Wed 06, September 2006 @ 17:13
Introduction - LRCI Vs LFI
The assertion that capitalist productive resources were "stagnating" or "showing a tendency towards stagnation" provides the economic basis for the L5I's assertion that the world is in a "pre-revolutionary period" akin to the situation Trotsky described in the Transitional Programme in 1938. In making this assertion ironically, but not unknowingly, the leadership of the L5I were repeating a mistake of the Degenerate Trotskyists of international centrism after WWII. Faced with the need to re-elaborate Trotsky’s pre-war perspective based on a stagnant world economy and imminent revolutionary crisis, the Trotskyists refused to acknowledge the post war recovery of world capitalism “the Long Boom” and preferred to insist that the world remained stagnant and that as a result Trotsky’s "Transitional Programme" of 1938, was “adequate today.” This was ironic because the LRCI, the predecessor to the LFI had been founded on the idea of re-elaborating the Transitional Programme as it was no longer "adequate" today, a programme is a guide to action and by definition becomes “inadequate” once the situation it was written for had changed, in the case of the Transitional Programme, this particularly applied because its faulty post-war stagnation perspective. The L5I in refusing to reassess their 2003 perspective, which claimed that the "engine of the world economy had halted", the very year that the world economy embarked on a marked upswing, were knowingly repeating the same mistake of the various centrist Trotskyist traditions after WWII.
Here we reprint a polemic between the LRCI and the WRP in 1986, where the LRCI take issue with Geoff Pilling of the WRP, who had defended the idea that the capitalist productive forces must always "stagnate" in the imperialist epoch; and an article written by Michael P in March 2006, which unwittingly asserts exactly the thing that the LRCI had previously argued against.
Michael P March 2006, article, “The concept of capitalist decline in Lenin’s theory of imperialism”, attempts to establish that stagnation is a predominant essential feature of the entire imperialist epoch and that the tendency towards crisis, always present in the capitalist mode of production, similarly predominates throughout it.
“Most contributions — including unfortunately Keith’s article on Lenin’s theory — declare this thesis of the stagnation and decline of capitalism in the imperialist epoch either to be perhaps explainable in light of the circumstances of the time, or to be exaggerated, or simply wrong. In reality, however, it is the core, the quintessence of the imperialism theory of Lenin and — following him — of Trotsky!"
From the recognition that the tendency towards stagnation and crisis exists, Michael goes onto to claim that capitalism is always stagnant and in crisis.
Directly echoing the arguments of Geoff Pilling of the WRP exactly 20 years before, for Michi and de facto the L5I, perspectives are no longer an honest assessment of the world, but a testament of revolutionary “commitment.” As the International Faction pointed out on many occasions, it was and is a feature of degenerate Trotskyism to transform perspectives into strategy and in so doing, the L5I had embarked on a re-run of the post WWII collapse of Trotskyism into centrism. And truly the second time around it is a farce.
Ironically at the end of his piece Michael attempts to establish the correctness of his assertions about the world economy by appending a series of GDP figures from various bourgeois agencies, including the OECD, IMF, World Bank and co. As the faction have demonstrated elsewhere, the reason these figures show a decline in the 1990s, is because the collapse of the Stalinist economies is measured as a collapse of capitalism, when in fact it was an addition to it. That Michael and the L5Is entire edifice of stagnation was constructed on such a feeble empirical basis, explains the vituperative tone of the piece. What Michi lacked in facts he made up for in certainty.
