The Pandora's Box of a mode of production in putrefaction

The prospects offered by the world situation are everywhere creating a deep sense of anxiety.

War is spreading across the planet, giving the lie to world leaders who fill the media with empty promises of peace. The US/Israeli assault on Iran and Lebanon, and the counter-attacks by Iran and its proxies on Israel and the Gulf states, have set the whole of the Middle East on fire. The war in Ukraine is now four years old and there is no sign of a settlement. Look further east and you will see clashes between Afghanistan and Pakistan, between Pakistan and India, Cambodia and Thailand. Look west and you will see the genocidal conflict in Sudan, the seemingly endless war in the Congo, the battles between Islamist gangs and the Nigerian state…. Meanwhile every new scientific report on climate change confirms that the existing system is utterly failing to deal with the destruction of the environment. On the contrary, the spiralling military barbarism not only brings added ecological catastrophes but makes it virtually impossible for the world’s states to devote even the minimum of resources to mitigating the impact of global heating.

Little wonder that anxiety, nihilism, and apocalyptic moods are everywhere on the rise, generating increasingly irrational responses which are becoming part of the political mainstream. It has been reported, for example, that high-ranking officers in the US army have delivered fiery sermons to the troops engaged in the war on Iran, explaining the war as follows: Donald Trump has been anointed by God to usher in Armageddon and the return of Jesus. But many suspect, quite rightly, that the war in the Middle East is a real sign that the world leaders are losing their grip on this slide towards a world of wars, towards new levels of barbarism and self-destruction, and that the very future of humanity is under threat.

Faced with these sombre perspectives, small minorities across the world are moving towards the recognition that behind this deadly spiral lies an entire social system, a system of class rule which is demonstrating its incapacity to meet the needs of humanity; a senile, putrefying system which ‘survives’ and defends itself by inflicting catastrophe after catastrophe on the world’s population. This is capitalism in its epoch of decadence and decomposition.

Anti-Trumpism and anti-fascism: capitalism’s ideological defence mechanisms

But the ideology of the capitalist class presents numerous obstacles to the deepening and extension of a real understanding of social reality.

It is evident – including to broad sections of the ruling class itself – that the war in Iran has been initiated without any clear plan or objective, or that the stated objectives change from one day to the next: is this awesome (and vastly expensive) mobilisation of US military power aimed simply at destroying Iran’s military capacities, or is it aimed at overthrowing the Mullahs’ regime altogether? Without any definite goal, how will the conflict be brought to an end? Was there any calculation of Iran’s capacity to respond not only by firing missiles and drones all over the Middle East and even beyond, by adopting a scorched earth strategy throughout the region, but also, and probably more significantly, by delivering a heavy blow to the world economy by closing off the Straits of Hormuz, a key conduit for global trade and energy supplies? 

This lack of any coherent plan behind the war is generally explained by pointing the finger at Trump and his cronies, and particularly at Trump’s narcissistic or egomaniacal personality, his incapacity to think coherently, or his growing signs of senility and cognitive decay. And Trump is indeed all these things. But as the saying goes “cometh the hour, cometh the man”. That such a man could be placed at the head of the most powerful county of the world speaks volumes about the nature and trajectory of the capitalist system, which has not only been obsolete for over a century but since the end of the 80s has entered the terminal phase of its decline. Its inability to offer humanity any future inevitably produces ‘leaders’ who are increasingly unable to think ahead and who are themselves in a state of denial about what lies in front of us. Trump’s insistence that climate change is a huge hoax, or that America is on the verge of a new Golden Age, are symptoms of this irrational myopia.

The improvisation, the bungling and vengefulness of Trump and his clique of political amateurs are a factor in accelerating the tendency of the US power to act, no longer as the main bulwark of the world capitalist order, but as a force of increasing destabilisation all over the planet. But this tendency long predates the reign of Trump. In the early and mid-2000s, for example, in many of our articles and international resolutions we noted that, faced with the growing disorder in inter-imperialist relations that came about after the collapse of the Russian bloc, the USA was itself becoming the principal promoter of global chaos, despite or rather because of its efforts to defend its interests through brutal exhibitions of military power. What happened in Iraq was the prime example: the fact that it brought about the spectacular overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime did not prevent its invasion of Iraq from plunging the country into endless bloodshed and fragmentation, with the rise of numerous uncontrolled armed militias and terrorist gangs like ISIS. The present war on Iran, with its considerable military, political and economic consequences, is already taking this effect onto a higher level. It is dragging more and more states and factions into the quagmire and inflicting a much higher degree of damage to the world economy. But this is fundamentally because the underlying tendency of capitalism towards its “inner disintegration” (to quote the Communist International in 1919) has been progressing in leaps and bounds for some decades now. 

Blaming all this on Trump or his faction alone has a definite ideological function: it implies that if this gang could be replaced by serious, democratic politicians, the profound trajectory of this doomed civilisation could be reversed. Hence the need to prepare for the next round of elections, to support the Democratic Party or even the more sensible rump of the Republican party in their campaigns to dump Trump, put the grown-ups back in charge of government and help restore a “rules-based order” at the international level. In sum, this argument is a way of preventing the cultivation and spread of a very different conclusion: that the real problem is not this or that politician or capitalist party, but capitalism itself, including the sham of parliamentary democracy and the international institutions (UN, NATO, etc) which exist to perpetuate its global domination.

The same goes for the illusion that Israeli imperialism could pursue a policy of peace if Netanyahu and the religious fanatics in his government could be ousted at forthcoming elections, when all the Israeli political parties from right to left are unashamedly rallying behind the attack on Iran. Or indeed that the torture and massacre of dissidents in Iran would come to an end if the cruel reign of the Mullahs was replaced by democratic opposition parties or even by returning to the rule of the Pahlavi dynasty.

And it also applies to the argument that Trump and his carbon copies in other countries are a threat to democracy, that they are leading us towards fascism.

Again, it’s true that with Trumpism we are seeing the state relying more and more on directly repressive methods, on the violence within its own cities that parallels the violence being meted out to the cities of Iran. The use of ICE as a kind of praetorian guard of the leader, deployed to impose open terror on the population of the US, certainly has echoes of previous authoritarian regimes like Mussolini’s fascism or Hitler’s Nazism, even if the historic conditions which brought those regimes into being are very different today. But the principal lie concealed in this grain of truth is that the way to fight such examples of state repression, even though it primarily involves the arrest and deportation of proletarians, must again be fought by campaigns and marches organised around the defence of ‘true American democracy’. In short, campaigns which call on the proletariat to immerse itself in the mass of citizens and behind bourgeois political slogans, rather than uniting and organising around its own class interests. These interests, though in the first place mainly posed on the economic level, certainly include the defence of fellow workers against state repression. But when the workers abandon their own class struggle and follow calls to join a ‘popular’ front behind so-called ‘progressive’ factions of the bourgeoisie to ‘stop fascism’, they deliver themselves into the hands of the class enemy. In the so-called ‘Spanish revolution’ in 1936-39, the workers thus found themselves being shot down not only by Franco and his troops but also by the militias of the Popular Front (most famously at the barricades of Barcelona on May 1937).

The reality of the ‘rules-based order’

Liberal and democratic opinion in the US and western Europe is in mourning for the ‘rules-based order’ which was set up in the wake of World War Two. This ‘order’ lies in pieces following the US threats against Greenland, a fellow NATO country, the kidnapping of Maduro, the attempt to establish a ‘Board of Peace’ in place of the UN, and the growing divorce between Europe and the US, made crystal clear by the refusal of America’s NATO allies to commit themselves to Trump’s war and take part in unblocking the Straits of Hormuz.

But what was this ‘rules-based order’ in reality? It was from the start an American order, formed above all to counter the rise of the USSR as a global imperialist power. The formation of the two-bloc system did impose a certain discipline on the countries under US or Russian ‘protection’. But we must never forget that both bloc leaders were always ready to maintain their blocs through coups, infiltration, assassinations, and above all through endless proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Africa and elsewhere - wars fought in the name of ‘containing Communism’ or ‘national liberation’ and which cost millions of lives. It was an ‘order’ over which the shadow of a nuclear holocaust was a permanent threat.

When the Russian bloc collapsed in 1989, the ICC predicted that we would now be entering a phase dominated by ‘each against all’ in international relations, a mounting tide of chaos which did not cancel out decadent capitalism’s drive towards war but merely gave it a different shape. At first the USA acted as a global ‘gendarme’, attempting to use its military superiority to keep its former allies in line and stem the tide of chaos and destabilisation. But as we have already said, US actions like the first Gulf war or the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had the net opposite effect: accelerating the break-up of old alliances and plunging the invaded countries into chaos. Since then, we have seen this process of decomposition accelerating more and more, marked by key moments like the pandemic at the start of the 2020s, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war between Israel, Hamas and Hizbollah. The US/Israel assault on Iran, and Iran’s counter-attack on neighbouring countries and on world trade, signifies that the slide towards uncontrolled military barbarism has acquired a new quality, confirming what the Communist International affirmed in its first Manifesto in 1919, looking at the ruins left by the war which marked capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decline: "the ultimate result of the capitalist mode of production is chaos".

It might be thought that Trump’s objective was, as shortly before in Venezuela, to strike a blow against China, the USA’s principal rival, and for whom Iran is an important imperialist partner at the economic and strategic level. But far from imposing US hegemony over the Middle East by force, this conflict has led the US into a new quagmire: either Trump plunges deeper into an endless destructive conflict, or he withdraws his army and leaves a huge amount of chaos behind him. Whatever happens, America has not only been humiliated and isolated more than ever, but it has also had to pull forces out of the Pacific and thus weaken its position vis-à-vis China. For its part, Iran has also entered into a purely scorched earth logic, and if the regime does fall (which seems less and less likely at the moment) this will also sow a deadly harvest of chaos and barbarism.

Capitalism is truly in its death throes and if it is not overturned it will drag the whole of humanity down into the abyss with it. This is why it’s so important for the working class and its revolutionary minorities to reject all illusions that this deadly trajectory can be reversed by changing political leaders, reinvigorating global institutions or ‘democratising’ the state. Our enemy is not this or that politician or political party, this or that country, but the very mode of production which lives by exploitation and war, and which can only be brought to an end by the revolutionary struggle of the exploited class in all countries.

Amos