Contribution to the International Communist Seminar
‘Economic Crises and Possibility of a Major World Crisis’
Brussels, 2-4 May 2002

www.icsbrussels.org , ics[at]icsbrussels.org

Germany

Workers' League for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party of Germany

Comrades,

At this moment we do not know exactly how deep the coming crisis will be.
We do not know whether there is a certain upturn for some time or there will be an immediate and deep fall into an open crisis within the next months.
But what we know for sure is the following:
Twice in the last century imperialism had no other means left to come to terms with crisis but the final means of imperialist war.
The cleaning effects of the last world war have been so successful that for some decades monopoly bourgeoisie did not live to see a major crisis as has been, for example, the deep world-wide crisis at the end of twenties.
As the Communist Manifesto claims there are no other means for the bourgeois class to prevent crisis but to prepare new and deeper crisis.
This is the moment we have come to.

Without any doubt this crisis will show us quite clearly: That there is not something like an "European monopoly capital". That there are no transnational companies which don't have any connections to their own national states. That the importance of national state for monopoly capital - even and especially in Europe - is not diminishing but is getting stronger.

There is not time enough to discuss all the reasons for the ever deeper general crisis the capitalist system is living to see. But I think we all agree that the main reason is that imperialism is a rotten system. A system that economically broke the chains of national states long ago but is not at all able to produce a real world economy. (So there is nothing like "imperialist globalisation", I think.) A system which is therefore politically and militarily pushed back to the narrow borders of the national state again and again. The ruling classes of this system are no longer able to subject the whole of society to the way of its own enrichment. (This is shown in large parts of the world after the collapse of the former socialist states in Eastern Europe where there is no working capitalism installed! And this is shown in the German Democratic Republic, where after the annexation by German imperialism millions of workers have to be nourished by the bourgeois class instead of nourishing this class by their work.)

It comes to be true what Marx claims in volume 3 of "The Capital": "The real Barrier of capitalist production is capital itself." There is excess capital that can not be used any longer in production. 35% excess capital in the automobile industry. 95% of all optical fibre cables in the world are not used. In the eyes of a monopolist company this excess capital means: The real barrier of my capital is yours.
So the meaning of all those take-overs and buy-outs of the last years is simply destruction. It is not to create new and better working capitalist companies. There is no new spring of capitalism to bee seen in all that. In this way from 1970 till 2000 more than two thirds of all independent automobile companies have vanished. Of all that Foreign Direct Investment 90 per cent are just to buy out existing plants. In most cases they are destroyed. Look at what the German company BMW did to Rover: Rover was bought for no other reason than to destroy it, to destroy a competitor, and to throw out Japanese capital out of Europe.

Look how German imperialism acts in Eastern Europe. The figures of Foreign Direct investment there are really small: about 10 to 15 billions of Dollars within the last 12 years. These billions where concentrated on some central industrial areas: automobile, communication, transport and so on. The plants there are in most of the cases destroyed. For example: in Bulgaria there was the biggest European factory for fork-lift trucks producing those trucks for the whole of the Comecon. German monopoly capital bought that factory and immediately closed it down. With very small sums of money German capital destroyed the biggest factory of those fork-lift trucks in Europe. So you see: what happened to the factory of Zastava in Yugoslavia by NATO shells is done to other factories by the means of capital export. The utmost destruction in Eastern Europe is done by German capital.

The essence of capital export is destruction, I said, and for political, historical and geographical reasons German imperialism is the leading power in all that in Eastern Europe. Of course this is a programme to prevent crisis. It worked, for example, in the years 1990 through 1993, when the barbarian act of the annexation of the German Democratic Republic for some years helped German imperialism to avoid an economic crisis. (German monopoly capital smashed GDR's industry to pieces and at the same time conquered its markets.)
But of course this is a programme as well to produce new crisis.

All the contradictions between the imperialist powers are sharpening, even and especially in Europe. There is no doubt that the unevenness of development is growing. If we look at the share of US-Imperialism in world trade we see: it fell from 27% in 1947 to 16% in 1960 and to 11% in the eighties. In 1960 the share of the USA was exactly as high as the combined shares of Western Germany, France and Italy. At the end of the eighties the German share alone was as high as the US one. And this is happening in Europe, too. Take the 12 biggest companies of Germany and of France: In 1990 the turnover of the German companies was about 40% higher than that of the French ones. In 1999 it was 100% higher.

These changes and instabilities will go on because of the strong position of German imperialism in Eastern Europe. No other capitalist country sends as much of its capital export to Eastern Europe than Germany. In almost every Eastern European country German capital won the biggest share in commodity trade. German companies in 1998 held a share of 34% of all imports of Eastern European countries. The next competitors are the USA with 7,5% and France with 6,5%.

Shifting in economic questions like this of course produce instability in political questions. Some years after the temporary defeat of the common enemy (i.e. the working class in power) all those agreements like Maastricht, Amsterdam, even the treaties of Rome are put in question. Look at what Germany does: German government need a lot of money to buy a lot of new weapons. Of course Schröder as well as Stoiber know quite well that war is looming. Armament means more debt. And from one day to the other Schröder tells the European Commission that the regulations of Maastricht aren't worth any sheet of paper. So all, these treaties and agreements are far from creating a European superstate or a European imperialism. They turn out to be just ceasefires of a fight between the imperialist powers going on and on.

In their fight against the looming danger of a major crisis the German imperialists try to use the European Community to weaken their imperialist competitors in Europe, and at the same time to strengthen the political Power of German imperialism. This is behind Schröders dictum about "renationalisation of European politics". This means for example to shift the burden of agricultural overproduction back to the French imperialism and to other imperialists with a rather large agricultural sector and to give more political power to European institutions, which will be even more dominated by German imperialism after all its vassals in Eastern Europe have joined the European Union.

You may see the same procedure on economic levels. The big German companies on the one hand fight against their competitors by the means of capital export. In this fight they remain national-based monopolies. You won't find any international company if you look at the question of ownership in Europe. (Communist should always look at the question of ownership!) And especially you won't find any really international bank.

On the other hand you will find that the big capital tries to concentrate the most important parts of production within the borders of their national state. You will even find that there is a tendency within the last years, when everybody spoke about "globalisation", to bring back those important parts from plants abroad. More than 90% of the work in research and development is done within the borders of the national bases of the big companies.
When German Bank (Deutsche Bank) and Daimler started to create a new European giant of the weapons' industry (the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company), they started by taking the most delicate parts of military production out of the deal and to concentrate these parts within a special company, which is not only German controlled, but which is totally German owned.

Let me make one last point.
There is a lot of phrases about the retreat of the state apparatus from economy. This is totally wrong, at least as far as German imperialism is concerned. The share of state expenditure in Gross National Product rose sharply in the seventies, when there was a common crisis for all major capitalist countries. From then on it remained at between 40% and 50% with a new sharp rise between 1990 and 2000.
Of course we all know that this does not at all mean more money for the jobless or the poor. It means more money for police and army. In Germany that means 110 Billions of Euro within the next 10 years. For this is the problem of German imperialism at the moment: if it should be necessary to defend its sphere of political influence by war, German imperialism is not prepared at the moment to do so. But the government do their very best.

In Europe of today we see a group of imperialist states preparing for a deeper crisis. In some sense they are working together. In another sense they fight each other fiercely. And amidst all that, once again, German imperialism, getting economically stronger and stronger, asking when it is time to challenge US-imperialism, trying to weaken other European imperialist powers or to use them, as the German foreign minister Fischer said, to build a new basis for the domination of the continent and for a serious quarrel with the USA.