History of the World Crisis

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.

In several of my lectures I have explained how human life has become more unified, how it has become connected, how it has become internationalized. Western human life, to be more precise. Among all the nations which make up European civilization – Western civilization – links and bonds have been established which are new in human history. Internationalism is not just an ideal; it is a historic reality. Internationalism exists as an ideal because it is the new reality, the nascent reality. It is not an arbitrary ideal, nor an absurd ideal of a few dreamers and a few utopians. It is that ideal which Hegel and Marx define as the new and superior historic reality which, locked in the belly of current reality, struggles to emerge and which – while it has not emerged, while it is still emerging – appears as an ideal in the face of aged and decaying reality.

A great human ideal, a great human hope, does not sprout from the brain nor emerge from the imagination of a more or less ingenious man. It grows from life. It emerges from historical reality. It is the present historical reality. Humanity never chases insincere or unreachable chimerae; humanity chases after those whose realization it foresees as near, senses is ripe, and feels is possible. The same thing happens with humanity as happens with an individual. An individual never longs for anything absolutely impossible. He always longs for something relatively possible, something relatively reachable. A villager, unless he is a madman, never dreams of the love of a princess nor of a distant and unknown multimillionaire. He dreams instead of the love of a village girl with whom he can speak, whom he can attain. The child who chases the butterfly may realize he may not trap it, that he will never catch it; but for him to chase after it, it is indispensable that he believes or feels it to be more or less within his reach. If the butterfly goes too far, if its flight is too fast, the child gives up on his impossible conquest. Humanity’s attitude toward the ideal is the same. A capricious ideal or an impossible utopia, however beautiful it may be, never moves the masses. The masses become emotional and impassioned toward that theory which constitutes a nearby goal, a probable goal; toward that doctrine which is based on reality; toward that doctrine which is none other than the revelation of a new reality on the march, of a new reality on the way. We see, for example, how the socialist idea emerged and why it impassioned the masses.

When he was still a Social-Revolutionary, Kautsky taught, in line with history, that the will to bring about socialism was born from the creation of large industry. Wherever small industry prevails the ideal of the dispossessed is not the socialization of property but the acquisition a bit of individual property. Small industry always generates the wish to preserve private ownership of the means of production and not the wish to socialize property, to institute socialism. This wish emerges where large industry is developed, where its superiority over small industry is beyond doubt, where the return to small industry would be a step backward, a social and economic reversal. The growth of large industry, the emergence of the large factories, kills small industry and ruins the small artisan but, at the same time, it creates the material possibility of bringing about socialism and, above all, it creates the desire to make that happen. The factory gathers a great mass of workers – five hundred, one thousand, two thousand workers – and generates within this mass, not the desire for individual and solitary work, but the wish for the collective and associated exploitation of that instrument of wealth. Notice how the factory worker understands and feels the syndicalist idea and the collectivist idea; and note, on the other hand, how the same idea is hardly understandable to the isolated worker of the small workshop, to the solitary worker who works on his own. Class consciousness germinates easily among the great masses of the factories and vast businesses. It germinates with difficulty among the dispersed masses of artisans and small industry. Industrial and agricultural latifundism lead the workers, first, to organize to defend their class interests, and, later, to the willingness to expropriate the latifundia and to exploit them collectively. Socialism, syndicalism; they have not come from some book of genius. They have emerged from the new social reality, the new economic reality. And the same is the case with internationalism.

From many days back – from about a century ago – European civilization has shown a tendency toward preparing an international organization of the Western nations. This tendency does not only have proletarian manifestations, it also has bourgeois manifestations. Well, now, none of those manifestations has been arbitrary nor has taken place just because; on the contrary, it has always been the instinctive recognition of a latent new state of things. The bourgeois order, the individualist order, freed economic interests from all encumbrances. In the bourgeois order, capitalism does not produce for the national market. It produces for the international market. Its need to increase production impels it every day to conquer new markets. Its product, its merchandise, recognizes no borders. It struggles to pass through and overcome political confines. Competition, the struggle between industrialists, is international. Aside from markets, the industrialists compete internationally over raw materials. A country’s industry is supplied with the coal, petroleum, and minerals from diverse and distant countries. As a consequence of this international web of economic interests, the great banks of Europe and the United States end up being complexly international and cosmopolitan entities. Those banks invest capital in Australia, in India, in China, in Transvaal. The circulation of capital, through the banks, is an international circulation. The English rentier who deposits his money in a London bank perhaps has no idea where his capital will be invested, from whence will come his return, his dividend. He does not know if the bank is going to destine his capital, for example, toward the acquisition of shares in the Peruvian Corporation, in which case, without knowing it, the English rentier becomes co-owner of railways in Peru. The Central Railway strike can affect him, lessen his dividends. The English rentier is unaware of it. Likewise, the Peruvian rail worker, the engineers, are unaware of the English rentier’s existence, in whose portfolio a portion of their labor will end up. This example, this case, helps us explain the economic ties, the economic unity, of international life in our times. And they help us explain the origin of bourgeois internationalism and the origin of proletarian internationalism, which is at the same time a common, and opposite, origin. The owner of an English textile mill has an interest in paying his workers a lower salary than the owner of a textile mill in the United States, so that his merchandise may be sold more cheaply, and with greater advantage and in greater abundance. This makes the North American textile worker have an interest in the English textile worker’s salary not going down. A decrease in salaries in the English textile industry is a threat to the worker in Vitarte, to the worker in Santa Catalina. In light of these facts, the workers have proclaimed their solidarity and fraternity above and beyond borders and nationalities. The workers have seen that when they waged a battle it was not only against the capitalist class of their own country but against the world’s capitalist class. When Europe’s workers fought to win the eight-hour day, they fought not only for the European proletariat but for the world proletariat. It was easy for you, Peruvian workers, to win the eight-hour day because the eight-hour law was in place in Europe. Peruvian capitalism gave in to your demands because it knew that European capitalism also gave way. And, in the same way, the battles that Europe’s workers wage today are, of course, not indifferent to your lot. Every worker who falls, in these moments, in Berlin or in the barricades of Hamburg falls not just for the cause of the German proletariat. He falls also for your cause, Peruvian comrades.

It is because of this, of this confirmation of the historical fact, that for over half a century, since Marx and Engels founded the First International, that the world’s working classes have tended to create international solidarity organizations to join their actions and unite their ideals.

However, in the opposite camp, capitalist policy is not insensible to the same effect of modern economic life. Bourgeois liberalism, the economic liberalism which allowed capitalist interests to expand, connect, and associate above and beyond States and borders, had perforce to include free trade in its program. Free trade, the free-trade theory, corresponds to a deep and concrete need of a given period of capitalist production. What is free trade? Free trade, free circulation, is the free commerce of merchandise across all borders and all countries. Between nations there exist not only political borders or geographic borders, there are also economic borders. Those economic borders are customs; the customs that burden merchandise with a tax upon entry to a country. Free trade intends to do away with those economic borders, to do away with customs, to open the free passage of merchandise in all countries. In short, during this period of the apogee of the free-trade theory, the bourgeoisie was eminently internationalist. What was the cause of free-tradism, what was the cause of its internationalism? It was the economic need, the commercial need, of industry to expand freely in the world. The capitalism of some economically highly-developed countries found an encumbrance to its expansion in the economic borders and proposed to break them down. And this free-trade capitalism – which, of course, does not encompass the whole of the capitalist camp, only a part of it – was also pacifist. It preached peace and preached disarmament because it saw in war an element of disruption and disorganization of production. Free-tradism was the offensive of British capitalism, the most evolved in the world, the most prepared for competition against the rival capitalisms. In truth, capitalism could only be internationalist because capitalism is imperialist by nature and of necessity. Capitalism creates a new class of historic conflicts and of armed conflicts. Not the conflicts between nations, between races, nor between opposing nationalities, but the conflicts between blocs, between economic and industrial interest conglomerates. This conflict between two adversarial capitalisms – British and German – led the world to the latest great war. And, as I have had occasion to explain to you, bourgeois society has emerged from it deeply undermined due, precisely, to the contrast between the peoples’ nationalist passions, which make enemies of them and draw them apart, and the need for collaboration and solidarity and for reciprocal amnesty between them as the only means of rebuilding in common. In one of its fundamental aspects, the capitalist crisis resides in exactly this: in the contradiction between capitalist society’s politics and capitalist society’s economy. In today’s society politics and the economy have stopped coinciding, they have stopped agreeing. The politics of today’s society are nationalist; its economy is internationalist. The bourgeois state is built on a national base; the bourgeois economy must rest on an international base. The bourgeois State has educated man in the cult of nationality, it has infected him with spite and distrust, and even of hatreds, regarding the other nationalities. On the other hand, the bourgeois economy needs agreements and understandings between different, even enemy, nationalities. The traditionally nationalist teaching of the bourgeois State – excited and stimulated during the war period – has created an intensely nationalist feeling, in the middle class above all. It is that feeling which now prevents the European nations from agreeing and coordinating around common program for rebuilding the capitalist economy. This contradiction between the political structure of the capitalist order and its economic structure is the deepest, most eloquent, symptom of the decay and dissolution of this social order. It is also the revelation, the confirmation that society’s old political organization cannot endure because the world’s new economic and productive tendencies – whose characteristic is their internationalism – cannot develop nor prosper within its rigidly nationalist molds. This social order declines and expires because the development of the world’s economic and productive forces no longer fits within it. Those economic and productive forces aspire toward an international organization which permits their development, their circulation, and their growth. That international organization cannot be capitalist because, without betraying its structure, without betraying its origin, the capitalist State cannot cease to be a nationalist State.

However, that incapacity of capitalist and individualist society to transform itself according to the international needs of the economy, does not prevent the appearance within it of early signs of an international organization of humanity. Within the nationalist and chauvinist bourgeois order – which distances peoples and makes them enemies – a thick web of international solidarity is knit, which prepares the future of humanity. The bourgeoisie itself may abstain from forging, with its own hands, international organizations and institutes to attenuate the rigidity of its nationalist theory and practice. Thus, we have seen the appearance of the League of Nations. As I said in its respective lecture, the League of Nations is, at root, an homage from bourgeois ideology toward internationalist ideology. The League of Nations is an illusion because no human power can stop the conflicts, enmities, and imbalances inherent to the capitalist and nationalist organization of society from appearing within it. Supposing even that the League of Nations came to include all the world’s nations, not just because of that would its actions be efficiently pacifist nor effectively regulating of the conflicts and the differences between nations, because humanity – reflected and synthesized in its assembly – would still be the same nationalist humanity as before. The League of Nations would gather the peoples’ delegates, but it would not gather the peoples themselves. It would not eliminate the reasons for differences between them. The same divisions, the same rivalries, which bring nations together and push them apart in geography and history, would bring them together and push them apart within the League of Nations. The alliances, the agreements, and ententes, which gather the peoples into opposing and enemy blocs, would survive. In the end, the League of Nations would be a class International, an International of States, but it would not be a peoples’ International. The League of Nations would be a label internationalism, a façade internationalism. This is what the League of Nations would be if it gathered to it all the world’s governments, all the States. In actuality, when it gathers only part of the governments and part of the States, the League of Nations is even less than that. It is a tribunal with no authority, jurisdiction, and strength, beside which the nations contract and litigate, deal with and attack one another.

However, with the appearance and the existence of the League of Nations, the attempt to bring it about is a recognition, is a declaration, of the evident truth of the internationalism of contemporary life, of the international needs of life in our times. In this century, everything tends to link, tends to connect, peoples and men. In other times, a civilization’s stage was reduced, was small. In our time it is almost the whole world. The English colonist who establishes himself in a wild corner of Africa takes the telephone, the wireless telegraph, the automobile, to that corner. Poincaré’s latest pep talk or Lloyd George’s latest speech echo in that corner. The progress of communications has connected and joined the activity and history of nations to an unbelievable degree. It is the case that the punch which knocks down Firpo in New York is known about in Lima, in this small South American capital, two minutes after having been seen by the spectators of the match. Two minutes after having thrilled the spectators in the North American coliseum, that punch dismayed the good folk who queued before the doors of the Lima newspapers. I recall that example in order to give you a precise sense of the intense communication which exists between the nations of the Western world due to the growth and improvement in communications. Communications are the nerve tissue of this internationalized and unified humankind. One of the characteristics of our times is the speed, the velocity, with which ideas spread; with which the currents of thought and culture are transmitted. A new idea, brought up in England, is not an English idea but for the time needed to print it. Once it is launched into space by the newspaper, that idea, if it conveys any universal truth, can instantly be turned into a universal idea as well. How long would it have taken Einstein to be popular worldwide in another time? In these times, despite its complexity and technicality, the Theory of Relativity has gone around the world in very few years. All these facts are further signs of the internationalism and the unity of contemporary life.

Today, in all intellectual, artistic, scientific, philanthropic, moral activities, a tendency toward building international means of communication and coordination can be seen. In Switzerland there are the headquarters of more than eighty international associations. There is an international association of teachers, and international association of journalists, there is an international feminist organization, an international student organization. Even chess players, if I’m not mistaken, have international offices or something similar. Dance instructors have held an international congress in Paris, at which they have discussed the merits of keeping the fox trot in style or of reviving the pavanne. Thus, the bases have been laid for a dancers’ international. Moreover, among the internationalist currents, among the internationalist movements, there is one that is curious and paradoxical like no other. I refer to the fascist international. Fascist movements are, as you know, rabidly chauvinistic, ferociously jingoistic. However, they encourage and help one another. The Italian fascists help – it is said¬ – the Hungarian fascists. Mussolini was once invited to visit Munich by the German fascists. Italy’s fascist government has greeted the emergence of a fascist-friendly government in Spain with explicit sympathy and enthusiasm. Even nationalism, then, can’t do without certain internationalist features.