US, British, German, French state power which drives forward the new phase of imperialism in its main features outlined above. It is the state power of each country which creates alliances with others where their interests coincide.

The collapse of their common enemy the Soviet Union opened up new opportunities to exploit the resources of the former socialist countries, but also to intensify exploitation in the Third World and in the imperialist countries themselves.

So the imperialist powers have combined together to impose IMF structural adjustment programmes, establish the World Trade Organisation and promote the abortive Multilateral Agreement on Investment and now the General Agreement on Trade and Services. But these policies are political decisions which ultimately rest upon the power of national states, acting in concert with one another. This is seen at its most naked in the case of imperialist military intervention to secure control of strategic resources and supply routes.

Although these decisions derive from the logic of capitalism's imperatives, they are not only the only ones that could have been taken. They were not 'inevitable' any more than many of the characteristic features of imperialist globalisation are inevitable.

Nor, given the origins and motive forces of 'globalisation' and the character of the political and economic forces which govern it, can we agree that globalisation is either a neutral or potentially benign process. There is the 'reformist' perspective which believes that the development of international regulatory organisations and codes of conduct can make it so. While Communists do not reject reforms out of hand, these offer no more than the hope of curbing some of globalisation's worst excesses, some of the time.

Then there is the 'utopian' response to globalisation which sees way forward in terms of building global resistance against transnational capital and related international organisations, believing wrongly that capital - and therefore the struggle against it - is no longer organised on a national basis.

Both perspectives share a common root in overestimating the economic - and underestimating the political - content of this new phase of imperialism. Both therefore downplay the importance of challenging monopoly capitalism at the level where most of its political power continues to be concentrated, namely that of the nation state.

For as long as this is the case, we take the nation - or in Britain's case the multinational - state as our starting point in the political class struggle. Our revolutionary programme Britain's Road to Socialism, constantly renewed and updated, is our party's strategy for the working class to 'first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie' as Marx and Engels put it in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Such an approach does not deny the value of reforms and mobilisations at the national and international - as well as the local - level. In particular, acting in solidarity with peoples across the world fighting to preserve or achieve national sovereignty against imperialist pressure is essential not only as our internationalist duty, but also because it promotes solidarity and political consciousness within the working class and progressive movement at home.

Successfully challenging the pro-monopoly, pro-war policies of Britain's New Labour government, achieving a left government here on the basis of mass struggle and a Labour, socialist and communist majority in parliament, would deal far more severe blows to 'globalisation' than could any number of international demonstrations and regulations .

II. National and Popular Sovereignty

The disappearance of the Soviet Union as a unifying factor has also exacerbated the divisions within imperialism which reflect their rival economic and political interests.

It is in this context that we assess renewed efforts to expand the European Union and cement it into the foundations of a single market, economic and monetary union, neo-liberal policies and an EU military-industrial complex. The drive to construct a monopoly capitalist United States of Europe with a common foreign and military policy has the same three-fold purpose identified by Lenin in 1916: to promote monopoly capitalism and suppress socialism at home, to exploit neo-colonies abroad and to compete against rival imperialist powers and in particular the US. At the global level, it should be no surprise that the EU is a champion of privatisation, the free movement of capital, GATS and other archetypal 'globalisation' measures aimed at the developing and former socialist countries.

No less important is the joint need of Europe's imperialist centres to circumvent the democratic institutions of their own countries in face of the system's deepening economic contradictions. These institutions still, in our view, hold the potential for fundamental change - demonstrated over the past decades by the increasing instability of political parties aligned to imperialism. For this reason the drive to a United States of Europe is also designed to undermine and circumvent the democratic institutions of EU member states. More specifically, EU laws and treaties have sought to limit the powers of democratic national parliaments - themselves the product of long working class struggle - precisely in those areas where they might limit the power and freedom of capital. Meanwhile, such unelected EU institutions as the European Commission and the European Central Bank acquire powers to initiate and enforce policies of privatisation, deregulation and monetarism enshrined in EU fundamental law.

Thus our 48th congress identified as a key task for our party 'the defence of the existing democratic institutions of member states and in particular the ability of national parliaments to exercise economic and social control over capital - and thereby to change the balance of forces against imperialism'.

In our view, the only practical way to reverse the process of globalisation is to attack its political base in the imperialist states. But merely to defend the imperfect institutions of bourgeois democracy is no attack at all. Which is why the concept of 'popular sovereignty' is so valuable.

For us, popular sovereignty is the ability of progressive anti-monopoly forces to transform the sovereign democratic institutions of their country in order to meet the economic and social needs of the people. We have to defend those institutions and their powers against the unelected and the unaccountable - history and Georgi Dimitrov have taught us that. But in this case, we do so also in order to transform them through mass popular struggle into weapons against monopoly capital and against those state structures that support it.

This concept of popular sovereignty can trace its pedigree to the French revolution, when the sans-culottes of Paris battled to impose popular control over elected representatives and - through them - over the power of property. Indeed, in one vital respect the revolution itself was a series of struggles to decide which class genuinely constituted the French nation and so should wield sovereignty.

Popular sovereignty reverberates through the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels call upon the proletariat to win the battle of democracy, to constitute itself as the nation, to take state power in order to wrest economic and social power from the capitalist class. When the people had to defend national sovereignty against Prussian invaders - bourgeois politicians and their institutions having capitulated - they transformed it into popular sovereignty and created the Paris Commune. Workers soviets or councils express the same revolutionary democratic essence.

In the present day, popular sovereignty is the struggle to impose the will of the working class and its allies - the vast majority of the nation - over monopoly capital. In Britain, the campaigns against participation in imperialist wars and in the US Star Wars programme are embryonic expressions of the aspiration for popular - and not just national - sovereignty.

In the immediate future, as Communists and internationalists in Britain our responsibility is to ensure that the referendum campaigns against the single European currency and the EU constitution are imbued with the same spirit. They must not be allowed to become dominated by right-wing and chauvinist ideas and led by sections of the bourgeoisie. They must be based in the organised labour movement and project the values of internationalism and anti-imperialism in common struggle with working people across Europe.



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