VALUABLE ADMISSIONS OF PROFESSOR MILIBAND (3 of 7)

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(VALUABLE ADMISSIONS OF PROFESSOR MILIBAND - 3 -)

A WORD ON VACANT POSSESSIONS ONCE BEYOND THE BORDERLANDS

Peru is a country of 23 million people and the cradle of a very old indigenous 
civilization.
The country was colonised by Spain since 1524 and became the administrative, 
intellectual
and economic hub of Spain's South American empire. Peru achieved its 
independence in
1824 after the capitulation of the Viceroy's Armies at Ayacucho before the 
coalition of
independence armies of Argentina and Colombia led by Simon Bolivar and with the
participation of detachments of Peruvian and other South American rebels.

British imperialism also played a part in the defeat of Spain with the aim of 
stepping up
their own imperialist penetration. This they managed to do. In Peru, for 
example, British
monopoly capital dominated the country until displaced by US imperialism in the 
first
decades of the XX Century.  (Referring to the battle of Ayacucho, George 
Canning, the
British Prime Minister at the time, wrote: "The deed has been done, Spanish 
America is
now free and if we play our cards right it will be ours".  Obviously, "a free 
Latin America"
meant simply "vacant possession" for British imperialism).

Therefore, this independence was more formal than real since, in the era of 
imperialism,
no true modern nation in the bourgeois sense did arise, despite the 
introduction of
bourgeois democratic institutions. Feudalism remained intact or basically 
unchanged in the
"relations of production".  The weakness of the "indigenous capitalist class" 
coupled with
British, French and American imperialist political, military and economic 
action in support
of the old feudal structures.

Backing different factions of the land owning and mercantile classes 
(feudalists and
comprador bourgeois) in their struggles for supremacy following and even 
preceding
independence, the imperialists positioned themselves into even more domination 
of the
political and economic life of such countries.  They accumulated mineral, oil 
and
commercial concessions, forced un-equal treaties, peddled shyster loans, milked 
the
weakling former colonial state with usurious bond and share issues, etc., tried 
and tested
methods of imperialism in the Third World and elsewhere.  This imperialist 
process made
the survival of the semi-feudal and semi-colonial condition under which 
Peruvian history
continues to develop completely inevitable.

Miliband himself notes: "There has existed no strong indigenous class of 
large-scale
capitalists, since the major industrial, extractive, financial and commercial 
enterprises are
likely to be mainly controlled by foreign interests".

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS, SAID THE QUEEN OF HEARTS

In relation to the semi-feudal condition, Miliband also notes: "The mass of the 
working
population is of peasant character and the main "relations of production" in 
these countries
tend to be between landlord and peasant in a multitude of different patterns and
connections".  That is, that although such countries may be bourgeois 
democracies in
theory, and in juridical and political form, in essence, in reality, they are 
semi-feudal in
character.

In Miliband's own words: "The development of these countries has been 
exceedingly
distorted by colonialism and external capitalist domination, direct and 
indirect, and this has
naturally reflected in their economic, social and political, structures".  That 
is, Peru, like all
similar countries, remains in a semi-colonial and semi-feudal condition. 
Formally
independent and democratic bourgeois, but in reality, fettered by "external 
capitalist
domination", i.e. imperialism.  A country ruled by a joint dictatorship of 
landowners,
comprador and bureaucratic bourgeois relying on the economic, military and 
ideological
backing of imperialism to maintain their rule over the mass of the people.

In Marxist terms, therefore, and in order to become effectively independent and 
true
nations in the "bourgeois sense of the word", the necessary precondition for any
meaningful socialist advance, such countries need an anti-feudal and 
anti-colonial
revolution, i.e., a national democratic revolution.  In today's world, that 
means a peasant
war led by the proletariat, a national and social war of liberation against 
semi-feudalism and
imperialist oppression.

BOLDLY INTO THE IMPERIALIST MAZE

However, Professor Miliband does indeed go further.  In his work "The State in 
Capitalist
Society" - page 15 - in describing the growing process of capitalist 
internationalisation, he
says: "But advanced capitalism is also international in another more 
traditional sense,
namely in that large-scale capitalist enterprise is deeply implanted in the 
under-
industrialised areas of the world. The achievement of formal political 
independence by
these vast zones of exploitation, together with the revolutionary stirrings in 
many of them,
have made the preservation and the extension of these capitalist interests more 
expensive
and more precarious than in the past. But for the present, this Western stake 
in Latin
America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, remains very large indeed, weighs 
very deeply
upon the foreign policies of capitalist states, and is in fact one of the 
dominant elements,
if not the dominant element, of present-day international relations". (The 
underlining of the word
extension is ours).

Here we have an indication that Miliband grasps well an important element in
understanding the Peruvian situation. That in these countries, we have a 
process of
capitalist development, of "capitalist extension".  However, this is a process 
of
development and extension of a kind of capitalism that, far from being 
"indigenous", is in
fact indentured by a feudal and tributary relationship with international 
finance capitalism,
with imperialism, in Peru's specific case US imperialism. The Peruvian big 
bourgeoisie, as
do all Third World ruling classes, directly depends upon finance capital for 
its capitalist
development and expansion.  It is a bourgeoisie with a symbiotic relationship 
and a
parasitic dependence on imperialist capital - in other words, a big bourgeoisie 
with
bureaucratic-comprador features exists in Peru.

Miliband gives us a farther element of fundamental importance to grasp the 
essence of the
social process in Peru.  In his work "Marxism and Politics", he says: "The 
first and most
obvious feature of the state in both "Third World" and communist societies is a 
very
pronounced inflation of the state and executive power".

A STRICTLY SCIENTIFIC FORMULA

Here we must query Professor Miliband's characterisation as communist societies 
of countries that have undergone some degree or another of socialist 
transformation in the past.  Professor Miliband, as a Marxist, would surely 
agree that in strict scientific terms there are not, and there cannot be within 
the era of class society, within the era of monopoly capital, "communist 
societie".  That these are merely societies undergoing different stages in the 
building of socialism undertaken under specific and transitional forms of the 
"state" in which the proletarian dictatorship is exercised, or can be exercised.

That only when socialism is completely or sufficiently built-up for the 
necessity for states and class dictatorships of any kind to be dispensed with, 
when class society has actually disappeared from the earth, it would be 
possible to speak of a "communist society".