The following article was written by our section in France as a response to cases of cruelty against animals exposed in French slaughter-houses. But the same horrors have also come to light in British abattoirs, for example in 2015 following the secret filming of what goes on behind closed doors at a slaughter-house in Butterton, Staffs[1]. As the article explains, cruelty to animals is inseparable from cruelty to human beings, and both are inseparable from the capitalist mode of production, where everything is subordinated to the drive for profit.
“Poor dogs, they want to treat you like human beings” - Marx on the proposed tax on dogs in France, in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
Just over a month ago some videos were put onto social media showing great cruelty going on within some French abattoirs. The association L214, Ethiques & Animaux distributed a video filmed on a hidden camera showing how animals in an abattoir close to Pau were being treated. This video was taken up on social media from March 29. The treatment inflicted on the animals, the atrocities and cruelties, committed sometimes directly by the employees, are indefensible. The employees butcher still-living animals, felling them sometimes with blows from a hook. Others push the animals by blows on the head from an electric prodder and you can even see a separated living lamb transfixed on two hooks in the absence of an operator. These are similar images to those which led to the closure of the abattoir of Ales in October 2015 and, following that, one at Vigan in February 2016.
Such a banalisation of barbaric practices doesn’t mean that they are a simple consequence of sadism or a lack of scruples among the staff. Submitting to infernal, mechanised time-keeping, pushed by profitability in a context of intense competition and staff reductions, these acts are driven by the need for speed, provoking unimaginable suffering in the animals, but also, in some ways, in the men who must kill them. The situation in fact demands the personnel to develop a very thick skin, a forced desensitisation. The bestiality of the staff is first and foremost that of the capitalist system, of its totalitarian power. The savage acts, the jokes and the laughter of the employees which sometimes accompany them, are as much defence mechanisms faced with daily tasks institutionalised and imposed by the bloody logic of capital.
Beyond the current practices of cruelty, we should understand that the trade-mark of this capitalist society is standardisation and the violent transformation of quality into quantity. What’s the aim of this? Profitability, the sacrifice of nature and man himself to this sole end. Everything which resists this quantification is eliminated, meticulously disqualified and excluded.
Competition gives rise to battery farming: removed from the outside world, animals are fattened and bloated by antibiotics[2]. The animals are systematically transformed in the meat factories into real monsters. The cattle in feed-lots (fattening areas) are not only pressed together in much reduced spaces but physically deformed to the point of showing muscular hypotrophy. Milk cows have a very reduced life-span because of their intensive treatment, even though overproduction pushes angry farmers to pour their unsold milk over the fields! The pollution from this intensive and massive form of farming is a major bane, the animals wallowing in their own waste, with all the risk of spreading diseases.
The same farming methods are used in the selection of ducks and geese for the production of foie gras. Terrible and often useless suffering is inflicted on these animals. First of all the males are selected because of their larger livers and the staff are required to throw the females into the crusher, with some dying slowly in agony. The forced-feeding itself “gives rise to lesions, inflammations (the gut, enteritus), infections (forms of thrush, bacterial infection)[3]. One could continue with similar scandalous cruelties, towards pigs for example or domestic animals. But it’s clear that the reality of this violence is in no way limited to acts upon animals. It is really the result of a totalitarian industrial uniformity through which the animals are reduced to commodities just like the producers, those who sell their labour-power.
The association mentioned above calls above all for action via the application of article L 214 of the Rural Code which recognises animals as “sensate” beings[4] .
Even if we can understand it, the combat of this association is destined to fail or at least only obtain very ephemeral changes since it simply asks for “the application of the law”. Laws in reality are only fig leaves which aim to make us think that the indignant reactions of politicians and their media supporters could in any way modify such practices, which are fundamentally linked to the very real logic of capitalism and profit. That’s why the L 214 association, which justly denounces numerous barbaric practices involving the killing of animals, participates in the mystification of bourgeois legality when it calls for “the elected of the nation” to “make the law apply”. It even invites “citizens” to put pressure on “political personalities”: “Politique-animaux.fr wants to be at the service of the citizens. Resources given to them could help them question their elected politicians and candidates, as well as orient their vote during the electoral process”.
When we see the way that capitalism treats human beings, workers in “production units” or migrants fleeing from the atrocities of war or the horrors of hunger, it’s hard to see why the question of animal farming should be any different. The deceitful reality of “public liberties”, of “equality between men” drawn up in the “Rights of Man” 200 years ago shows that “animal rights” can only turn out to be an empty shell.
The light thrown on these practices linked to the inhumanity of the production of commodities, the exposure of cruelty to the point of sadism in the killing of animals, while it arouses indignation, has no other end than to mystify the “citizen”, to restrict thought to the terrain of a capitalist order that is the very basis of these horrors. The system has established its hypocritical rules (the laws) which are adapted to the economic logic of productivity and the generalised commercial war. In several sites of the production of animal meat where barbaric acts have been committed on the animals, the meat produced has been given labels denoting quality (Red Label and IGP) and, in several cases, been declared clean and healthy. Which should mean, in principle, that a maximum amount of care and respect has been given. The director of an abbatoir gave a very limpid explanation for these cruelties when he described the working deadlines: “We had to kill 15,000 lambs in a fortnight for Easter. If we worked slower they wouldn’t commit these types of acts”[5]
In fact the more that barbarism develops within this society, the more any argument will be used or rules applied in order to mask the causes of it and continue the selling of products for the most profit. For that the market has come up with new “labels” which aim to get the consumer to buy a product with a “mark” which claims a so-called “ethical” or “superior quality”. But these labels don’t give any protection from the advancing decadence of the capitalist system. As an expert consultant on food security said, we have in front of us images “revealing the standard functioning of abbatoirs in France (in which) negligence and ill-treatment occur daily.”[6]
In fact they take no more care in slaughtering animals than they do in cutting down wood or picking out the best stones. And it’s the same thing for human beings robotised by the social relations and who are only labour power to be exploited, “things”, more exactly commodities, that one buys and one sells on the labour market.
Capital doesn’t care at all about human beings or animals. Its implacable organisation does not include the satisfaction of human needs. It responds only to the law of profit and the market. It is claimed that the mad destructiveness of capitalist growth is a price worth paying for feeding humanity. That’s false. The reality is that industry produces in a blind manner with an almost unique objective: to sell at any price. Nourishment is just a simple consequence which the system doesn’t care about. As it happens it can be more pertinent to talk about food production as a form of poisoning (see our article on junk food on https://fr.internationalism.org [2]). This also explains why this totalitarian logic can also allow for the fact “every five seconds a child under ten dies of hunger. On a planet full of riches... In its present state, in fact, world agriculture could feed 12 billion human beings with no problem – twice the present population. There’s no fatality in this respect. A child that dies of hunger is a child that has been murdered.”[7]
Look at how the governments of the European countries have just been haggling with the government of Turkey over the acceptance or rejection of new migrants who are treated as cattle, herded and corralled without any thought or respect for their dignity. The capitalist state treats human beings as it treats animals and vice-versa.
Of course the bourgeoisie doesn’t directly carry out the horrible practices that it wants implemented and quite often it takes care to keep its distance. For the most part it doesn’t get its own hands dirty! It leaves that for the mass of the exploited. Little consequence is given to the humans or animals, these “sensate beings” that capital despises and grinds down. All this Rosa Luxemburg recognised and denounced a hundred years ago, affirming at the same time her great moral sense as witnessed by one of her letters from prison. She felt herself close to a suffering animal who was being violently beaten by a soldier because it couldn’t move its load. And she was able to connect this ferocity to the barbaric acts committed between human beings in times of war: “I had a vision of all the splendour of war...”[8]
Paco, 22 April, 2016
[1] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/harrowing-undercover-footage-butchers-abattoir-5124981 [3]. See also https://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/CAMPAIGNS/slaughter/ALL/// [4]
[2] This also favours the growth of resistant bacteria and equally reduces the effectiveness of medicines for humans.
[3] “Ducklings ground and mutilated in order to produce foie gras” (Le Monde, December 21, 2015).
[4] “All animals being sensate beings must be kept by their owner in conditions compatible with the biological imperatives of the species”. (Article L 214-1 of the Rural Code).
[5] “An abattoir in the Basque country closed after the discovery of acts of cruelty” (Le Monde, March 29, 2016)
[6] “Acts of cruelty in an abattoir in Gard certified as organic” (Le Monde, February 23, 2016).
[7] Massive destruction – The geopolitics of hunger, 2011, Jean Ziegler (Special Reporter to the UN for the entitlement to food between 2000 and 2008).
[8] Letters from Prison, p 56-58, cited in Peter Nettle, Rosa Luxemburg,OUP 1969, p 412
The whole range of imperialist war and conflict in the Middle East, despite various truces, talks and cease-fires, continues to deepen and spread: Syria’s Assad, backed by Russia, Hezbollah and Iran, is continuing the regime’s butchery; around a hundred “rebel” groups, fighting each other as well as the Assad regime, are backed by the USA, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey; the Saudis, with US and British backing as part of a more or less willing “Coalition”, launched “Operation Decisive Storm” a year ago in Yemen, which has turned into an all-round disaster; the “Caliphate” of Isis is still a strong force in fragmented Iraq and Syria with its affiliates strengthening their positions in Libya, other parts of north Africa, the Sinai Peninsula and Yemen, while al-Qaida also strengthens in Syria and Yemen – where it effectively has a mini-state – and both are making inroads into Afghanistan; Turkish actions in its manoeuvres against Russia have reignited the smouldering conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, potentially spreading the conflict to the fragile Caucasus; Turkey’s war on the Kurds has intensified while it has been giving succour to Isis and moving its Turkmen forces into Syria; different Kurdish factions have fought for the Syrian regime, the Americans, the Russians and the British, while tensions increase between the Syrian Kurds and Iraqi Kurds. Both Lebanon and Israel are increasingly in danger of being drawn into this maelstrom.
Within this general centrifugal tendency, of each against all, a myriad of national, religious, ethnic, alliances are being formed between global and regional powers, and this includes obscure alliances between various rebel groups and jihadists. The “Scorched Earth” policy practised by all the forces involved has further increased the killings, the destruction, the misery of the civilian populations, further multiplying the numbers of displaced people and refugees.
In these circumstances it is useful to look into the root of these developments within the framework of the decadence of capitalism – the context of imperialist domination and its connection to the formation the nation state in the area of the Middle East; in particular, we want to concentrate on the “Islamic Republic” of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose rivalries are becoming increasingly significant within the overall pattern of conflicts. These two countries, now arch-enemies, bear the inevitable curse on all the nation states born in capitalism’s decadent period – i.e. from around the beginning of the First World War. These two religious regimes – the first preaching a Shia version of Islam, the second the Wahabi interpretation of the Sunni Muslim tradition - co-exist perfectly well with the modern developments of internal repression and within the ever-expanding spiral of militarism. They have grown in the hundred years since they formed but, as expressions of decadent capitalism, they have grown deformed, stunted by a development that has been chained by the self-destructive nature of capitalism in decline, and are thus straightaway forced to sacrifice vast portions of their national capital to the demands of militarism and war.
The establishment of Iran as a nation took place in the early conditions of decadent capitalism. It was born of war and imperialism and involved one the least-known and worst atrocities of the 20th century. An estimated 8 to 11 million Persians, roughly half the population, were killed in a famine engineered by the British – see the book by the Princeton University-based author Mohammed Gholi Madj The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917-19. The British, taking increasing control of the country, which had just lost vast parts of the Caucasus to the Russians, diverted the material resources of the country to its military effort elsewhere. Britain confiscated food, local transport, goods, oil etc., which it refused to pay for, and sent these away from the country in order to assist its war. Not a “genocide” in the strict legal framework of the bourgeoisie, which requires direct slaughter of populations, but just as deadly. Moreover, with malice aforethought, the British banned any import of food into the country, including from the local areas around Mesopotamia (Iraq) that had a surplus which it controlled. The approximate figures for the engineered famine above are based, in part, on contemporary information kept by the American Legation in the country, the US State Department, British and local sources and a later census. The British had already used starvation as a weapon against the Irish in the mid-1800’s, causing a million deaths, and Churchill was to use the weapon of famine again in his “Denial Policy” which caused the deaths of over 3 million in India in 1943.
Britain had a dominant role in the Middle East from the early 1900’s, pushing out the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, Germany and eventually Russia from the region. In 1907, the British and Russians divided up the region between themselves in the “Great Game” as part of the carve-up of the Middle and Near East. In 1919, Britain established the “Anglo-Persian Protectorate” with a strong occupation of the country as the forces of Russian imperialism were withdrawn in 1917, a result of the proletarian revolution (which the British also attacked from its positions in Persia). The “Anglo-Persian Agreement” was forced on the Iranian government by Britain in 1919 as it tightened its military control on the state. In the conditions of capitalist decline, the disintegration and collapse of the Ottoman Empire could not give birth to new coherent industrial nations with a dynamic bourgeoisie, but only to fragmentation and states that were abortions; and then as now these states were not at all independent expressions but were prey to global imperialism and its machinations. Historically, capitalism needed large integral and united territories with a strong intellectual base, leading to the development of new forces of the working class, which is why Marx and Engels supported certain movements for national independence during capitalism’s rise. But there was no chance of any of this developing in the Middle East at the onset of capitalist decay, when the priority of the “old” nations was to carve up the world at the expense of their rivals and fight over what was left.
Certainly Britain was now the main power in the region but the Communist International at its 2nd Congress, at Baku in 1920, was wrong to pose national solutions and “national revolutions” against British domination, which it saw as a “greater evil”. The Comintern was already degenerating on the question of imperialism and national liberation and would soon fall into the trap of the “United Front” with the ruling class mobilising the working class for national “solutions”. In Persia any attempts at a more independent policy by local elements were swiftly and ruthlessly dealt with by the British, beginning with the latter fomenting a coup against undesirable Iranian elements in 1921. The British installed the Pahlavi clan as its chosen pawns and this clique, despite a pro-Nazi move in 1941 that was defeated by the British, remained in power from the mid-20’s to the late 1970’s. The Imperial State of Persia was established by the British and the Pahlavis in 1925, to be transformed into the Imperial State of Iran ten years later.
In the Second World War many factions of Arab nationalism flirted with the Nazis, as did certain elements of Zionism, and as did Britain’s pawn in Iran, Reza Shah of the Pahlavi clan who had crowned himself King and declared his “Divine Command”. He further declared Iran “neutral” but was getting too close to the Nazis, threatening Britain’s oil and strategic interests. Britain and a now fully-imperialist USSR invaded Iran in 1941 and replaced Reza with his son who ruled until his overthrow in 1979. A further attempt to make some sort of independent move, which could have only taken place within the confines and conditions of imperialism, was made by the Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, when he attempted to reduce Britain’s influence and tried to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by Britain and helped by the CIA in “Operation Boot”, which used all sorts of thugs and criminals as well as religious fundamentalists, the latter being around since the 1920’s, in order to save the Pahlavi regime. This period also marked the strengthening of the USA as the major world power, more and more supplanting Britain economically and militarily, particularly following the Second World War – a trend that had continued from World War One. Well before labelling it the “Great Satan”, the Iranian clergy kept a low profile, working primarily as forces of social control within the Iranian state that was becoming a lynchpin of US imperialist strategy in the region, above all as an outpost of the western bloc against Russian imperialism at its southern flank. But the 1963 “White Revolution” of the Shah, bringing in land and various other “reforms” including votes for women, was opposed by the Shia clergy and its particular figurehead Ruhollah Khomeini. The reforms were a sham, the proposed “trickle-down” wealth effect went the same way as all such attempts – upwards; and more and more resources went to the military and militarism with 50% of the Iranian population living below the poverty line by the early 1970s. With the traditional power of the clergy reduced by repression, backed by the USA’s strengthened position which included diplomatic immunity for all US forces in the country, the Shah declared war on the clerical opposition, resulting in some 15,000 Muslims killed and Khomeini’s exile to Iraq, Turkey and then Paris, which took in him and his clique for its own longer-term imperialist interests. Khomeini continued to call for “Islam to stand united against western and arrogant powers” and for an “Islamic revolution”.
Hobbled from the outset, the Iranian economy, based on a war economy and its plentiful oil reserves, never really developed, thrusting most of its population into poverty, while corruption and high-living among its rulers were rife. The overthrow of the Shah in 1979 was not a bourgeois revolution – such times were well past; nor was it a proletarian revolution – the working class was certainly involved and combative through months of struggle but it wasn’t strong enough to become an autonomous and leading force. The army and security forces remained intact, merely adapting to the new situation. When the now Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from Paris he established the Islamic Republic of Iran, ruled by a Supreme Leader. This was a theocratic state that relied not only on the clerics but on the army, the secret police and the feared Revolutionary Guards. Iran was now out of US control but, unusually, did not turn towards Russia. This was a foretaste of what was to become a feature of the new phase of capitalist decomposition where, in contrast to the certainties of the Cold War, irrationality, centrifugal forces and unpredictability would become the norm (as we saw later with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tendencies of every man for himself in the western bloc). Today Iran has the highest per-capita execution rate in the world, and strikes and labour unrest are ruthlessly put down by the Revolutionary Guard.
The importance of Iran as a country can be seen in its geo-strategic position: located between the Caucasus and the Indian Ocean, the country has offered its services as an alternative route for the gas and oil pipelines from the Caspian Basin without crossing Russia, with whom it has fallen out on many occasions over oil and gas issues. The country itself has claimed to have 12% of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and also has the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas. China alone currently depends on Iran for 15% of its industrial oil and gas needs and most of Europe and Japan relies on oil that goes through the Straits of Hormuz, which are overlooked by Iran. The country has worked itself into its position of relative strength thanks to the undermining of the position of the US, not as an economic powerhouse, even with its vast natural resources, but as a militaristic regime. These resources have not been used for the modernisation of existing industries nor the setting-up of technically advanced ones, and while sanctions economic haven’t helped it, the only effective industries are those directly related to the military with the others being derelict, backward and non-competitive. Being an underdog, the country can threaten, challenge and destabilise but its formidable resources are squandered for military purposes. The clergy in particular has resorted to whipping up religious divisions and nationalism, while intensifying the dictatorship and its ruthless suppression of political dissent and social protest, such as the demonstrations of 2009.
Iran’s reliance on religious ideology is a characteristic expression of a social order which has no future, of the growth of irrationalism throughout the capitalist system But the Iranian ruling class also makes very calculated use of the Shia card in cementing imperialist alliances, for example with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in Iraq where entire parts of the country and its capital Baghdad have been purged of Sunni influences and taken over by Shia cliques. At the same time it doesn’t want to be seen as an exclusively Shia country, preferring rather to present itself as an anti-imperialist umbrella to all, a counter-weight to the USA and Israel and to the corrupt Arab regimes. In short, the export of the Islamic Revolution was nothing other than Iranian imperialism in a new situation. The regime rejected Russia while at the same time constantly challenging the US in the region, building up alliances and backing terrorist networks that were making its rivals – and the greater powers – extremely nervous. Iran made a long-standing alliance with Syria which only briefly faltered over the question of Palestine. Iran was behind the assassination of President Gemayal of Lebanon in September 82 and two months later an Israeli military HQ in Tyre was bombed. The first modern suicide bombers hit the US embassy in Beirut in 83, followed by similar attacks against US, French and Israeli forces, forcing a withdrawal by both the US and Israeli militaries. But drained by the Iran/Iraq War and screwed down by very tight US sanctions, Iran was obliged to jettison the overtly aggressive stance typified by President Ahmadinejad with his threat to wipe Israel off the map. The regime now appears to be coming in from the cold under the “moderate” and more intelligent regime of President Rouhani. The recent nuclear deal, essentially with the US, brings Iran back as a more or less approved player in the region. Even before this deal was signed, Iran and the US were working very closely at the highest military levels in Iraq, and continue to do so, particularly given their mutual interest in opposing the advance of Isis. Allowing Iran to take a greater role may well benefit the US and may partially make up for its weaknesses in the region, but it is already causing major ripples among its local rivals, not least Saudi Arabia. This disquiet has both military and economic aspects: Iran is certainly feared as a regional military power, but the lifting of sanctions could also give Iran an edge over other regional oil-producers in the sharpening competition for a dwindling world oil market.
Like Iran the origins of this Kingdom lie in imperialist rivalries and war, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the various manoeuvres around it. In 1912 the religious Ikhwan (Brotherhood) based on Wahhabism gave its support to the al-Saud family exiled in Kuwait by the Turks. The Saud-backed forces took control of Riyadh and by 1924, the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, consolidating their power in the region then known as Hijaz. The Ikhwan turned against their rulers because of their plans for modernisation, but were defeated, resulting in the 1932 establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia led by Abd-al-Aziz, aka, Ibn Saud. Britain’s India Office had already secretly agreed to support Ibn Saud and his tribal forces while betraying other anti-Turkish forces and the idea of a unified Arabia being promoted by Lawrence of Arabia. In 1914, the Earl of Crewe, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, summed up the approach of British imperialism: ”What we want is not a unified Arabia but a disunited Arabia split into principalities under our suzerainty”. In the following year Britain, along with France, achieved this aim by, as elsewhere, partitioning this country along meaningless boundaries and carving up territories in a classic divide and rule strategy, forming the Kingdom as an absolute monarchy under Islamic law.
The regime was a gerontocracy replete with anachronisms, and the ruling sheiks have never been part of a class of industrially-minded capitalists, but are a highly privileged clique, enriching themselves at the expense of the population as a whole, a trend which increased even more spectacularly with the discovery of oil in the 1930s. Britain had been the initial protector of the Saud regime and the US wasn’t much interested until the oil started flowing; by the early 30s the US established bilateral relations and shortly after full diplomatic relations. In common with the global squeezing out of the interests of British imperialism, the US Quincy Agreement of 1945 guaranteed Saudi security on condition that the latter provided the US with most of its oil. The Saudi regime, apart from some secondary spats over Israel during the 1970s, continued to be a stable and faithful ally of the US until relatively recently. The situation began to change with the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, when amidst the acceleration of decomposition in international relations, Saudi Arabia began to defend its own imperialist interests much more independently and voraciously.
On the basis of its gigantic oil revenues, Saudi Arabia has become ”the world’s largest oil producer and exporter, controlling the world’s second largest oil reserves and the sixth largest gas reserves... (it) has the fourth highest military expenditure in the world and in 2010-14 was the world’s second largest arms importer” (Wikipedia). Its command economy is petroleum-based: “roughly 75% of budget revenues and 90% of export earnings come from the oil industry” (Ibid). The ruling class has been unable to develop any substantial industrial base and has failed to integrate the greater part of its 28.7 million people into any meaningful productive process. There is virtually no production of commodities or heavy goods for the internal or export market. The population is fed and looked after by a work-force of 8 million relatively cheap migrant workers who are mainly employed in oil-related industry along with foreign experts and contractors. Hundreds of thousands of undocumented foreign workers, Yemenis, Ethiopians and Somalis, have been detained, deported and expelled. Thousands of highly-trained Saudi youth, often expensively tutored abroad, are mostly unemployable because their wages would be far higher than foreign workers. The Saudi ruling clique invests much of its considerable wealth in speculative foreign dealings and, of course, the arms sector. Because of a lack of broader industrial development – closely tied to the general conditions of decadence – there has been no development of a classical bourgeois sector able to act as a political or social buffer, and brutal repression with its religious police and ubiquitous secret services are the order of the day: the horrible practice of beheading, so decried in the west when carried out by Isis, is a routine means of instilling terror in Saudi, as is the amputation of hands for those accused of theft. The appalling oppression of Saudi women has been fairly well documented. A system of clans run the country and it has been able to buy social peace at the cost of massive state subsidies. In 2011, King Abdullah announced “a series of benefits for citizens amounting to $36 billion” and a few months later “a package of $93 billion which included 500,000 new homes.... in addition to 60,000 security jobs” (Ibid). Whatever its specificities, Saudi Arabia shows the same development of militarism and repression, the same state capitalist tendencies inherent in all nation states in decadence. But the problems with the economy that appeared a couple of years ago have developed dramatically since. For the second consecutive year the country faces a deficit and cuts in state expenditure and increases in taxes are being implemented for the first time. For the country to avoid a budget deficit the price of oil would have to be $106 a barrel. At the moment it’s just about making $40.
While much of Saudi youth, who have the money to do so, study abroad in relatively liberal circumstances, at home the contrary tendency is for the increasing domination of religious indoctrination. “As of 2004 approximately half of the broadcast air-time of Saudi state television was devoted to religious issues. 90% of the books published in the Kingdom were on religious subjects and most of the doctorates awarded by its universities were in Islamic studies. In the state school system about half of the material taught is religious... assigned reading over 12 years of primary and secondary schooling devoted to covering the history, literature and culture of the non-Muslim world comes to a total of about 40 pages” (Ibid). Saudi Wahabism, which does everything it can to maintain the Sunni/Shia divide, is hostile to any reverence given to historical or religious places of significance for fear of idolatry (“shirk”) and the most significant Muslim sites in the world, Mecca and Medina, are located in the western Saudi region. While the west, which has caused the most global devastation to historical and cultural monuments, hypocritically criticises Isis for its cultural destruction, it is estimated that the Saudi regime has destroyed 95% of Mecca’s historic buildings, most of them over a thousand years old. Fewer than 20 out of 300 sites linked to Mohammed and his family survive after being demolished by the regime in the name of religious purity. The dazzling skyscrapers and shopping malls that have become a feature of economic “growth” not only in Saudi Arabia but in the other oil-rich sheikhdoms in the region are a better indication of the true religion of these “puritans”: the worship of money and worldly wealth. On the imperialist level Saudi Arabia has exported its Wahhabi ideology throughout the world, not least through the development of well-funded terrorist factions. Though overshadowed by the Sunni/Shia split, the conflict between the Saudis and Iran is one between two imperialist sharks. During the 2011/12 protests in Bahrain the Saudi government sent shock troops in British-supplied Armoured Personnel Carriers not only to quell the social unrest but also to send a bloody warning to Iran in case the latter used the protests to rally Shia resistance to the Saudi regime. The Saudis’ execution of the dissident Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr at the beginning of 2016 was an even more explicit message aimed at Iran, which responded by staging massive demonstrations calling for the Sheikh to be avenged.
The oil-reliant economies of both Iran and Saudi are ill-suited to compete on a world market saturated with over-production. Iran may have had a certain respite with the ending of sanctions and the new deals and openings that this may bring, but its economic base remains fundamentally weak. Even more precarious is the economic reality of Saudi Arabia whose trillion-dollar attempt to move away from oil dependency, the “National Transformation Programme”, proposed by the Crown Prince Mohammed, has been called “manic optimism” by the Economist. Moreover this doomed strategy has already upset the clergy who, like Iran, still hold great power within the state. These types of tensions, in the land that gave us al-Qaida and thus Isis, can only get worse where an estimated 3 million Saudis themselves live in poverty. State subsidies will end or be severely cut back and direct taxes have been imposed for the first time. One of Saudi’s largest companies outside of the oil industry, the construction giant the Saudi Bin Laden Group, was recently unable to pay its workers, summarily sacking 77,000 of them. In short, the economic situation will impact on the social situation and imperialist rivalries.
Ever since the fall of the Shah, the Saudis have been supporting any enemy of Iran, firstly spending $25 billion in supporting Saddam Hussein in the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s. In March 2015 “Saudi spearheaded a coalition of Sunni Muslim states, starting a military intervention in Yemen against the Shia Houtis and forces loyal to the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh who was deposed in the 2011 social uprising”(Ibid). It has stationed over 150,000 forces on the heavily fortified Saudi/Yemeni border and launched devastating air-strikes on the poverty-stricken inhabitants of this country while taking severe losses itself. At the same time, “together with Qatar and Turkey, Saudi Arabia is openly supporting the Army of Conquest, an umbrella group of anti-government forces fighting in the Syrian Civil War that reportedly includes the al-Qaida linked al-Nusra Front and another Salafi coalition known as Ahrar ash-Sham ...” (Ibid). We should also mention the close relationship that Saudi has with Pakistan with much speculation that the Kingdom has bankrolled Pakistan’s nuclear programme and is looking to purchase atomic weapons from it in the near future.
The recent nuclear deal between the US and Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA), as well as the spectacle of these two old foes fighting alongside each other against Isis in Iraq, has dealt quite a blow to the Saudis and added a dangerous twist to imperialist developments in the region. The Saudis are very worried about losing their standing with the US and the weakening of the US overall has allowed the Iranians to make significant gains in Syria. The Saudis have been forced to look for new alliances: Turkey, Egypt and even the arch-enemy, Israel, have been courted. The economic plight of the country will hamper its imperialist reach somewhat but this doesn’t make the situation any less dangerous – on the contrary. In April the Saudis did a deal with Egypt, who it’s been subsidising to the tune of billions a year, offering it two Red Sea islands, Sanafir and Tiran, as a sweetener. The deal had to be agreed by the Israeli government, which it did. In fact Saudi support for the new Egyptian butcher el-Sisi in overthrowing Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government, which went against the wishes of the USA, was a further indication of the weakening of the latter and the strengthening of every man for himself.
The tendencies to war in the region are speeding up and spreading: in early spring the Turkish Prime Minister explicitly warned the Russians that it would make trouble for them and their Armenian clients in the enclave of the High Karabakh in Turkish-backed Azerbaijan, spreading potential war and uncertainty to the South Caucasus. Should the war currently going on at a low level between Saudi Arabia and Iran intensify – and we cannot rule out open military clashes – then this would be an important qualitative step in the further decomposition of the region, destabilising the whole of trade and traffic around the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz, including oil supplies, which in turn would have an enormous impact on the world economy.
If we have gone into detail about the historical development of Iran and Saudi, it is because they are almost a showcase of the totally decadent character of the world capitalist system. Instead of being able to draw on the natural riches of the region, the ruling classes, caught in a spiral of war and imperialist rivalries, has been forced to feed large parts of their profits into the military machine. And if the two biggest regional rivals are now clawing at each others’ throats, it is because imperialism in its advancing decay has turned the Middle East into a true nest of vipers.
Boxer. 8.6.16 (This article was contributed by a close sympathiser of the ICC)
In the first article in this series [9], we gave a brief overview of the origins and function of migration in the capitalist system and how this has changed as that same system began its remorseless historical decline in the early 20th century. In part two [10], we examined the culmination of those trends in the horror of the Holocaust. But the defeat of the Nazi terror did not mean an end to the suffering and trauma of displaced people around the globe. As Nazi terror was replaced by the terror unleashed by the Stalinist and democratic powers, millions of displaced Jews, fresh from the horror of the concentration camps, became pawns in the imperialist struggle in the Middle East around the formation of the Israeli state. As the Cold War confrontation widened, millions more around the globe fled wars and massacres, victims of murderous rivalry between the global super-powers and their equally murderous local client states.
At the end of the Second World War, the disastrous destruction caused by imperialist confrontations created a world of ruin and desolation. In May 1945, 40 million people were displaced or refugees in Europe. To this must be added the 11.3 million workers who had been conscripted by Germany during the war. In other major regions of the world, the weakening of colonial powers caused instability and conflicts, particularly in Asia and Africa, leading over time to millions of migrants. All these population movements provoked terrible suffering and many deaths.
On the still smoking ruins of the world conflict following the conferences at Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July 1945), the "Iron Curtain" that fell between the former allies (the Western powers behind the United States on one side and the USSR on the other) drove millions of people to flee from hatred and vengeance. With the division of the world into spheres of influence dominated by the victors and their allies, the new line of inter-imperialist confrontations was drawn. Hardly had the war ended than the confrontation between the Western and Eastern blocs began. The months that followed the end of the war were marked by the expulsion of 13 million Germans from the Eastern countries and the exile of more than a million Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Poles and Balts, all fleeing the Stalinist regimes. Ultimately, “Between 9 and 13 million people perished as a result of the policy of Allied imperialism between 1945-50. There were three main foci of this monstrous genocide:
- Firstly amongst a total of 13.3 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern parts of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary etc., as allowed by the Potsdam agreement. This ethnic cleansing was so inhumane that only 7.3 million arrived at their destination within the post-war borders of Germany; the rest 'disappeared' in the most gruesome circumstances.
- Secondly amongst the German prisoners of war who died as a result of the starvation and diseased conditions of the allied camps - between 1.5 and 2 million.
- Finally amongst the population in general who were put on rations of around 1000 calories per day, guaranteeing slow starvation and sickness - 5.7 million died as a result.”[1]
A great number of Jewish survivors did not know where to go because of the resurgence of anti-Semitism, particularly in Poland (where new pogroms broke out such as at Kielce in 1946) and Central Europe. The frontiers of the Western democratic countries had been closed. Jews were often housed in camps. In 1947 some sought to reach Palestine to escape hostility in the East and rejection in the West. They did so illegally at the time and were stopped by the British to be immediately interned in Cyprus. The aim was to deter and control all these populations to maintain capitalist order. In the same period the number of prisoners in the camps of the Gulag in the USSR exploded. Between 1946 and 1950, the population doubled to more than two million prisoners. A large number of refugees and migrants, or "displaced" persons, ended up in the camps to die. This new world of the Cold War shaped by the "victors of freedom" had created new fractures, brutal divisions tragically cutting populations off from each other, causing their forced exile.
Germany was divided up by the imperialist victors. And to prevent migration and the flow of its population to the West, in 1961 the GDR had to build the "wall of shame". Other states such as Korea and Vietnam were also cut in two by the "Iron Curtain". The Korean War, between 1950 and 1953, divided a population imprisoned by the two new enemy camps. This war led to the disappearance of nearly 2 million civilians and caused a migration of 5 million refugees. Throughout this period until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many populations were forced to flee from the incessant local conflicts of the Cold War. Within each bloc, numerous displacements often directly resulted from the political games played by the American and Russian great powers. Thus, propaganda concerning the 200,000 refugees who fled to Austria and Germany after the suppression of the uprisings in East Berlin in 1953 and Budapest in 1956 by the Red Army fed the ideological discourse of the two rival camps. All the wars fuelled by these two great East-West military blocs continued to create large numbers of victims who were the systematically exploited by the propaganda of each opposing camp.
The brutal divisions of the Cold War continued in the 1950s with decolonisation movements that fuelled migration and further divided the proletariat. Since the beginning of the period of decolonisation, and especially in the 1980s when Cold War conflicts intensified and worsened, so-called "national liberation struggles" (in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East) were particularly murderous. Pushed to the geographical periphery of the major capitalist powers, these conflicts gave the illusion of an "era of peace" in Europe while the lasting wounds and forced displacement of large numbers of migrants appeared as so many "distant" tragedies (except of course for the old settlers coming from these regions and the nations directly affected). In Africa, since the end of the colonial era, there were many wars, some of them among the most murderous in the world. Throughout these conflicts, major powers like Great Britain or France (then acting as the Western bloc’s "gendarme of Africa" against the USSR) were widely involved militarily on the ground where the logic of the East/West blocs prevailed. For example, hardly had the Sudan gained its independence in 1956 than a terrible civil war would involve the colonial powers and thus be exploited by the blocs, leaving at least 2 million dead and more than 500,000 refugees,forced to seek asylum in neighbouring countries. Instability and war became a permanent feature. The terrible war in Biafra caused famines and epidemics, leaving at least 2 million dead and as many refugees. Between 1960 and 1965, the civil war in the former Belgian Congo and the presence of mercenaries led to many victims and many displaced. One could add to these examples, like that of Angola which had been ravaged by war since the first uprisings of its population in Luanda in 1961. After its independence in 1975, many years of wars followed between the forces of the ruling MPLA (Movement of Liberation of Angola, supported by Moscow) and the rebels of UNITA (supported by South Africa and the United States): not less than one million died and 4 million were displaced, including half a million refugees who ended up in camps. The many conflicts on this continent permanently destabilised entire regions such as West Africa or the strategic Great Lakes region. One could equally find examples in Central America, or in Asia, which saw many bloody guerrilla conflicts. The Russian intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 marked an acceleration of this infernal spiral, leading to the exodus of 6 million people, the largest refugee population in the world.
The new states or nations that emerged following large displacements were the direct product of imperialist divisions and poverty. They were the fruit of nationalism, expulsions and exclusion: in short, a pure product of the climate of war and permanent crisis generated by decadent capitalism. The formation of these new states was a dead end that could only fuel destructive tensions. Thus the partition of India in 1947, then the creation of Bangladesh, forced more than 15 million people to be displaced on the Indian subcontinent. The founding of the state of Israel in 1948, a real besieged fortress, was also a significant example. This new state, growing from 750,000 to 1.9 million inhabitants in 1960, was from its birth the focus of an infernal spiral of wars that caused the growth of Palestinian refugee camps everywhere. In 1948, 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and the Gaza strip gradually became a vast open-air camp. Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Damascus, Amman, were transformed gradually into suburbs of the capitals.
Similar problems of refugees and migrants were widely created across the planet. In China, millions of people were displaced, themselves victims of the ferocious Japanese oppression during the war. After the victory of the Maoist troops in 1949, some 2.2 million Chinese fled to Taiwan and 1 million to Hong Kong. China then isolated itself in relative autarky to try to make up for its economic backwardness. In the early 1960s, it then undertook a forced industrialisation and launched the policy of the "Great Leap Forward", imprisoning its population in kind of national labour camp, preventing any attempt at migration. This brutal policy of uprooting and repression practiced since the Mao era led to the growth of the concentration camps (laogai). Famine and repression caused not less than 30 million deaths in all. More recently, in the 1990s, the massive urbanisation of this country tore from the land not less than 90 million peasants. Other crises struck Asia, such as the civil war in Pakistan and the flight of Bengalis in 1971. Similarly, the taking of Saigon in 1975 (by a Stalinist-type regime) provoked the exodus of millions of refugees, the "boat people". More than 200,000 of them died.[2] There followed the terrible genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia causing 2 million deaths: refugees were the rare survivors.
Refugees have always been the exchange currency for the worst political blackmail, the justification for military interventions by intervening powers, sometimes for use as "human shields". It is difficult to calculate the number of victims who paid the price for the confrontations of the Cold War and give a precise figure, but "At a World Bank conference in 1991, Robert McNamara, former Secretary of State for Defence under Kennedy and Johnson, gave a table of losses in each theatre of operations whose total exceeds forty million.”[3] The new post-war period had therefore only opened up a new period of barbarism, increasing further the divisions among populations and the working class and sowing death and desolation. By further militarising borders, states exerted a globally greater and more violent control over the populations bled dry by the Second World War.
In the early days of the Cold War, not all migrations were caused by military conflicts or political factors. The countries of Europe that had been largely devastated by the war needed to be rapidly reconstructed. But this reconstruction had to overcome a decline in population growth (10 to 30% of men had been killed or wounded during the war). Economic and demographic factors therefore played an important role in the phenomenon of migration. Everywhere, there was an available workforce, at low cost.
This is why East Germany was forced to build a wall to stop the leakage of its population (3.8 million had already crossed the border to the West). The former colonial powers favoured immigration, primarily from the countries of southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece ...). Initially, many of these migrants arrived legally, but also illegally with the help of organised smugglers. The need for labour meant the authorities at the time closed their eyes to these irregular migrations. In this way, between 1945 and 1974, many Portuguese and Spanish workers fled the regimes of Franco and Salazar. Until the early 1960s, Italians were recruited in France, first from northern Italy and then the south as far as Sicily. Then a little later it was the turn of the former colonies in Asia and Africa to provide their quotas for a docile and cheap workforce. In France, for example, between 1950 and 1960, the number of North African migrants rose from 50,000 to 500,000. The state then built hostels for migrant workers to keep them away from the population; this foreign labour was in effect deemed a "risk", justifying its marginalisation. But this did not stop it from hiring cheap labour for the heaviest work, knowing that it could get rid of them overnight. The high turnover of these newly arrived workers allowed a frenzied and unscrupulous exploitation, particularly in the chemical and metallurgical industries. Between 1950 and 1973, nearly 10 million people migrated to Western Europe to meet its industrial needs.[4]
This situation was inevitably exploited by the bourgeoisie to divide the workers and turn them against each other, to generate competition and distrust on both sides. With the recovery of workers' struggles in 1968 and the waves of struggles that followed, these factors would feed the many divisive manoeuvres by the unions and the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie. On the one side, racial and xenophobic prejudices were encouraged; on the other, the class struggle was diverted by anti-racism, often used as a distraction to workers' demands. In this way, poison was spread and foreigners became "undesirable", or were portrayed as profiteers" or "privileged". All this would favor the growth of populist ideologies, facilitating the expulsions which have increased wholesale since the 1980s.
WH (April 2016)
In the next and final article [11] in this series we will cover the issue of migrants from the 1980s to the current period which is marked the final stage of decomposition of the capitalist system.
[1] See ‘Berlin 1948: The Berlin Airlift hides the crimes of allied imperialism’, https://en.internationalism.org/node/3865 [12]
[2] Source: UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees).
[3] According to André Fontaine, The Red Spot. The Romance of the Cold War, Editions La Martinière, 2004.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/abattoirs.jpg
[2] https://fr.internationalism.org/
[3] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/harrowing-undercover-footage-butchers-abattoir-5124981
[4] https://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/CAMPAIGNS/slaughter/ALL///
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/france
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/iran_saudi_gloves.jpg
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/260/iran
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/post_war_refugees.jpg
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201510/13477/migrants-and-refugees-victims-capitalist-decline
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201601/13766/migrants-and-refugees-victims-capitalist-decline-part-2-depth-counter-revolut
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201701/14230/migrants-and-refugees-victims-capitalist-decline-part-4-collapse-berlin-wall-
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/node/3865
[13] http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/historyteaching/Source/Projects/DocumentsTwentyCentury/Population_fr.pdf