* The world situation forged: the analysis of imperialism, debates on the national question, and battles over forms of political, social and parliamentary organization. I. A NEW EPOCH?
1. Behind the major political events of the last few years (fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification, collapse of the USSR, Gulf War and military interventions in Africa, war in the
Balkans) lies the exhaustion of the period of growth and development that followed the Second World War. From 1945 to 1970, the average rate of growth of the industrialized countries was exceptionally high: percent on average, compared with roughly 2 percent between 1914 and 1950 and 2.5 percent since 1973. Worldwide production multiplied sevenfold, worldwide trade fourfold. This headlong growth supplied the foundation for social compromises in the world's different sectors. It shaped the protagonists of these social compromises (reformist parliamentary parties, trade union movement, populist and anti-imperialist movements in the Third World):
• Development of the welfare state and the cult of progress in the imperialist centers, with the reinforcement of reformist positions, imperisocial pacts, and a deepening of bureaucratic phenomena;
• Euphoria on the part of the bureaucracy in the East in terms of a short-term perspective of catching up and going beyond the capitalist West (the Sputnik years in the USSR); and
• The Bandung turn and projects for decolonization and development in the Third World (a New World Economic Order, technology transfer, import-substitution industrialization).
This configuration encouraged the expression of radical challenges to the system of domination: national liberation struggles (Algeria, Cuba, Indochina) against the traditional forms of colonization and dependence; mass anti-bureaucratic struggles in Czechoslovakia or Poland; youth movements and mass strike movements in most of the developed countries. 12 International Viewpoint
2. THE BIG CHANGE TAKING PLACE IS frequently summed up with the notion of globalization: sometimes in order to sing the modernizing praises of a free-market liberalism «without borders», just as often on the contrary to use globalization as a bogeyman justifying backward-looking reflexes (economic protectionism, the social clause, backward preventive measures to against immigration). It is therefore important to specify the reality, limits and contradictions of the changes under way. Accelerating globalization is real. International trade is growing more quickly than the GDPs of the countries involved. Since 1975 foreign direct investment has grown more quickly than domestic investment (from 1980 to 1988 foreign direct investment within the US-JapanEurope triangle tripled). Corporate interpenetration and mergers are creating oligopolies whose links to their International trade is replacing development of domestic markets as a basis of accumulation (François Chesnais, La mondialisation du capital, 1994, p184). Can we conclude that "the world market has been created"? The formula is so general that it is bound to be ambiguous. While accelerating globalization cannot be denied international trade makes up only 2030% of the total volume of exchanges, and foreign direct investment was 1% of world GDP in 1990. While capital and good markets are more and more unified, this is not true for the labor market (350 million workers in the rich countries earn an average hourly wage of $US 18, compared to an average hourly wage of SUS 1 or SUS 2 for 1,200 million workers in the poor countries). While a number of multinationals operate on several different continents produce in several dozen countries, they are still dependant on the dominant imperialisms' political, diplomatic, monetary and military power. Finally, globalization ot capital has been going on in recent years on the basis of its sweeping transformation into finance capital, rather than on the basis of development of productive forces. We are therefore facing an intermediate, transitional situation, a crisis of the old modes of regulation whose effects are already perceptible:
a) mutation of social formations;
b) disjunction of political and economic spheres (leading to a crisis of the nation-state and ruling classes); and c) attempts at regional reorganization of markets and institutions. 3. THE PLAYERS IN THE SOCIAL CONFLICT who were fashioned by the previous period and mode of growth have been partially and unevenly destructured by the effects of the crisis, the liberal offensive, and the reorganization of the productive apparatus. The industrialized countries have registered a significant drop in industrial labor (change in the organization of work and skills, individualization and flexibility) and a rise of services with a spectacular increase in permanent unemployment and durable exclusion, the reorganization of urban space and the partial dismantling of working class concentrations (the factory-housing relationship, which used to determine social solidarity), marginality in suburbs, the situation of women and youth. Nobody can predict the effect of these phenomena over several decades in societies where wage labor represents more than 80% of the active population and where certain traditional elementary mechanisms of solidarity (extended family, links to the countryside) have been smashed.
In the ex-USSR and Eastern Europe, the appearance of dependent capitalism will have devastating effects on urbanized and industrialized societies, with new forms of third or fourth worldization. This process has been slowed down for the time being by the partial character of the privatizations (low official unemployment linked to the hybrid character of the property forms), but the urban crisis is already severe and may very well provoke a reverse rural exodus (an urban exodus) or migratory movements to the West.
A series of dependent countries have seen the end of the model of the industrialization by substitution as well as the emergence of increasingly severe dualization (free zones, informal economy, agrarian question) and the degradation of their primary exports (technological changes in the North, unequal exchange, and financialization of these markets). The urban and rural crisis is such that it does not seem to be controllable without serious agrarian reforms that can only directly clash with the ruling classes who are linked to the landed oligarchy. Massive displacements of populations and refugees are reaching unprecedented proportions, at the same time as
14th World Congress of the Fourth International 13 interventions trying to control these movements (Haiti) and xenophobic regulatory measures (the Schengen agreements, Proposition 187 in California).
The organized forces (social movements, parties, unions) that came out of the preceding cycle of struggles have been socially weakened. They have undergone significant defeats in the wealthy countries (British miners, sliding scale in Italy, steel industry in France) and the in poor countries (Bolivian miners, agrarian counterreform in Mexico) without the new organizing poles of the next cycle of struggles having made appearance yet. From this point of view, the Brazilian PT is more a heritage of the preceding period of growth (industrial miracle) than a general model for what is to come (even if the question of an independent class party retains its full propagandistic, and in some cases agitational value in a number of countries). The loosening grip of «national compromises» forged during the period of growth and the weakening of class movements facilitate the outbreak of panics over identity and quests for other kinds of communities (national, ethnic or religious). The social forces and forms of organization forged during past cycles of mobilization are virtually exhausted, while new generations have not yet clearly emerged. The role of youth (for traditional reasons) and women (for more specific reasons — see "Women and Economic Integration" in Women's lives in the New Global Economy, NSR 22, IIRE, 1995) will be decisive in the of a new cycle of mobilization. 4. ONE OF GLOBALIZATION'S MAJOR consequences is the tendency of the political and economic spheres to come apart. During the 1950s the dominant national economies formed relatively coherent wholes, linking together a market, a territory and a state. International competition and
The world situation * deregulation bring about fractures between economic logic and political sovereignty. It becomes difficult in many cases to say what a product's or company's national identity is. Social inequalities between winners and losers in globalization are deepening, not only on an international scale but also within the dominant countries, to the point that the social compromises of the welfare state are being put to a rude test: "Are we still part of one community even when we're no longer part of one economy?" (Reich). A question like this contains much exaggeration, specially concerning the USA, but it expresses a real tendency and real anguish.
The crisis in fact affects the redistributive function of the state, which in the past fostered a certain social cohesion. This has led to a loss of legitimacy for institutions that have been driven back by the combined impact of privatization (the reinforcement of private economic power), globalization (loss of control from above of economic and monetary
* The world situation relations) and deregulation. This phenomenon is not limited to dependent states or to still fragile ruling classes. It has also begun to affect some of the European bourgeoisies. Neoliberal market restructuring, national (e.g. US, Italian and Belgian) and local debt, displacement of the tax burden onto the poorest people, and the severe crisis of public finance all produce a challenging of the mechanisms of the welfare state (cost-of-living allowances, public services, social security, cutbacks in wages, benefits, private insurance and charity) and an increase in regional inequalities. ization of economic power at the expense of public service and the public good have produced corruption and the proliteration ot matia-type phenomena. In the dependent countries, this genera. tendency has produced a generalized crisis of populist systems (Mexico, Arab countries, Sub-Saharan Africa), a process of privatization, dollarization and loss of sovereignty under the pressure of the debt and the erosion of export-driven materials), and an "involuntary delinking" for some countries (from 1966 to 1987, while the Newly Industrialized Countries' share of world exports rose from 1.1% to 5.5%, the South's overall share fell from 23% to 15% and Latin America's share fell to 3%). The debacle of weak local "elites" , incapable of homogenizing themselves around a viable national project, exacerbates corruption, redistribution of sinecures among protegés, and a tendency toward dismemberment of some countries (Somalia, Ethiopia, Rwanda) along clan and ethnic lines. The crises that Mexico and Algeria are going through are particularly revealing, since these are countries that have experienced a revolution or a radical war of liberation, countries that seem to be among the best situated to overcome handicaps of dependency. Today Mexico is looking for salvation in a socially costly association with its big northern neighbor, while Algeria is sinking into the chaos of disguised civil war, under the arbitration of its former colonial rulers. This is the context in which we can understand social 14 International Viewpoint violence and political violence, and the rise of "shadowy identities" that is inversely proportional to the weakening of class identification and solidarity. 5. DIVIDED BY COMPETITION, THE RULING class only exists as such through the state project that unifies it. The nation-state project (which emerged in the course of the last century in the dominant countries, and in the course of this century with decolonization and independence) has exhausted its integrating and unifying effects without any alternative project emerging. The existing states remain the necessary form of class domination, but are already no longer the appropriate form in terms of the main tendencies of globalization. This explains the destabilization of the ruling classes and their political personnel, which is perceivable everywhere: Galloping corruption, clientism, drug trafficking; the rise of
Collor, Berlusconi); the tendency of those petty-bourgeois and bourgeois layers who are least able to accept a loss of state sovereignty and to adapt to the effects of liberal competition to challenge the rule of the dominant forces, producing a crisis of identity in bourgeois parties and some signs of fragmentation among their leaderships; and signs of division within big business on immediate perspectives and solutions (Europe, NAFTA, WTO and Ross Perot).
In spite of its specificity, Italy is symptomatic in this respect. In Latin America and the Arab countries (in the Indian subcontinent?), the bureaucratic populist cycle is at the end of its rope. In Africa, a number of decolonized states have not succeeded consolidating any national reality or bourgeois class. The redistributive effects and inter-class solidarity that corruption and clientism produced in the past are disappearing. The comprador elites are also disappearing. Caught between the demands for structural adjustment and social decomposition, a number of dependent countries have become increasingly fragile (Ethiopia, Sudan, Afghanistan, ex-Soviet republics). Even in those countries where the struggle for independence was the most radical in its forms and in its long-term consequences (Algeria, Mexico, Angola, Mozambique), the populist regimes have exhausted their historic dynamism and their bureaucratic and bourgeois elites have reached an accommodation with a partial loss of sovereignty either in fact or in law. The aggressivity of the neo-colonial discourse, which would have been unthinkable only twenty years ago, on the immaturity of the child-peoples and the necessity for "benign" guidance is simply a reflection of this situation.
In the bureaucratic regimes, the emergence of a entrepreneurial and dynamic bourgeoisie has run into enormous difficulties. decomposition of the different levels of the bureaucracy has rather given birth to a mixture of speculative capitalism and bureaucratic clientism, to a kind of comprador and mafioso protobourgeoisie. 6. THE SOCIALIST PROJECT IS NOT THE only one in crisis, so are the different world visions that co-existed, clashed and complimented each other in the preceding period: Bandung, bourgeois democratic universalism and illusions in progress, productivist communism that will be victorious in the year 2,000. The triumph of the tandem of the free market and parliamentary democracy has not survived very long. Even if historical analogies are somewhat inevitable in military and political thinking, it is not useful to reason through analogies (references to the beginning of the century or to the 1930s) given the depth of the historic mutation going on and uncertainties in terms of what will result. We have to remain very attentive to the unforeseen, to the specifically contemporary forms of old contradictions. We are no longer in the political period of 1968. We are not out of the long wave depressionary economic cycle and we are at the end of an epoch (including the political culture it generated) that the First World War and the Russian revolution culture opened. The break-down of the unstable balances created at the end of the last world war have not produced a new order, as Bush proclaimed. But new and inevitable conflicts in an unjust world (inequalities, dependency, apartheid) as well as violent (Gulf, Yugoslavia, Rwanda) and unstable ones. We are now dealing with a type of regressive (cultural, political and economic) Counter-Reformation which we have to begin to resist. Capitalist Counter-Reformation against all democratic and social conquests: longterm unemployment, precariousness, old and new forms of poverty,
14th World Congress of the Fourth International 15 exclusion, epidemics, the absolute pauperization of certain populations, ecological catastrophes, technologies and a moral crisis. There is always a way out of an economic crisis. The question is, at what cost and to whom. The present crisis will not produce a cataclysm, but the slow strangulation and worldwide deepening of inequality can take on equally violent or barbaric forms. Within the cyclical movement, the growing contradictions come down to the essential characteristics of the system: the inability of measurements to regulate the exchange of complex work and organize the long-term relationship between society and its natural environment. In the midst of the crisis, the elements of potential new modes of regulation are making their appearance technologies, new products, a new division and organization of labor). Nonetheless these elements remain partial; they have not systematized.
Reestablishing the conditions for a new phase of accumulation and lasting growth depends not only modification of the relationship of forces in the key countries, but also on a reorganization of markets, territories, institutions and legal systems. The crucial question is thus the change of scale that is on the agenda: the redistribution of relationships of dependency and domination, the emergence of regional entities and and the consolidation of international agreements and bodies capable of disciplining the neoliberal order. This leads to several, more and more ominous problems:
a) The problems of the political and institutional instruments of globalization (the role of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization), of alliances and of new forms of imperialist military intervention;
b) The problems involved in the emergence of regional entities with nonetheless very different characteristics: an attempt at monetary and political unity (the European Union); a common market under imperial hegemony between rich countries and a dependent country (NAFTA); a dependent regional common market (Mercosur); and a more or less organized free-trade zone (APEC); and c) The crisis and dismemberment of several countries, the rise of nationalism, the problem of the relationship between nation, ethnicity and state, and the multiplication of regional conflicts. We will briefly go over each of these three major headings. One of the functions of an international organization, even a modest one, is in effect to contribute to steering us through this transition by pushing through a programmatic updating that must be comparable, within certain limits, to the great controversies of the turn of the 20th century, which determined for almost a century the political culture of the various different components of the workers' movement. II. NEW PROBLEMS? 7. FOR ALMOST TWO CENTURIES, THE nation-state has been the functional form in which a goods and capital market, a labor market, and a space of political institutions were articulated There is no guarantee that globalization will lead to a simple transfer of this relationship between social and political spheres to a larger scale. One capital internationalized. At the same time, mergers and concentration are sketching the formation of a regional (in Europe continental) sector of capital. Still another sector of capital remains national. The processes are combined; there is no automatic economic mechanism involved. The political will to organize markets and forge new governments also plays a role, without anyone's being able to predict what institutional political forms will prevail in the future. For the time being nation-
The world situation * states, federal projects (Europe) and institutions linked to globalization are combined during the transition Whether we look at world trade (GATT-World Trade Organization), political concertation (the proposed reorganization the UN), management of the debt (World Bank/IMF), even management of the ecosphere (the international institutions seem to be more and more visible and active. Some people go too far, and conclude superimperialism has arisen, with a organioligopolies and planetary protostate institutions. We are not there yet, far from it. But the tools of globalization are already raising problems for our analysis and interventions, problems that we should face.
a) From GATT to the World Trade Organization. An integral part of the system established at the end of the war (Bretton Woods system, IMF, World Bank), GATT is one of the mechanisms for liberalizing trade controlled by the dominant powers, which perpetuates unequal exchange and dependency. Behind the hypocritical free-market credo lies the reality: structural adjustment diktats, hidden protectionism on behalf of the rich, cultural and financial hegemony reinforced by the deregulation of services, "patenting" of the genetic heritage, etc. The discreet shift (stealth parliamentary ratification) from GATT to the World Trade Organization in the framework of ratifying the Marrakech accords means new ways of