This statement, published in 1998, is a comprehensive reply to the US-based Spartacist League and other organizations who claimed that the global integration of capitalist production—globalization—was simply a myth invented by the capitalist class.
The statement exposes the class basis of Spartacist’s claims that the technical revolution in computers, communications and transportation over the previous two decades had not fundamentally changed the structure of world capitalism. The Spartacist League maintained that the economic and political power of the nation-state remained undiminished. On this basis, it claimed that organizations based on a national perspective, including the trade unions and the national movements, provided the only viable perspective for the working class.
The book evaluates the bitter historical experiences of the working class with the trade unions and national liberation movements and with Stalinism as practiced in the former Soviet Union and China. It also relates the nationalist perspective of the Spartacist League to the group’s origins in the 1960s and its subsequent political evolution.
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Purchase from Mehring Books- Globalization and the dynamics of capitalist development
- Global economy versus the nation-state system
- A qualitative change in the structure of world capitalism
- Globalized production and the trade unions
- Capitalism and the origins of the nation-state
- Spartacist and the “stockholders who care”
- International finance vs. the capitalist state
- The rise and fall of the Bretton Woods system
- Marx and the “iron law of wages”
- The rejection of a revolutionary perspective
- A separation of immediate demands from the struggle for socialism
- Spartacist denies the fall in living standards
- Economic nationalism and American chauvinism
- Globalized production and proletarian internationalism
- Transnational production, the nation-state and the origins of war
- Capitalism strains against the confines of the nation-state
- Karl Kautsky and “ultra-imperialism”
- Spartacism and Kautskyism
- Fear of globalization’s revolutionary implications
- The Spartacist League and the trade unions
- Marxism and the trade union question
- The antagonism between the unions and revolutionary Marxism
- Engels and the English unions
- The lessons of German social democracy
- The historic degeneration of trade unionism
- Mythologizing the CIO
- Spartacist’s defense of the AFL-CIO
- The degeneration of the unions—an international phenomenon
- A wave of defeats and betrayals
- Strategy and tactics, Marxism vs. opportunism
- A crude apology for bureaucracy
- On the national question
- Globalization and the “new nationalism”
- Lenin’s conditional attitude toward self-determination
- Where Spartacist champions self-determination
- Promoting Quebécois nationalism
- Sri Lanka and the Tamil question
- The Mexican crisis: Marxism vs. petty-bourgeois nationalism
- The perspective of permanent revolution
- Spartacist and Stalinism
- The USSR’s dissolution and the crisis of capitalism
- National state socialism
- The Chinese “workers state”
- Conclusion