Dear Comrades,

It is a distinct honor and privilege to be invited as the guest speaker of your national conference which is in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of the Netherlands.

I am thankful for this invitation and for previously having had the opportunity to participate in the educational program of your Party and hold study sessions with highly responsible cadres of your Party on the subject of “globalization” and Party building.

Neoliberal policy in the Netherlands

At the outset, let me clarify that “globalization” is a fancy expression to obscure the precise and scientific term imperialism. It is a supraclass, petty-bourgeois expression originally used by bourgeois journalists and academics and subsequently adopted by corporate executives and high bureaucrats. It seeks to smuggle into the public consciousness the acceptance of the antiworker and antipeople notion that the increasing “laissez faire” rapacity of monopoly capitalism is necessary and appropriate to high technology and increased social productivity.

You are well acquainted with the concrete meaning, actual workings and disastrous consequences of “globalization” because you live in an imperialist country whose state and multinational enterprises are notorious advocates and practitioners of “globalization”.

In domestic terms, it means bringing down the wage and living conditions of the proletariat and the people, by nullifying hard-won social rights, reducing regular tenured employment in favor of temporary part-time jobs under the slogan of labor flexibility and dismantling the system of social benefits that were adopted in the course of several decades of struggle by the proletariat and the people. And yet a heavy tax burden, in the form of personal income tax and value-added tax for goods and services, is imposed on the Dutch working class.

The prices and fees that ordinary people in the Netherlands pay for basic goods (food, clothing, etc.) and services (housing, transport, telephone, water and energy, etc.) are always creeping up. In sharp contrast, the giant multinational enterprises are granted tax cuts, overpriced contracts and subsidies and are allowed to bring out of the Netherlands large amounts of capital to invest in other imperialist countries, especially the United States, and in some chosen “emerging markets” and to keep the capital holdings and profits in tax havens. The monopoly bourgeoisie uses the state to tax the ordinary people heavily and to incur a huge amount of public debt.

State companies, state financial institutions (insurance companies and banks), state stockholdings in private companies, public utilities (postal service, telecom, energy, water, garbage and sewage) and social services (including medical insurance and functions related to labor and social welfare), have been privatized at bargain prices to the private monopoly firms. The government uses the proceeds from the sale of public assets for budgetary expenditures and for making up for the reduction in the taxes paid by the private monopolies.

It seems that the only things not being offered for sale in the so-called free market are the office of the prime minister, parliament, the core of the civil bureaucracy, the courts and the army. But, of course, all these remain tools of the monopoly bourgeoisie at public expense and are unprofitable concerns. The rule of the private monopolies is to privatize what is profitable and to socialize what is unprofitable.

The rationale behind the attacks on the wage and living conditions of the proletariat and people and to privatize public resources is to make more capital available to the monopoly bourgeoisie, supposedly to generate economic growth and employment and to sally forth for megacompetition worldwide. The shameless line of the imperialists is to serve the welfare of big corporations and to oppose people’s welfare.

The result is jobless growth. The Netherlands officially boasts of a low unemployment rate of 3.9 percent. But in fact, among the industrialized countries, it has one of the highest rates of eliminating regular tenured jobs. It is notorious for converting regular into temporary and part-time jobs, under the scheme of “labor flexibility”. The illusion of growth is conjured mainly through the overvaluation of private monopoly assets through the workings of finance capital. Ultimately, paper pyramids collapse, as you have seen the billions of guilders in stock values wiped out in the Amsterdam stock exchange since July this year. The quarterly reports of the Dutch multinational enterprises show huge reduction of profits from the levels of last year.

They extract superprofits from the workers in subsidiary plants and a multitude of sweatshops in some underdeveloped countries. They can extract superprofits because they give extremely low wages and in effect impose 12 hours or more of work time for a subsistence wage through exceedingly high output quotas. They can do so because they collaborate with client-states that toe the line of “economic liberalization” as dictated by the imperialist states through the IMF, World Bank and WTO.

The multinational enterprises still enjoy huge amounts of profits. But they have shamelessly announced further mass layoffs and further pressing down of the wage level in order to increase their profits and counter the tendency of profits to fall. They have announced closure plans of a considerable number of plants in the Netherlands and abroad.

The Dutch multinational firms extract superprofits from the workers in subsidiary plants and a multitude of sweatshops in some underdeveloped countries. They are able to do so because they give extremely low wages and in effect impose 12 hours of more of work time for a subsistence wage through exceedingly high output quotas. They can do so because they collaborate with client-states that toe the line of “economic liberalization” dictated by the imperialist states through the IMF, World Bank and WTO under the rubric of “free market liberalization”.

Within the Netherlands and on a global scale, the rapid upward concentration of productive and finance capital in the hands of the monopoly bourgeoisie results in the crisis of overproduction, as production with high technology and low regular employment result in the shrinkage of the market. The Netherlands is a big contributor and is at the same time vulnerable to the global crisis of overproduction and the global crisis of finance capital. According to the latest information from Fenedex, 54 percent of the Dutch gross national product consists of exports.

The Dutch banks, especially ING and AMRO, are also overextended in speculative expansion and lending operations to foreign governments and private corporations. In the current global crisis, many of the private debtors have become incapable of paying back what they have borrowed. Ultimately, it is the client-states that assume the debt burden of the private sector in exchange for IMF-initiated bailouts that use public funds.

The Dutch multinational enterprises face a drastically reduced demand for their exports because of the economic collapse of the “emerging markets” and the global recession affecting all imperialist countries. At the same time, the Dutch exports are squeezed by the increased export of other countries trying to solve their own economic crisis by increasing the quantity of their exports at lower prices.

The biggest Dutch multinational enterprises have incurred greatly reduced profits because of the global overproduction of what they produce: Shell in oil, Akzo Nobel and DSM in chemicals, Philips, Baan and ASM Lithography in consumer electronics, software and chip-making equipment, respectively; KPN in telecommunications; KLM in air transport; Hoogovens in steel and aluminum; and so on and so forth. Even Vedior and Randstad are finding the market for temporary employees glutted. Name any major Dutch company. It is in trouble.

In the Netherlands, the rising rate of exploitation and the deterioration of wage and living conditions compel the proletariat and the rest of the people to fight back and demand basic social reforms. The conditions of increased exploitation in imperialist countries are the very same conditions for the revolutionary party of the proletariat to strengthen itself, wage a revolutionary class struggle against the monopoly bourgeoisie and lead the entire people in the struggle for socialism.

In the world today, all types of goods are overproduced relative to the shrinking market. The imperialists and local reactionaries in the entire world try to solve the problem by aggravating the problem through mass layoffs and further exploitative policy actions against the proletariat and the people. The inevitable result is social and political turmoil. The objective conditions of all-round crisis are favorable for the building of the world proletarian socialist revolution.

It is absolutely necessary that the proletariat and people in both imperialist and dominated countries to unite under the banner of proletarian internationalism and anti-imperialist solidarity. The monopoly bourgeoisie oppresses and exploits the working people of the world all at the same time and inflicts terrible suffering on them in the current crisis. The working people of the world must therefore unite to liberate themselves from imperialism and to build socialism.

The meaning of “globalization”

Beyond the era of free competition capitalism of the 19th century, the imperialists have always dishonestly called monopoly capitalism as “free enterprise” capitalism in the 20th century. But in recent decades, they attach a certain set of meanings to the slogan of “globalization”.

They contrapose the “free market” to state intervention as they demand the liberalization of trade and investments, the privatization of public assets and the deregulation against social and ecological concerns. This does not mean that they reject the role of the state. They recognize it as the most important instrument of domination over the working class domestically and the oppressed peoples and nations abroad; and that it is a necessary political instrument as much as multinational firms and banks are necessary economic instruments.

In fact, imperialist states in the G-7 and OECD directly and through such multilateral agencies as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO) dictate upon client states to open up their domain and make way for multinational firms and banks to invest and trade and to facilitate the exploitation of the people. There is a hierarchy of states as much as there is a hierarchy of business corporations.

In economic and social policy-making, the imperialists have shifted from Keynesianism to “neoliberalism” since the beginning of the ‘80s after the ideological work of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School from the ‘60s onward. With Reagan and Thatcher taking the lead, the imperialists adopted the specious official line that the phenomenon of stagflation in the ‘70s has been caused by rising wage levels and the government’s big social spending. The bias is against the working class and the people. However, the imperialists obscure the cost-push effect of their high military spending.

They wish above all that the state give free rein to the “free market” and the central bank act sparingly in managing public securities, money supply and interest rates. They wish at all times that the state collect more taxes from the mass of consumers and to deliver to big business a plethora of tax cuts, revenues and assets. Their line is: corporate welfare, yes! social welfare, no!

The “neoliberals” deliberately gloss over the reality of imperialist states and the dominated states for a certain reason. They wish to make people forget that there are contradictions between the imperialist states and the oppressed peoples and nations, among the imperialist states and between the monopoly bourgeoisie and the proletariat in imperialist countries.

They have as collaborators the pseudoprogressives who criticize multinational enterprises as having become more powerful than states in order to insinuate that imperialist and client states are more benign than the MNEs and in order to beg for reforms from both MNEs and states. Front door and backdoor “neoliberals” collaborate in disregarding distinct national modes of production and superstructures in different countries and, most importantly, in denigrating the need for the broad anti-imperialist struggle and class struggle in the specific circumstances of various countries.

The imperialists have aggravated the exploitative and oppressive conditions of neocolonial domination. The OECD countries are pushing the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, an international treaty, to make the underdeveloped countries give up their economic sovereignty, accord national treatment to multinational enterprises and allow these to sue client-states for unfair and unequal treatment and compel them to pay for damages.

They have put aside previous Keynesian pretenses at aiding the development of underdeveloped countries, which they so well drummed up in the UN decades of development and in World Bank and UNCTAD propaganda. They have simply sapped the general run of third world countries through repeated IMF structural adjustment or austerity programs, which in the absence of industrial development actually aggravate their problems of chronic accounts deficits and debt burdens.

Economic crisis as consequence of “globalization”

As Marx and Engels pointed out a long time ago in the Communist Manifesto, the basic contradiction in capitalism is between the social character of the forces of production and the private character of appropriation by the capitalist class. This contradiction became manifest in the commercial crises of the 19th century and in the far bigger crises and global wars of the 20th century in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution.

This contradiction has grown more acute than ever before with the rapid rise of social productivity, through the adoption of higher technology and the availability of a more knowledgeable and skillful workforce, and with the extremely rapacious and accelerated accumulation and concentration of both productive and finance capital by the monopoly bourgeoisie.

The current crisis involves the overaccumulation of productive capital in the hands of the monopoly bourgeoisie, overvaluation of assets through finance-capital manipulation, excessive leveraging in the imperialist countries as well as in the “emerging markets”, chronic mass unemployment and overproduction relative to the shrinking market demand. The illusion of growth in the past decade, even if low and stagnant at the average of two percent or lower for the OECD countries, has been conjured by ever growing overvaluation of assets.

At the moment, all basic contradictions in the world are sharpening in the socioeconomic sphere. These include those between the monopoly bourgeoisie and the proletariat in imperialist countries, between the imperialists and the oppressed peoples and nations and among the imperialist powers.

Among the imperialist countries, the US is relatively the strongest not only because it has the lead in technology but also because it receives the most investments from the other imperialist countries. It carries the factors of implosion which include its accumulated federal debt and chronic trade deficits. In all imperialist countries, assets are overvalued through the workings of finance capital, such as bank loans, stockmarket sales, speculative mergers and excessive leveraging by hedge funds.

In addition to the basic class contradictions, every imperialist country is beset with problems in its relations with “emerging markets” within its particular region and in other regions. The economic collapses in the “emerging markets” have already caused two big waves of prolonged and steep stockmarket declines in the financial centers of the imperialist countries, in the fourth quarter of 1997 and another one in the third quarter of this year.

The contradiction between the imperialists and the oppressed peoples and nations in the socioeconomic sphere is now the sharpest in the world. It involves the overwhelming majority of the people of the world who suffer the worst forms of exploitation and oppression in the hands of the imperialists and the local exploiting classes.

Since the beginning of the ‘80s, the imperialist countries, among which circulate 80 percent or more of the global foreign direct investments (FDIs), have shifted from the pretense of officially aiding “development” to open promotion of the “free market” between them and the client-states at whatever given level of development or underdevelopment. They have chosen only some ten countries as “emerging markets”, to which 20 percent of global foreign direct investments flow in and out. The rest of the third world are also made to follow the IMF and WTO prescriptions, without receiving significant amounts of the speculative kind of funds that flow into the “emerging markets”.

The “emerging markets” have collapsed in one country after another and in one region after another since July 1997 because their types of goods are overproduced on a global scale and their falling export incomes expose their gross inability to pay back the foreign funds that they receive. There is a limit to the generation of superprofits by the monopoly capitalists from highly speculative finance capital on the basis of a real economy that is subject to the global crisis of overproduction.

The Southeast Asian countries have abruptly exposed their fundamental semifeudal backwardness and have plunged to a new depth of poverty and misery. Gone are the illusions of development conjured by real estate speculation, droves of late car models and proliferating sweatshops for slightly processed products.

The economic crisis is driving the imperialist powers to maneuver against each other for advantageous position and for a larger share of the global market. As the leader of the imperialist alliance, the US tries to divide the costs of policing the world but is always poised to grab the entirety or lion’s share of the spoils of aggression and intervention.

In East Asia, we see the conflicting economic strategies of the US and Japan. The US wishes to take over the key ailing technological and financial firms and have the rest declared bankrupt. But Japan would rather use taxpayer money to bail out the Japanese monopoly firms and banks and revive the Japanese and East Asian economies with public works pump-priming. It advocates state restrictions on the outflow of foreign funds. As principal creditor in East Asia, it wishes to retain the largest chunk of the market in the region.

In Europe, there is resistance to the US demand for lowering interest rates. At the same time, the US keeps its interest rates higher than those in other imperialist countries in order to attract foreign investments from them and avert the dumping of US bonds and stocks in their hands. As principal creditor of Russia and Eastern Europe, Germany wishes to keep the largest chunk of the market there.

The inherence of war in imperialism is currently manifested by the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia, the beefing up of the US-Japan security treaty partnership in East Asia, the stirring up of local wars and aggressive acts and threats by US imperialism in the name of peacemaking and humanitarianism.

Right now, the conditions for interimperialist wars in the 21st century are being laid by the worsening of economic conditions, the rise of fascist and racist movements, the acts of aggression and intervention of US imperialism and the growing complexity of a global situation in which interimperialist collisions can occur in the future.

The basic conditions for socialism grow within the very womb of industrial capitalism. The social character of the forces of production rises with higher technology and with higher knowledge and skills of the working class. An unprecedented crisis of monopoly capitalism has broken out just before the end of the 20th century and has laid the ground for the great struggles for national liberation and socialism against imperialism in the 21st century.

The subjective forces of the socialist revolution must arise and develop to take advantage of the basic conditions, especially during prolonged periods of serious crisis of the world capitalist system such as the current period. The proletariat must build its revolutionary party for fulfilling its historic mission of building socialism. There must be mass organizations and movements to involve the broad masses of the people in the revolutionary process and to fight the adversary in every aspect of social life.

The optimal economic and technological conditions for building socialism are present in the industrial capitalist countries. However, it is also here where the capitalist class is strongest in using both the coercive and persuasive means to prevent socialist revolution.

So far, in its epochal struggle against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat has been able to make use of the very crises and global wars generated by monopoly capitalism to seize political power and build socialism at the weakest points of the world capitalist system. But now, at the very centers of imperialism, new conditions have arisen to sharpen the class struggle between the monopoly bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The so-called third stage of the technological revolution (high technology spearheaded by information technology) under capitalism initially allows the monopoly bourgeoisie to tighten its control over society. But the growing disparity between imperialist propaganda and reality ultimately incites the proletariat and the rest of the people in imperialist countries to fight for their social liberation.

The proletariat and people are intensifying their protest and resistance against mass unemployment, job insecurity and rapidly worsening social conditions. They have raised the demand for the reduction of working hours at full time pay in order to spread the dignity of employment and expand the domestic market.

The monopoly bourgeoisie uses the high-tech mass media to spread disinformation and false illusions as well as petty bourgeois mentality among the workers, underemployed and unemployed. But the people can as well use electronic techniques to conduct revolutionary propaganda in ever widening and intensifying guerrilla fashion, if there is a party of the proletariat to raise the level of revolutionary consciousness and militancy.

General strikes and strikes in key companies manifest the sharpening class struggle between the monopoly bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These are breaking out increasingly beyond the control of the labor aristocracy. In view of the growing social discontent, the blatantly conservative parties that push “neoliberal” policy are discredited. But the other bourgeois parties push the same policy and sugarcoat this with deceptive phraseology in order to win elections. There are also the parties and movements which whip up neofascist and racist currents.

Conditions are becoming favorable for the working class to build up their revolutionary parties and break out of the lingering influence of relatively better times in the past, widespread petty-bourgeois mentality, the bureaucratic control of unions by the labor aristocracy and reformist and revisionist parties and organizations. The working class must include into its ranks the white collars who do repetitive work with their fingers rather than with their full arms and shoulders.

For so long as there are no revolutionary parties of the proletariat that are capable of overthrowing the monopoly bourgeoisie, the boom-and-bust cycle will continue to recur. But new conditions in social production worsen the structural crisis, involving chronic overproduction, chronic high rates of unemployment and chronic abuse of finance capital.

Under these conditions of political disorder among the reactionaries themselves, the proletariat and the people have ample opportunity to build the revolutionary party, the people’s army and the united front to wage a new-democratic revolution towards the socialist revolution.

A number of third world countries have revolutionary parties of the proletariat guided by Marxism-Leninism and are waging the new-democratic revolution through a protracted people’s war. They play a signal role for the spread of armed revolution against the imperialists and the local reactionary classes.

The economic collapse in the few “emerging markets” in the third world has brought about conditions of social and political disorder and revolutionary mass struggles. The withdrawal of Suharto from his position of power is remarkable. But his replacement by one of his stooges underscores the need for a new-democratic revolution.

In such countries as China and Russia, genuine communist parties can arise to avail themselves of outstanding revolutionary legacies, such as those of Lenin, Stalin and Mao. They can easily target for popular condemnation and overthrow the new bourgeoisie, which has so flagrantly robbed the people of their social wealth. In Russia, general strikes and mass protests have erupted on a widescale. In China, workers’ strikes, local peasant uprisings and other forms of concerted action have occurred.

The intensifying exploitation and oppression compel the proletariat and the people to wage the revolutionary struggle for socialism against imperialism and the local reactionaries. For this struggle to succeed, the revolutionary party of the proletariat must lead the broad masses of the people in the process of overthrowing the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and building socialism.

The scientific socialists of today must learn from the basic teachings and great achievements of their predecessors and draw lessons from both positive and negative experience in order to fare better and win greater victories in the forthcoming struggles against the imperialists and reactionaries.

The victory of socialism over monopoly capitalism is inevitable on the scale of a whole historical epoch. The revolutionary party of the proletariat and the broad masses of the people must master the circumstances, pursue the correct strategy and tactics, defeat the imperialists and reactionaries in one country after another and build socialism until it prevails over imperialism on a global scale. #

Speech at the Conference of the New Communist Party of the Netherlands ↩︎