Last year, the ruling “elites” of world capitalism were shocked by the outcome of the referendum in the United Kingdom about British membership in the European Union (“Brexit”), and by the result of the presidential elections in the United States (President Trump). In both cases, the results obtained did not correspond to the intentions or the interests of leading factions of the bourgeois class. We are therefore embarking on a series of interconnected pieces which will aim at making an initial balance sheet of the political situation in the United States and Britain in the aftermath of these events[1]. To widen the scope of our examination, we will also develop an analysis of the politics of the ruling class in the two main countries of continental Europe, France and Germany. In France, presidential and parliamentary elections took place in the early summer of this year. In Germany, the general elections to the Bundestag took place in September. The bourgeoisie of both countries is obliged to react to what has taken place in Britain and the USA – and they have reacted.
In choosing to concentrate on these four countries, these pieces will not attempt an analysis of the political life of the bourgeoisie in two countries – Russia and China – which play a key role in the capitalist, imperialist power constellation today. A study of the situation there remains to be done. Having said this, we should point out that both Russia and China play an extremely prominent role in our analysis of the political situation of the four old central “western” capitalist countries to be examined in these pieces. We will also concentrate on the political life of the ruling class, without entering into that of the proletariat. Here again, it is clear that the present situation poses a series of questions and challenges to the working class which revolutionary organisations have to take up and help clarify, and which we will attempt to do in future articles. For the moment, we recommend readers to consult the resolution on the international class struggle [1] from our last international congress, published in this issue of the International Review.
The historical background to these political developments is provided by a deeper process: the accelerating decomposition of the capitalist social order. We highly recommend that the reading of this and following articles be supplemented by a reading or re-reading of our “Theses on Decomposition [2]”, available on our site. For us, the present situation is a strong confirmation of what we outlined in that text, written over a quarter of a century ago. In particular, the concrete examination of the present situation confirms that it is indeed the ruling class itself which is first and foremost affected by this decomposition of its system, and that (except in face of a proletarian menace) the bourgeoisie has increasing difficulties to maintain its political unity and coherence.
[1] These pieces, which are intended to be read as a unity, were first written in the summer of 2017 after the general elections in Britain and the presidential elections and those to the National Assembly in France, but before the Bundestag elections in Germany. For various reasons this work could not be published at the time. Some updating and editing has been done, but we have chosen not to alter the section in Germany where the situation even after the elections remains extremely uncertain. For an analysis of the elections in Germany, see our article on IKS website [3]. It was also written before the latest crisis in the relations between the United States and North Korea and between the United States and Iran about the atomic and rocket programmes of what Washington calls “rogue states”. For the North Korea crisis, see our article "Threat of war between North Korea and the US: it is capitalism which is irrational [4]".
In reaction to the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, the media in the rest of the world, and the spokespersons of “liberalism” in America itself, painted a grim picture of a planet soon to be plunged by Trump into the throes of a protectionist catastrophe such as already happened after 1929. The assumption was that protectionism is the programme of political “populism” in general, and of Donald Trump in particular. Already at that time, in our articles about populism and about the election of Trump, we argued that a particular economic programme (protectionist or otherwise) is not a major characteristic of right wing populism. On the contrary, what characterises this kind of populism, at the economic level, is the lack of any such coherent programme. Either these parties have little or nothing to say on economic questions, or – as in the case of Trump – they demand one thing one day and its opposite the next. Although Trump in power has already proven his penchant for “unilateralism” by threatening or beginning the withdrawal of the United States from two of the most important trade agreements: that of NAFTA (with North America) and TPP (with Asia without China). In the first case, this remains a threat and one that will be opposed by many important US companies. In the second, the actual agreement has never been signed so a formal withdrawal by the US is not necessary. At the same time Trump has suspended the TTIP negotiations with the European Union – his intentions in so doing remain unclear. According to his own claims his goal is to impose a “better deal” for America. Throwing in the whole weight of the United States to pressurise the others, Trump is gambling with high stakes, as we predicted he would. The outcome remains unpredictable. What is clear however is that, at the level of economic policy, the ruling classes of the other countries have profited from the protectionist rhetoric of Trump in order to one-sidedly blame the USA for something which is first and foremost a product of global capitalism. What we have witnessed recently is nothing less than a qualitatively new stage in the economic life or death struggle between the leading capitalist powers - something which had already started before Trump became president. And at the same time as the other governments issue loud statements in “defence of free trade” against Trump, in reality they have all begun to adopt his rhetoric against dumping and for “free but also fair trade”. Once a slogan of NGO's, “fair trade” is today the war cry of the bourgeois economic struggle. Protectionism is neither new nor the monopoly of the USA. It is part of capitalist competition, practised by all countries.
Formal market protectionism however is only one of the forms which this conflict takes. Another one is the weapon of sanctions. The economic sanctions against Moscow promoted above all by the United States are aimed against the European economy almost as much as against the Russian. In particular the recent American renewal and sharpening of these sanctions (imposed by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, against the will of the president), openly put into question new oil and pipeline deals by western Europe with Russia, and have provoked a storm of protest, above all in Germany. Already under Obama, the American bourgeoisie had also begun to legally prosecute German companies operating in the United States such as the Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen. It would not be an exaggeration to speak of an offensive American trade war against Germany, first and foremost against its car industry. We do not doubt for a moment that the likes of VW or Mercedes are guilty of all the dirty tricks they are being accused of (centred round the falsification of pollution controls). But this is not the main reason they are being prosecuted, and the proof is that other “culprits” are hardly being affected by the legal procedures.
Although Trump, unlike his predecessor, has for the moment not taken such measures, he continues to massively threaten, not so much Europe, but above all China. From his point of view, he has good reason to do so. Already at the economic level, China is presently mounting two gigantic threats to the interests of the United States. The first of them is the so-called new Silk Road, a massive infrastructure programme aimed at linking southern Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe to China through a vast system of modern railways, highways, harbours and airports by land and by sea. Peking has already pledged a thousand billion dollars to this, the most ambitious such infrastructure programme in history to date. The second threat is that China (but also Japan) have started to withdraw capital from the United States and the dollar zone, and to establish bilateral agreements with other governments (the so-called BRICS states, but also Japan or South Korea) to accept payment in each other's currencies instead of paying with dollars. Although there are of course objective limits to how far China and Japan can go in this without harming themselves, these moves represent a serious threat to the United States: “Sooner or later, the currency markets will mirror the relation of forces in international trade – meaning a multi-polar order with three centres of power. In the foreseeable future the Dollar will have to share its leading role with the Euro and the Chinese Yuan” (...) That will affect not only the economy and the social sector but also the military armament of the world power”[1]. This would indeed risk undermining, in the long term, the overwhelming military superiority of the United States, since it presently finances its gigantic military machine, and its state debt, to a considerable extent thanks to the role of the dollar as the currency of world trade.
Although both the United States and the European Union are threatening China with custom duties in response to what they call Chinese dumping, what they above all want to achieve is that Peking is stripped of its status, in the international economic institutions, of a “developing country” (which gives China many legal possibilities to protect its own markets). The element in the economic programme of Trump, however, which has most impressed the ruling class, not only in the United States, is his planned “tax reform”. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany declared that it would constitute – should it ever be realised – nothing less than a “tax revolution[2]”. Its main idea is not new in itself, but goes in the same direction as similar “reforms” in the “neo-liberal” era: that of taxing consumption rather than production as much as possible. Since everybody pays consumer tax, all such shifts constitute a kind of tax cut for the owners of the means of production. Convinced that the United States is the only major country where such a tax system could be imposed in a really radical manner, Trump hopes, by making production in the United States virtually tax free, to bring American companies, their headquarters now in places like Dublin or Amsterdam, but also some of their overseas production, “back home” - and to become more attractive for foreign investors and producers. This above all seems to be the counter-offensive which Donald Trump has in mind in the present stage of the economic war.
At the economic level, Trump is anything but the opponent of “neo-liberalism” which he sometimes claims to be. If anything, the goal of his government of billionaires is more like the “completion” of the “neo-liberal revolution”. Behind the rhetoric of his former adviser, Steve Bannon, about the “destruction of the state” there lurks the neo-liberal state, a particularly brutal and powerful form of state capitalism. But the problem of the Trump administration today is not only that its economic programme is self-contradictory. It is also that those elements of his programme which could be of most use to the American bourgeoisie are very unsure of ever being put into operation. The reason for this is the chaos in the political apparatus of the leading ruling class in the world
[1]Josef Braml: Trump's Amerika. Page 211. Braml works for the German Society for Foreign Policy (DGAP)
[2]Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02.04.2017. The FAZ newspaper is one of the leading mouthpieces of the German bourgeoisie.
Today, there is a president in the Oval Office who wants to run the country like a capitalist business, and who appears to have no understanding of things like the state and statesmanship, or diplomacy. This in itself is a clear sign of political crisis in a country like the US. Since 2010, the political life of the bourgeoisie in the United States has been characterised by a tendency for the main protagonists to reciprocally block each other. Radical Republicans held up the budgetary planning of the Obama Presidency, for instance, to such an extent that, at critical moments the state was on the brink of being unable to even pay the wages of its employees. The mutual obstruction between the president and the Congress, between the Republicans and the Democrats, and within each of the two parties (in particular within the former) has reached a scale where it has begun to seriously hamper the capacity of the USA to fulfil it role of maintaining a minimum of global capitalist order. An example of this the reform of the structures of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which became necessary in response to the growing weight in particular of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in the world economy. President Obama recognised that, if US-inspired and led international economic institutions were to continue to perform their function of providing certain “rules of the game” of the world economy, there was no way of avoiding giving the “emerging countries” more rights and votes within them. But this restructuring was blocked by the US congress for no less than five years. As a result, China took the initiative in creating the so-called Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Worse still: Germany, Britain and France decided to participate in the AIIB (March 2015). A major step had been taken in the creation of an alternative, Chinese-led institutional architecture for the world economy. Nor did the opposition within America even succeed in preventing the “reform” of the IMF.
Donald Trump wanted to put an end to this tendency towards a creeping paralysis in the American system of power by breaking the power of the “establishment”, of the established “elites”, in particular within the political parties themselves. Needless to say, this establishment has no intention of surrendering its power. The result of the Trump presidency, at least to date, has transformed this tendency towards blockage into a full scale crisis of the US political apparatus. A furious power struggle has opened up between the Trumpists and their opponents, between the president and the judiciary system, between the White House and the political parties, within the Republican Party itself – which Trump more or less kidnapped as part of his presidential bid – and even within the entourage of the president himself. A power struggle which is also being fought out in the media: CNN and the East Coast press versus Breitbart and Fox News. The courts and the municipalities are blocking Trumps immigration policy. His “health reform” to replace Obamacare lacks the support of his “own” Republican Party. The funds to build his wall against Mexico have not been granted. Even his foreign policy is openly contested, in particular his intention of making a “great deal” with Russia. The frustrated, hot headed, twittering president has been firing one prominent member of his own team after the other. Meantime, step by step, the opposition against him is constructing a fire-wall around him, composed of media campaigns, investigations and the threat of prosecution and even impeachment. His capability to rule the country, and even his mental sanity, are being questioned in public. This development is not specific to the United States. The past two years, for instance, have witnessed a series of mass demonstrations against corruption, whether in Latin America (for example Brazil), Europe (Rumania) or in Asia (South Korea). These are protests, not against the bourgeois state, but against the idea that the bourgeois state is doing its job properly (and of course they are protests against certain factions –often to the advantage of another faction). In reality, so-called corruption is but a symptom of deeper-lying problems. The permanent managing, not only of the economy, but of the whole of bourgeois society by the state, is a product of the decadence of capitalism, the global epoch inaugurated by World War I. The decline of the system necessitates a permanent control by the state with an increasingly totalitarian tendency: state capitalism. In its present form, the existing state capitalist apparatus, including the administration, the decision-making process and the political parties, are a product of the 1930s and/or of the post-World War II period. In other words, they have been in existence for decades. In the course of time, their innate tendency towards inertia, inefficiency, self-interest and self-perpetuation become more and more marked. This also goes for the “political class”, with an increasing tendency for politicians and political parties and other institutions to pursue their own vested interests to the detriment of those of the national capital as a whole. “Neo-liberalism” developed partly in response to this problem. It tried to make bureaucracies more efficient by introducing elements of direct economic competition into their mode of functioning. But in many ways the “neo-lib” system has worsened the illness it wanted to cure. The “economisation” of the functioning of the state has given rise to a gigantic new apparatus of what is known as lobbyism. Out of this lobby system has developed in turn the sponsoring, by private individual or groups, of what in the United States are called Political Action Committees (PAC): “think tanks”, political institutes and so-called grass root movements. In March 2010, the US Court of Appeals granted unlimited funding rights to such bodies. Since then, powerful private groups have increasingly been assuming a direct influence on national politics. One example is the “Grover Norquist Initiative” which succeeded in getting a large majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives to take a public oath never again the vote for tax increases. Another example is the Cato Institute and the Tea Party Movement sponsored by the Koch brothers (oil tycoons). Perhaps the most relevant example, in the present context, is Robert Mercer, apparently a brilliant mathematician, who used his mathematical skills to become one of the leading hedge fund billionaires (a kind of right wing equivalent of the “liberal” George Soros) and to create a powerful instrument for the investigation and manipulation of political opinions called Cambridge Analytica. The latter, along with his white supremacist news network Breitbart, were probably decisive in winning the presidency for Donald Trump, and have also been implicated in manipulating opinion for a pro-Brexit result in the UK referendum[1].
The clearest indication that the mutual obstruction within the US ruling class have reached a new quality – that of a full scale political crisis - is the fact that, much more than in the recent past, the imperialist orientation, the military strategy of the super-power has itself become the principle bone of contention and object of obstruction.
[1] For a more detailed analysis of the contradictions between the policies of Trump and the interests of the main fractions of the American bourgeoisie, see our article on the Trump election [9], which also develops on the context of the global decline of the United States and the still growing cancer of militarism which weighs on its economy.
One of the peculiarities of the 2016 US presidential elections was that (like in the proverbial “banana republics”) neither of the two candidates would accept their defeat. Trump already announced this before Election Day, but without saying what he would do in the case of his defeat. As for Hillary Clinton, instead of blaming someone else for her defeat (for instance herself)[1], she decided to blame it on Vladimir Putin. In the meantime, a large part of the US political establishment has taken up this theme, so that “Russia-Gate” has become the principle instrument of opposition to the Trump administration within the American ruling class. As the world now knows, Trump's connections with Russia go back all the way to the year 1987, when Moscow was still the capital of the USSR and the “Empire of Evil” in the eyes of the USA. According to a recent documentary film shown on ZDF, the second state TV channel in Germany[2], it was Trump's Russian connection, not least his business links to the Russian underworld, which (possibly several times) rescued Trump from going bankrupt. At all events, the main idea of the investigations against Trump about Russia is that someone has become president of the United States who is dependent on the Kremlin, and is perhaps even being blackmailed by it. What is certainly true is that the new president has business and other connections there. Not only Trump, but many from the inner circle of power he gathered round him when he entered the White House, including Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus and Jeff Sessions. What is true above all is that the Trumpists wanted and still want to radically change the Russia policy of the United States, to make a “great deal” with Putin.
Here it is necessary to briefly recall the history of American-Russian relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the heady days of the US “victory” in the Cold War, there was a strong feeling in the American ruling class that its former superpower rival could become a kind of subordinate state and above all a source of abundant profits, The first Russian president Boris Yeltsin relied on American (“neo-lib”) advisers in the process of converting the existing Stalinist system into a “market economy”. What resulted was an economic disaster. As for the US “expert” advisers, their main concern was to as much as possible get the fabulous raw material wealth of Russia under American control. The Yeltsin presidency (1991-1999) a mafia type government, was more or less ready to sell out the resources of the country to the highest bidder. The administration which succeeded it, that of Vladimir Putin, although it has excellent connections to the Russian underworld, soon proved to be a regime of a very different kind, run by secret service officers determined to defend the independence of mother Russia, and to keep its wealth for themselves. It was Putin therefore who prevented the planned American takeover of the Russian economy. This serious loss corresponded to a more global decline in US authority, in which most of its former allies and even a number of secondary, dependent powers began to challenge the hegemony of the world’s only remaining superpower.
Ever since Putin’s ascendancy, the so-called Neo-Cons, the “conservative” and openly belligerent institutes and think-tanks in the United States, have been publically advocating “regime change” in Moscow. Once again, Russia under Putin became a kind of “Empire of Evil” for the war propaganda of US imperialism. Despite the abrupt change in the US policy of Russia under Putin, the American policy towards Russia remained, until 2014, basically the same. Its main axis was the military encirclement of the Russian Federation, first and foremost through the deployment of NATO ever closer to the heartlands of Russia. Through the integration of the former Baltic states of the USSR into NATO, the US military machine found itself surrounding the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, almost within marching distance of the suburbs of St Petersburg, the second city of Russia. However, when Washington offered NATO membership to two other former components of the Soviet Union – the Ukraine and Georgia - this was prevented by other NATO “partners”, in particular Germany, who realised that this step was likely to provoke some kind of military reaction by Moscow.
Instead, the western “partners” agreed on a more subtle procedure: the European Union offered the Ukraine a “free trade” agreement. But since the Ukraine already had a similar agreement with the Russian Federation, the consequence of the deal between Brussels and Kiev would be that European goods, via the Ukraine, could gain free access to Russia. Brussels however had deliberately excluded Moscow from its negotiations with Kiev. The reaction of Moscow to the deal between Brussels and Kiev therefore came promptly: the Ukraine would have to choose between a shared market with the EU, or one with Russia. A situation arose which led to an open confrontation between “pro-western” and “pro-Russian” forces in the Ukraine. In the wake of the massacre on the Maiden Square in Kiev (20.02.2014), president Viktor Janukovich was toppled and fled to Russia. At the time, the Grand Old Master of US diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, told CNN that regime change in Kiev was a kind of dress rehearsal for what would happen in Moscow[3]. But then something happened which nobody in Washington seems to have been expecting: a Russian military counter-offensive. Its three main components were the Moscow- backed separatist movement in the eastern Ukraine, the annexation of the Crimean peninsula on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast, and the military intervention of Russia in Syria. A new situation had arisen, in which the coherence and unity of the US policy towards Russia began to crumble.
Agreement could still be reached in Washington about the economic strangulation of Russia, seen as an adequate response to the counter-offensive of Moscow. The three pillars of this policy – still in place – are economic sanctions; hurting the Russian energy sector by keeping the price of oil and gas on the world market as low as possible; and the stepping up of the arms race with a Russia economically unable to keep the pace. But from 2014 on there was growing dissent about how America should respond to Russia at the military level. A hard line faction emerged, which was to give its support to Hillary Clinton at the 2016 presidential election. One of its representatives was the commander of NATO forces in Europe, Philip Breedlove. In November 2014 and again in March 2015 Breedlove spread what turned out to be the fake news that the Russian army had invaded the east of the Ukraine. It looked like an attempt to create a pretext for a NATO intervention in the Ukraine. The German government was so alarmed that both Chancellor Merkel and foreign minister Steinmeier condemned in public what they called the “dangerous propaganda” of the NATO commander[4]. Breedlove, evidently, was not breeding love, but war. According to the German review Cicero ((04.03.16) Breedlove also proposed to the US Congress to attack Kaliningrad, the Russian Port on the Baltic Sea, as an adequate response to Russian aggression further south. He was not the only one in such a mood. Associated Press reported that the Pentagon was considering the use of atomic weapons against Russia. And at a conference of the US Army Association in October 2016, American generals argued that a war with Russia, and even China, was “almost unavoidable”.[5]These pronouncements have been extreme, but they do show the ingrained strength of the “anti-Russian” position within US military circles.
Alarmed by this escalation, the last head of state of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, wrote a contribution for Time Magazine (27.01.17) entitled “It looks as if the world is preparing for war”, where he warned of the danger of a nuclear catastrophe in Europe. Gorbachev was reacting not least to an idea increasingly put forward by conservative think- tanks in the United States: that the risks imposed by a nuclear conflict with Russia have become calculable and can be “minimised” - at least for the United States. According to this “school of thought” such a conflict would not be declared, but would develop out of the present “hybrid war” (Breedlove) with Russia, where the distinctions between armed clashes, conventional warfare and nuclear war become blurred. It was in response to such “thinking aloud” in Washington that the Kremlin “assured” the world that the Russian nuclear second strike capacity was such, that not only Berlin but also Washington would be “razed to the ground” if NATO attacked Russia.[6]
In the face of this growing consideration of the military option against Russia, opposition developed not only within NATO, but also within the US ruling class. The NATO summit of September 2014 in Wales rejected proposals to intervene militarily in the Ukraine, and abandoned, at least for the moment, the idea of Kiev becoming a NATO member. And from that moment on, Barak Obama, as long as he was in office, while contributing to the modernisation of the Ukrainian armed forces, always rejected a direct American military engagement there. But the politically most important reaction within the US bourgeoisie to the situation with Russia was that of Donald Trump.
To understand how, in this context, a new position on policy towards Russia came to be formulated within the American bourgeoisie, it is important to keep in mind that Russia does not have the same significance for the United States as it had a quarter of a century ago, during the “honeymoon phase” between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin. At that time, the main goal of America's Russia policy was Russia itself, the control of its resources. Today American control of Russia would be more a means to a new end: the military encirclement of the new enemy No. 1, which is China. In this changed context, Donald Trump poses a very simple question to the rest of his class: If China is now our main enemy, why can't we try to win over Moscow for an alliance against China? Russia is neither the natural friend of China, nor the natural enemy of the United States.
The question which is of more interest to the “mainstream” of the US bourgeoisie (in particular the supporters of Hillary Clinton) at the moment, however, is a different one: did the Kremlin influence the outcome of the last US presidential elections? The answer to this question is in fact not difficult. Not only did Putin influence the election, he even helped to create the group within the US bourgeoisie open to making deals with Moscow. The principal means he used to this end was the most legitimate one possible in bourgeois society: the proposal of business deals. For example, the deal offered to Exxon Oil and its president Rex Tillerson – now US secretary of state (foreign minister) - is said to have been worth 500 billion dollars. We can thus understand how, after all the bourgeois talk in recent decades about fossil energy sources belonging to the past, there is a government in Washington today with a strong over-representation of the oil and even the coal industry: they are the part of the US economy to which Russia can offer the most.
Although Trump has apparently succeeded in convincing Henry Kissinger of his proposal (Kissinger has become an adviser of Trump and an advocate of “detente” with Russia) he is very far from having convinced the majority of his top brass opponents. One of the reasons for this is that what Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech as president of the United States (17.02.1961) called the “military-industrial complex” feels threatened in its existence by a possible deal with Russia. This is because Russia, for the moment, continues to be the main justification for the maintenance of such a gigantic apparatus. Unlike Russia, China, at least for the moment, although it is an atomic power, has no comparable array of intercontinental nuclear rockets directly targeting the major cities of the United States.
[1] Her husband, ex- president Bill Clinton, was allegedly hopping mad about how incompetently her campaign had been managed
[2]ZDF Zoom: Gefährliche Verbindungen – Trump und seine Geschäftspartner (“Dangerous Connections – Trump and his Business Partners“) by Johannes Hano and Alexander Sarovic.
[3]Youtube 17.08.2015.
[4]Der Spiegel, 07.03.2015. “NATO Oberbefehlshaber Breedlove irritiert die Allierten”. (NATO Commander in Chief Irritates the Allies)
[5]Wolfgang Bittner: Die Eroberung Europas durch die USA (The Conquest of Europe by the USA), Page 151.
[6]YouTube 05.02.2015
In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May had called early elections for June 2017, with the goal of winning a larger majority for her Conservative Party before entering negotiations about the conditions under which the country would leave the European Union. Instead, she lost the majority she had, making herself dependent on the support of the Ulster (North of Ireland) protestant Unionists from the DUP. The only success of the Prime Minister at these elections was that the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP, the hard liner Brexiteers to the right of the Conservative Party) are no longer represented in the House of Commons. Despite this, , the latest electoral debacle for the Conservatives made it clear that the fundamental problem remains unresolved –the problem which, a year ago, made it possible that the referendum about British membership of the European Union produced a result –the “Brexit”- which a majority of the political elites had not wanted. This problem is the deep division within the Conservatives –one of the two main state parties in Britain. Already when Britain joined what was then the “European Community” in the early 1970s, the Tories were divided over this issue. A strong resentment against “Europe” was never overcome within the Tory ranks. In recent years, these inner party tensions developed into open power struggles, which have increasingly hampered the capacity of the party to govern. In 2014, the Tory Prime Minister David Cameron managed to checkmate the Scottish Nationalists by calling a referendum about Scottish independence, and winning a majority for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom. Emboldened by this success, Cameron attempted to silence the opponents of British membership of the European Union in a similar manner. But this time, he had seriously miscalculated the risks. The referendum resulted in a narrow majority to leave, whereas Cameron had campaigned to stay in. A year later, the Tories are as divided on this question as ever. Only that today, the conflict is no longer about membership or not in the EU, but about whether the government should adopt a “hard” or a “soft” attitude in negotiating the conditions under which Britain will leave. Of course, these divisions within the political parties are emanations of deeper lying tendencies within capitalist society, the weakening of its national unity and cohesion in the phase of its decomposition.
To understand why the ruling class in Britain is so divided on such issues, it is important to recall that, not so long ago, London was the proud ruler of the largest and most far flung Empire in human history. It is thanks to this golden past that the British high society is still today the richest ruling class in western Europe.[1] And whereas an average German bourgeois engages himself or herself traditionally in an industrial company, an average British counterpart is likely to own a mine in Africa, a farm in New Zealand, a ranch in Australia, and/or a forest in Canada (not to mention real estate and shareholding in the United States) as part of a family inheritance. Although the British Empire, and even the British Commonwealth, are things of the past, they enjoy a very tangible “life after death”. The “White Dominions” (no longer so-called) Canada, Australia and New Zealand, still share with Britain the same monarch as formal head of state. They also share, for instance (along with the former crown colony: the USA) a privileged cooperation of their secret services. Many among the ruling class of these countries feel as if they still belong, if not to the same nation, than to the same family. Indeed they are often interconnected by marriage, by shares in the same property and by business interests. When Britain, in 1973, under the Tory Prime Minister Heath, joined what was then the European “Common Market”, it was a shock and even a humiliation for parts of the British ruling class that their country was obliged to reduce or even sever its privileged relations with its former “crown colonies”. All the resentment accumulated over decades about the loss of the British Empire began, from this time on, to vent itself against “Brussels”. A resentment which was soon to be augmented by the neo-liberal current (very important in Britain from the Thatcher days onwards) to whom the monstrous “Brussels bureaucracy” was anathema. A resentment shared by the ruling classes in the former dominions such as Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media billionaire, today one of the most fanatical Brexiteers. But quite apart from the weight of these old links, it was humiliating enough that a Britain which once “ruled the waves” had the same voting rights in Europe as Luxemburg, or that the tradition of Roman law held sway in the continental European institutions rather than the old Saxon one.
But all of this does not mean that the “Brexiteers” have or ever had a coherent programme for leaving the European Union. The resurrection of the Empire, or even of the Commonwealth in its original form, is clearly impossible. The motive of many of the leading Brexiteers, apart from resentment and even a certain loss of reality, is careerism. Boris Johnson, for instance, the leader of the “Leave” fraction of the Tories last year, seemed even more amazed and dismayed than his opponent, the party leader Cameron, when he heard the result of the referendum. His goal did not seem to be Brexit, in fact, but replacing Cameron at the head of the party.
The fact that it is the Conservatives, more than the Labour Party, which are so divided over this issue is equally a product of history. Capitalism in Britain triumphed, not through the elimination, but through the bourgeoisification of the aristocracy: the big land owners themselves became capitalists. But their traditions directed their interest in capitalism more towards the ownership of land, real estate and raw materials than towards industry. Since they already owned more or less the whole of their own country, their appetite for capitalist profits became one of the main motors of British overseas expansion. The larger the Empire became, the more this land- and real estate owning- layer could get the upper hand over the industrial bourgeoisie (that part which had originally pioneered the first capitalist “industrial revolution” in history). And whereas the Labour Party, through its intimate links to the trade unions, is traditionally closer to industrial capital, the big land and real estate owners tend to assemble within the ranks of the Tories. Of course, under modern capitalism, the old distinctions between industrial, land owning, merchant and finance capital tend to become dissipated by the concentration of capital and the domination of the state over the economy. Nonetheless, the different traditions, as well as the different interests they partly still express, still lead a life of their own.
Today there is a risk of a partial paralysis of the government. Both wings of the Conservative Party (who at the moment present themselves as the proponents of a “hard” versus a “soft” Brexit), are more or less poised to topple Prime Minister May. But at least at present, neither side seems to dare to strike the first blow, so great is the fear of widening the rift within the party. Should the party prove unable to resolve this problem soon, important fractions of the British bourgeoisie may start to think about the alternative of a Labour government. Immediately after the Brexit referendum, Labour presented itself, if anything, in an even worse state than the Conservatives. The “moderate” parliamentary fraction was disgruntled about the left rhetoric of its party leader Jeremy Corbyn, which they felt was putting off voters, and about his refusal to engage himself in favour of Britain remaining in the EU. They also seemed poised to topple their leader. In the meantime, Corbyn has impressed them with his capacity to mobilise young voters at the recent elections. Indeed, if the tragic Grenfell Tower fire (for which the population holds the Conservative government responsible) had taken place before instead of just after the elections, it is not unthinkable that Corbyn would now be Prime Minister instead of May. As it is, Corbyn has already begun to prepare himself for government by ditching some of his more “extreme” demands such as the abolition of the Trident nuclear armed submarines presently being modernised.
[1] Magazines such as Fortune publish annual figures about the world’s wealthiest banks, companies, families and individuals.
In France, Emmanuel Macron and his new movement “La République En Marche” (LREM) spectacularly won the summer 2017 presidential and legislative (parliament) elections. This victory of the best possible candidate to defeat populism in France was the product of its ability to garner broad support around this goal among the French bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of the European Union and influential political figures such as Angela Merkel. The Front National (FN), the main “populist” party in the country, had no chance in the second round of the presidential elections against Macron. Weighed down by the backwardness of its origins, in particular by the domination of the Le Pen clan, the double electoral defeat of the FN has plunged it into open crisis. In a front page editorial about the situation there, under the title “France is Falling Apart at the Seams”, the often astute Swiss daily, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote that “the French party system is falling apart”. This analysis was published February 4th 2017, long before the victory of Macron could draw attention away from the crumbling of the established parties. If, as we have seen, the Republican Party in the United States has been hijacked by Donald Trump, and the Conservative Party in Britain is divided, in France both of the main established state parties are presently floundering. The conservative “Les Républicains” (LR) won only 22% of the votes, whereas the Socialist Party (PS) did even worse, gaining only 5,6% at the legislative elections. Beforehand, neither of the candidates of these two parties succeeded in qualifying for the second round of the presidential elections (where the two candidates with the most votes in the first round fight it out). Instead the spectacularly incompetent populist candidate Marine Le Pen lost against the new shooting star Macron, who did not even have a party behind him.
At the beginning of the presidential campaign, most pundits had expected a fight between the president in office at the time, Francois Hollande from the PS, and Alain Juppé from LR, a “moderniser” much favoured by important currents within the French bourgeoisie. Five years previously, Hollande had become president after being nominated by the Parti Socialiste in a highly media-promoted “primary” - a voting procedure of the presidential candidate on the American model. Les Republicans, thinking that what worked for the Socialists could not fail for them too, decided to hold their own “primary”. In so doing, they lost control of the nomination process. Instead of Juppé or another, more or less solid candidate, Francois Fillon was nominated. Although the favourite of the Catholic vote and of parts of the High Society, it was clear to an important part of the French bourgeoisie that Fillon would in no way be assured of victory against Marine Le Pen if he did qualify for the second round. But if political judgement was not a particular quality of the candidate Fillon, stubbornness was. Despite the scandals directed against him, Fillon refused to resign, and LR were stuck with their “lame duck” candidate. On the side of the Socialists, the president in office Hollande renounced a second candidature in view of the absence of electoral or party internal support for him. As for the Prime Minister under Hollande, Manuel Valls, he failed at the party primary, where, out of protest against the leadership, the base nominated instead the hardly known candidate Hamon.
The loss of control by the established parties was the opportunity for Emmanuel Macron. The latter had already tried his hand as an economic and political reformer when he served as an adviser to the first PS led government under president Hollande, and then as member of the second government led by Valls. At that time, his goal seems to have been to start an economic modernisation process in France something along the lines of the “Agenda 2010” of Gerhard Schröder in Germany. But Macron did not stay long in this government, soon realising that, unlike the SPD in Germany, the Parti Socialiste was not strong, disciplined and united enough to put through such a programme.
By the beginning of the year 2017, a very dangerous situation had arisen for French capitalism. In face of the incompetence of the main established parties, the danger of an electoral victory of the Front National could no longer be ruled out. Its ideas about taking France out of the Euro Zone and even out of the European Union were in flagrant contradiction with the interests of the leading fractions of French capital. In face of this danger, it was Macron who rescued the situation. He did so, to an important extent, by using the methods of populism against the populists.
First,Macron succeeded in stealing from the populists one of their favourite current themes: that the traditional right and the traditional left have both failed historically because they have been too busy opposing each other ideologically and in their power struggles to properly serve the “cause of the nation”. But Macron did not only adopt this language, he put it into practise by deliberately recruiting support and supporters both from the left and from the right for his new movement “En Marche”. His claim to serve “neither the left nor the right, but France alone” helped him to politically disarm Marine Le Pen. He was even able to present the FN as itself belonging to the “establishment”, as a longer standing right wing party.
Secondly, Macron responded to the growing general disgust towards the existing parties by putting forward, not a party, but a movement, and above all by putting forward… himself. In doing so, he took into consideration a growing mood within parts of bourgeois society: a longing for the authority of a strong leader. If an “irresponsible” politician like Trump could be successful with such a tactic, why not Macron (who sees himself as a highly responsible one). Instead of hijacking one of the two main established parties, Macron instead incited, from the outside, a kind of partial mutiny and defection from within both of them. As such, he contributed seriously to damaging these parties. According to a theory of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), “charismatic leadership” is one of the three forms of bourgeois rule. In post-World War II in France, it has a tradition: That of General De Gaulle (1890-1970) who, in 1958 “saved” a nation in the throes of the war in Algeria. In doing so, De Gaulle altered the constitutional and party political structure of France in a manner which, in the longer term, proved not to be particularly efficient and stable.
But Macron does not only stand in the tradition of De Gaulle. He is also the expression of a new trend within the bourgeoisie in response to the rise of “populism”. At the spring elections of this year in the Netherlands, the Prime Minister in office, Mark Rutte, described the electoral win of the “pro Euro and pro EU” parties over the enfant terrible of right wing populism, Geert Wilders, as the victory of “good” over “bad” populism. In Austria, in an attempt to counter the populist FPÖ, the conservative ÖVP, for the first time, went into the electoral campaign, not under its own, once prestigious name, but as the “electoral list Sebastian Kurz–ÖVP”. In other words, the party decided to hide itself behind the name of a hoped for “charisma” of the young vice chancellor and foreign minister who recently threatened to mobilise tanks on the frontier to Italy against refugees.
Thirdly, Macron followed the example of the German chancellor Angela Merkel in openly defending the “European Project”. Whereas the established parties undermined their own credibility by adopting the anti-European rhetoric of the NF, while in reality continuing to uphold French membership of the European Union, the Euro-Zone and the Schengen- Zone. This clear stance helped to remind a bourgeois society in disorder that French capital is one of the main beneficiaries of these European institutions.
Like De Gaulle in the 1940s and 1950s, Macron is a stroke of good luck for the French bourgeoisie today. It is mainly thanks to him that France has been able to avoid landing in a similar political dead end to that in which its American and British counterparts presently find themselves. But the longer term success of this rescue operation is anything but guaranteed. In particular, if anything happens to Macron, or if his political reputation becomes seriously damaged, his République En Marche risks falling apart. This is the characteristic liability of “charismatic leadership”. The same goes for the new political star of the French left opposition, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who succeeded in responding to the demise of the traditional bourgeois left (Socialist and Communist Parties, Trotskyism) by creating a left movement around himself, in a manner strikingly resembling that of Macron himself. Mélenchon has lost no time taking up his role of canalising proletarian discontent in face of the coming economic attacks into bourgeois dead ends. Overnight, the division of labour between the two M's, Macron and Mélenchon, has become one of the axes of the politics of the French state. But here again, the movement around Mélenchon remains unstable for the moment, liable to fall apart if its leader falters.
General elections in Germany are scheduled for mid-September. Germany also has seen the rise of a right wing populist protest party, the “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD). But although this party seems likely to enter the national parliament, the Bundestag, for the first time, it has little chance, for the moment, of upsetting the plans of the main fractions of the politically and economically still relatively stable German bourgeoisie. The present electoral campaign of Chancellor Merkel reveals a lot about the situation of German capitalism. Her slogan is: stability. Without using the same words, her approach seems to be inspired by that of her post war predecessor, the Christian Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who once campaigned under the motto:“no experiments”. Under the present circumstances, “no experiments” expresses the self-understanding of Germany as being more or less the only haven of political stability among the major powers of the western world at present. But behind this fixation on stability, there is also a growing alarm. The main source of the consternation of the German ruling class is the United States. We have already mentioned Trump's protectionist threats. There is also his unilateral withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, and in particular the American offensive against the German car industry started under the Obama administration. But the threat to the interests of German imperialism does not limit itself to economic or environmental issues. It concerns first and foremost the military and so-called security questions. A brief historical recapitulation is necessary here.
Under the Social Democratic led “Red-Green” coalition of Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005), Germany had moved closer to Putin's Russia, pioneering joint energy projects, and joining Moscow (and Paris) in refusing to support George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Schröder’s successor Merkel, like many politicians from the former East Germany (GDR) a staunch “Atlanticist”, changed this orientation, reaffirming the “partnership” with America as the cornerstone of German foreign policy. Under Obama, Washington offered Berlin the role of junior partner of the United States in Europe. Germany was called on to assume a greater share of the work of NATO in Europe, allowing America to concentrate more on the Far East and its main challenger China. In return for this enhanced status, Merkel had to abandon the “special relationship” with Moscow inaugurated by Schröder. But at the same time, Washington reassured Berlin that it was not “abandoning Europe to its fate” by modernising the US military presence in Germany, including at the military level. But under the surface, already during Obama's second term in office, tensions mounted between Berlin and Washington. One moment when this became visible was during the “refugee crisis” of summer 2015. The calls of the German bourgeoisie for US support went almost demonstratively unheeded. What Berlin was asking for was not that the USA take Syrian or other refugees, but that it should intervene politically and even militarily in some way to stabilise the situations in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin. But Washington did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, Obama affirmed repeatedly that the “refugee crisis is the problem of Europe alone”.
But it was above all concerning the policy toward Russia that the relations between Berlin and Washington became increasingly conflictual. Germany under Merkel supported and supports the NATO policy of encirclement of Russia, and hopes as America's junior partner to be one of its main beneficiaries. But it opposed and opposes the American strategy (championed by Hillary Clinton much more than by Barak Obama) of replacing the Putin government in Moscow. Indeed, on this question, the opposition within the European bourgeoisie is growing, even if it does not always express itself openly.[1] After the fall of Schröder's Red-Green coalition, the fraction of the German bourgeoisie with close links to Russia neither disappeared nor became inactive. In particular, with the formation of the Grand Coalition government between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats four years ago, the “friends of Putin” within the SPD returned to power. One can speak of a certain division of labour between the Merkel and Schröder fractions, and it is probably more astute and favourable for German interests, if the friends of Schröder only play the role of junior partner in the government (as is presently the case). But there have also been behind the scenes activities of this fraction. According to the first results of the public investigations about Trump's Russia connections in the United States, the Deutsche Bank played a central role in promoting business and other transactions between Trump and the “Russian Oligarchy”. They prefer to see Putin propped up rather than brought down by “the west”. It is also known that parts of German industry made generous financial contributions to Trump's electoral campaign. And it is an open secret that one of the strongholds of the Schröder-Gabriel[2] fraction in Germany is the province of Lower Saxony and the Volkswagen company which that provincial state partly owns and runs. In this light we can better understand that the court cases against Volkswagen and the Deutsche Bank in the United States are motivated not only economically but above all politically, and why, seven weeks before the national general elections, a power struggle has broken out in Lower Saxony (and in Volkswagen), bringing down the Red-Green coalition in Hanover. Although she does not necessarily share their orientation, Chancellor Merkel has, to a certain extent, tolerated the activities of this other fraction and tried to benefit from their links both to Putin and to Trump. Today however, the anti-Russian hawks in Washington are mounting their pressure not only on the Trump, but also on the Merkel government. Merkel's response to this has been typically two faced. On the one hand, she maintains her contacts with the Trumpists. On the other hand, she maintains a demonstrative distance from the new US leadership in public. There is hardly a country in western Europe where the criticism of the new administration in Washington has been so open and severe, and so much shared by almost the whole political class in Germany. Alongside Erdogan, Trump has eclipsed Putin as the favourite “bad guy” of the German media. We are entitled to conclude that the German bourgeoisie has taken advantage of the political and other bad manners of the Trump people in order to politically distance itself from the United States to a degree which, under other circumstances, would probably have provoked an international scandal. Under these circumstances, the pressure from Washington (augmented by Trump) for the European NATO “partners” - in particular Germany – to increase their military budgets, is in reality more than welcome (even if many of their politicians affirm the opposite in public). Berlin has already begun this augmentation. The plan is to raise military spending from the present 1.2% of German GNP to 2% by 2024 – almost double the present rate. If it were to conform to Trumps's demand of 3% of GNP, Germany would have the biggest military budget of any state in Europe (at least 70 billion Euros annually). Moreover, Germany has recently officially changed its “defence doctrine”. After the end of the Cold War, it was officially declared that Germany and western Europe no longer stand under any direct military threat. Today this doctrine has been revised, stating that “territorial defence” is once again the main goal of the Bundeswehr. With this new doctrine, the German state reacts not only to the recent military counter-offensive of Russia in the Ukraine and Syria, but also to growing fears about the political stability of Russia, and about the chaos which might develop there. Germany is also profiting from “Brexit” in order to increase the militarisation of the structures of the European Union and a certain independence from NATO (something Britain was able to prevent as long as it was an active EU member). Under the slogans of the “war against terrorism” and the “war against the smuggling of immigrants”, the EU has been declared to be no longer only an economic or political, but also (and even “above all” according to Merkel and Macron) a “security union”.
[1]For instance, at a symposium in Berlin this summer organised by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, it was put forward that the main danger to the stability of Europe is not the Putin regime, but the possible collapse of the Putin regime.
[2]Schröder is officially on the pay roll of the German pipeline project with the Russian Gazprom. Gabriel, who recently came out in favour of a “federal solution“ to the Ukraine conflict not unlike that propagated by Moscow, is Germany's new foreign minister.
The German bourgeoisie was among the very first to recognize the political talent and potential of Emmanuel Macron. From an early stage in the French electoral campaign, most of the political class in Germany and almost the whole of the media strongly supported his candidature. Of course, the German bourgeoisie has only limited means of directly influencing a French election. The general public in France follow neither the German media nor what politicians there say. But the French “political elite” necessarily takes note of what is being said and done on the other side of the Rhine. Through their clear stance in his favour, the German bourgeoisie helped to convince the powers that be in France that Macron is a serious and capable politician. This German support for Macron was motivated not only by the will to stop Marine Le Pen and save the European Union. Macron was also the only presidential candidate to make the renewal of the French-German tandem one of the central points of his electoral programme.
Macron takes this Paris-Berlin axis very seriously. According to him France is not yet able to assume its role in such an “alliance”, because it has not yet resolved its economic problems. Only an economically revitalised France, he says, could be anything like an equal partner of Germany. He sees its relative loss of economic competitiveness as the main threat to the stature of France as a global player on an international scale. For this reason, Macron poses the acceptance of his economic programme as the precondition for the constitution of a solid axis with Germany. By posing things in such terms, he has formulated a programme of action which can appear as being at once desirable and realistic to the ruling class of his own country. He presents his “reforms” as the condition for the maintenance of the imperial glory of France, and at the same time as something attainable – because it will be supported by Germany. But by the same token, he has formulated a goal both desirable and attainable to the German ruling class. Whether towards Russia or towards the United States, Berlin needs the backing of Paris. To obtain it, Berlin will have to support the economic “modernisation” of France.
The insistence of Macron on his economic programme as the precondition for everything else does not mean that he has a narrow economic view of the problems facing France. According to an old analysis of one of his predecessors as French president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the main economic problem of France is not its industrial and agricultural apparatus, which produces for the most part efficiently at a high level, but its backward political apparatus, and the rigid, bureaucratic nexus which links politics to its economy (the existing “systeme étatique” in France, which Helmut Schmidt and other German leaders have been criticising for decades). Macron wants to confront this problem today. Not unlike Trump in the United States, he wants to “shake” up the old elites. But he also has to overcome possible resistance from the French working class. Whether or not Macron is able to impose his attacks on the living and working conditions of the French proletariat may well decide whether or not the experiment of En Marche and the Macron presidency ends in success or failure.
Whenever Macron speaks of the French-German tandem, while he always mentions these economic and political dimensions, he insists that it should be first and foremost seen as a military (a “security”) question. In reality, the axis Macron, and Merkel, are speaking of, is not a stable imperialist alliance such as was still possible under the conditions of the Cold War. It is more like a deal based on a greater determination to defend a bigger common policy of certain countries of the EU – expressed by the reaction to the Brexit - and to loosen dependencies on the US in reaction to the "positions" of Trump. The association between Germany andFrance in a leading tandem of the EU is made possible by the complementarity between these two countries. France is the leading military power in Europe, on a par with Britain and really stronger than Germany, and not only because of its possession of the nuclear weapon. The co-leadership with France could benefit to Germany by conferring on it a higher political and diplomatic credibility. On the other hand, France could expect positive spinoffs from an alliance with the economic leader of Europe, mainly a countertrend to the economic / political decline it suffers. And more. The existence of such a co-leadership presents the advantage that it arouses less fear from other EU partners as a Germany assuming the leadership on its own.
The first French-German governmental consultations after the election of Macron decided, among other things: the development of a joint jet fighter to replace both Eurofighter and Rafale; enforcement of “Frontex” against refugees, and the establishment of a joint EU entrance and exit register; under German leadership, the development, along with Italy and Spain, of a European military drone; new investments in modern tanks, patrol boots and space technology. The EU “foreign minister” Mogherini joined Merkel and Macron to declare a European “Alliance for the Sahel Zone”. Germany declared its willingness “in principle” to increase its public and private investments in Europe, and to give financial support to the present French military missions in Africa. All of this under the slogan of “protecting Europe”.
The centre of the cyclone of decomposing capitalism is today the central country of the bourgeois system: the United States. The electoral triumph of a president who embodies the populist wave has already demonstrated how much this upsurge is antagonistic to the “rational” interests of the national capital and those factions of the bourgeoisie (security, military, diplomatic and political) who have the strongest sense of the “needs of state”.The tendency there at present is clearly one towards an intensification of tensions and even an authentic impasse within the ruling class,. But precisely because the USA is so central to world capitalism, the pressure is daily increasing on the American bourgeoisie to try to resolve their present predicament. But how? Just at the moment it does not look as if the Trump Administration will be able to impose its politics – the resistance to this within the ruling class appears to be too strong. Another possibility is that the Trumpists give in and tacitly adopt the politics of their opponents (or at least show more readiness to compromise). Although there are signs in this direction, there are signals in the opposite direction too. The option most under discussion in public at present is that of the impeachment of the president. The drawback of this method of removing Trump from the Oval Office is that it threatens to become a protracted and complicated legal and political procedure. Other options, promising a more rapid resolution of the problem, are undoubtedly on the table too, even if they are not so freely discussed: one of them is to have president declared insane. It is also possible that Trump (or someone else) will try to break out of the existing deadlock through military adventures abroad. One of the advantages of the “war against terrorism” led by George W. Bush was that it enabled his government, at least temporarily, to unite the ruling class behind him, and to impose large parts of their “neo-conservative” programme. Today, countries such as North Korea or Iran offer tempting targets for such operations, since they are closely linked not only to Russia but also to China. If there is one thing the US bourgeoisie still agrees on, it is that Peking is its main challenger today.
Steinklopfer. First written 23.08.2017 but subsequently updated
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201711/14435/22nd-icc-congress-resolution-international-class-struggle
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition
[3] https://de.internationalism.org/content/2731/nach-dem-erfolg-der-populisten-schadensbegrenzung-durch-die-deutsche-bourgeoisie
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201709/14384/threat-war-between-north-korea-and-us-it-capitalism-which-irrational
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2075/donald-trump
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2074/brexit
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2085/donald-trump
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2086/populisme
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201702/14255/trump-election-and-crumbling-capitalist-world-order
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2087/political-crisis
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2088/american-bourgeoisie
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2090/macron-emmanuel
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2089/france
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2091/germany-between-russia-and-united-states
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2092/french
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2093/german