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Class Consciousness and Crisis in the World Order

The consciousness of the proletariat “cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population”. If it concentrates exclusively “or even mainly” upon itself alone, the proletariat cannot be revolutionary, “for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding — of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society”. For this reason, the worker “must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real 'inner workings'; he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected”.

Moreover, “class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes”.

This passage is very well known by anyone beginning to study the Leninist conception of the party: it is at the theoretical heart of Lenin's What Is to Be Done? and also of Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party by Arrigo Cervetto, the theorist and founder of Lotta Comunista. Lenin criticises the spontaneist and economicist conceptions of the workers' struggle; Cervetto sees an “organic link” between Marx's Capital and What Is to Be Done? and sums it up in the formula of the science-party.

Five years ago, we defined the electric car battle — marked by the Green Deal in European planning and by the “televised crowds” of the gilets jaunes in France as a “What Is to Be Done? moment”. What we meant was that, in this “moment”, we glimpsed more clearly than in other critical junctures the objective movement of the clash between the automotive big groups, the electric and fossil fuel sectors, the activity of their lobbies, the dynamic of the European and national powers, the social effects of electric and digital restructuring, and the ideologies and movements mobilised on the different fronts.

And this was not all. In the 1980s, while thinking about the “corner-stones” of strategy, Cervetto returned to a 1969 reflection on the “internationalisation of the workers' struggle”. According to Lenin, Cervetto writes: “every workers' struggle has an international character and must therefore be addressed by a correspondingly internationalist revolutionary strategy”. Cervetto goes on to say that this was part of a more general thesis by Lenin: “In the imperialist phase, all political currents become internationalised. They adapt themselves to the carving-up of the Earth's surface carried out by monopolies and cartels, to the productive, financial, and social interpenetration of all the areas of the world, and to the worldwide nature of imperialist war”. Without an internationalist revolutionary strategy, every workers' struggle would have been “used in a thousand ways by the international strategy of Italian imperialism or, to put it better, by the Italian fraction of global imperialism”.

This defined a specific task of the science-party in the imperialist phase. “To bring class consciousness from without” took on a content that was “wider and more complex than spreading the knowledge of the relations between all the classes indicated in What Is to Be Done?":

“It means spreading in the working class the consciousness that the struggles between the classes, the clashes between the States, and the battles and interdependencies between sectors, groups and companies are of international dimensions. It means making visible the spider's web of communicating vessels which joins together, at every latitude, apparently unconnected facts and contradictions”.

We now add three observations. First, when we point out how the Chinese irruption into the car battle “reveals the crisis of the old order”, the “What Is to Be Done? moment” takes on the dual meaning of both knowing the relations between all the classes and, at the same time, grasping the international facts with which they are inter-woven. The new strength of Chinese manufacturing, its military potential in the crisis in the world order, the financial strength that Beijing is developing in parallel with it, and the wars that the crisis of the world order is generating, are summed up in the car battle.

Second, it is precisely the scientific analysis of those international facts that has made it clear to us, for at least a quarter of a century since the inception of the euro federation, the extent to which Italian imperialism is definitively an integral part of European imperialism. The political consequences of this are fundamental for the proletariat; the ideologies and influences of the ruling class will increasingly take on a European guise, and therefore also the mobilisation of social-imperialism or assertions of protectionism. Today, imperialist Europeanism threatens to grip the workers' consciousness in the Old Continent, including the variants of sovereignist transformism that are merging with it. We need only look at the highest echelons of the Confederation of Italian Industry: they tell us they will be more actively involved with Brussels than with Rome in negotiating a European line on the revision of the Green Deal, and they would like the workers and their trade unions involved in confronting the Chinese offensive. As Il Corriere della Sera summarises it: “the enemy is outside, let's close ranks at home”.

Third, there is the “specific task” of the party in the new conditions of the imperialist contention, namely the extension of What Is to Be Done? to the consciousness of the international connections in the struggle between classes and States. And this brings us to the “unprecedented task” of entrenching a party based on the Bolshevik model in an advanced imperialist metropolis. For this purpose we need to recall the historical course of the revolutionary movement, as follows: the “three sources and component parts” of Marxism in the German, English, and French experience; its bond with Bolshevism in Russia; the defeat of the revolutionary movement in Germany and the isolation of the October Revolution leading to the Stalinist counterrevolution and the ignominy of the Yalta partition, when the State capitalism of the USSR was passed off as socialism; and finally, the arduous attempt in Italy in the postwar period to re-tie the thread of Lenin's strategy. This course has led precisely to our unprecedented task, which is now the challenge of European Leninism. This means entrenching the science-party and the strategy-party in the political and social conditions of imperialist maturity in Europe, fighting against European imperialism and, by virtue of that entrenchment, building an internationalist connection with all sectors of the world proletariat. Today, this means that European Leninism is being tested by the crisis in the world order.

The whole of the last European legislative session, and part of the one before it, was defined by what the French call a surenchère -- a bidding war over the Green Deal, involving the European Parliament, parts of the Commission, and the European Council. Within the Council of Heads of State and Government, which serves both as a Senate of the States and a federal/confederal executive body, a consensus had been reached on setting more distant deadlines for decarbonisation. However, the European Parliament, aligned with the faction of the Commission led by Frans Timmermans, launched a series of environmentalist initiatives that effectively challenged and pushed beyond this compromise.

Certainly, the push for the Green Deal was largely driven by lobbying from the electricity sector. However, the pandemic of the century, which led to significant initiatives such as Next Generation EU and the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, alongside the electrification race in China, spurred a further wave of investment plans. In the battle among European car manufacturers, Volkswagen was the first to take a stance, due to its particularly strong presence in the Chinese market.

Lobbying has found fertile ground in the European Parliament, an institution with a distinctive character it is far more vocal than the European Council or the Commission but wields even less power than an ordinary parliament. It has often been marked by propagandistic positions of principle and the outsized influence of second-tier parliamentarians. While this dynamic has made it an advantageous arena for the electricity lobby, the surenchère in Strasbourg would likely have remained an empty exercise without the Keynesian economic plans prompted by the pandemic and the Timmermans line within the Commission. This reflects the nature of many positions adopted by an institution that is not immune to manifestations of parliamentary cretinism on a European scale.

Moreover, while the European Parliament lacks the power to initiate legislation, it wields a veto power in the so-called trilogue with the Council and the Commission, which can have disruptive consequences. A notable example is the fate of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) between the EU and China, which stalled in 2021 due to principled objections regarding the rights of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. These objections chimed with American pressure and the reservations of pro-Atlanticist factions within Europe.

In February 2019, we found the arguments of Alberto Bombassei from the Brembo group revealing. On the electrical front, China had launched a “soft war”. Europe's unexpected “acceleration” towards electrification was forcing manufacturers to rush through a restructuring process that should have taken “ten years”. Such a “radical” stimulus was unprecedented, with its “social impact” largely underestimated. Meanwhile, Brussels offered no support to the automotive sector or its vast supply chain, which employs millions. Instead, “the electricity lobbies” went unchallenged. Looking back, Bombassei's remarks on the German manufacturers, particularly Volkswagen, stand out: “One of the three car makers has 30 models in development, ranging from hybrids to fully electric vehicles. The Germans are investing relentlessly and hiring at an extraordinary rate. Yet, at times, I sense they are almost out of breath driven to occupy every possible niche without knowing what the market will look like in five, ten, or twenty years”.

While one of the key themes of the European election campaign was the rebalancing of the Union's past decisions, several factors have contributed to a standstill in the EU's energy transition, particularly in the automotive sector. These include the inflationary aftermath of the pandemic, which dampened demand; the unexpectedly slow rollout of electric charging infrastructure; and the war in Ukraine, which disrupted energy prices. Most notably, the emergence of Chinese electric cars has eroded market shares for foreign manufacturers in China and exposed European companies to a price war within the EU. This has undermined Volkswagen's strategy of relying on its strong presence in China to capitalise on the electric transition in the European market.

The European elections and the new Commission mark a defeat for environmentalist parties and a clear political victory for the strategy of Ursula von der Leyen's European People's Party. The co-optation of Giorgia Meloni and some members of the Conservatives could facilitate a system of variable majorities, functional to the new policy dosages of the Clean Industrial Deal, the implementation of the Draghi report, and European rearmament in response to the Ukrainian conflict. In this context, the power struggles within the new Commission reflect not only the rebalancing of a previous imbalance but also the ongoing war of capital between Europe, the US, and China, alongside the military war in Ukraine. These are the European powers being tested by the crisis in the world order.

In the global automotive battle, the upheavals in the Chinese market have become the epicentre of an earthquake with world-wide effects. According to the Financial Times, more than 50% of the cars sold in China are now electric or hybrid reaching this milestone ten years ahead of central planning targets. This leapfrog development has caught foreign companies in China by surprise, overtaking them in the process. Michael Dunne, former head of General Motors in Indonesia and founder of the specialised website Dunne Insights, reports that from 2000 to 2024, the market share of Japanese cars in China fell from 16% to 12%, German cars from 19% to 16%, American cars from 12% to 7%, Korean cars from 7% to 2%, and French cars from 3% to just 0.4%. In contrast, the market share of Chinese car manufacturers surged from 43% to 62%, a dramatic increase of almost twenty percentage points.

The announcement of the merger between Honda and Nissan, Japan's second and third-largest car manufacturers, marks the beginning of a global wave of restructuring. According to the Financial Times, this move could prompt “hundreds of other Japanese companies” to follow suit, potentially in other sectors as well. In Germany, Volkswagen has wrested an agreement from the trade unions to cut 35,000 jobs and reduce production capacity by 734,000 vehicles equivalent to nearly three car plants and more than the total annual car production in Italy.

In both economics and politics, a consistent dynamic is that for every trend, there is a countertrend. Beijing has initiated the electric car battle by swiftly bypassing the established players, potentially gaining a lead of several years. However, it is clear that consolidations and restructurings are often the precursor to a counteroffensive.

According to Nikkei Asia, consolidation is expected to take place within the Chinese car industry as well. By 2025, the production capacity for electric and hybrid cars will surpass 36 million vehicles, while sales are projected at 17 million, resulting in an over-capacity of nearly 20 million. This excess will surely spill over into exports, intensifying the global price war, but it will also force the process of concentration in China. As reported by the specialised website Just Ante, a subsidiary of the British company GlobalData, there are currently 140 active brands in China 97 domestic and 43 in joint ventures with foreign groups. Zhu Huarong, chairman of Chongqing-based Changan Automobile, forecasts that 60-70% of these brands will either be divested or merged within the next two to three years, with many production lines for internal combustion engines being shut down.

In Europe, Volkswagen asserts that its ongoing restructuring is positioning the company for a counteroffensive in the electric vehicle sector by 2027. GERPISA, half-way between a network of research institutes and a car industry lobby, has proposed the creation of a new category of affordable electric cars, termed ASEVS (Affordable Sustainable Electric Vehicles), which the EU's industrial policy should incentivise through regulation and taxation. The European negotiating table on automobiles, convened by the von der Leyen Commission, is expected to discuss the revision of the Green Deal, electric infrastructures, measures to mitigate restructuring, and the modulation of tariffs on Chinese-made cars. Additionally, the discussion should include the promotion of an affordable electric small family car aimed at the mass market. The GERPISA proposal contradicts the view, endorsed by Sergio Marchionne during his time at FIAT-Chrysler, which posited that the production of entry-level and mid-range cars would inevitably be phased out. These vehicles, now commodities with low profit margins, were seen as being better suited for production by Asian manufacturers.

What will be the social consequences of the announced restructuring, not just in the car industry? Ding Gang, in an oped piece in Global Times that takes the irruption of the Chinese car as exemplary of the global strategic shift, recalls that, for Thomas Friedman, globalisation made the world “flat”. However, he objects that it became so on Western terms: “As workers in developing countries like China secure more stable jobs, can Western workers maintain their standard of living?".

If the West really believes in the universal value of the market economy, “it should allow market forces to decide”, but reality often diverges from principle. The issue transcends economic theory, but it concerns precisely the question of “living standards”: “Traditional industrial nations face the challenge of reforming their own systems during de-industrialization. They must recognize that ceding market share is inevitable and transform this pressure into a drive for enhanced competitiveness, rather than shifting the burden to developing countries lower in the supply chain. Fundamentally, this involves improving labor productivity and, more importantly, achieving convergence in labor costs”.

According to Ding Gang, the governance systems in the US and Europe are struggling to address this issue, and in response, they are intensifying pressure on China. He argues that this leads to “frictions” and “conflict” that ultimately result in a net loss. He suggests that the West has two choices: it can either adapt to relinquishing market share and accept the resulting social restructuring, thus sharing the benefits of the global economy with the emerging powers, or risk a “fragmented future where Americans drive American cars, Europeans drive European cars and Chinese drive Chinese cars”. However, Ding Gang warns that “no country can thrive in a globalized world with fractured industrial and supply chains”.

We note that this is literally the process of imperialist development. Western and Japanese capital once benefited from China's market and its low-cost workforce. Today, however, Chinese groups, which have emerged from that very development, are now challenging Western firms, in China, in other markets, and even in Europe and the US. Beijing is asserting the right of its capital to exploit the “reserves of surplus value” of labour-power, both domestically and abroad, as part of a broader process of raising wages and living standards, which constitutes Chinese social-democratisation. The West is being urged to reassess the terms of its own social-democratisation. It is no coincidence that the crisis at Volkswagen is viewed as a crisis of co-management, a social-imperialist form of participation of wage-earners in their companies.

Imperialist Europeanism represents European capital's resistance to the demands of a new division of global markets one that involves contentions and alliances with the United States, also in decline, alongside compromises with rising Chinese imperialism. The battle of European Leninism is to resist this influence on our own class. The true enemy is not “outside” Europe, but at home.

Lotta Comunista, December 2024

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