On the 24th and 25th of October, Decay and Rebuilding will be hosting two days of roundtable and discussion, in association with Derek Varn, Prolekult, Geese Magazine, Prometheus.
What is a sect and why is the socialist left dominated by sects? How does this impede our organisational efforts? How can we break our organisations out of these sectarian tendencies and build a thriving socialist movement?
The family is still one of the primary sites of social reproduction for the working classes, therefore understanding it properly means we get a clearer view of how class works. This article goes into a broad analysis of the development of patriarchy by first establishing several critical moments in recent history with respect to homophobic laws in the U.K and Bulgaria. Then, we go into a overview of the way that the family has been structured since the Industrial Revolution to our contemporary era.
Materialist feminism is a feminist movement that originated in France in the later half of the 20th century. A lot of its main thinkers were coming from various socialist movements and parties but were disillusioned with how the question of feminism was treated within those movements. The most advanced, so to say, feminist analyses there went along the line of the following : The situation of working class women was simply of super-exploitation within the capitalist system in the sense that their wages were lower and that their subordinate position within society was a result of the bourgeoisie’s desire to force low wages upon them. Therefore for everything that had to do with the oppression of women the capitalist class was to blame.
The movement of peoples is not, contrary to popular thought, a modern invention. In fact, the history of peoples is also that of movement. Millions of people did not stay fixed in one single location forever, even in the most strictly feudal arrangements. However, the regime (and degree) of control over how, when and which people move, that is in fact quite recent. And it is precisely this control that we face today, as Marxists, that we have to engage with; the division of one great majority of populations into “non-citizens”, oncoming from abroad as this great, so-called “horde”. Politicians and media tell us constantly that they are coming for “our” wages, “our” jobs, “our” women, and so forth. But not only that. Even within the trade unions, the citizenship principle rules above all else – to be represented in the large trade unions, you must be a German, an Englishman, a Frenchman, et cetera. Otherwise, you are a threat to the “native” workers. Not just economically, however; but also, the migrant “brings” corruption from abroad, as here in Germany and elsewhere, there’s a greater order established. And so forth.
Another example of a crisis in profitability can be found in the German economy in the inter-war period. Sanctions, demobilisation of the economy and limitations on accessing international markets severely affected the German capitalists, especially those within the heavy industry sector. In this part we will see how this economic crisis was able to emerge from World War I and its parallels with the marxist theory of breakdown.
But more than that, we will focus on how the German bourgeoisie tried to tackle this crisis. Its plans and strategies as well as the political framework required to put them into action. This is important to us because those actions were taken in order to restore profitability for the German industry. Because of this they constitute some of the counter-tendencies to the general breakdown of capitalism we’ve been discussing so far.
Aside from the view that the falling rate of profit is explanatory of all crisis formation in a capitalist economy, many other vulgarisms proliferate in relation to the theory. Each new vulgarism necessarily spawns at least as many disavowals of the notion that Marx possessed a breakdown theory, or that one is necessary. We do not have time today to run through even a representative portion of these different responses. As such, we will briefly consider another form of vulgarism and two disavowals of breakdown theory to illustrate some of the most prominent problems which arise from them.
In 1892 the famous theorist of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), Karl Kautsky wrote that “The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time.”1 Over 120 years since Kautsky’s proclamation, the clock is still ticking, but we have had no shortage of those proclaiming that each second it counts will be the last.
Prophesies of capitalism’s collapse, often and preferably immediate, have been a commonplace in Marxist literature and politics since the publication of the third volume of Marx’s Capital in 18942. It is not hard to see, in the face of so many failed prophets, why the view that Marxism requires a breakdown theory of capitalism has largely become the domain of dogmatism and vulgarism, with most mature Marxisms treating it as an inconvenient part of the movement’s history.
At the end of the 19th century, the German workers movement had the reputation of being among the most powerful forces of its kind. However, this power had always been more fractured and complicated than both its reputation at the time and its subsequent retrospective romanticisation. From a history of splits and unions, ardent conflict and compromise, the SPD had emerged as one of the largest institutions of the working class. Throughout being persecuted and criminalised during the Bismarck Era, it had kept close ties to the union movement and built a solid support base in among the working class. At its early 20th century prime it had also constructed a range of organisations from publications, news outlets, educational facilities, recreational clubs, unions, legal support structures and many more. To no surprise it had been labelled as a state within the state.
The Marxist left in Britain, Germany, and perhaps Europe as a whole is in crisis. This is not a unique observation; it could even be considered a cliché. It should not be news to anyone here that Marxist organisations, whatever their flavour, are small and essentially irrelevant, aside from brief revivals on the back of spontaneous movements. To those of us familiar with the Marxist left, what remains is a social milieu, composed largely of students and academics, middle-class ideologues, and the rare tired worker, organised into small activist groupings1. Each, of course, proclaims itself the true heir of the Marxist movement, explicitly or implicitly considering itself to represent the vanguardist leadership of a resurgent workers movement, whenever that is to arrive. They need only to bring their politics to the masses.
Decay & Rebuilding is a communist and marxist educational project with the aim of combating sectarian and reductionist tendencies within the socialist movement. That means we do not accept the manner in which theoretical positions are posited as explanations of historical and political phenomena and view approaches which situate theory in this way – for example, a reductive approach to modes of production which stipulates class categories as uncomplicated social realities (ie. “there is the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and this alone”) - as actively harmful to the Marxist tendency and the proletarian movement.