INVESTIGATION

Full Marx for George Bush

5 November 2005

The President of the United States is not a communist, says John Laughland, but his belief in a global democratic revolution is inspired by Marxist thinking

For Marx and Engels, indeed, the key to the revolutionary power of the bourgeoisie lay precisely in its international and cosmopolitan nature. ‘To the great chagrin of Reactionists,’ they wrote, ‘the bourgeoisie has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. In place of the old local and national self-seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.’ Globalisation, in other words. Engels argued explicitly that the atomisation and deracination caused by international capitalism was the necessary precursor to worldwide emancipation. ‘The disintegration of mankind into a mass of isolated, mutually repelling atoms,’ he wrote, ‘means the destruction of all corporate, national and indeed of any particular interests and is the last necessary step towards the free and spontaneous association of men.’

It is well known that Marxists believe political arrangements to be a mere ‘superstructure’ determined by the underlying economic reality. ‘The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord,’ Marx wrote, ‘the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.’ After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the division between East and West was overcome, Western ideologues of globalisation used this same Marxist argument to claim that things like the internet and the fax machine meant that the sovereign state belonged in the dustbin of history. They then used this alleged withering away of the state to argue in favour of a one-world political regime, in which statehood would have to give way to the superior claims of universal human rights. Tony Blair justified Nato’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 by saying that the right to bomb a country for alleged human rights abuses derived from globalisation. ‘People are recognising that if there is a serious problem with the Brazilian economy, it develops into a serious problem for the British economy,’ he said. ‘It is similar with security problems.’