Translated by: Juan R. Fajardo,
2016.
Source of the text: Translated from Historia de la
crisis mundial, in Obras Completas, volume 8, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/historia_de_la_crisis_mundial/index.htm
Editorial Note: This text is available in print as
part of: José Carlos Mariátegui,
History of the World Crisis and Other
Writings, Marxists Internet Archive Publications (2017); ISBN
978-0-692-88676-2.
Today’s topic is the economic problems of peace: reparations, fiscal deficits, debts between the Allies, unemployment, change. These problems are different aspects of the same thing: the capitalist order’s decay, hastened by the war. The war has destroyed an enormous amount of social wealth. The war expenses are calculated at one trillion, three-hundred billion gold francs.
Furthermore, the war has left other tragic legacies: millions of invalids, millions with tuberculosis, millions of widows and orphans, to whom the European states owe help and protection; devastated cities, territories, factories, and mines, which the European states must rebuild.
Europe could have faced all these economic obligations – albeit not without great difficulty¬ – if the war had not greatly reduced its productive capacity, its work capacity. But the war caused the deaths of ten million men and the crippling of just as many. Europe’s human capital has thus diminished considerably. Today, Europe can count many millions fewer productive arms than before the war. Moreover, in Central Europe the war has caused malnutrition, the undernourishment of the working population. This malnutrition, caused by the long food privations, has reduced the productivity and vitality of the Central European population. A sick or weak man produces less, works less, than a healthy and vigorous man. Likewise, a people that is poorly fed, exhausted from hunger and misery, produces much less, works much less than a well-fed people.
Europe finds itself needing to produce more and to consume less than before the war in order to annually save the corresponding amount for the payment of war debts. At the same time, it finds it impossible to increase its production, and almost impossible to reduce its consumption, because Europe’s imports are not of luxury items, of industrial items, but imports of foodstuffs – meat, wheat, fat – which are indispensable to feeding its peoples, or of primary resources – metals, cotton, and woods – which are indispensable to the activity of its factories and industries.
There is, moreover, an unsurmountable obstacle to the increase of its population: the sharpening of the class struggle, the intensification of the social war. The working classes do not want to collaborate in the rebuilding of the capitalist order. Instead, a part of them, that which marches with the Third International, seeks to definitively seize power and to put an end to the capitalist order. Thus, for political reasons or economic reasons, strikes, slow-downs, lock-outs, occur in one place after another. These complete or partial work interruptions impede not only the increase of production, but also the maintenance of normal production. Therefore, European statesmen, who preach a policy of economic reconstruction in Europe, aim for a truce, a peace treaty between capitalism and the proletariat. They want a more or less long-lasting understanding, agreement, or deal, between capital and labor. But, what could be the bases, the conditions, for that agreement? They would, of necessity, have to be the ratification and development of the proletariat’s gains: eight-hour workday, welfare, etc.; the extirpation of speculation, which makes life more expensive; high salaries in relation to the cost of living; control over factories; the nationalization of mines and forests.
In short, the proletariat’s co-operation could not be gained but through the acceptance working classes’ minimum program. This deal is opposed by interests of the great captains of industry and banking, of the Stinnes, the Tyissens, the Loucheurs, and, above all, of the cloud of speculators who prosper in the shadows. It is also opposed by the will of the maximalist masses, who are with the Third International, who hope for the final destruction of the capitalist order, and therefore reject the notion of the proletariat agreeing and collaborating in its restoration and convalescence. Further, it is doubtful that it could be possible to simultaneously achieve the rebuilding of the destroyed social wealth and improvement in the proletariat’s quality of life. Rather, it is likely that, no matter how much production grows, how much Europe’s profits rise, they will not give enough to take care of the debt payment and of the workers’ welfare. More than a mode of production, socialism is a mode of distribution, and capitalism’s current problems are problems of production more than problems of distribution. How, then, could the capitalist order accept and act on the proletariat’s minimum program? That is the substantial difficulty in the situation, which confounds all economists.
Some European statesmen – Lloyd George among them – favor a bold move, a daring plan. They believe that it is not possible to save the capitalist order without conceding a bit of welfare to the workers. They think that this bit of welfare should be granted partly at the capitalists’ expense. But the capitalists’ sacrifices will not suffice to considerably improve the lives of the workers, and other resources must therefore be sought.
Those resources, which can’t be found in Europe – which can’t be found in the capitalist nations – are, they believe, possible to find in Africa, in Asia, in America. In the colonial nations.
Who rises up, who rebels, against the capitalist order? The workers, the proletarians of the peoples belonging to capitalist civilization, to Western civilization. The social war, the class struggle, is sharp, is critical, in Europe. It is less so in the United States, and lesser still in South America, but, in societies corresponding to other civilizations it almost doesn’t exist, or exists under other attenuated and basic forms. Therefore, it is a matter of reorganizing and widening the exploitation of the colonial countries, of the incompletely evolved countries, of the primitive countries of Africa, Asia, America, Oceania, and of Europe itself.
It is a matter of enslaving the backward populations to the evolved populations of Western civilization. That the laborer of Oceania, America, Asia, or Africa, pay for the greater comfort, the greater welfare, the greater leisure of the European or American worker. That the colonial laborer produce, at a lower cost, the raw materials which the European worker transforms into manufactured goods, and that he abundantly consume these manufactures. That that least civilized part of humanity work for the most civilized part.
The hope is thus, not to definitively resolve the social conflict, because social conflict will exist while wages exist, but to soften the social conflict, and put off its final crisis, to postpone its last chapter. Human generations are selfish, and the current capitalist generation worries more about its own fate than about the fate of the capitalist order. “After us, the flood”, they tell themselves, but their plan to scientifically reorganize the exploitation of the colonial countries, of turning them into solicitous purveyors of raw materials and into solicitous consumers of manufactured items, stumbles upon a historical difficulty: Those colonial countries strive to gain their national independence. The Indian East rebels against European domination. Egypt, India, Persia, awaken. The Russia of the Soviets foments nationalist insurrections in order to attack European capitalism in its colonies. The national independence of the colonial countries would hamper their methodical exploitation. Without a protectorate or a mandate over the colonial countries, Europe cannot easily impose upon them the handing over of their raw materials or the absorption of its manufactured goods.
A politically independent country can be economically colonial. These politically independent South American countries, for example, are economically colonial. Our landowners and our mine owners are vassals, tributaries to the European capitalist trusts. For example, our cotton farmer is, by any measure, naught but a yanacón[1] of the English or North American large industrialists who rule over the cotton market. Thus, Europe can grant the colonial countries political sovereignty without those countries thereby becoming economically independent. But, today, Europe needs to perfect – on a vast scale – the economic exploitation of those colonies. And, it needs, therefore, to be able to run them as it wishes, to have greater agility and freedom of action over them. I leave detailed examination of this aspect of the world crisis for the lecture in which I shall deal with the colonial problems and the Eastern question.
For now, I wish only to note its ties to Europe’s economic crisis.
Let’s quickly look at what constitutes each of the economic problems of peace. Let’s begin with the problem of reparations.
What are reparations? Reparations are the indemnizations which, in light of the peace treaty, Germany must pay the Allies. The Versailles peace treaty obligates Germany to pay the cost of the devastated territories of France, Belgium, and Italy, and the amount of the pensions to the Allied war wounded, widows, and orphans.
When peace was signed, the Allies – and specially France – believed that Germany could pay fabulous reparation. Little by little, as Germany’s true situation became known, the amount of the reparations was reduced.
In 1919, Lord Cunliffe spoke of an annuity of 28 billion gold marks. In 1919,
in September, Mr. Klotz indicated 18 billion. In April of 1921, the Reparations
Commission demanded a bit over 8 billion. In May of 1921, the Allied accord
established 4.6 billion. This London accord establishes the total of reparations
owed by Germany to the Allies at 138 billion, so that sum seemed the minimum
which the Allies could demand. Experience has later shown that said sum was too
large.
Currently, it is thought impossible that Germany could manage to pay a sum
greater than thirty or forty billion gold marks. Germany has offered the Allies
the amount of, at most, thirty billion, but France has refused to even discuss
these proposals, which it has called laughable and rash.
With the pretext of Germany not meeting the terms of the London accord, France has occupied the Ruhr region, which is Germany’s richest industrial and coal producing region.
The specific pretext has been the lateness and deficiency in the coal shipments which, according to the treaty, Germany is obligated to make to France. Well, then. Germany had indeed started to provide France with coal, but in amounts smaller than it was forced to hand over.
However, since France has taken over the Ruhr it has taken from the region even less coal than what Germany was voluntarily giving. France has all along classified the occupation of the Ruhr as the taking over of a productive property. It has said, “What does a creditor do when his debtor fails to make payments? He intercedes in his business; he embargoes one of his properties in order to exploit it until the debt is cancelled.”
But in this case, the Ruhr is, for France, not only a productive property but, on the contrary, a burdensome one. Maintaining the troops of the administrative army detailed by France to the Ruhr, in order to govern it, constitute a formidable expense. Theoretically, the payment of this expenditure falls to Germany, but in practice France has to withdraw from its treasury the necessary amounts to cover it. It is the case, actually, that the politicians who currently govern France do not sincerely want that Germany pay, but rather that Germany not pay, in order to thus have a pretext to dismember and mutilate her. They have a nightmare that Germany will rise again, that Germany will rebuild, and they hope to free themselves of this bad dream by killing it. But, as I have previously said and as I’ve had the chance to explain, Germany’s economic ruin would bring about the economic ruin of continental Europe.
Europe’s economic body is too interlaced for it to be able to withstand the bankrupting of Germany, one its most vital organs. We thus see that war, which brought as a consequence the fall of the German mark, caused depreciation on the French franc. The pattern is clear. France’s credit depends, in part, on Germany’s solvency.
For the mechanism of European production to regain its normal rhythm it is indispensable that Germany function calmly once again. And, contrary to that need, France’s policy toward Germany tends to tear Germany apart. Many Allied bankers, economists, and experts have verified the impossibility of Germany paying exaggerated reparations. Their arguments are logical. One could extract a large amount of money from Germany if she had returned to her old instruments of commerce, her colonies, her foreign markets, her merchant fleet; if she were allowed to infinitely increase her industrial production; if the sale of that production abroad were facilitated. But, those exemptions are impossible. Impossible because that competition from German industry is not favorable for English, French, and Italian industry. Impossible because, in order to receive a few, or many, millions of francs from Germany, France cannot tolerate that Germany re-emerge stronger and more vigorous than ever.
If the victorious powers – if France, if Italy – do not manage to level-off their budgets nor pay their debts, it is absurd to think that a defeated power could, not only reorganize its finances, but also line the victors’ pockets. The impossibility of Germany paying is demonstrably proven. However, France insists that Germany must pay, and must pay in the billions, because she thus has the pretext for punishing her, for tearing her apart, for taking her richest territories. According to the technicians, Europe’s reorganization is not possible unless a policy of unity, of collaboration between European countries, is put in place. Hence the importance of the issue of reparations, which causes enmity and distancing between Germany and France, the two most important nations in continental Europe. When the danger that this Franco-German conflict constitutes for Europe’s future is laid before it, the French government replies that it is unfair that Germany be exempted from all payment while France remains obligated to pay its war debts to the U.S.A. France says: “Let England and the U.S.A. forgive our debts if they want us to be generous and soft toward Germany.”
Thus, we have arrived at yet another problem of peace. At the problem of
debts between the Allies, which is intimately tied to the problem of
reparations.
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[1] Yanacón: a tenant farmer or a sharecropper. From the Quechua word yanakuna, which originally referred to the class within Inca society who served the Inca royal family and the state. - Trans.