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WHAT IS A VIABLE NATIONAL ECONOMY?
This position begs the fundamental historical fact that social development of all kinds (both by the capitalists and the working class) has occurred on the basis of nations as viable social and economic and cultural units since the l6th century and that if Communists intend to act in history they must act on the basis of accepting nations as viable social , economic and cultural units. This fundamental historical fact underlies the B&ICO's position on Britain's entry into the EEC. The EEC is an attempt to develop a European nation as a viable social, economic and cultural unit on a voluntary basis from 9 separate nations. The question of whether it will succeed is still unanswered. It is a fact that the success will depend on the conscious action of the bourgeoisie and the working class in the 9 nations: on their ability to make the changes involved in integrating 9 separate national economies into one and their will to do so. Further articles will deal with this.
The fact that the working class has no interest in nationalism or in oppressing other nations or in fighting wars for national honour and that it has a definite interest in supporting members of its class in all nations as and when that support is necessary means that the working class has an interest in organising internationally. It is not beyond the realms of historical possibility (though it remains a highly hypothetical possibility) that there will be a voluntary union of all nations under capitalism in order to develop the productive forces: because of the necessity for capitalism to continue to revolutionise the relations of production if it is to survive. It remains a highly hypothetical possibility because of the uneven development of capitalism.
At present much of the world is still in the throes of developing national capitalist economies and therefore still coming to terms with founding a unified national market, national politics, culture and even a national language. It also remains true that the working class' ability to achieve a voluntary unity of nations (as occurred within the territory of Tsarist Russia after Oct 1917) depends on the historical circumstances when the working class of one nation takes power in its nation. Had there been a revolution in Germany in 1918, then the question of a voluntary union of the USSR and Germany would have been very much on the agenda. Because there was no German revolution, the internationalism of the working class was not soiled or betrayed because there was no such voluntary union. Indeed, Lenin in concluding Brest-Litovsk showed that the working class having taken power in one nation was furthering the international interests of its class by defending itself against international capitalism: that its forces in the USSR were too weak to overthrow national capitalism in Germany without the German working class.
The working class has an active and material interest in the development of the productive forces within each of the capitalist national economies in which it exists. It must be an active interest because as materialists we know that a class must develop itself on the basis of what exists, i.e. it is a matter of concern to the working class that it labours at a definite level of technical and social organisation and that what it produces is a direct consequence of that level. If this were not the case, then communism would indeed be a matter of the spirit and would depend not on the ability of the working class to continually improve and develop the productive forces by the conscious application of social labour to technical and social organisation, but on some inner soul of the class.
In such a case the best communists would be quietists who would show the working class that the conditions under which it produced were of no consequence, had no bearing on the question of Communism. They would say that there should be strict indifference to whether it was a steam locomotive or an electrified high-speed train which ASLEF members drove; that there should be stoic acceptance of producing surplus value by using a manually operated lathe or an electrically driven one; that a worker should be unconcerned whether he produces whiskey or computers.
In Tsarist Russia the Bolsheviks dealt very little with this aspect of the working class' development because in Russia the main obstacle to the development of the productive forces and the working class was political: the fact that no viable national political unit existed under which capitalism could develop. In the event, the bourgeoisie proved incapable of creating that political unit and the working class proved equal to the task. Bolsheviks began to deal with the relation of the working class to the productive forces after 1917. They necessarily took both working class and means of production as they existed: read Lenin on the importance of electrification to the revolution, on the possibilities of the trade unions organising production (as trade unions). There is no doubt that had the bourgeoisie been able to create a capitalist nation unit in Russia in 1917, Lenin would have been equally as concerned to develop the working class' interests in the productive forces.